Why is sexism universal?

[jakovasaur]

I would think any decent study would take this into account

Well yes, but the contention is that this isn't a decent study.

What is your basis for making this contention? Is it because you disagree with the conclusion?

[Wodashin]

I think the study has some merit, but I don't even see why I'm defending it specifically. It's one study out of hundreds from my citation. The truth just is that violent people are violent people, regardless of gender. Men may be "stronger" as a whole, but women will more often use weapons, so that about evens it out. Plus, the fact that Average Man isn't really a person and shouldn't matter when we're looking at abuse. Plus, the implication of saying that "Oh, well, men are stronger" is that a) men being abused doesn't really matter, and b) weak people can bully strong people. It's a really backwards way of thinking. I weigh like 100 pounds. If I beat my girlfriend up, no one would go "Oh, well, you're stronger than him" when talking to her. And if Average Man were to get in a fight with me, people wouldn't automatically see me as the victim just because I'm weaker. I think the "men on average are stronger" line of reasoning when talking about abuse really hurts both genders. It sets women up as only being victims, likening them to children and to being defenseless. And it makes men the bad guys and automatically guilty, and that abuse inflicted upon them doesn't matter.

I really can't think of people who vehemently oppose studies that find some sort of parity between men and women in domestic abuse as anything other than sexist. In this day and age, we should be caring more about people than men or women. Abuse is a human problem, and only addressing half of it will do nothing to fix the issue. This "women are victims and men are the abusers" mentality is just modern chivalry. Protecting the meek and helpless damsel from the bad guy. It's degrading to everyone involved.

[gmalivuk]

I would think any decent study would take this into account

Well yes, but the contention is that this isn't a decent study.

What is your basis for making this contention? Is it because you disagree with the conclusion?

No, it's because the methodology is flawed, as I've already been discussing for the last several posts. I could give a shit about the conclusion. The conclusion is irrelevant if the methods are too flawed.

My point was that you can't just assume this was a decent study (that therefore took this into account) when the discussion is about whether or not this was a decent study. It's circular reasoning.

I think the "men on average are stronger" line of reasoning when talking about abuse really hurts both genders. It sets women up as only being victims, likening them to children and to being defenseless. And it makes men the bad guys and automatically guilty, and that abuse inflicted upon them doesn't matter.

No, you're the only one in this discussion taking things to such ridiculous, absolutist extremes. Men being stronger on average means that violent men will do more damage on average, which will be reflected in the statistics of murders and hospitalizations and other serious physical damage.

I'm not drawing any conclusions about individuals, saying that women are always weaker or men are always stronger or women are always victims or violence against men doesn't matter or any of these other absurd things you're attributing to my point of view.

I really can't think of people who vehemently oppose studies that find some sort of parity between men and women in domestic abuse as anything other than sexist.

That might be true of people who oppose *all* such studies, regardless of how tight their methodology is. But I'm not talking about all such studies. I'm talking about this one, and focusing on a single (albeit serious) flaw in it. Namely, its inability to distinguish the kind of violence children commit all the time from the kind of violence that sends someone to the hospital.

[jakovasaur]

I would think any decent study would take this into account

Well yes, but the contention is that this isn't a decent study.

What is your basis for making this contention? Is it because you disagree with the conclusion?

No, it's because the methodology is flawed, as I've already been discussing for the last several posts. I could give a shit about the conclusion. The conclusion is irrelevant if the methods are too flawed.

My point was that you can't just assume this was a decent study (that therefore took this into account) when the discussion is about whether or not this was a decent study. It's circular reasoning.

You concluded that the study is flawed because you think they count "inconsequential" violence. I asked why you think this. You said it is because you think the study is flawed. That is circular reasoning.

I think it is safer to assume that a domestic violence study excludes things that are not real violence, than to assume that it doesn't.

[gmalivuk]

You concluded that the study is flawed because you think they count "inconsequential" violence. I asked why you think this. You said it is because you think the study is flawed. That is circular reasoning.

No, I think they count inconsequential violence because nothing in the quoted definition of "severe violence" distinguishes consequential from inconsequential. You countered this with the completely baseless assumption that it must have made such a distinction, because any decent study would have.

But even if they did, if they don't tell us how they did, so it's still irrational to accept the study's conclusion.

[jakovasaur]

So it was like I expected, you just don't like the conclusion, so you decided they did it wrong with no reason.

[omgryebread]

So it was like I expected, you just don't like the conclusion, so you decided they did it wrong with no reason.

There's a study that showed that eating 20 oreos a day prevents heart disease. A bunch of scientists proved it. To do this, they did some sciency stuff. But you can trust them, the sciency stuff is legit, seriously. No, I don't know what sciency stuff they did, but their scientists so you can be sure it's sciency.


He's saying he's not going to accept a study if he doesn't like their methodology. Which is good.

I always mistrust Rasmussen polling, not because they always say Republicans are going to win, but because they have poor polling methodology, not using callbacks and only using landlines, and they are not as accurate a predictor as other polls.

[Wodashin]

The Gelles/Strauss study, as I posted before, is literally one study out of hundreds that I linked to. Focusing on purely that one study doesn't disprove the whole lot of them. Not only that, but does it seem likely that people would look on a list of things that included "using a weapon" and "beating someone up" and go "Oh, well, I once punched my wife on the shoulder because she made a bad joke, so that definitely goes down in here." Sure, we don't know if or how they counted for consequential versus inconsequential violence, but you're kind of assuming that the people involved in the survey are complete idiots. But that doesn't even matter, because it's one study. One, out of tons. Tons that all point to the same answer, more or less.

Even the CDC recently stated that men are abused forty-something percent of the time. Which goes WAY against their studies from the 90s, because those studies were operating on the basis of "men hit women, find out how many". That, or women have started beating men up at astounding rates, or male domestic violence has plummeted by an astounding number. If the latter is true, which it isn't if we just look at the numbers, then that means domestic violence campaigns are campaigning against a non-issue. The only answer is that shoddy studies are shoddy, and a lot of them were finding men to make up the vast, vast majority of abusers. Now we're seeing that that was untrue.

We can get the numbers back to "normal", female-victimixation numbers by just assuming that women won't damage men very much, basically having inconsequential violence.

Then again, this fight is somewhat pointless in a world where surveys that ask "is it ever okay to hit a woman?" that get back numbers that aren't "100% no rate" get touted around as showing systematic gendered violence, when the question is obviously horribly posed in order to show that men hit women and think "it's okay" to abuse people, even though there's a universe of possible reasons to say "yes", but a yes looks like a "I abuse women and am evil" rather than "I will protect myself if it comes to it".

tl;dr Stop focusing on the Gelles/Strauss numbers. I linked to a huge list of studies, and nitpicking one out of hundreds is silly, especially when it's not even great nitpicking. The study seems to have some merit if you just assume intelligence on the part of the people involved.

[gmalivuk]

So it was like I expected, you just don't like the conclusion, so you decided they did it wrong with no reason.

Look, repeating yourself doesn't make it true. I have explained numerous times that my rejection of that study has to do with their methodology, not their conclusion. Any conclusion based on faulty logic is faulty, whether it happens to be true or false.

The Gelles/Strauss study, as I posted before, is literally one study out of hundreds that I linked to. Focusing on purely that one study doesn't disprove the whole lot of them.

Nor did I or anyone else say it did. I've been focusing on that study, and particularly on the part about how its reasoning is exposed as flawed when applied to children, because that's the part where your defense of the study was most ridiculous.

I am not rejecting its conclusions on principle, and I am not rejecting any of the studies I haven't looked at, either, because I haven't looked at them.

Sure, we don't know if or how they counted for consequential versus inconsequential violence, but you're kind of assuming that the people involved in the survey are complete idiots.

No, I'm just assuming that enough of the people involved took the question literally (which is apparently completely idiotic of them -- how silly to assume that the researchers wanted to know about the things they explicitly ask about in their survey!) to skew the results.

The study seems to have some merit if you just assume intelligence on the part of the people involved.

And if you assume some intelligence on the parts of people involved in all those terrible 90s studies and analysis thereof, they seem to have some merit, too.

Sorry, but I'm absolutely not willing to just take on faith that a study was well-done despite the complete lack of evidence in the published results themselves to that effect. If they took the things into account that you blindly assume they must have, why didn't they say so?

[Adam H]

It's not unreasonable to discount a study based solely on disagreeing with its conclusion. It can be very dangerous, but if you have good reason to think that the sky is blue, you should probably immediately discount studies that show the sky is actually red.

To address the OP, I've heard a theory that one of the general differences between males and females is that males have higher gene variance. This is seen in test scores and could possibly partially explain things like why there are more troubled (in jail, homeless, dumb) males as well as historically more "highly successful" males (you know, like the top 100 most influential people in the history of the world or something).

I'm curious if this is a debunked theory, or if it's known fact, or if it's true but meaningless in application. I really don't know. I think I heard this in my college sociology class (yuck), and the best I can do is link you to google.

[Wodashin]

http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm

I'm still asserting parity. I don't care for the Gelles/Strauss numbers. I'll cede the study as being too ambiguous. Sure. Doesn't really change anything. Normalization of violence against men is still a thing, and always has been a thing. Sexism is probably the reason for the huge differences between domestic abuse numbers and those who are actually tried and convicted for domestic abuse, when it comes to gender.

When it comes to variance, I too have heard of that. I'd think there'd probably be variance between the brains of the sexes, though I'd wonder if it's really enough to matter solely on that. Hormones probably play a larger role than strictly structural things. Though, that's just be guessing. I really don't know at all.

[gmalivuk]

It's not unreasonable to discount a study based solely on disagreeing with its conclusion. It can be very dangerous, but if you have good reason to think that the sky is blue, you should probably immediately discount studies that show the sky is actually red.

Which is why I'd argue that a polling organization that always picks Republican winners shouldn't be trusted, because in fact Republicans are not always winners. But this is different from rejecting the polls because I simply don't like their conclusions. Rather, as with the Gelles/Strauss survey, I reject their current conclusions on the grounds that the same logic leads to other obviously false conclusions. Those conclusions just happen to be hypothetical in the case of Gelles/Strauss and historical in the case of a Rasmussen-like group that always predicts Republicans will win. (I'm not bothering to check, but I'm willing to grant that Rasmussen itself probably doesn't always pick Republicans, and omgryebread was exaggerating to make a point.)

Normalization of violence against men is still a thing, and always has been a thing.

Indeed, and this is a serious problem and one of the reasons why the rape of males is so horrendously underreported.

http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
I'm still asserting parity.

I do take some issue with the aggregate data on that site, though, because while each individual study may be reasonably good, we are given no reason to believe the total collection of them is a reasonable cross-section of all studies done on relationship violence. The danger of any meta-analysis is that the collection of individual studies being combined might lean disproportionately in one direction or another, which will significantly bias the results of the meta-analysis. If Fiebert is specifically compiling studies that show near-parity or greater female aggression, then it's not unreasonable to assume that the studies themselves are somewhat cherry-picked.

[Wodashin]

So the whole is less than the sum of its parts in this situation? Perhaps. I've not looked through each and every study, but I have looked through some of them, and they seem to be reasonable on the whole. And I've seen many studies pointing to the same things, though they may or may not be on the list. And, as said, the CDC is even showing similar results now. And when it comes to male rape, it's not that it's just under-reported, but that female-on-male rape is basically impossible legally anyways, unless the woman has a penis. The worst it could be is "sexual assault", and that's what it's tracked as. I remember seeing a statistic that something like 20% of male rapes (using the definition as it applies to women and expanding it to give men the same protection under the definition) are male-on-male. Plus, the fact that male consent is assumed for the most part doesn't help, mainly because an erection is assumed consent. I mean, we do live in a country where an underage boy can be raped and then forced to pay child support to his rapist, so there's that too.

You'd think we could just get past gender differences and start focusing on 100% of the population, rather than only the problems of half of it. You can't fix things that way.

[Sleeper]

Tl;dr version: There’s definitely more violence against women than men.

Even the CDC recently stated that men are abused forty-something percent of the time. Which goes WAY against their studies from the 90s, because those studies were operating on the basis of "men hit women, find out how many".

What CDC study are you referring to? Their 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey reported that:

More than 1 in 3 women (35.6%) • and more than 1 in 4 men (28.5%) in the United States have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime.

The figure for rape by itself is "Nearly 1 in 5 women (18.3%) and 1 in 71 men (1.4%) in the United States".

For "severe physical violence", it's 24.3% for women and 13.8% for men.

Looking at all the statistics in the CDC report, there's still an obvious pattern of more frequent severe abuse suffered by females.

There are some figures that are at parity, though: "Nearly half of all women and men in the United States have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime (48.4% and 48.8%, respectively)."*

I'm not sure what precisely you're saying, though. I think you're saying that:

1. There's a parity of domestic violence between the sexes
2. CDC and DOJ studies from the last 10 years show vastly different findings than the ones from the 1990s.
3. There's too much focus on violence against women at the expense of focus on violence against men
4. There's a danger of depicting women as victims and men as villains.

Is that right?
I agree that "infantilizing women and making men to be assumed wrong-doer" is wrong. It's important to avoid that.

I disagree that violence between the sexes is even close to equal.

I've shown that recent CDC studies continue to report consistently higher rates of violence against women. I'd like to see your more recent figures from the DOJ.

I actually think there's too little focus on violence against women. There's battered women's shelters everywhere. There's relatively little need for shelters for men battered by women.

There is a consistent pattern of more violence committed by males than females everywhere in the world, even apart from domestic violence. More violent crimes, and more crimes of almost every sort are committed by males. This is US figures, but it’s pretty much the same everywhere.

Focusing just on domestic violence, it’s still the same around the world. You see much less inequality in more developed areas, but the disparity in level of violence between the sexes is still there. In India, about half of all women and half of all men agree that men are justified in beating their wives for one of the reasons listed below:
(Table 14.15.1 – this one shows data for women’s attitudes only. For men it’s much the same)


There is a consistent global pattern of violence against women (by men) being a bigger problem than violence against men (by women). Everywhere and at every time.

*("Psychological aggression includes expressive aggression (such as name calling, insulting or humiliating an intimate partner) and coercive control, which includes behaviors that are intended to monitor and control or threaten an intimate partner.")

[Wodashin]

40% of the time =/= 40% of men are abused. Of all the people who are abused, it's a men a good portion of the time. If women are being abused more, that's bad, but just throwing away the group of men and focusing on the majority, which isn't even a vast one, is extremely self-defeating. And obviously I'm only talking about Westernized countries. And most crimes are committed by men, against men, and by men in poverty at that. Poverty causes crime, men are doing the crime, ergo more men are living in worse conditions than women. Vast majority of homeless are men. You can't just stop once you have the variables you want.

Violence against men doesn't seem like a problem because it has been normalized over the centuries. And to say that there isn't enough focus on violence against women is just so untrue. Violence against women gets the same over-examination as breast cancer does, when in comparison to the tons of other horrible things that do harm more people. High schools talk about domestic violence of the male-on-female variety all the time. Any type of violence against a woman is seen as an inhuman thing in this day and age, but violence against men is normal. If a man punched a woman in public, he'd get swarmed. If a man punched another man, ten people aren't going to jump in and save him. And that's DEFINITELY not going to happen if it's a woman hitting a man. If a woman's hitting a man in public, some would even cheer her on. At least, if that "What Would You Do?" show has any bearing, especially since it took over a hundred takes to get one person to step in and do something. Maybe it seems like men get abused so much less in some statistics because we just don't care about men getting abused one bit, while any slight against women is seen as misogyny at its worst. A carryover from the time of chivalry. Strong violence against women was never accepted, and wife batterers would often see vigilante justice against them. Men who were beaten by their wives were publicly ridiculed, and still are.

And to say that there's systematic violence against women globally is cherry-picking. Men, no matter where you are, commit the most violent crime. But, it's against men. Men murder men more than they murder women. Men assault men more. Men, over the millenia, have been sent to die in droves more often, or worked to death. Yeah, women see horribly upped retribution in the middle east or India, but so do men. It's not like it's a male paradise, goin' around doing whatever you want and being bros with the government. Men get executed for other crimes, men get their hands lopped off, etc. Violence is violence, and cherry-picking a certain type to say that "women suffer the majority of violence" is disingenuous. Sure, men don't get stoned for adultery, and no woman should ever be stoned for that, but that doesn't just make all the male executions go away or be any less wrong. And here in America, women will get far less time prison for the exact same crime, and will get acquitted more often, so just going "hey look, so many more men in prison" is also a non-point, as it forgoes that, and leaves out the fact that most of those men were in poverty, so in the end people will just see "men are violent".

[gmalivuk]

So are you going to direct us toward any of the alleged CDC and DoJ studies that show different results, or do we just have to take your word that they exist?

[CorruptUser]

Focusing just on domestic violence, it’s still the same around the world. You see much less inequality in more developed areas, but the disparity in level of violence between the sexes is still there. In India, about half of all women and half of all men agree that men are justified in beating their wives for one of the reasons listed below:
(Table 14.15.1 – this one shows data for women’s attitudes only. For men it’s much the same)

So... Christians and Buddhists, more abusive than Muslims. How dare you not fit into pre-conceived notions!

Also, those Jains seem relatively nice by comparison. If only I knew what they were. Heads to wikipedia for a bit. Oh crap Godwin's! Wait...

Anyway, the core of the religion is pacifism and no harm to anyone. So wife-beating is definitely wrong. Yet there are Jains that think it's ok to beat their wives?

[Wodashin]

http://www.therainbowtimesmass.com/2012 ... -violence/
http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/p ... 2010-a.pdf

As for the rape, I don't really think any measurement of male rape can be trusted since male rape is only rape under specific circumstances in our current legal system, and obviously a huge, huge number would go unreported due to social stigma. And most people wouldn't consider a lot of male rape to be rape, or even sexual assault. The "drunk guy waking up next to 'fat chick'" trope is a point of humor, not rape. Mainly because male consent is assumed, so a man having sex while drunk isn't being raped because he already gave his consent by having a penis. Horrible Bosses featured male rape, and had the roles been reversed in that movie, I think many would've taken offense to "girl is knocked out by boss and then raped and blackmailed with pictures of the rape to disrupt marriage. Also the boss rapes people regularly by knocking them out and having sex with their unconscious bodies. And everyone she tells thinks they're being a wuss and that what happened was awesome". Or the most recent Twilight movie, in which Bella just rapes Edward over and over by coercing him to sleep with her, just jumping on top of him while he protests. So, there's that.

Crimes against males are normalized, because we see them as normal. That's what that means. There's systematic gendered violence against men, but we don't care, because it's normal, so there's nothing to care about. Violence against women is, in most cases, lower than that against men. In the areas where it's higher, we run campaigns to stop it, even if it's only somewhat higher. I'm not saying we should stop that, but I'm saying that it's kind of messed up to just ignore an entire demographic of people because they didn't get the genitalia that made them socially more important to protect.

[gmalivuk]

I don't really think any measurement of male rape can be trusted since male rape is only rape under specific circumstances in our current legal system

Which is why the most reliable studies of rape (of either sex) are those that ask specific questions about actions, rather than just "have you ever been raped?".

[Sleeper]

And obviously I'm only talking about Westernized countries.

Why?
You keep arguing that it’s wrong and cherry-picking to just focus on violence in just one little segment, like violence against women. You said we should “start focusing on 100% of the population”. The majority of the world’s population is non-Western. Violence against women is generally worse in non-Western (more specifically, less rich) countries.

And to say that there's systematic violence against women globally is cherry-picking. … Violence is violence, and cherry-picking a certain type to say that "women suffer the majority of violence" is disingenuous. Sure, men don't get stoned for adultery, and no woman should ever be stoned for that, but that doesn't just make all the male executions go away or be any less wrong

You seem to be missing my point. I’m not saying that women suffer the majority of all violence of all types. Actually, violence is generally more common by and against males. I’m not saying that cultural traditions of stoning women can “make all the male executions go away or be any less wrong.”

That’s a non sequitur.

I’m saying that there is a greater propensity for violence among males, which your own data shows. The last study you linked shows more domestic violence among males than females in nearly every category.

. And here in America, women will get far less time prison for the exact same crime, and will get acquitted more often, so just going "hey look, so many more men in prison" is also a non-point, as it forgoes that, and leaves out the fact that most of those men were in poverty, so in the end people will just see "men are violent".

I think you’re probably right that there’s an unfair tendency to give women lighter sentences (though I admit I haven’t looked into it much, and suspect you haven’t either). But the huge disparity in the incarceration rates between males and females cannot possibly be explained by that. Including that “most of those men were in poverty” also doesn’t explain why there are more men convicted of crimes, because more women are in poverty than men. The same is true globally. (page 104)
Of course violence in general is a problem. Violent acts are committed against both men and women. Men are executed more often, die in war more often, and are victims of violent crime more often:

Most victims and perpetrators in homicides are male
Male offender/Male victim 65.3%
Male offender/Female victim 22.7%
Female offender/Male victim 9.6%
Female offender/Female victim 2.4%

Both male and female offenders are more likely to target males than females, and that's rarely commented upon. So you have a good point. It’s probably true that in most cultures there’s an unreasonably higher tolerance for violence against males than females, and that’s wrong.

However, it’s also clear that males kill females more than twice as often as females kill males. Male-on-female violence is more common and more severe than female-on-male violence, as your own data shows. This supports my original point that the power dynamic between the sexes, historically almost always in favor of males, has likely been at least partially supported by the male’s propensity for violence. (This is not an attack on men. I happen to be one myself. I’m trying to figure out an explanation for female disadvantage being present in most cultures, not trying to disparage categories of people.)

It’s a minor point, but I’d still like to see a citation for your “forty-some percent of the time” figure.

You haven’t shown that there’s an equal amount of violent acts committed by men and women. The two links you just provided both show that women suffer domestic violence more often than men. The Rainbow link indicated that it’s much less unequal than was once thought, so I’ll concede that more recent statistics show less of a disparity than earlier ones.

Statistics on rape are almost certainly imperfect, but even supposing that rape among men occurs twice as often as the data shows and among women half as often as the data shows, it still occurs far more often among women.

Strong violence against women was never accepted, and wife batterers would often see vigilante justice against them.

That’s not accurate. Do you have any citations for that? I have evidence to the contrary.
There have been cases of vigilantes targeting men who severely beat their wives, but I see no evidence that it was common. In fact, beating your wife (within “reasonable” limits) was common and officially sanctioned in the US and England. Today, it’s still widely accepted in many countries around the world. (That India survey I posted earlier was done in dozens of other countries too, and found strong support for beating your wife in many countries for the same six reasons.)
While “picking on” people including women (hitting someone in public for no good reason) has pretty much always been condemned, strong violence against women has often been not only accepted but sanctioned. For example:

In the 1870s courts in the United States stopped recognizing the common-law principle that a husband had the right to "physically chastise an errant wife".[6] In the UK the traditional right of a husband to inflict moderate corporal punishment on his wife in order to keep her "within the bounds of duty" was removed in 1891. (Wikipedia article “Violence against women”)

“In the seventeenth century, again this is from Jesuit missionaries to China, reporting back to Europe, they were horrified to find that in Beijing alone… several thousand babies, almost exclusively females, were thrown into the streets like refuse to be collected each morning by carriers who dumped them into huge pits outside the city.”

(this was because the parents would rather have sons). [/quote]

“And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire.” – Leviticus 21:9
“If however the charge is true and no proof of the girl’s virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death…” Deuteronomy 22:13-21.

There’s also female genital mutilation, there's “honor killings,” and there’s also practices in several cultures in which when the husband dies, the wife must be killed. (“[among the Kurnai tribe in New Guinea] It was the duty of the [widow’s brother] to strangle the widow on her husband's death ; and, if the Levir wanted to keep her for himself, he had to wrestle for her with her brother, if this dragging at the woman can be called wrestling. The wretched woman was sometimes almost torn in two between them.” In India there’s the practice of Suttee, in which a widow was expected to burn herself to death or be willingly buried alive along with her husband’s corpse. It’s illegal now.)

No culture has a practice in which the husband must be killed when the wife dies.

This is all violence against females in which the fact that they are female is not incidental.

[Wodashin]

There are also no cultures that say women should just give up life and go kill other women on the whim of the state. This is sort of the point I'm getting at here. That you're focusing on these things like they're special. Yes, life for women in the third-world is utter crap. It's horrifying, and terrible. But it's so for the men as well. It's not like men are some upper-class that waltzes around sipping martinis and being all oppressy all the time. Violence against men, the death of men, the oppression of men, none of this matters to people. The reason violence against women matters to us so much more is because it's neo-chivalry. There are whole lots of violence that is mostly put onto males, and whole lots that are only put onto females. Why focus on the latter?

Female genital mutilation goes on, so does male genital mutilation. But it's okay, because they were born with a penis and that means putting sharp objects near their genitals is cool. Female genital mutilation that removes basically all outer parts of the genitals is also the rarest [ http://joseph4gi.blogspot.com/2012/01/m ... ision.html ]. It's also much rarer in the world in general, female circumcision. It's horrible, sure, but I don't see why it's necessarily more horrible that you felt the need to point it out.

As for my "about 40% of the time" comment, it's just math. There's about the same number of men and women in the US. 35% of women get abused, 28.5% of men. 35 women out of a hundred, 28.5 men out of a hundred. Those are all the people in the world who get abused, let's say. A total of 63.5. 28.5/63.5 = 44.88%. Men get abused nearly 45% of the time. We add in a margin of error, and you have about parity. Unless I'm retarded and suck at math and logic, I think this is correct. So, my point stands. Or it doesn't and I'm stupid. I wouldn't put that off the table, since I may just be blindly missing something that makes my math incorrect, even if it seems simple and logical to me.

Women are more in poverty because of how poverty is measured. A huge portion of those women, I am assuming (though I don't think I really need to cite this, but if you want I could), are single mothers. Poverty sucks, yes, but those single mothers get much more government support than men could get. There is a much better net for those women to make their lives, though hard, somewhat easier. If this were not true, there would not be more homeless men than women [ http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/who.html ]. Homeless women spend less time homeless, and less time in unsheltered areas [http://www.springerlink.com/content/w3400u1ru0100v57/ ]. Now, this isn't to diminish the suffering of those women. It's just to point out that we, as a society, don't give two shits about men because we have normalized violence against them, and normalized their poor conditions, where with women we give better services and help, even if they suffer at around the same levels (domestic abuse), or suffer less (homelessness). Not only that, but about 40% of homeless men are war vets.

Men are disposable. This is why no one really cares that x number of men are homeless, or commit suicide, or die on the battlefield, or get abused. We take young men who haven't lived a day into their adulthood, ship them off to a foreign land to die and throw away any sense of self or personal agency, and those that survive have a good chance of ending up on the streets and/or committing suicide. But, you know, they have a penis, so the experience must've been pretty awesome for most of those guys. No real reason to help them because that penis of theirs gives them magical superpowers that make them "man up" and tough out those crappy situations. Plus the fact that they don't get to have feelings.

[CorruptUser]

There are also no cultures that say women should just give up life and go kill other women on the whim of the state.

Soviet Russia, WWII. Look up nightwitches or anything about Stalingrad sometime.


Also, the reason in general for that, aside from women making poor soldiers in times when upper body strength was among the most important part of being a soldier (drawing a bow, using a spear or axe), women were used to recover from war; a society with 500 women and 100 men can produce a lot more soldiers the next generation than a society with 300 men and 300 women.

[Sleeper]

This is sort of the point I'm getting at here. That you're focusing on these things like they're special... There are whole lots of violence that is mostly put onto males, and whole lots that are only put onto females. Why focus on the latter?

Well, back in the OP I said that there's evidence that males have a greater tendency and capacity for violence. I said that I'm guessing that this has something to do with the prevalence of male dominance in most* cultures.

I strongly suspect that the patterns and traditions of violence against women by men (such as widely prevalent illegal battering, genital cutting to reduce promiscuity, legally sanctioned wife-beating, and infanticide for newborn girls so they can try again for a son) contribute to the pattern of male dominance.

I think you've done a good job showing that women are sometimes just as violent as men. But that doesn't change the fact that men are violent more frequently and more severely. The CDC report you linked showed 35.6% of women had been abused, compared to 28.5% for men. But was it equally bad for both groups? For women, 28.8% said it had a significant impact on them and for men 9.9% said it did. (Tables 4.1 & 4.2, page 38).

(They define "impact" in this way: "Includes experiencing any of the following: being fearful, concerned for safety, any PTSD symptoms, need for health care, injury, contacting a crisis hotline, need for housing services, need for victim’s advocate services, need for legal services, missed at least one day of work or school. For those who reported being raped it also includes having contracted a sexually transmitted disease or having become pregnant.")

Female genital mutilation goes on, so does male genital mutilation. But it's okay, because they were born with a penis and that means putting sharp objects near their genitals is cool. Female genital mutilation that removes basically all outer parts of the genitals is also the rarest [ http://joseph4gi.blogspot.com/2012/01/m ... ision.html ]. It's also much rarer in the world in general, female circumcision. It's horrible, sure, but I don't see why it's necessarily more horrible that you felt the need to point it out.

Are you equating male circumcision and female genital mutilation?
They are not at all the same.
I don't see why you don't see why I pointed it out. You said that strong violence against women was never accepted, and I pointed out several cases of violence against women being official policy. Including that millions of women today by tradition have their clitorises sliced off or vaginas sliced up and scarred until marriage when the scar tissue can be broken with a penis or knife.
The blog you linked says that removal of basically all outer parts of the genitals occurs in about 15% of FGM cases. The blogger doesn't provide any citation for that, but I Googled up a Guttmacher Institute report that says "it is estimated that about 15% of all circumcised women have been infibulated, although an estimated 80-90% of all circumcisions in Djibouti, Somalia and the Sudan are of this type." If in most places 1 in 7 instances of male circumcision included total removal of the whole penis, I bet people would be pretty up in arms about it. And while supposedly only 15% of FGM cases involve removal of basically all outer parts of the genitals, most FGM cases involve removal of at least the clitoris.
The same Guttmacher Institute report says: "the amputation of the clitoris and other sensitive tissue reduces a woman's ability to experience sexual pleasure. For infibulated women, the consummation of marriage is likely to be painful because of the small vaginal opening and the lack of elasticity in the scar tissue that forms it. Tearing and bleeding may occur, or the infibulation scar may have to be cut open to allow penetration."
The most important difference may be the function that FGM serves:

female circumcision reduces the uncertainty surrounding paternity by discouraging or preventing women's sexual activity outside of marriage. Although the societies that practice circumcision vary in many ways, most girls receive little education and are valued primarily for their future role as sources of labor and producers of children. In some communities, the prospective husband's family pays a brideprice to the family of the bride, giving his family the right to her labor and her children; she herself has no right to or control over either.

A girl's virginity may be considered essential to her family's ability to arrange her marriage and receive a brideprice, as well as to family honor. In Somalia, for example, a prospective husband's family may have the right to inspect the bride's body prior to marriage, and mothers regularly check their infibulated daughters to ensure that they are still "closed."

I think I just didn't get what you meant by "forty-some percent of the time". You mean that 44.88% of the population of people who have been abused are male. Okay. So in terms of any sort of domestic violence at all, women are only abused a little more often. The fact remains that women face more severe abuse. The full version of the CDC report you linked shows that 28.8% of women report a significant impact from the abuse, while 9.9% of men do. Using the same reasoning you used to arrive at your forty-some percent figure, about 45% of those who are abused are men, but only 25.58% of those who suffer severe impacts from abuse are men.

Women are more in poverty because of how poverty is measured. A huge portion of those women, I am assuming (though I don't think I really need to cite this, but if you want I could), are single mothers. Poverty sucks, yes, but those single mothers get much more government support than men could get. There is a much better net for those women to make their lives, though hard, somewhat easier. If this were not true, there would not be more homeless men than women [ http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/who.html ]. Homeless women spend less time homeless, and less time in unsheltered areas [http://www.springerlink.com/content/w3400u1ru0100v57/ ]. Now, this isn't to diminish the suffering of those women. It's just to point out that we, as a society, don't give two shits about men because we have normalized violence against them, and normalized their poor conditions, where with women we give better services and help, even if they suffer at around the same levels (domestic abuse), or suffer less (homelessness).

Hold on. You said the higher poverty rate for women is just an anomaly of the way poverty is measured, but you didn't provide any evidence or reasoning to support it.

*(EdgarJPublius pointed out the Tuareg people of North Africa have pretty good traditions of equality, and I forgot to say thanks for letting me know about 'em. Thanks, EdgarJPublius!).

[relmn3iko]

First of all, everyone in this thread should read "Female Power and Male Dominance" by Peggy Sanday.

She basically outlines some of the stuff that was already mentioned in this threat - agriculture encourages patriarchy while hunter-gatherer societies tend to be more gender-equal. Also times of war tend to encourage male dominance while in peacetime women increase in influence - basically, men are good at killing things and women are good at making babies. The established culture is also pretty vital - cultures with a male creator God are generally patriarchal. Patriarchal societies tend more to rigid hierarchy and top-down chains (the ur-example of masculine hierarchy being the military) while more matriarchal and gender-equal societies tend towards cooperation - take a boo at some recent studies on women and transformational leadership style. I would say that's part of why it's often difficult for women to get into positions of power in America: the entire system is rigged with a masculine bias that men can operate in more easily.

Men are disposable. This is why no one really cares that x number of men are homeless, or commit suicide, or die on the battlefield, or get abused. We take young men who haven't lived a day into their adulthood, ship them off to a foreign land to die and throw away any sense of self or personal agency, and those that survive have a good chance of ending up on the streets and/or committing suicide. But, you know, they have a penis, so the experience must've been pretty awesome for most of those guys. No real reason to help them because that penis of theirs gives them magical superpowers that make them "man up" and tough out those crappy situations. Plus the fact that they don't get to have feelings.

I'm highly leery of many of Wodashin's comments because he sounds like a gigantic MRA. I will counter a few of these "woes of men", however:

Sure all of these are violent situations that are generally experienced by men, but particularly in the case of the military (or on the opposite spectrum, violent crime, as a lot of things like gang violence involves covert prestige), there is a lot of prestige associated with the entire experience of violence. Men who go to war and do well are honoured highly. I mean, diss a soldier if you wanna scandalize an American. A woman who is beaten by her husband might be ignored or pitied - a woman who is raped is often blamed for her own assault and considered dirty, broken, damaged. While both men and women are experiencing violence, the end treatment of these two people is very different.

And I find it pretty hilarious that Wodashin is whining about men in war losing sense of self and personal agency when the entire traditional institution of marriage is about denying women personal agency. Babymaker, prostitute and maid all in one, and yeah, you have to change your name. Can you think of anything else more emblematic of loss of self? You are now the chattel of your husband, yey? Someone needs to read A Handmaid's Tale.

I'm not going to argue that there aren't gender stereotypes that are harmful to men (like manly men not showing feelings) or that men don't experience violence, but there are different KINDS of violence and different kinds of POWER associated with said violence. The violence men experience is different than the violence women experience.

I'll make one final comment that Wodashin will jump on, but... yeah, homelessness with men is a problem, but the fact that society is more likely to help women with children (in order to keep them from being homeless) is not bad, imo. Homeless men are almost always single. Children are a priority and they need someone to raise them... if the mother is in danger of homelessness, it's probably because the dad fucked off on his kids, so who's really to blame, eh?

[Ormurinn]

First of all, everyone in this thread should read "Female Power and Male Dominance" by Peggy Sanday.

Please post some specific citations - its unfair to reference material that isn't freely availiable.

I'm highly leery of many of Wodashin's comments because he sounds like a gigantic MRA.

Thats outrageous, equivalent to Wodashin saying he's leery of your comments because you sound like a massive Feminist. Advocating for male causes isn't a bad thing.

Sure all of these are violent situations that are generally experienced by men, but particularly in the case of the military (or on the opposite spectrum, violent crime, as a lot of things like gang violence involves covert prestige), there is a lot of prestige associated with the entire experience of violence. Men who go to war and do well are honoured highly. I mean, diss a soldier if you wanna scandalize an American. A woman who is beaten by her husband might be ignored or pitied - a woman who is raped is often blamed for her own assault and considered dirty, broken, damaged. While both men and women are experiencing violence, the end treatment of these two people is very different.

From a different perspective, battered women have a network of shelters for them that dont exist for men (and feminist groups cheer when equal protection is denied to men http://www.cwl.org/advocacy/amicus-prog ... ered-women ), and raped women are almost always treated with sympathy. Anonymity in rape cases is lifted for the accused, so even the aquitted have their lives ruined by false accusations. We take rape so seriously we suspend justice for the accused.

Men who return from battles with PTSD are implied to be weak or cowardly, and men overwhelmingly work in 3K's jobs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty,_Dan ... _Demeaning whilst women, as a rule, do not.

And I find it pretty hilarious that Wodashin is whining about men in war losing sense of self and personal agency when the entire traditional institution of marriage is about denying women personal agency. Babymaker, prostitute and maid all in one, and yeah, you have to change your name. Can you think of anything else more emblematic of loss of self? You are now the chattel of your husband, yey? Someone needs to read A Handmaid's Tale.

Thats a base and disgusting attitude. Dont transplant your relationship issues into the debate. In any case, consciption is compulsary, marriage is not. Even when married, women have extensive legal rights denied to enlisted personnel, including bodily autonomy. A husband can't force his wife to take drugs against her will, force her to die for him, or lock her away on a whim. The millitary can do all this and more to men.

I'll make one final comment that Wodashin will jump on, but... yeah, homelessness with men is a problem, but the fact that society is more likely to help women with children (in order to keep them from being homeless) is not bad, imo. Homeless men are almost always single. Children are a priority and they need someone to raise them... if the mother is in danger of homelessness, it's probably because the dad fucked off on his kids, so who's really to blame, eh?

That is sexism. For one, you're missing the point, even women without children are more likely to be housed than men without children. Secondly, perhaps there would be a more even split in custody were it not for custody laws that blatantly discriminate against men. Finally you stereotype all relationship breakdown as being the fault of men. That paragraph is such a twisted tangle of prejudice that I'm at a loss.

[jestingrabbit]

Someone needs to read A Handmaid's Tale.

I've gotta say, relmn3iko, that I agree with what you are saying in general, but using fiction to back an argument isn't great imo.

I'm highly leery of many of Wodashin's comments because he sounds like a gigantic MRA.

Thats outrageous, equivalent to Wodashin saying he's leery of your comments because you sound like a massive Feminist. Advocating for male causes isn't a bad thing.

No, its not equivalent. That's kinda the point. There is a power differential between men and women in modern western culture, and it is overwhelmingly in favour of men. Being all about men's rights, and using things like conscription, that hasn't happened in the west for decades, to argue that its so much worse for men, is a demonstration of a pretty blinkered way of seeing the world.

and raped women are almost always treated with sympathy. Anonymity in rape cases is lifted for the accused, so even the aquitted have their lives ruined by false accusations. We take rape so seriously we suspend justice for the accused.

This is nonsense. Women who are raped are often labeled as sluts or as "asking for it". Regarding anonymity, people who go to court as a defendant in a criminal case are routinely publicly identified in what are known as court notices. See, for instance, this page from the jurisdiction in which I reside.

http://searchcourtlists.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/scm/search

All the adult defendants are identified, the children are not. Why should there be a special rule for rape?

Men who return from battles with PTSD are implied to be weak or cowardly

Who does this?

[The Great Hippo]

and raped women are almost always treated with sympathy.

Which women? In what culture? In what context?

We still exist in a world where we are often punished for having the audacity to be sexually abused--women and men. Throwing generalities like these around doesn't do them or anyone else any favors.

Anonymity in rape cases is lifted for the accused, so even the aquitted have their lives ruined by false accusations. We take rape so seriously we suspend justice for the accused.

I'd argue that we (I'm thinking US culture, here) fetishize rape--caring neurotically for the concerns of some, dismissing the concerns of others. There's certain things you can do to reduce how much we care--like dress the wrong way, come from the wrong neighborhood, work in the wrong profession, say the wrong things, or even have the wrong color skin.

And the sexual abuse we care about as a culture doesn't always follow a simple 'women vs men' line of thought. It's far more complex than that, and again, you're doing no one any favors by implying otherwise.

Even when married, women have extensive legal rights denied to enlisted personnel, including bodily autonomy. A husband can't force his wife to take drugs against her will, force her to die for him, or lock her away on a whim. The millitary can do all this and more to men.

And women, in the US. Again, complex issue. Resist generalizations.

if the mother is in danger of homelessness, it's probably because the dad fucked off on his kids, so who's really to blame, eh?

I'm not going to address the rest of your stuff, but I want to stop at this statement, because I think it brings up an important point about how we address sexism. 'Who is to blame?'--is that a useful question? Does assigning fault to someone give us a solution for the problem? Sometimes, yes--it can answer questions like 'Who should pay alimony?' or 'Who should take care of the kids?'.

But is it always useful? I often don't find it to be a particularly interesting question, because it seems like a question that's more about exercising moral indignation than addressing real, actual abuse. Finding who's to blame should only be a function of protecting the abused--and ensuring no one else suffers that abuse.

I think both of you are rushing to play blame games with sexism and, in the process, grossly oversimplifying a very complex subject. I don't dispute that women in our culture are discriminated against--abused--and then, even punished for daring to have the audacity to be abused. I also don't dispute that these things also happen to men in certain contexts.

I don't think it's useful or interesting to run around holding up various examples of that abuse and say 'BUT LOOK AT THIS, ISN'T THIS TERRIBLE?' and in the same breath try to minimize the extent of abuse that the other person is bringing up. 'Are women more abused than men?' might be a useful question to answer, but let's not answer it for the wrong reasons.

Men who return from battles with PTSD are implied to be weak or cowardly

Who does this?

It took a very long time for PTSD to even be recognized as a legitimate disorder. There was a surprising amount of resistance to it, and quite a number of people assumed it was just cowardice.

Don't know how prevalent it is today, but it wouldn't surprise me to know there are people out there who still think PTSD isn't a 'thing'.

[Ormurinn]

No, its not equivalent. That's kinda the point. There is a power differential between men and women in modern western culture, and it is overwhelmingly in favour of men. Being all about men's rights, and using things like conscription, that hasn't happened in the west for decades, to argue that its so much worse for men, is a demonstration of a pretty blinkered way of seeing the world.

Off the top of my head, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Norway, Switzerland, Greece, and Austria all enforce male conscription.

Why is arguing in favour of men's rights such a terrible thing? Men can advocate for parity in the family court system, in legal standing in civil court cases, in sentencing after convictions. They can campaign for access to "Paper Abortions" to level the playing field with regards to child support, or lobby for wrongful paternity to be taken seriously, and yes, against one-sided conscription - and fight to have male sexual abuse, health problems and other concerns recognised socially, without harming women in any way whatsoever. Your position amounts to "People shouldnt care about things I don't care about because POWER DIFFERENTIAL!"

and raped women are almost always treated with sympathy. Anonymity in rape cases is lifted for the accused, so even the aquitted have their lives ruined by false accusations. We take rape so seriously we suspend justice for the accused.

This is nonsense. Women who are raped are often labeled as sluts or as "asking for it". Regarding anonymity, people who go to court as a defendant in a criminal case are routinely publicly identified in what are known as court notices.

In the U.K, people are innocent until proven guilty, so their identities are kept secret (automatic in all but the crown courts - where anonymity has to be applied for) until such time as they are convicted. It prevents all kinds of nasty drama with people who are certain the defendant was guilty, and think he needs roughing up. This is ignored in rape cases, for no good reason really. Recently a campaign to restore anonymity for men accused of rape was quashed by radical feminist groups.

It's not nonsense that raped women are treated with sympathy - in my personal experience, and pretty universally across the western world, Rape is a serious or even capital crime. I can't think of a crime thats taken more seriously, or has more media attention devoted to it generally. There isn't, for instance, a widely ranging public information campaign to hammer home how bad assault is in the U.K. Theres a laundry list of such campaigns for rape awareness.

[The Great Hippo]

Why is arguing in favour of men's rights such a terrible thing?

Because a lot of times, the actual tone of these arguments end up as 'Women don't have it bad, men are the real victims!'.

There's nothing wrong with caring about men's rights--with supporting men's issues, and on the flip-side, not really going out of your way to support women's rights or women's issues. I mean, what's important to you is what's important to you, and there's more than enough injustice in the world for us to all stick to our passions.

The problem is when, on your way to argue for men's issues, you proceed to minimize, demean, or otherwise dismiss women's issues. This happens a lot. You just did it in this very thread. It happens on the flip-side, too (people who care about women's issues demeaning or dismissing men's issues) and it's just as wrong then as it is now.

It's not nonsense that raped women are treated with sympathy - in my personal experience, and pretty universally across the western world, Rape is a serious or even capital crime. I can't think of a crime thats taken more seriously, or has more media attention devoted to it generally. There isn't, for instance, a widely ranging public information campaign to hammer home how bad assault is in the U.K. Theres a laundry list of such campaigns for rape awareness.

What you originally said wasn't "We treat the rape of women as a serious crime", or "We devote tons of media attention to the rape of women", or "We run tons of campaigns to promote awareness about rape".

What you said was: "[In the Western World,] raped women are almost always treated with sympathy".

What I'm saying is: It depends on the context.

[CorruptUser]

The problem is when, on your way to argue for men's issues, you proceed to minimize, demean, or otherwise dismiss women's issues. This happens a lot. You just did it in this very thread. It happens on the flip-side, too (people who care about women's issues demeaning or dismissing men's issues) and it's just as wrong then as it is now.

And what if the issue happens to be an issue that both can't simultaneously have? We don't live in some magical land where every philosopher knows how to fix. Protecting people accused of rape will make it harder for true victims to get justice, but making it easier to convict rapists will mean more innocent or falsely-accused people end up in prison for decades for crimes they didn't commit. (Personally, I wouldn't mind if the "well she's a slut" was inadmissible in a court of law). Child support is, well, "complicated" is an understatement, as is Alimony, but protecting Fathers' Rights may have some negative impact on Mothers' Rights.

Personally, I prefer Humanism to either Feminism or Masculinism; in general, it should be about protecting the rights of everyone rather than any particular demographic, though I'll agree sometimes you have to focus on what affects you the most. Many 19th century Feminists were Humanists of a sort; the Feminism movement was very much against slavery. Though there was a huge outcry when the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments were passed. It's actually funny in a macabre way; the men in charge had given more dignity/rights to the former slaves than to their own wives. After that, you had a few Feminists rather annoyed with the Black community.

[jestingrabbit]

Off the top of my head, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Norway, Switzerland, Greece, and Austria all enforce male conscription.

I had no idea continental Europe was so backwards.

I was actually thinking of being drafted into an army that is engaged in a war, that is, being conscripted into active service. Wodashin's initial comment

We take young men who haven't lived a day into their adulthood, ship them off to a foreign land to die and throw away any sense of self or personal agency

is only about men who have been on a battlefield, not those who spend half a year in basic training, which is what national service amounts to. And if they volunteered, I think its widely known that the experience of active duty military personnel is, to say the least, known to be unpleasant. But Wodashin used the word "take" which seems to me only consistent with a draft (and the remainder indicated into active service), which hasn't happened for decades, as I said. I suppose that you would fit this into a narrative of how men do most of the "dirty, dangerous, and demeaning jobs".

But, I wonder, when you say that, do you count prostitution in the list of these jobs? By far, the majority of sex workers are women, the work is dirty (that's why people have showers after sex), dangerous (prostitutes are at a hugely increased risk of rape and other violence) and its not at all considered to be prestigious.

Both women and men sometimes choose to do dangerous work for money, but when men do it, people build monuments to their bravery, and when women do it, its criminalised, if not demonised.

Why is arguing in favour of men's rights such a terrible thing?

A priori, its not. But, like hippo says, it seems to be all about how women have it so great, and men have it really bad by comparison. Generally, that's not true. Do men's rights activists ever acknowledge this?

Your position amounts to "People shouldnt care about things I don't care about because POWER DIFFERENTIAL!"

You said that one thing was equivalent to another. My position is that they're not, because the two things you interchanged aren't interchangeable in the world at large.

People can care about whatever they like, but people can also get tired of stupid arguments with blinkered people. People can express that frustration.

In the U.K, people are innocent until proven guilty

This statement - "innocent until proven guilty" - is about who has to prove what in a court of law. Its not required of the legal system to treat people accused of a crime as being identical to those who are not.

, so their identities are kept secret (automatic in all but the crown courts - where anonymity has to be applied for) until such time as they are convicted.

So, in every trial that involves a jury, the defendant's name is public knowledge.

It's not nonsense that raped women are treated with sympathy - in my personal experience, and pretty universally across the western world, Rape is a serious or even capital crime. I can't think of a crime thats taken more seriously, or has more media attention devoted to it generally. There isn't, for instance, a widely ranging public information campaign to hammer home how bad assault is in the U.K. Theres a laundry list of such campaigns for rape awareness.

How about terrorism, or murder, or drink driving, or just "horror" car smashes in general?

A lot of rape awareness campaigns are about pointing out to men that demanding sex from someone who is saying no counts as rape. I think that's pretty telling, that men expect to be able to force or demand sex from unwilling participants. That's the power imbalance that makes being feminist and being MRA not interchangeable.

[Wodashin]

and raped women are almost always treated with sympathy. Anonymity in rape cases is lifted for the accused, so even the aquitted have their lives ruined by false accusations. We take rape so seriously we suspend justice for the accused.

This is nonsense. Women who are raped are often labeled as sluts or as "asking for it".

Who does this?

Men who return from battles with PTSD are implied to be weak or cowardly

Who does this?

Maybe it's just because I live in some strange, Twilight Zone-esque part of the US, but when women are raped, most people's reactions aren't "Well, she was asking for it and was a slut!" It's usually, you know, compassion that's shown to these people. If the opposite were true, we would NEVER have national outcries against, for example, the Duke Lacrosse scandal or the scandal in Hofstra University. In the former case, the only thing stopping those men from going to jail was the confession from the woman that it was a false accusation, and in the Hofstra case, the only thing from stopping multiple men from going to jail was the fact that it was filmed. They were guilty before proven innocent. That type of mentality wouldn't exist if the normal response to rape victims was that they "were asking for it". Heck, the boys from the Hofstra case were invited onto a talk show and were booed after they had already been proven to be innocent. Everyone was telling them that "it was their fault". Some people think that being falsely accused of rape can be a "learning experience" as well.

Now, this isn't to dismiss the horrible crime of rape when it is committed against a woman. It's just to point out that you're a) being disingenuous about people's normal responses, and b) that we are biased to protect one gender and demonize the other in almost every case. Men who rape women are horrible, evil people. However, we don't see the opposite as being true, and we give compassion to false accusers and scorn to those falsely accused. I don't want to bring down the importance of fighting rape, but it's important to not do so through sexism and judicial bias. Men's rights, women's rights, these things are important. They aren't mutually exclusive, but you people make it seem like doing anything to help men is evil and misogynistic. Or that even trying to help the other 45% of domestic abuse victims is bad because they have penises, and in the word of Zardoz, the penis is evil.

As I pointed out before, mathematically, 45% of domestic abuse victims are men. And that's just with what's been reported by men in the studies. Obviously men would be less likely to report or to reveal in a study that they have in fact been domestically abused, due to our soceity's culture. Throw in a margin of error, and we basically have near parity. But, well, they're men, and by being men, they don't need any help. I've never once seen a domestic abuse campaign that focused on both forms as equally bad. It's always abuse against women, by men. And unilateral abuse at that. Unilateral male abuse of women is not the most common form of abuse. However, it's treated as such, and the vast majority of help for domestic abuse victims goes to women. Not 55% of the funds. Nearly all of it. There are no domestic abuse shelters for men, and even male children cannot go into domestic abuse shelters once they're over a certain age. But, you know, those abused men and male children have all dem privileges, so it's not like they need any help or shelter or anything. Probably best we just let them add to the non-important numbers of vastly higher male homelessness and suicide rates.

Once again, don't try and twist my words to mean that I think women's abuse problems don't matter. They DO matter, but they matter just as much. Not vastly more. The notion that women are in need of so much help, and are in so much danger that we need to protect them from at all costs, even if the danger they face is faced by men as well, is neo-chivalry. Somehow, though, I'm sure that my saying that "men and women are equal, and we should treat the problems of them as individual people rather than sexual demographics, as equal", makes me a misogynist.

E: Also, my "take" when it came to male conscription was a reference to world history of the West, and also, that stuff happens all the time in the third world. And even as recently as the 60s here in America. I don't think I have to go back through all my posts to show who and what I was responding to, but this thread isn't about just the current affairs of things. It's about universal and cultural sexism, which supposedly is aimed against women and has been through the centuries, and I rebuffed that by saying that life for men and women have sucked, just in different ways. To say one suffered more or less is silly. Just because some men are at the top does not mean men are at the top. It's never, ever been a man vs. woman thing. It's always been power. If it were otherwise, there would never have been things such as Queens or Empresses.

[chrlat]

to jestingrabbit

why don't you go out and make a difference if this is how you feel (though seems like that difference would be men being discriminated against), instead of whining and ignoring any argument that goes against yours? just a thought, sweetheart angelcake dearest darling honeybun


... I don't even know where to start with this idiocy. So, banned.

- Az

[Ormurinn]

I was actually thinking of being drafted into an army that is engaged in a war, that is, being conscripted into active service.

Danger and loss of personal liberty are not exclusive to active service. Your flippancy towards what amounts to sex-exclusive slavery is surprising. Many of the nations mentionned are engaged in U.N peacekeeping, and so there is a possibility that conscripts could be deployed in combat zones.

I suppose that you would fit this into a narrative of how men do most of the "dirty, dangerous, and demeaning jobs".

Thats not a narrative, it's a fact. Dispute it with figures if you like.

But, I wonder, when you say that, do you count prostitution in the list of these jobs? By far, the majority of sex workers are women, the work is dirty (that's why people have showers after sex), dangerous (prostitutes are at a hugely increased risk of rape and other violence) and its not at all considered to be prestigious.

Ok, there is a single, minority occupation done mainly, but not exclusively, by women. It by no means makes up close to a majority of this kind of work. How does this refute the fact that men do most of the worlds 3K jobs?

Both women and men sometimes choose to do dangerous work for money, but when men do it, people build monuments to their bravery, and when women do it, its criminalised, if not demonised.

Perhaps this is down to our different countries, but I've never seen a monument to trawlermen, windowcleaners, miners, meatpackers and abbatoir workers, loggers, Ironworkers, migrant farm workers, or really any 3K job. Miners in particular are hated, especially in the south, for the Thatcher-era strikes.

You said that one thing was equivalent to another. My position is that they're not, because the two things you interchanged aren't interchangeable in the world at large.

You're dismissing someone because their ideology doesn't match up with yours. If they do the same to you, you can't then claim the situations are different because the particulars of their ideologies are different.

This statement - "innocent until proven guilty" - is about who has to prove what in a court of law. Its not required of the legal system to treat people accused of a crime as being identical to those who are not.

The incidence of vigilante justice is high in rape cases (another sign that male on female rape isnt minimised in western culture) so high that it used to be common practice to conceal the accused's identity. Unless you're saying that even to be accused of rape means you should be subjected to a lower quality of life, I suggest you rethink your position.

A lot of rape awareness campaigns are about pointing out to men that demanding sex from someone who is saying no counts as rape. I think that's pretty telling, that men expect to be able to force or demand sex from unwilling participants. That's the power imbalance that makes being feminist and being MRA not interchangeable.

...that men expect to be able to force or demand sex...

men

All men are rapists? You really do have an unhealthy attitude.

[The Great Hippo]

and raped women are almost always treated with sympathy. Anonymity in rape cases is lifted for the accused, so even the aquitted have their lives ruined by false accusations. We take rape so seriously we suspend justice for the accused.

This is nonsense. Women who are raped are often labeled as sluts or as "asking for it".

Who does this?

Sometimes? The police. Rape: The Victim Experience Review

All men are rapists? You really do have an unhealthy attitude.

That's not what they said. They said 'rape awareness campaigns are often focused on telling men this'. That is the reality of what most rape awareness campaigns are focused on.

Is there any chance we can simmer down and stop dismissing the reality of actual abuse that exists for actual people--and the various ways our various societies demean, trivialize, and ignore that abuse--merely because the consequences of its existence is inconvenient to our point? Or is this just going to be some nonsensical 'man vs women' game of 'Who's Got It Worse'? Will the sex that wins get a prize? Because if so, I want a convertible.

[jestingrabbit]

and raped women are almost always treated with sympathy. Anonymity in rape cases is lifted for the accused, so even the aquitted have their lives ruined by false accusations. We take rape so seriously we suspend justice for the accused.

This is nonsense. Women who are raped are often labeled as sluts or as "asking for it".

Who does this?

I went to google and typed in "Crystal Mangum slut" (Crystal Mangum was the accuser in the Duke Lacrosse incident) and got back more than a million hits.

A fairly large number of people do this.

As I pointed out before, mathematically, 45% of domestic abuse victims are men.

Okay, but, if we go up the page a bit to where you got that figure, you can see some other figures, too.

The figure for rape by itself is "Nearly 1 in 5 women (18.3%) and 1 in 71 men (1.4%) in the United States".

For "severe physical violence", it's 24.3% for women and 13.8% for men.

So its true that if we include all partner violence, men and women are about equal. But in terms of severity of physical abuse, men come off a lot better than women, statistically. I think that this difference in severity is why we have such a difference in the provision of shelters for victims of spousal abuse.

E: Also, my "take" when it came to male conscription was a reference to world history of the West, and also, that stuff happens all the time in the third world. And even as recently as the 60s here in America. I don't think I have to go back through all my posts to show who and what I was responding to, but this thread isn't about just the current affairs of things. It's about universal and cultural sexism, which supposedly is aimed against women and has been through the centuries, and I rebuffed that by saying that life for men and women have sucked, just in different ways. To say one suffered more or less is silly. Just because some men are at the top does not mean men are at the top. It's never, ever been a man vs. woman thing. It's always been power. If it were otherwise, there would never have been things such as Queens or Empresses.

I'm going to address this because its the core of your argument. The very crux of it seems to be "To say one suffered more or less is silly".

Its definitely the case that rigid gender roles have led to the suffering of both men and women. But I don't think its silly to say that one gender had it worse off than another. In particular, women had, and have, it worse than men. The figures that I pointed to are a good indication of this. Another would be acts like this one.

Many of the nations mentionned are engaged in U.N peacekeeping, and so there is a possibility that conscripts could be deployed in combat zones.

This is really beside the point, but this is just wrong. A member of NATO would never send conscripts to a peacekeeping engagement in this or any coming decade, unless there's another world war. Its long been accepted that professional, volunteer soldiers are the only soldiers that can be trusted to do the job with any degree of effectiveness, having to supply units that would amount to little more than canon fodder is a hindrance to modern armies.

I suppose that you would fit this into a narrative of how men do most of the "dirty, dangerous, and demeaning jobs".

Thats not a narrative, it's a fact. Dispute it with figures if you like.

If its a fact, surely you can demonstrate it with some data, or are we just to take your claims as facts, and mine as things that need proof?

And its not just prostitution. Maids, elder care, nursing, these are all dominated by women, and all obviously dirty and pretty demeaning. As for dangerous, nurses and those who work in nursing homes often get hit or otherwise abused by their patients, and maids often suffer abuse from their employers. Here's an unpleasant anecdote.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/08/ ... 7420100826

And why is this the category that we need to focus on? If men are more represented in the 3D category, but women are more represented in the dirty and demeaning jobs, how do we measure who came off better or worse?

The standard thing to look at to measure socioeconomic disparity is mean income, and men get paid more than women.

Perhaps this is down to our different countries, but I've never seen a monument to trawlermen, windowcleaners, miners, meatpackers and abbatoir workers, loggers, Ironworkers, migrant farm workers, or really any 3K job. Miners in particular are hated, especially in the south, for the Thatcher-era strikes.

or perhaps you're unobservant.

http://public-art.shu.ac.uk/other/memorials/index.html

You're dismissing someone because their ideology doesn't match up with yours. If they do the same to you, you can't then claim the situations are different because the particulars of their ideologies are different.

No, I'm agreeing with someone voicing suspicion of a particular stance, because the arguments people with that stance put forward are pretty rubbish. In much the same way, I am suspicious of young earth creationists. If a group of people often spout crap, I don't think it unreasonable to make note of that, and adjust one's expectations accordingly.

This statement - "innocent until proven guilty" - is about who has to prove what in a court of law. Its not required of the legal system to treat people accused of a crime as being identical to those who are not.

The incidence of vigilante justice is high in rape cases (another sign that male on female rape isnt minimised in western culture) so high that it used to be common practice to conceal the accused's identity. Unless you're saying that even to be accused of rape means you should be subjected to a lower quality of life, I suggest you rethink your position.

I think that the rights of wrongly accused men and the social ill of vigilante justice are not the only things at stake. That you choose to frame the issue in this way, whilst ignoring any other issues, like other victims coming forward, or possible witnesses who know the defendant who would not know he was a suspect if he had anonymity, is telling. Its a complex issue with many things in the balance. That you only want to look at one side of those scales demonstrates your lack of perspective.

And frankly, if you are charged, and a prosecutor thinks they can make a case, the public good is served by people knowing that. That a man was accused of rape and it went to court is something that a potential partner should have a right to know. In much the same way, if you are charged of embezzlement and it goes to court, a potential employer should know that.

All men are rapists? You really do have an unhealthy attitude.

that some men, that enough men for it to be seen as worthwhile... I suppose that this one slip gives you deep Freudian insight into my character.

Edit: for formatting.

[The Great Hippo]

Its definitely the case that rigid gender roles have led to the suffering of both men and women. But I don't think its silly to say that one gender had it worse off than another. In particular, women had, and have, it worse than men.

'Worse' is a nebulous term, and one I think we should avoid. We can say things like 'statistically, women experience more violence then men'--particularly if that's what the statistics say!--and even things like 'socially, women have less pull then men' are things we can measure (to a point), things that have use, things that can inform our actions. But 'Women have it worse than men'?

Let's ignore the accuracy of this statement for a moment. What use does this statement serve? How does it help us prevent abuse? How does it change the landscape of abuse? How does it modify our response to that abuse?

[Wodashin]

Men get abused just as often as women, about, but they're men, so we shouldn't really have domestic abuse shelters for them. In fact, the fact that we disallow boys over the age of 12/13 (can't remember) to get shelter at these shelters benefits them by teaching them an important life lesson about their male privilege! The beatings that their father or mother will give them will surely mold them into good people. Boy, all those male teenagers must be thrilled that they have literally no one to turn to but their abusive parents, and those abused husbands and boyfriends must just be sissies who can't handle their privilege. Quite clearly, exposing male children to abuse for no reason other than their penis makes them unworthy to be protected could in no way be part of the reason domestic abuse exists. I mean, it's not like people who abuse people don't tend to have been abused in the past, male or female. This in no way continues the problems of domestic violence.

Obviously the 25% of the 35% of women who get abused is justification to cover that entire 35%, even the 75% that isn't severely abused, and not to cover the entirety of the 29% of men who are abused because only 14% of them get severely abused. If we do the math, we see that about (but probably less than this number, due to low male report rates) 55% of domestic abuse victims are women. 25% of that is 14%, so overall, 14% of domestic abuse cases are cases involving severely abused women. For men, they make up (probably more than, as stated before) 45% of all domestic abuse cases. Of that, 14% are severely abused, so that equals 6.3% of all domestic abuse cases that involved severely abused men.

So, 20% of domestic abuse cases are severe. Women get severely abused at about twice the rate as men. So, by this, we should see that 1 out of every 3 domestic violence shelters should be for men! But that a) is FAR from the truth, with male domestic violence shelters being basically non-existent, and b) would be pointless, because penises give the wielder the power to not care about being severely abused. Therefore, the fact that we only focus on women's abuse, and only give help to abuse victims who are women, is perfectly justified if we just don't pay attention to the statistics!

I went to google and typed in "Crystal Mangum slut" (Crystal Mangum was the accuser in the Duke Lacrosse incident) and got back more than a million hits.

A fairly large number of people do this.

I googled "rape victims are sluts" and came back with almost a million hits. The vast majority? About the Slut Walk, and how they are trying to stop people from calling rape victims sluts. So, it seems far more people are concerned with rape victims being called sluts than people actually think they are sluts. But, you know, not like that matters. Blowing non-existent problems out of proportion by making them a problem in the first place is a perfectly reasonable way of going about things. Here's something that I won't back with a study, because I don't need to, because it's common sense. If you polled people, and asked "are rape victims sluts?", you would get back nearly 100% "no". I guarantee it. In the West.

Its definitely the case that rigid gender roles have led to the suffering of both men and women. But I don't think its silly to say that one gender had it worse off than another. In particular, women had, and have, it worse than men. The figures that I pointed to are a good indication of this. Another would be acts like this one.

You know, making assertions to dismiss my assertions, where I backed mine with facts and you simply waved my comments away, not making note of any of them, and posted that link as if it's some end-all be-all to the discussion, is stupid. Women, in the past, had very little personal agency. So did men. Women toiled away in the house menially. Men toiled away around the house menially, and on the battlefield. Your argument is fallacious, because it's insinuating that men have it better off simply because they're men. You're comparing the lowest women with the highest men. It's idiotic, plain and simple. Most men weren't business owners, or kings, or aristocrats. The VAST majority of men throughout history would work themselves to death for their family, with no personal agency, simply taking up the job of their father or being a serf or slave to the aristocracy, or they would be taken at very young ages to fight and die in droves. That's not something to clamor for, and neither is what the VAST majority of women had to go through through history.

However, you imply that men have just always had it better. That somehow, most men have power at all. That men can't be disenfranchised. Or that women can't have power. Look through history, and you can see that that is just wrong. As said, there would NEVER be a Queen or Empress if that were the case, and men would ALWAYS get first priority over women if they were inherently more important. The Titanic would've sunk, and the captain would've called out "Men and children first!". That didn't happen. Men are disposable, and can be thrown away. Their hopes and dreams and being unmattering. Just like most women. The difference is that society wants to protect women, and couldn't give two shits about men. That's why no one cares about the male homelessness problem, or suicide problem, or their domestic abuse problem, or anything else that faces men more than women, or equal to women. Because we are still a chivalrous society that wants to save the damsel in distress. That's why women's domestic abuse is the only abuse you hear about, and why breast cancer research gets so much more funding than research for lung or skin cancer or even prostate cancer. Neo-chivalry.

[Ormurinn]

If its a fact, surely you can demonstrate it with some data, or are we just to take your claims as facts, and mine as things that need proof?

You were questionning something thats effectively common knowledge - extraordinary claims have a higher burden of proof. that said, heres a link to the ONS statistics;

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key ... utput=html

It's not sorted specifically into 3K jobs, but try scrolling down to "Elementary Occupations" and "Skilled trades."

And its not just prostitution. Maids, elder care, nursing, these are all dominated by women, and all obviously dirty and pretty demeaning. As for dangerous, nurses and those who work in nursing homes often get hit or otherwise abused by their patients, and maids often suffer abuse from their employers. Here's an unpleasant anecdote.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/08/ ... 7420100826

And why is this the category that we need to focus on? If men are more represented in the 3D category, but women are more represented in the dirty and demeaning jobs, how do we measure who came off better or worse?

The standard thing to look at to measure socioeconomic disparity is mean income, and men get paid more than women.

You consider Nursing to be a demeaning profession? "Nurses are heroes" gets 8,630,000 hits on google, versus 3,950,000 for "Miners are Heroes." I come from a family of Nurses, and to pretend it's not a profession with massive attatched social prestige is disingenuous. Nursing is celebrated all over the world in the same way as soldiering, which you gave as an example of a profession for which there is there is "a lot of prestige associated"

http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/nurse-memorial.htm
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/894231

I think that the rights of wrongly accused men and the social ill of vigilante justice are not the only things at stake. That you choose to frame the issue in this way, whilst ignoring any other issues, like other victims coming forward, or possible witnesses who know the defendant who would not know he was a suspect if he had anonymity, is telling. Its a complex issue with many things in the balance. That you only want to look at one side of those scales demonstrates your lack of perspective.

And frankly, if you are charged, and a prosecutor thinks they can make a case, the public good is served by people knowing that. That a man was accused of rape and it went to court is something that a potential partner should have a right to know. In much the same way, if you are charged of embezzlement and it goes to court, a potential employer should know that.

We're not going to agree on this point. I'll just say that Blackstone's formulation disagrees, and you're in disagreement with a significant body of Jurisprudential theory, though Pol Pot agrees wholeheartedly with your position.

Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

I honestly can't understand your position that people have no right to be vindicated, after being found not guilty. This person has been shown to not have comitted the crime beyond reasonable doubt, and you want to institutionalise discrimination against them.

All men are rapists? You really do have an unhealthy attitude.

that some men, that enough men for it to be seen as worthwhile... I suppose that this one slip gives you deep Freudian insight into my character.

Well, you'd already demonstrated a really wierd position on gender relations with your comments on marriage. The patriarchy must be very persuasive to convince so many women every year to become "Babymaker, prostitute and maid all in one". That comment is, ironically, the most misogynistic thing thats been said in this whole discussion.

[The Great Hippo]

Men get abused just as often as women, about, but they're men, so we shouldn't really have domestic abuse shelters for them. In fact, the fact that we disallow boys over the age of 12/13 (can't remember) to get shelter at these shelters benefits them by teaching them an important life lesson about their male privilege!

Is that what you think the primary concern is?

I googled "rape victims are sluts" and came back with almost a million hits. The vast majority? About the Slut Walk, and how they are trying to stop people from calling rape victims sluts. So, it seems far more people are concerned with rape victims being called sluts than people actually think they are sluts. But, you know, not like that matters. Blowing non-existent problems out of proportion by making them a problem in the first place is a perfectly reasonable way of going about things. Here's something that I won't back with a study, because I don't need to, because it's common sense. If you polled people, and asked "are rape victims sluts?", you would get back nearly 100% "no". I guarantee it. In the West.

Oh, for fuck's sake. Did you read the review I linked? It's far more complex than that.

Please stop nullifying the existence of other people's experiences based on some nonsensical 'IT MAKES NO SENSE TO ME SO IT CAN'T POSSIBLY BE TRUE' statement. This is what you're complaining about re: Men's Abuse, and you're doing precisely the same thing.

Just like most women. The difference is that society wants to protect women, and couldn't give two shits about men.

It is far more complex than that, and acting like it isn't does an enormous disservice to the men you're interested in protecting.

Well, you'd already demonstrated a really wierd position on gender relations with your comments on marriage. The patriarchy must be very persuasive to convince so many women every year to become "Babymaker, prostitute and maid all in one". That comment is, ironically, the most misogynistic thing thats been said in this whole discussion.

Please stop misrepresenting what people are actually saying for the sake of making them look bad.

So I guess the answer to my question of 'can we please stop behaving like morons in this thread' is a 'no'? The 'men vs women' race to see who's got it worse (or if they both have it equally as worse! Because that's totally a reasonable statement to make too, right?) is on? Because I'm really looking forward to that convertible.