I think the mistake here is seeing feminism as a sort of general welfare program for women, as opposed to a political movement against the specific oppression women face *as women.* For example, I'm pretty sure every feminist would admit that men are murdered more often than women. But the vast majority of men's murders aren't the sort of thing where their maleness is central to the act - it's not like most men are murdered because the other man murdering them is biased against men and wants to harm them. But a huge amount of the violence women face *does* stem directly from specific social factors where gender is a central factor. So when feminists focus on things that impact women, it's not because they're broad utilitarians who just have a false belief that women are suffering much more. It's just that they're specifically interested in harms that come to women *as women.* That's also why feminists don't spend time on things like, I don't know, fighting malaria or something - obviously those things harm millions of women all the time, but the mosquitos aren't seeking out women specifically so it's not considered a feminist issue.
Rape is a great example of this. Feminists focus on rape because it's a very central aspect of women's oppression as a class - they've done a huge amount of work over the years showing how rape isn't just an isolated crime that takes place between individuals, but overwhelmingly something that's deeply intertwined with patriarchal power structures and cultural practices and involves one class of people targeting another. When a man is raped, that's obviously a tragic instance of violence, but the number of women who are seeking out male strangers to rape is essentially zero and men as a class clearly don't have their social and political position constrained by the practice of rape. That's what matters to feminists, not just general suffering.
Of course, the reason a lot of people miss this is that modern feminism is often very depoliticized and doesn't always have a good framework for explaining this class analysis. But that's definitely what's going on behind the scenes to bring about the dynamics you're talking about. And I don't think it's an uncommon thing, either - you don't see immigrant rights groups advocating for things that help native-born citizens, even though there are probably some immigrants who are doing better than many native-born citizens, right?
Why is this seen as so morally important though? Is the idea that people have some kind of right not to be harmed qua member of a gender, that makes it way worse to inflict or permit such harms?
No, I don’t think Feminists have ever argued that sexist crimes are intrinsically worse than other crimes. The idea is just that sexist crimes are rooted in social attitudes (patriarchy) that can be changed for the better by activism and people should do that.
I've never seen them argue that either. But many of them judge people very negatively who are more concerned with larger scale harms, like EAs. So those feminists seem to believe that sexism is objectively worse than non gendered harms, at least from their behavior.
Almost nobody subjectively cares about issues in proportion to their social harms. Most feminists are just normal in that respect. That some feminists are unfair to EA is neither here nor there: it says nothing about feminism as an ideology. Feminism is perfectly compatible with effective altruism.
I agree that it is compatible, but also I'm not talking about fringe figures here. If you were to ask someone like Manne or MacKinnon or Srinivasan, "Is it ok that resisting what remains of patriarchal oppression is not very high on my list of priorities?" they would not say that that's ok. These are sophisticated thinkers, not laypeople. I think the most charitable interpretation of their beliefs is that they do think sexist oppression in the western world has a moral importance of comparable scale to war or factory farming.
I’m struggling to see why we should care, if true. ‘Feminists disproportionately likely to think feminist issues are important, news at 11.’ Besides, I’m not even sure your suggestion is correct, if its that they will chide you for prioritizing other issues as more important: feminists of my acquaintance are not angry at environmentalists or people donating to malaria nets for diverting attention from women’s issues. Where they WILL chide you, rightly in my view, is for using poor arguments like BB’s above to argue that patriarchy is over or that women do not face important discrimination on the basis of their sex.
The feminist notion of "the paytreearkee" is non-falsifiable in the same way that DEI activists have made "racial bias" into a non-falsifiable omni-cause. When people do this, they are engaging in dishonest grift, not in altruistic problem-solving. Serious attempts at problem-solving do not start from an unfalsifiable premise in this way.
Dude, have you ever read any history in your life? Because if you had, I would have thought you would be familiar with the historical reality of patriarchy for nearly every culture since people started writing shit down. We can disagree about how much of it is left in countries like Canada and the US in the present but saying that it’s unfalsifiable is… uh.. no, it definitely is not. Patriarchy is a real, objective observable phenomenon and one reason people like you and BB don’t realise it is because feminism was objectively successful in reducing it a huge amount so today we can argue about how much is left. Thanks, feminism!
Things that existed in the past are not evidence of things existing today. This is such a strange error in basic logic that I'm honestly not sure how to respond to it. Thousands of years ago, Christians were burned alive as human torches for the amusement of the Roman Emperor Nero. If I go around today talking about how horribly oppressed I am as a Christian because of this, and demanding that you show deference to my victim status, are you going to take that seriously? No, of course not, as well you shouldn't.
A five year old should be able to grasp this. Not sure why you're having such trouble with it.
>Patriarchy is a real, objective observable phenomenon and one reason people like you and BB don’t realise it is because feminism was objectively successful in reducing it a huge amount so today we can argue about how much is left.<
This is also unfalsifiable. I can just as easily claim that paytreearkee went away because men were willing to listen to the concerns of women, and women should therefore be grateful that men have learned to restrain themselves and no longer abuse their advantages in strength and aggression. I can posit to you that if men truly wished to, they could reduce women to the status of sex slaves, and just point at Afghanistan as evidence of this fact.
You seem to have a really poor understanding of the concept of falsifiability. Some light reading that you might find helpful:
Ok, I have a bad habit of getting snarky and I know that it is never productive, so I apologise for the snarky tone. I will try to be less snarky.
So, the claim is not that 'patriarchy existed in the past, therefore it must exist today". It is "Patriarchy verifiably existed in the past, therefore the existence of patriarchy is verifiable in general, therefore patriarchy is not an unfalsifiable concept." You claimed it is, you are wrong. Obviously wrong because we can also make falsifiable claims about it right now. If I claim "Sweden is more patriarchal than Saudi Arabia", you will find it easy to provide lots of evidence that my claim is false.
What you really want to say, which is actually defensible, is that feminists SOMETIMES make claims about patriarchy that are divorced from evidence and even unfalsifiable in principle. That sometimes patriarchy in feminism becomes a magical evil force that cannot be observed but is always there. I agree! Feminism is a popular and influential intellectual movement and consequently there are plenty of idiots who have made ridiculous feminist claims. But we probably disagree about how prevalent that tendency is, because I think it is pretty unimportant conceptually since there is lots of good evidence supporting active and relevant discrimination happening today in western countries.
Much less than there used to be, thankfully. Which we can say since it's measurable and not an unfalsifiable concept.
>It's just that they're specifically interested in harms that come to women *as women.*
I don't understand the distinction you're drawing here or why it's relevant. This is still an accurate description of feminism and still an accurate description of why it's bad. Having special interest groups that work to benefit one group of people at the expense of others is bad. You seem to be operating under the exact mistaken utilitarian paradigm you outlined - are you aware of the numerous attempts feminist groups have made to shut down men's interest groups, men's domestic abuse shelters, etc, in order to preserve women's better status in these areas? This is why feminism is still clearly bad no matter how you characterize it.
I don't think people who blame feminists for shutting down men's groups or programs that exist to help men are understanding the situation accurately. What's an example you have in mind?
I can grant that because there's still a mountain of evidence that feminist bias is entrenched in our social systems and working against men's interests. From BB's post above that I haven't seen anybody address yet:
>In computing its Global Gender Gap, the much-quoted annual report, the World Economic Forum has explicitly ignored male disadvantages: if men fare worse on a particular dimension, a country still gets a perfect score for equality on that measure. Prodded by the federal Title IX law banning sexual discrimination in schools, educators have concentrated on eliminating disparities in athletics but not in other extracurricular programs, which mostly skew female. The fact that there are now three female college students for every two males is of no concern to the White House Gender Policy Council. Its “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality” doesn’t even mention boys’ struggles in school, instead focusing exclusively on new ways to help female students get further ahead.
This seems to me much less open to interpretation, and is indicative of feminists outright refusing to address gender inequality that disadvantages men... in gender equality reports.
I'll also add that I think you should be very skeptical in general that a special interest group is going to toe the line of what you in particular think is acceptable practice in a liberal society. It's more likely going to keep accumulating power and fighting for more, like public unions requesting more privileges from your taxes each year after securing what they called a "fair wage" the year before or BLM groups not just wanting an end to police brutality but an end to police.
The idea that male murder is not gendered is absurd on face. An awful lot of murder is gang related and/or in other contexts where males solving interpersonal violence is considered in some sense acceptable, while doing the same to women would be condemnable.
Ironically, you’re basically assuming male culture as “default” and inherently non-gendered, when it very much is.
I agree male murder is "gendered," in the sense that gender plays a huge role in what's happening. But what I mean to say is that murder between men has no class dimension - men don't go out and target men *as men* to maim or kill. There's a fundamental difference between members of a dominant social group killing each other for interpersonal slights and one member of a dominant social group killing a member of the subjugated social group in a completely one-sided pattern.
“Men don’t target men as men” - of course they do. You ascribe reason to someone who commits murder as a rational act. Men target men because if they are offended by a man the punishment is murder. Being female is startlingly protective for murder.
I think you're failing to understand what I mean by "as a man." I don't just mean that their gender plays some sort of role in the exchange. I'm saying the interpersonal exchange isn't influenced by inter-class dynamics. But if you don't recognize the basic concept of social classes, that's not going to appear to you.
Again, of course they do. In fact it’s an extremely old trope - men who go out looking for trouble - with men; and men - as men.
Men patrol the boundaries of their territory and look for men to harass.
Men go into a new area and assert dominance - “competitive aggression”, “machismo” or “honor culture”. It’s something I don’t understand, men who go to a bar or a car race or sports event specifically to get into a fight _with other men_ qua “men”. Watch any old machismo movie - “The Dirty Dozen” or “Paint Your Wagon” I imagine, and there’s a fight scene for no reason other than men to fight and hurt men. The end of “Blazing Saddles” has a spectacularly long “fight sequence”; “Victor / Victoria” has a perfect one; James Garner and his outed bodyguard Alex Karras go to a bar specifically to get in a fight - with men - so they feel manly. In the end they sit around arm in arm with the men beaten to a pump singing.
It’s not just movies.
Certainly I understand it. Men primarily fight men, as men.
>I think the mistake here is seeing feminism as a sort of general welfare program for women, as opposed to a political movement against the specific oppression women face *as women.*<
1. If true, it still means feminists should stop lying when they say their movement is about "equality."
2. By obsessing over things like "women in STEM," feminists reveal themselves to be the former (a general welfare program for women), not the latter option that you are proposing. There was probably never a good case that female under-representation in STEM was due to some sort of malicious sex-based oppression, but such a case certainly isn't plausible now and hasn't been plausible for decades at this point. Feminists make no attempt to prove that case, they simply assume it as true and go from there, in much the same way that race-based agitators assume that all racial disparities must be the result of malicious racism.
The majority of feminist activism, both globally and in the west, is *not* stuff like Women in STEM. I agree that sort of bourgeois representation politics can be overemphasized, but most feminists are still working on traditional issues like rape, domestic violence, sexual exploitation, etc. It's just not the sort of thing your average man would encounter in their daily lives, so you probably don't notice it.
I can only draw reference from the people I interact with. If nearly every feminist I speak with talks about things like women in STEM or the so-called "gender pay gap," I have to conclude that these are some of the primary things feminists care about. If we are being honest, feminists moving in highly-educated circles in first-world nations probably talk about these things instead of rape because there simply is not very much rape going on to whinge about in that sub-population. I don't necessarily blame them for that, I think they're just wrong on the merits. There was somewhat of an attempt to make things about rape again with #MeToo, but I'm not sure if that really went the way that feminists would have liked it to.
If it were really true that most feminists are primarily concerned with something like sex slavery, then I have to ask why someone like me, who is extremely far removed from that world, seems to keep encountering so many of them.
I also must point out that feminists do not by any means have a monopoly on not liking and wanting to end practices such as rape and sexual slavery. Believe it or not, people were against these things long before the term feminism was ever invented. No one is in favor of violent sexual crimes. The beliefs about representation in STEM and gender pay gaps are the distinguishing views of the feminist, the views she holds that the average person doesn't.
I mean, between this comment and your earlier admission that you don't really have any experience reading prominent feminist works or understanding feminist theory, I think it's just clear that you aren't the sort of person who's in an epistemic situation where you can properly evaluate a movement you don't know much about.
Alright, well, you're welcome to present some kind of actual evidence or argumentation to try and change my mind. But if you're just going to make hollow assertions then obviously you aren't worth the time of day, and I'd even cite your behavior as yet another example of intellectual laziness from self-proclaimed feminists.
I think what you see as "intellectual laziness" is better understood as feminists correctly assessing that you aren't interested in considering what they actually say and deciding it's not worth the effort.
Given that men are murdered so much more often than women, I’m not following how maleness is not central to the act? Central is a strong word, but maleness has to be in some way a major contributing factor, given the disparity.
In some sense a gang member may not be killing a man because he is a man, but given the nature of financial disputes or turf wars, these seem to be majority male domains of conflict.
Insofar as men are killing men, feminists will say, persuasively enough, that this is due to patriarchy and men are violence victims and perpetrators because they are socialized to solve problems with violence. So reducing the socialization of men into toxic norms would be a good way of alleviating this problem. And if you reject the feminist analysis, it’s not like you have an argument why feminists should care about it: they are activists about specific issues and they’re under no obligation to care about everything equally. Social movements focus on specific problems. You want to deal with male-on-male violence outside a feminist framework found your own social movement.
This implies that men should able to identify as "meninists" who don't care about women and respond to their concerns with laughter and mockery, joking about women getting raped the same way that the rape of men in prison is made light of. And if anyone is bothered by such an attitude, the response of "Well we're meninists, of course we don't care what happens to women!" would be justified.
Yet men who actually do attempt to engage in a sort of "reverse feminism," in much milder forms than what I've outlined above ("men's rights activists"), seem to be met with vilification and extreme hostility from feminists. Why is that? Would you agree that feminists, and people in general, have an obligation to shut up and let the "men's rights activists" focus on their specific problems?
No, it doesn’t because I never said feminists shouldn’t or don’t care about men at all, just that men’s issues that are not connected to gender, discrimination, (most are not) have no special interest to them AS FEMINISTS. Because there is nothing wrong with focusing on specific issues that you want to be active about.
Some men do identify as men’s rights activists. Sometimes those dudes were made fun of or criticized by feminists. So? A lot of men’s rights stuff is cringe and dumb and feminists are right to mock it. Also some feminists are mean and dumb, and they were wrong to mock some things they mocked. That’s life. But none of this has any bearing on feminism’s overall plausibility and importance.
>No, it doesn’t because I never said feminists shouldn’t or don’t care about men at all<
Yes you did. Quote:
"Social movements focus on specific problems. You want to deal with male-on-male violence outside a feminist framework found your own social movement."
This goes both ways. If this is your attitude, all men (and also non-feminist women I suppose) would be justified in dismissing feminists with "well, we're not feminists, so we don't care."
I think it was pretty clear, but I will lay it out more explicitly. Feminism as a social movement cares about discrimination due to gender. Feminists as activists may permissibly care disproportionately about their ‘pet cause’. This does not imply that feminists do not care about any other issues, and it would be wrong for feminists to care about NOTHING but feminism. Insofar as they care about other issues, it will not be AS feminists unless they think the issue is importantly connected to feminism. Similarly , it is perfectly fine to say ‘I am a men’s rights activist and my activism is not about women’s rights so I am not going to march in your march or donate to your campaign.’ But going on to say “Lol feminism sucks I don’t have to care about women” is cringe and also morally impermissible because we are obligated to care about everyone, even women.
But the feminist analysis is not presented as “patriarchy is fine as long as it doesn’t hurt women”. Feminists specifically use “patriarchy is bad for everyone” as a defense against the argument that they don’t care about gender discrepancies that disfavor men. This is specifically addressed in the OP, it’s a motte and bailey argument. If feminists only care about women, fine, but they need to be honest about it (and accept that people who actually want equity will therefore not be feminists).
Of course feminists don’t think patriarchy is fine. Why would they? They say patriarchy sucks for everyone, but especially for women because men have many benefits from it. And when people like BB complain, ‘men have it rough too’ they present a whole bunch of things that have nothing to do with discrimination. Patriarchy is discriminatory. That’s the main problem with it. Feminist oppose patriarchy. The fact that some things are bad for men is not an argument against feminism. The only relevant points here in this entire discussion concern whether or not there are still some patriarchal aspects of society that are discriminatory to either men or women, and if so to what extent and what can we do about it. Unfortunately, BB’s article does a terrible job of actually addressing that.
>Patriarchy is discriminatory. That’s the main problem with it. Feminist oppose patriarchy... Unfortunately, BB’s article does a terrible job of actually addressing that.
People are free to question and disagree with controversial theoretical posits. For example, I don't think people would disagree from within their reference frame that people who blame "black culture" are acting rationally - they identified a problem (e.g. high gang involvement in black neighborhoods), and constructed coherent ways of identifying the problem (e.g. adoration of gang culture in rap songs). The question then is - are there better theories that address this? I think the answer in the black culture example is obviously yes, snd for the feminist example BB listed ways in which feminists mistake discrepancies as evidence of discrimination and have a tendency to neglect or discount male discrepancies in favor of female ones.
You're not distinguishing between what feminists care about in a broad moral sense and what feminism exists to address. And I think that distinction would be pretty clear elsewhere. No one would accuse animal rights activists of "only caring about animals" because they don't, I don't know, do blood drives, and someone who cared about both animal welfare and blood drives shouldn't feel uncomfortable calling themselves an animal rights activist!
You're right that those are majority-male domains of conflict, but that doesn't mean there's a specific cultural arrangement that leads men to target and kill other men *as men.* Or, to put it another way, when two men get in a fight outside a bar and one ends up shooting the other, there's no class conflict, only an individual one - how could there be? It's a man killing a man. But if you see men and women as distinct social groups with a specific sociopolitical relationship, then obviously something like domestic violence or rape is going to be very different. Of course, I recognize that some people don't accept a class-based analysis of society. But the vast majority of feminists do, and that obviously explains why they prioritize what they prioritize.
Sure, and they're often trying to get money to be attractive to women at some level. (Though you do find the occasional gay gangster.)
I think part of the issue there is you often have a male perpetrator as well, so it's hard to claim it's some kind of global oppression of men. Same with the draft, though that's less of an issue in recent decades, and most young people probably don't realize it was ever a major issue at all.
Great point. The other thing I would point to is path dependency. Obviously, historical conditions are not as relevant as current ones, but you don't disband the idea just because its main original goal ("feminism is the belief that men and women are equal") has been achieved; you keep it around so that it can guard against backsliding. Naturally, to help keep it around, you continue to target remaining issues even if they are of much less salience than the issues you won on. In an integral over Western history, it's likely that the sum of women's welfare or fair treatment has yet to exceed that of men's.
>Obviously, historical conditions are not as relevant as current ones, but you don't disband the idea just because its main original goal ("feminism is the belief that men and women are equal") has been achieved<
If we are able to observe that the adherents of this idea are lying in the present (i.e. when they say "feminism is about equality"), we now must call into question whether its adherents were also lying in the past, from the very start. A cursory look at these sorts of movements suggests that this is likely to be the case--people hammer on about "equality" while they feel that they are the underdog, but their true motivation is always just self-interest, plain and simple.
The "Civil Rights" movement did not rest on its laurels and retire after its original goals were achieved, it kept going and morphed into DEI. Liberals were perceived as the party of "free speech" for decades until they finally gained the levers of power, at which time the discourse surrounding "free speech" flipped sides completely. Conservatives who whine about censorship today will probably turn out to be no different. And so forth and so on.
>In an integral over Western history, it's likely that the sum of women's welfare or fair treatment has yet to exceed that of men's.<
This is the same sort of logic used to suggest that black people today are still owed reparations for things that happened long in the past. Are you seriously suggesting that sanctions should be imposed on men who have never lived under "paytreearkee" to benefit women who have never lived under it, because of things that happened before any of them are born?
>In an integral over Western history, it's likely that the sum of women's welfare or fair treatment has yet to exceed that of men's
This is very stupid on two fronts. The first is that women were never drafted in the West, and many denials of opportunity were on the basis of "Women are too stupid/weak/whatever else to work 12+ hours a day in a coal mine with no workers' protections." It's not obvious to nonfeminists at all that women have a net suffering integral across Western history.
The second is that history is irrelevant to present circumstances. Some proto-Caucasoid hunter-gatherer has no relevance to my present day suffering or happiness as a white dude in America. It would reek of grievance-farming if I tried to compare myself to this hypothetical historical ancestor.
On the first point, that’s of course just one social policy among many. Women also died in childbirth at very high rates, etc. I pre-conceded that it is only likely rather than certain for this reason. But I would suggest that one attempt at a fairer metric would be revealed preference. When given the opportunity, did men seek to claim the rights and responsibilities of women or did women seek to claim those of men?
I suppose the meaning of your second point is that the “integral of welfare over time” doesn’t necessarily determine its current distribution (rather than that our societal structure should be based around what maximizes your personal welfare). Sure, but it’s also not uncorrelated. Moreover, and more to the original point, it’s simply a good reason for feminists to believe that they need to continue to have a feminist movement lest their position backslide to the historical norm.
> When given the opportunity, did men seek to claim the rights and responsibilities of women or did women seek to claim those of men?
Does this demonstrate that one is better than the other, or that there is more pressure to do one than the other? Not only that, but there are serious problems of both record and opportunity here.
If you're a woman who goes out, disguises herself as a man to join the army out of a sense of duty, it is much more likely to be recorded, but if you are a man who disguises himself as a woman to dodge having to serve, then it is unlikely this will get written down anywhere.
If you're being provided for economically by a man, it is easier to then also try and strike out on your own economically and provide more, whereas if you provide for a woman it is harder / impossible to give up and stop providing.
Yeah, this is something that really bugs me - a lot of anti-feminists will admit that, from about 10,000 years ago to maybe the 1960's, women were obviously a subjugated social class. But it seems to me that, if 99.9% of human history has been explicitly patriarchal, it's probably a bad idea to hang up our hats and relax once we go a few decades with marital rape being illegal and women being allowed to work outside the home. And of course once you bring in the traditional class analysis, it becomes even more obvious that these social dynamics have real inertia over time.
>from about 10,000 years ago to maybe the 1960's, women were obviously a subjugated social class
So were men, unless you believe feminist folk history that all men were rich property owners who treated women like slaves and never had to do manual labor in their lives. This is obviously wrong though, so whether or not you believe that there are still persistent inequalities or everything magically got fixed, it still doesn't justify a bias that works in favor of women and excludes men.
This comment shows a serious misunderstanding of the basic concepts you are discussing. The fact that there were lower class men who were oppressed does not contradict the fact that women were an oppressed class vis-a-vis men! Yes, a noblewoman was privileged relative to peasant men. But she was oppressed by her make relatives and relative to elite men, and peasant women were systematically oppressed by the men in their life and the social structures of society. Peasant men didn’t have much power, but they DID have power over their female relatives.
The original commenter only said women were a subjugated class, not what you wrote. I also disagree again with the 1 sided framing -husbands and teenage sons were forced to work their lives away and become breadwinners to support female family members. Framing male-female relationships as master-slave is misleading, and probably results from reifying gender classes and telling a grand narrative through them, rather than paying attention to the particular instances of discrimination that would constitute said class conflict.
Don’t try to run ‘things weren’t that patriarchal in the past’. Yes, yes they were. Women did not swan about supported by men. They worked, hard, while men made almost all the decisions and held the power and beat them if they were ‘disobedient’. Patriarchy is about who has power in the context of the family: it was men. Men, men, men. Read a book. Men patted themselves on the back about how superior they were, treated women like property, didn’t educate them, and made them legal second class citizens. Rape was a property crime against MEN. This is history, well known history.
The original commenter said women were a subjugated class, and I explained what that MEANS in feminist thought. That is also what the original commentator meant, because that is what the concept is.
What cultures are you thinking of where men were forced to work so they could support female family members who didn't work? And in those arrangements (if they did exist), were the men desiring the abolition of that social arrangement or did they desire its continuation?
At what time in human history do you believe men *as a class* were socially subjugated? Can you point to cultures where women as a class held significant social, political, and economic power over men as a class? Of course, throughout history men have been oppressed due to their existence in other social classes - slaves, serfs, workers, various racial castes, etc - but I can't think of any culture where men were historically disadvantaged on the basis of their gender, such that they would be worse off than a woman who was equally situated in every other respect.
>At what time in human history do you believe men *as a class* were socially subjugated?
When you ask questions like these where you're allowed to build in any presupposition and stipulate any definition of "class" or "social subjugation," you get whatever conclusion you want for free out of it. It's also not remotely a serious attempt to understanding anything (and is a criticism I frequently make not just of feminism but of the style of analytic philosophy that gets done on this blog where God is defined as the simplest perfect being and by stipulation can explain the universe, so atheist naturalism is "worse" as an explanatory theory because it's stipulated to not explain the universe or to be simple).
When you perform this class based social subjugation analysis, you are ascending from the analysis of individual cases of gender inequality and coarsegraining over particulars to establish some sort of metanarrative about which gender is worse off. Here is what I take to be a pretty convincing summary using these argumentation tools that states the opposite of what you probably believe: Men were historically a separate legal class compared to women, which meant that they had special legal obligations that women didn't have like mandatory military service, forced labor to provide for women who didn't have to to work, forced legal responsibility for any crimes their married female partners would commit, forced drafts where they had to die for their country while women stayed at home, all while facing an endless barrage of social stigma from women - don't you know it's *your* fault women can't vote, *your* fault you're not doing enough to support women, *your* fault your wife is starving, all while those men were working 12-16 hour days in coal mines and steel factories.
This analysis of course 1) picks out whatever I want to grievance-farm over, 2) doesn't compare or contrast the rights and privileges and interactions between men and women, 3) was written while entirely discounting any negative thing that might have affected women and explicitly blamed them for the social stigma men faced and implicitly blamed them for making life worse for men in general, 4) doesn't include any statistical data that quantifies how likely it was for men to die in wars or what hours they worked, 5) paints over every male's lived experience with a brush, 6) doesn't address men's complicity in the situations they suffered in, 7) is biased towards social events with high legibility to be turned into examples like "a draft occurring" rather than the intricacies of male-female social deliberation and localized (whether by geography or political party or whatever) factors, and so on.
There's so many weaknesses to this style of analysis that it can be used to convincingly argue for anything as long as you're dedicated enough to painting a picture where x class is oppressed, because there's a never ending amount of particular cases that you can cherry pick to form into a narrative rather than trying to understand the variability in the set of particular cases you're looking at. In other words, feminists are largely using the wrong tools for the job - understanding gender discrimination - and instead using the right tools to optimize for heat and outrage.
No, this just shows that an attempt to build a narrative where men were oppressed falls apart and doesn’t work.
By contrast, the narrative that women are a historically oppressed class is easy to build and convincing because it is true. You try to make really strong relativist claims here that nobody serious ever accepts. It is not that hard to make historical sociological claims! We look at the actual way people lived in ancient greece and say: hmm, Aristotle says women are deformed men, respectable women were segregated from men, only men could vote, men made decisions for the family including whether to keep children or expose them, women had lesser legal status in numerous ways, this society was very patriarchal. Your counterpoint is bad undergrad relativism, which is not actually looking at the evidence, it is putting your fingers in your ears and saying ‘in MY interpretation, I’m right and you’re wrong’. People have done the work on this snd it is not some big mystery: almost every historical is patriarchal and the differences are in detail and degree.
So no, this ‘style of analysis’ can NOT be used to convincingly argue for anything. On the contrary, this style of analysis is how we learn about any society, past or present. It is just history and sociology. You can close your eyes and say ‘you can’t prove anything’ all you want, but no serious scholars reject the reality of historical patriarchy.
I'm not stipulating any sort of arbitrary or capricious definition of social subjugation (or class) here. I'm using the very straightforward one that all social scientists would use, relating to relative political, social, and economic power. Can you point me to a society in history where, if you fixed every other quality between a man and a woman, the woman would have significantly more political, social, and economic power than the man?
From about 10,000 years ago up to maybe 1800, every society on Earth accepted slavery as a natural and necessary institution, the natural right of the powerful and victorious over the weak and defeated.
But there's no abolitionist movement in modern America, for the simple reason that the abolitionists won and almost everyone now agrees with them. Why would anyone join such a movement today? What would be the point? Because slavery lasted 10,000 years and we need 10,000 year of abolitionist activism to make up for it? No, continued activism only makes sense if there is some further change they want, beyond the abolition already accomplished, and it would be entirely fair to criticise (or support) them on that basis, and disingenuous for them to appeal to the successes of their predecessors as cover.
Much the same goes for the feminist movement. It's not a movement for granting women the right to vote, or for banning marital rape, or any other victory already accomplished, and it doesn't make sense to give ongoing support to a movement for those causes. (It can be a movement for abortion rights though, since there is an ongoing fight there)
I mean, movements have a hard time disbanding once their goals are achieved--the March of Dimes was supposed to fight polio--and forming a pressure group to achieve your goals is always useful. Disparities that favor men? Bad, get rid of them. Disparities that favor women? Well, the men are being toxically masculine in some fashion.
Feminists actually argue that patriarchy harms both men and women and the harms to men are one more reason to get rid of it. But a lot of the disadvantages men face (and that BB complains about) are not due to patriarchy or discrimination: expecting feminists to care about that qua feminists is foolish and unfair. It’s like complaining that environmentalists don’t do enough to alleviate poverty.
>Feminists actually argue that patriarchy harms both men and women and the harms to men are one more reason to get rid of it.
Feminists reify patriarchy like it's something over and above the attitudes of humans engaged in a social system. Do you agree or disagree that part of getting rid of patriarchy would involve disbanding feminist movements that instill attitudes into their adherents to the effect that they should shut down men's interest groups and men's domestic abuse shelters - for the obvious reason that these are sexist attitudes and actions that are backed by said feminist groups?
No, I don’t think they do, not in general. Feminists are very clear that patriarchy is a social system. Social systems are instantiated in human minds and the rules, beliefs and expectations humans live by. However they are often studied and discussed at a higher level of abstraction. That is how feminists mostly conceive patriarchy: sociologically.
I have no opinion about whether some feminists have been unfair to men’s rights groups. If they have been, they should stop. That said, I know at least some historical men’s rights groups that were founded on explicitly anti-feminist principles and it is unsurprising they ran into feminist opposition.
This is a thoughtful response, but I actually do think you could say that men face specific repression *as men* through violence because men are more likely to be put in that position. There's a "women and children should be thought of first" mindset in society, and men are more likely to be victims of many of these things because of their biological makeup as men putting them in more dangerous situations. So it's not clear how these situations involving women are different.
One of the most persistent dogmas I see within the modern movement is the idea that women simply do not fail, they are only failed. The question of female agency seems to constantly be in flux despite at least the forward face of the movement asserting (rightly) that women are full people with just as much agency and capability as men and society should treat them as such.
When women triumph it is because the women were the smartest and most talented, when a man triumphs it is only due to societal handouts. When a woman fails it is because society is stacked against her, when a man fails it is because he himself was incompetent. When women or feminism fails to achieve something, it is never because the woman or the movement’s approach was flawed, it is that the world is simply too hostile to their undeniable truth (it is of course never asked why if the feminist argument itself is so inherently undeniable it is unable to anticipate and adjust for the landscape). Our failures and successes are of course determined by an infinitely complex intersection of both skill and circumstance, as well as sheer luck, but this seems to be roundly ignored by the movement.
The most prescient example of this in recent history is of course the Clinton campaign’s failure, which blamed everything from Russian Interference to a deeply held misogyny as the reason for her failure, John Kerry by comparison simply failed in his duty to correctly politic to win.
This has also manifested itself in a very interesting way as the metoo movement has chugged along. Oddly nobody feels that the movement has failed more or is more sensitive to the backlash than the most ardent supporters of the movement, but there is a very narrow window of reasons why you’re allowed to acknowledge that failure according to them. If one points out that say the legal victories over people like Cosby and Weinstein relied to heavily on blatant civil rights violations or that the larger movement seemed too dismissive of concepts like discernment, fairness, and forgiveness that the larger society seems to hold important that caused the movement to stall you’ll simply be called an apologist. But of course when asked why the movement has failed or the backlash exist, their response is always that the same society that has basically spent 7+ years banishing anyone even slightly accused of a whole range of sexual impropriety at their insistence simply loves rape too much.
In practice the very concept of the patriarchy turns not into historical or political reality but an almost supernatural conspiratorial force. The only other group of people I’ve met who believe their group constantly loses due to an all powerful group controlling every lever of the world and are constantly beset upon at all times by criminals society fails to reign in to the same extent are White Nationalists.
I describe the patriarchy as the most prominent leftist conspiracy theory. The left believes only the right has conspiracy theories but something like half of the left fervently believes one. It’s just mainstream.
If the patriarchy is a group of rich and powerful men who meet every Tuesday to decide how to make the world worse for women then I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist.
But if you mean a society where political leaders are disproportionately male then yes we live in a patriarchy, but we also live in a plutocracy, a gerontocracy, and a bunch of other problematic ocracies.
I think the term is mostly used as a mildly inflammatory way of telling people to make it easier and more socially acceptable for women to run for office.
Yeah but we can’t have gender parity in positions of power without systemically disadvantaging men. Men vary more than women and have more incentive to gain power. Even in a perfectly equal world, we’d be ruled mostly by men.
So if a feminist believes that’s sufficient to justify feminism then they are fighting against reality, not oppression. The only solutions are tyranny or genocide (of various forms).
as for the second part everyone likes money, prestige and power I don't see why men have a bigger incentive to purse political careers then women do.
"So if a feminist believes that’s sufficient to justify feminism then they are fighting against reality, not oppression."
I'm really not sure what you mean by feminism here - I think on the margin encouraging women to go into politics probably makes the world a better place. Is this a feminist policy by your lights or do you mean more extreme stuff like affirmative action?
Women are *attracted* to powerful men. It's not clear why that would stop them from organizing to protect their interests like any other group. Indeed, you see this dynamic where you have young men complaining women expect them to succeed in a system the women have rigged against them through lobbying for affirmative action! Hey, a couple of guys did it, and that's the ones they want--too bad for the rest of you scrubs.
>encouraging women to go into politics probably makes the world a better place. Is this a feminist policy by your lights?
If we're spending societal resources, yes, this policy should be opposed. If we're integrating it into common parlance like a greeting, saying "Women should go into politics" rather than saying "Hi how are you?" that would be weird, but as long as no social pressure is exerted to conform or to adopt feminist policies, that would be OK. I think shibboleths like these are generally used to enforce conformity and kick out dissenters though, like pronouns or even identifying as a feminist, so probably not practically possible.
"I'm really not sure what you mean by feminism here - I think on the margin encouraging women to go into politics probably makes the world a better place. Is this a feminist policy by your lights or do you mean more extreme stuff like affirmative action?"
I mean extreme like, anything we do to get more women into positions of power is justified because literally the only reason it's otherwise is evil men or systematic favoring of men over women from our culture.
Affirmative action is justified on these grounds but what happens when affirmative action fails? Ideologues have a justification for any level of extreme action because literally the only way they will see the world as fair is if they make it overwhelmingly unfair in their favor.
Slightly nudging women to get into politics is fine. Once the law is involved, you're using violence in support of your beliefs. If your rage can never be sated then the violence grows. Feminist rage can never be sated because their dissatisfaction is with biology, not culture.
It's clear the author of that article started with the conclusion and worked backward. If they'd gone on a journey of learning the truth, they'd have cited other research. Not a one-off that has no bearing on gender.
The core problem is they make a strawman of GMV to take down: the idea that there's gotta be a gene on the Y chromosome simply makes men either smarter or dumber. Yet there is a genetic difference: men have way more testosterone than women. Men vary more than women mostly because testosterone gives us different behaviors. Even a small difference accumulates over time but the difference is often not small.
Testosterone pushes men to gain status, whatever that means in their culture. Like, the son of WASPs and a boy from a favela have very different ideas of status. This makes perfect sense because women prefer high-status men while men barely care about female status. If the women in your culture want gangsters then boys become gangsters. If they want barristers then boys become barristers. When there's no hierarchy of status, boys follow erratic and contradictory paths.
So I am not surprised he was able to train his daughters to be chess grandmasters. But the other chess grandmasters did not have the same level of parental involvement and, what they had, was not specifically formulated to make them chess grandmasters. It didn't need to be because boys do weird things because testosterone pushes them to be exceptional, to take risks, because that's how they convince women they're worthy fathers.
Women need to convince men they'll be worthy wives but they can be mothers any time they want... and being a worthy wife is only a little bit a matter of status. Men mostly marry within their class so a woman who wants a genius husband needs to attend university but she doesn't need to be a genius or even do particularly well.
Using the Polgar experiment to claim that the greater male variability hypothesis is not true is beyond wrong. Psychometrics is perhaps the most robustly replicated area of psychology. There are databases of IQs and other scholastic tests that would span N's in the mid millions if put together. Those show a standard deviation that is 10-25% larger for males than for females.
<<as for the second part everyone likes money, prestige and power I don't see why men have a bigger incentive to purse political careers then women do.>>
Everyone likes being better off if everything else is held equal, but of course you don't get power or money by random allotment. It requires grit, competency, will to power and the willingness to engage in high risk strategies. Men are less risk-averse than women, probably by nature. But even if we were all blank slates, the fact is that most females start off being socially and sexually desirable, while young men would struggle to attract a mate if they don't have something going for them. Ie: Females have median advantage (the median female being more coveted that the median male) but males have marginal advantage (since they have more room to exchange societal success for personal success). The differences in strategies that would follow from this are obvious.
I think the term "patriarchy" in current discourse pretty clearly implies not only that it's the case that positions of political power are disproportionately held by men, but also that this condition is almost entirely socially constructed in a historically contingent way, such that it could be substantially eliminated culturally without some major biological intervention (extensive artificial selection and/or genetic engineering to change the beings that (re)create the patriarchal systems). Even if an evopsych academic were to acknowledge that men predominate in positions of extreme power, and that this fact sucks for many women, they're not going to be considered feminists in good standing if they argue that the primary cause is a set of biological adaptations.
Feminism is more diverse than you give it credit for. Mainstream liberal feminism is generally hostile to claims of biological difference being the root of patriarchy, but many radical feminists accept that there are relevant biological differences and the idea has become more accepted in mainstream feminism as more evidence supports it. What you don’t get (and rightfully so) is feminists accepting that male domination in politics or the family is desirable.
I should have said biologically based psychological differences. Liberal feminists often argue that biological differences such as childbearing and physical strength explain patriarchy.
It really wasn't a conspiracy theory until let's say 35 years ago. (not a precise number) I've always assumed that a tipping point world be reached eventually where some course correction would be needed and a male version of feminism (masculinism?? sounds... odd) would become necessary and palatable.
I think we've reached that tipping point where men and boys need institutions which advocate for and are supportive of the male gender. The trick is making sure it's not a bunch of regressive assholes like Andrew Tate who just want to rewind the clock. To my knowledge there isn't even a forward looking model of what masculinity looks like in an equal world.
I call this phenomenon "Schrodinger's Agency." You can observe the same effect across left-wing, victim-based politics in general. Black people for instance--always victims if they are met with a negative outcome, brave stunning heroes who overcame adversity when met with a positive outcome.
One, I would take issue with the idea that "virtually nobody denies that men and women should have equal rights."~ 60% of the world's population is Christian, Jewish, or Muslim; around 15% of the world's population is Hindu; and *all* of these religions endorse horrifically and uncontroversially sexist ideas about women and deny their equality to men in their primary texts. Smaller religions, like Jainism and Zoroastrianism, are no different, and quasi-religious doctrines in East Asia like Confucianism and degenerate forms of Buddhism also clearly espouse that women are not equal to men. I can easily find you unambiguous passages in the Bible, Torah, Quran, and Bhagavad Gita that state truly horrific things about women and endorse male superiority - and most of the world considers these texts to be the undeniable word of God(s)! I simply can't take seriously the view that claims that institutions like the Catholic Church have zero influence on how societies view women and their place relative to men, even in "Western" countries. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the fact people don't view the Quran or Torah or Bible with instant revulsion, considering how these texts portray women, suggests that belief in women's equality and dignity is not a deeply held value even in the secular West.
Of course, you may mean by "virtually everybody" just "virtually everybody like me", a statement not about the world at large but about relatively small numbers of secular (or secular-adjacent) people in liberal areas of primarily Western countries. Of course, feminism doesn't simply work for women in those environments.
But even within those environments, I don't think these arguments work. For instance, you say that it's not possible to say which sex is treated worse, because certain statistics and surveys favor women. The idea seems to be that perhaps sexism (by women?) against men may be just as bad as sexism (if it even exists) against women by men.
The problem is that this reasoning would suggest that it's impossible to say whether any groups have ever been treated unfairly. In the early 20th century, in at least parts of the U.S., Jewish people tended to be more academically successful than gentiles. Can we say, then, that anti-Semitism couldn't have been a major issue in early 20th century America, and that anti-gentile discrimination (by Jews (?)) in that period may have been as bad or worse than anti-Semitism? Was it unfair or unreasonable for Jewish people at that time to focus on fighting anti-Semitism, since gentiles didn't do as well on college entrance tests? Obviously not, since the fact Jewish people did better in certain domains does not "cancel out" the effects of larger anti-Semitic sentiment, and in fact Jewish success in academics in that period may have been a *consequence* of certain anti-Semitic policies that forced them to work harder in certain fields. Many racists have endorsed the idea that Black people are naturally stronger or more athletic than non-Black people, but nobody would say that means that white athletes in the 1950s were victims of unfair anti-white bias.
Rather, analyses of racism and anti-semitism show that these individual "positive" stereotypes or outcomes for oppressed groups are deeply intertwined with the larger oppression of those groups. The same is true for women. Girls in Iran, for instance, frequently outperform Iranian boys in STEM and make up the majority of graduates in STEM fields there. But this may be (among other things) a consequence of the fact girls aren't allowed to participate in public life to the same degree as men, and therefore have more time at home to study, as there simply isn't that much else for them to do. The point being that positive outcomes for certain groups relative to the supposed oppressor do not prove that there is no larger oppression at work; in fact, a careful analysis shows that these successes often themselves are a consequence of this oppression.
Yeah I would beware the bubble effect of being from an upper class british environment. Outside of this environment sexism is still rampant, both among elites and more importantly among the people. It wasn't that long ago that the prime minister of the world's 7th largest economy - Italy - was calling Angela Merkel "an unfuckable fat arse"; and while Italy does have a female prime minister now, her looks have definitely been the subject of political attention.
Meanwhile, women are regularly fired for being pregnant, or not hired it they're over 30 and married (Italy has amongst the lowest female labour participation rate in Europe - hilariously, this results in one of the lowest gender paygap figures which goes to show how stupid of a measurement that is, but I digress).
OK, but there are definitely ways men are treated worse. Even feminists will admit men get more severe sentences for the same crimes, they used to send us to die in wars (and still do in countries like Ukraine that are fighting wars), and we tend to get worse settlements in divorce and family court (a big reason I avoided starting a family).
As for the Jews...that's true, but you see that in Asians as well, who face a lot less discrimination than Jews did in the 20s. There most definitely was anti-Asian discrimination--Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese internment being the most famous cases--but it had significantly decreased by the time the children of Chinese and Indian engineers and scientists started making their way upward through academia. How is that possible under the system of intersectionality?
(BTW, I'm technically Jewish by ancestry, and think academic success was partly a way to get around antisemitism, but as most Jews will tell you also a previously existing value--look at all those debating Talmudic rabbis. Most Jews will NOT also tell you this, but I think the gene pool may have been changed by years of sexual selection--women usually don't like nerds, but marrying the rabbi to the merchant's daughter is going to have an effect over time. 138 Nobels don't just come out of nowhere.)
I would quibble over some of these "ways in which men are treated worse" - there is definitely controversy over whether men actually are less likely to receive custody or if men are simply less likely to ask for custody in the first place, for example.
Nevertheless, this doesn't really challenge my main point, which is that the privileged class can sometimes have worse individual outcomes *due to their overall privileges*, and this does not change the overall power dynamic.
For example, the NYT did an excellent piece on the terrible outcomes boys have in extremist Yeshivas in NYC. Jewish girls in these communities often outperform boys in academia and to some degree economically. Is this because Hasidic communities privilege girls over boys? No; Hasidic Judaism is one of the most patriarchal religions to exist. It's because boys, as the chosen community/cultural leaders, are expected to obsessively study the Torah all day long whereas girls are not. The privileged status boys and men have in Hasidic communities ironically results in them having worse outcomes in certain practical domains. It's not because rabbis there are systematically prejudiced against boys in favor of girls; quite the opposite.
So too we might think about why women and girls weren't drafted. Is it because radical feminists convinced the U.S. military to not draft women? No, it's because historically combat realms have been closed to women due to patriarchal attitudes about women being incapable of performing in those areas. This "boon" to women is simply a side product of larger patriarchal attitudes, just as the success of Hasidic girls in academics (relative to boys, anyway) is a side effect of the larger patriarchal attitudes there.
Finally, is Jewish success biological? I don't think so, in part because it seems Jewish exceptionalism (in prominent math/science/engineering competitions, anyways) seems to be fading as those arenas are increasingly dominated by Asian Americans. This isn't to say Jewish young people are slouches these days; it's just that as anti-Semitic WASP attitudes towards Jews fade, the cultural pressures that led to Jewish exceptionalism are also fading, as secular Jews become more integrated with the larger white/Christian culture. (By contrast, it seems Harvard and similar institutions do discriminate pretty hardcore against East Asians.)
[Speaking as a feminist, I can say that while radical feminism in the 1960s/1970s was dominated by genius Jewish-American women, the epicenter of feminism today is undeniably South Korea rather than NYC. This has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with specific cultural pressures that have changed over the decades.]
Just because an inequality isn't created by radical feminists doesn't mean it favors men; radical feminists are not responsible for all the problems of men, biological or social. (We can assume they will usually make things *worse* for men, but not necessarily; it's not clear increased abortion rights hurt men, for instance, and may save some from having to pay for an unwanted child.)
Apart from weird outliers like boys in extremist yeshivas, men are disproportionately represented in dirty, dangerous jobs like lumberjacks, garbage collectors, and roofers, and in jails and as homeless people. Is that patriarchy? It's entirely possible for a group to be overrepresented at the top *and* bottom of society, in which case what's going on is not patriarchy or matriarchy but a situation where different roles are allocated to different sexes with pluses and minuses to each. However, if only one sex has an organized group to advocate for its interests, it will tend to do better with time, as we are seeing now.
Also, there are biological reasons they didn't put women in the military, not just patriarchal attitudes--the heavy artillery and so on are, well, heavy. It's very physically taxing in a way men are better at--unfortunately for us!
(I'm not sure further discussion of nurture versus nature in Jewish success is relevant, though I do agree my relatives are getting lazy. Oh well.)
>> Just because an inequality isn't created by radical feminists doesn't mean it favors men; radical feminists are not responsible for all the problems of men, biological or social.
Of course, my entire point is that patriarchal policies can sometimes result in men being disadvantaged in certain ways relative to women.
>>Apart from weird outliers like boys in extremist yeshivas, men are disproportionately represented in dirty, dangerous jobs like lumberjacks, garbage collectors, and roofers, and in jails and as homeless people. Is that patriarchy? It's entirely possible for a group to be overrepresented at the top *and* bottom of society, in which case what's going on is not patriarchy or matriarchy but a situation where different roles are allocated to different sexes with pluses and minuses to each.
This logic would suggest that women in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan are not really oppressed and do not live in a patriarchy, because men there also make up the majority of privileged *and* shitty jobs. That's absurd. As I've been saying, patriarchy doesn't have to uniformly benefit every man relative to women to exist.
It's also not really clear why it would matter to feminists whether men were overrepresented in the worst jobs or roles. It's not as if this compensates, in some karmic way, for women being underrepresented in the most powerful roles. I imagine that in the Confederate South, some of the worst jobs were not available to slaves; maybe slaves weren't allowed to be cannon fodder in the Confederate army, for instance. But that doesn't mean that this lack of representation in the absolute worst jobs somehow makes up for slaves' lack of power or autonomy in their own lives.
OK, but who's better off now, in the society we live in? Women live longer, and nobody seems to care about that. Their health is better. I think it's kind of a wash here in the West, honestly, and the younger generation of women may actually be better off.
We don't live in Taliban Afghanistan. It's the inverse of the argument Richard Dawkins made that Rebecca Watson couldn't complain about some guy making her feel creeped out in an elevator because she didn't live in an Islamic dictatorship. You can't just point at some random culture that has aspects you don't like--is the Taliban patriarchal? Sure. Was the Confederacy racist? Absolutely. I could go on about men among the Mosuo or something if I really wanted to go digging.
I wouldn't expect feminists to care about men at all. It's a movement made to advocate for the interests of women. We're the enemy gender and the author of all your misfortunes. But if you're talking about people in general who aren't ideologically committed one way or the other, well... perhaps, if you care about people in general, low-status men have some problems low-status women don't. And maybe we need our own movement, one with better ideas than Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson ('clean your room' is an important beginning and likely one a lot of young men needed to hear, but it's not an end.)
1. As mentioned in other comments, it is false that almost everyone agrees men and women should be treated equally. That statement is only true of educated secular westernized people.
2. The only reason educated secular western people believe women and men should be treated equally is because of the feminist movement. The starting point for the feminist movement was a society where the view you incorrectly say is universal was held by almost no-one.
3. Because feminism was fairly successful in changing attitudes and much of this happened many decades ago, many people such as yourself have accepted the core feminist ideals without recognizing they are feminist or identifying as feminists.
4. Yes, men's issues should be taken seriously, and sometimes are not. However, there has been LOTS of public attention paid to all of the issues you mention, including and especially the college attendance gap.
5. Further, we should distinguish between problems that affect men and women demographically, as the result of different free choices, versus problems that affect them as the result of discrimination. Feminism and any men's rights activism rightly concerns itself with the second type of problem, not the first. Men suffer more workplace-related injuries because they choose to work at more dangerous occupations. This is not an equity issue. What issues do men face that result from discrimination? What out of your laundry list are things that men's rights activists should actually be concerned about? Not lifespan. Not being victims of violence. Is discrimination a problem for men in any significant way?
6. The comparison of male sexual assault versus female is complex. I concede that male victims of sexual violence are discriminated against by society in ways that female victims are not. However, feminists argue, in my view plausibly, that male on female sexual violence is caused/enabled by patriarchal power structures in ways that male sexual victimization is not. Furthermore, it is plausible that societal minimization of male victimization is ALSO caused by patriarchy. If that is accurate, we may censure some feminists for not paying enough attention to the negative consequences of the patriarchy for men: at the same time it is hardly a point against feminism that males are victimized by patriarchy. Feminists generally insist on that. In any case, patriarchy is implicated in aspects of sexual violence against both men and women, .
>Further, we should distinguish between problems that affect men and women demographically, as the result of different free choices, versus problems that affect them as the result of discrimination.<
The same thought process disarms most or all of the things that feminists complain about ("gender pay gap," women in STEM, etc.). Feminists rarely if ever even attempt to present any serious case that there is any systemic anti-female discrimination left in first world nations. Just like left-wing race agitators, they instead take disparate outcomes as de facto evidence of discrimination.
Actually, feminists often present evidence about these topics. You’re confusing lame pop-culture feminism and bad feminist analysis with feminism. Try actually steel-manning the opposition instead of being lazy about it.
For example, contra what you probably believe, the wage gap is not explained by career choice and part time work, and there is plenty of evidence that systematic discrimination inhibits female employment in STEM. These are complex questions and I certainly wouldn’t say that it’s unreasonable to argue that the differences are small or even negligible. But its a genuine argument and there is plenty of evidence that supports the continued relevance of patriarchal discrimination.
Is patriarchy gone from America? You’re familiar with trads, quiverfull, redpills, and the southern baptist church, no? Is patriarchy gone from the world? Don’t make me laugh. So the fact that feminism has made enough progress that we can argue about whether STEM representation is just preferences or also discrimination is great, but there’s still CLEARLY a long way to go.
>Actually, feminists often present evidence about these topics. You’re confusing lame pop-culture feminism and bad feminist analysis with feminism. Try actually steel-manning the opposition instead of being lazy about it.<
You accuse me of being lazy then proceed to provide zero evidence in favor of your viewpoint. Strange!
>Is patriarchy gone from America? You’re familiar with trads, quiverfull, redpills, and the southern baptist church, no? Is patriarchy gone from the world? Don’t make me laugh.<
The logic here appears to be that if anyone exists who holds a certain viewpoint, one is now justified in claiming to be oppressed by that viewpoint. This means that, because black supremacists and feminists exist, I am now justified in claiming that I as a white man am oppressed, and everyone else needs to treat me as the victim that I am. Correct?
Scroll down that one wikipedia article and you will find 180 references to various journal articles and policy papers, many based on crunchy economic or statistical analysis.
Or if you prefer, here's a lovely statistics canada piece analysing the gender wage gap in great detail, accounting for every measurable cause of difference between men and women's wages and finding that there is still an unexplained pay gap (9.3% for canadian-born women). https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/45-20-0002/452000022023002-eng.htm
There is SO much research out there. So much. Not all of it is good, but lots is. Is it definitive? No, one can contest the conclusions in various ways. But please don't say that feminists haven't done the work, because they have. There is tons of good research out there. What IS true is a lot of public journalism on the topic is bad, because the simple yet misleading narratives are much easier and most journalists and pundits aren't very well informed. But boy, neither are the anti-feminists either.
Ah yes, Wikipedia. I am sure this is going to be a great source for serious inquiry and will not at all reflect the "lame pop-culture feminism" and "bad feminist analysis" that you reference. Let's take a look at the second sentence....
"However, despite this progress, gender inequality in the United States continues to persist in many forms, including the disparity in women's political representation and participation, occupational segregation, and the unequal distribution of household labor."
"Political representation and participation," meaning the common "lame pop-culture feminist" notion that women are somehow excluded from politics because of sexism. The evidence for this will be that women are less likely to run for office than men, which is exactly the sort of fallacy described at the beginning of this comment thread, a failure to distinguish between choices made freely vs those enforced by discriminatory coercion. Since you're pretending to care about academic studies and the like, here's something for you:
In which it is demonstrated that not only do women not actually face any sexism in the modern political environment, but that it is specifically the false feminist narrative that they do which is instrumental in dissuading them from running for office (after all, why would you want to try it if you believe that a bunch of sexist men will abuse you for it?). Who woulda thunk it!
Let's look at the other thing you shared. It has "Intersectional" in the title and is published in "Studies on Gender and Intersecting Identities," funding by the "Department for Women and Gender Equality." Absolutely ridiculous. This alone should disqualify it from consideration. I may as well present you with a study about why hens actually love being eaten from the Center for the Advancement of Foxes in Farmhouse Equity.
Putting that aside, the idea that malicious anti-female discrimination can be demonstrated in this way is yet another category error of the same kind that we've been discussing. You are doing the typical "bad feminist analysis" whereby you demonstrate that an earnings gap exists, control for a bunch of things, and conclude that the remaining difference must necessarily be due to hatred of women. This is not how causal inference works. The remaining variation in earnings remains unexplained--it does not simply default to hatred of women.
For instance, this line of reasoning discounts the possibility that gender itself is the explanatory variable, in the sense that women are simply less driven to pursue higher-paying job opportunities due to innate psychological differences. Proof of discrimination requires exactly that--you need to find an employer who is actually paying a woman less than a man for the same job specifically because he has an irrational dislike of women, and then you need to extrapolate from there that this is somehow happening on a massive scale despite being illegal in Canada, the United States, and probably every other white country.
Unsurprisingly you fail to read either source well. The statistics canada piece controls for every measurable variable: the remainder is termed ‘unexplained’. It does NOT say that this unexplained remainder must be purely due to bias. And neither did I! I called it the unexplained pay gap.
In your discussion, you say that the only way the unexplained pay gap would be due to patriarchy would be if it is because bosses pay women less because of irrational dislike. No, obviously no. Jesus. What if hiring committees are less likely to hire women because of fears they will get pregnant? What if women get worse customer feedback because of sexism? I could go on and on. Feminist analysts RECOGNIZE that it is hard to show causality here!
As for wikipedia, the point was the numerous sources, not whether you agree with them. You seem to jump from ‘I disagree with these conclusions cuz of one source I read and my pre-existing biases’ to ‘this is poor research’. No, get over yourself.
There isn't a uniform usage of patriarchy across feminists, but for what I consider to be among the bad things that are called "patriarchy," yes. For the inconsequential things like e.g. more men politicians existing than women ones, no, but that's inconsequential so I don't think anybody should care about that. In general feminists will slide from inconsequential characteristics of patriarchy to e.g. marital rape, and I interpret this dishonestly. Kind of like how pro Palestinians consider the Gaza war a genocide, even though the death count is quite low for a Middle Eastern war and humanitarian aid is let inside. Obviously they are right that some things like murder in warfare can constitute genocide, but I think it's disingenuous to call the Gaza war a genocide. Feminists and pro Palestinians are better off stating explicitly what they're concerned about so we can have a productive discussion on it, but I think a large part of support for these movements relies on obscurantism and bait and switching terms and definitions.
Your 3 is true, but it’s not like feminists packed up and went home after they got suffrage, no-fault divorce, anti-discrimination law, and Title IX. They continue to push for more beyond that, and it’s in precisely those are additional demands that the clear “men are oppressors, women are oppressed” narrative starts to break down.
Which is why comparatively few people who believe in 90%+ of the 1955 feminist agenda self-identify as feminists anymore.
Sure. But spend some time in Saudi Arabia and you might find yourself self-identifying as a feminist once more.
I’m definitely not claiming feminists are correct about everything. That’s impossible because they contradict one another a ton. But the basic idea that patriarchy is bad and important is still quite correct, and the VAST majority of anti-feminist stuff is just so fucking dumb (not all! Almost all). It’s cope for teenage boys/failsons/divorced dudes. And for most of the complaints that have any merit, the best solution is: we shouldn’t put unfair oppressive gendered expectations on men. Which is EXACTLY WHAT THE FEMINISTS HAVE BEEN SAYING FOR 50 YEARS.
I don’t think anyone here intended for this specific conversation to apply to the Saudis, so I’ll concede that as a given.
Everyone agrees with you that feminists have been saying that patriarchy is bad for everyone. The argument is over whether feminists actually give a shit about negative gender expectations placed on men, or if it’s just a thing they say to deflect criticism that they are misandrists.
Is that really an argument? Because, like, there are a lot of feminists so probably some don't care much about men's problems. You can always find some jerks. But I think caring about men's problems is much more common.
Speaking from personal experience, I know plenty of feminists and the number that I would call misandrist is 0, and the number I know that don't care at all about the impact of patriarchy on men is also 0. Rather, if anything it's a cliche that feminists talk about how patriarchy is bad for men because we can't talk to friends or access our feelings and so on. Do people really think that's just a snow job? Really? In my experience they think it's a real problem. And, like, there is tons of feminist analysis that discusses this. Why wouldn't feminists think that men matter?
Most feminists are heterosexual women who have plenty of men they care about in their lives. Why wouldn't they care about men's issues? Not, by the way, that the lesbian feminists I know don't care about men's issues either: I've heard them talk about these kind of things with sincere concern. So, if that's the argument, I don't think it's a very interesting one. Feminist theory cares because it talks about it all over the place, and many actual feminists care, so... yeah?
Even men barely care about other men's problems. To say that most feminists actually do care about men's problems is so cheeky. It's obviously not true
I do think that people don't make light of male prison rape so easily anymore. I do recall it being an example of an edgy joke that made it into children's cartoons in my youth to make adults laugh, but there's no way that kids watching SpongeBob tell his pet to not drop the soap understood the joke was about rape without that context.
But that was two decades ago. There's no way that a decade ago, such a joke would have made it into Adventure Time or Steven Universe. There would be a huge backlash against such a joke now.
Season 5 of Fargo - a season that dealt with domestic violence against women - ended with prison rape as an appropiate form of justice served against the perpetrator, presented as a cheerworthy moment and met with acclaim by audiences. Fargo used to be one of the smartest and most sociologically adept shows on TV and still chose to do this.
The article made an argument that male-on-male prison rape is taken so unseriously that it is a joke in children's cartoons. I would say that Fargo does not fit this pattern. Fargo S5 ends with a violent rapist and murderer being raped in prison, and this is depicted as a cheerworthy moment. I would argue that this is a different issue than the issue being treated unseriously- this seems like more of an extension of "bad guy gets an eye for an eye" or "vigilante justice is cool sometimes." I strongly disagree ethically with both of those statements, but I am not so sure that either issue is gendered.
I think there shouldn't be any limits on humor whatsoever, and that this should be the obvious default attitude in society. It's also not like there's a shortage of rape jokes where women are the punchline, so I am deeply unmoved on both counts.
Our evolutionary psychology has no experience with women being able to wield "male power". That is to say women voters can command the "monopoly of violence" of the modern state to a degree we are totally unaccustomed to.
For the first time, there is a big gender gap among the young, with majorities of young Republican and even *Democratic* men saying feminism has done more harm than good. Young men with no memory of patriarchy are starting to wake up. The situation is not hopeless.
Taking a more descriptive view of the movement, I think it's useful to think about how interest groups form, regardless of their moral claims. If you look at some of the biggest interest groups within the Democratic Party: blacks, feminists, and LGBT activists; all three movements have their locus in shared experience based on that identity rather than a ground-up philosophy. They glom on to a handful of negative experiences (being pulled over, being perved on, sexual shame, etc.) as a way of creating a shared, politcially-salient identity; with the goal of minimizing what they perceive as the harm from those experiences.
In terms of the feminist movement, by splitting it into two different focuses, sexual safety and being overlooked (particularly in the workplace), you can derive the goals of the movement from the shared experiences. On sexual safety, nearly every women I've ever met has some story about a man who groped them in public, or tailed them home, or didn't take no for an answer, or worse. These men are not representative of the overall male population (being largely the most aggressive and disagreeable men), but due to selection effects are an almost universal part of the female experience. These incidents also carry much higher risks for the average woman than the average man, as they are far less likely to be physically able to control the situation.
Being overlooked in the workplace is a similar experience. Though more women are succeeding than ever today, to the extent they are now outpacing man, every woman in a corporate environment can regale you with stories about being overlooked for promotion because of a lack of golf skills, or shouted down in a meeting, etc. The source of said issue is invariably, a man. The same selection effects that universalize the experience of women dealing with overly aggressive creeps applies in the corporate scenario (though selecting for different traits), and universalizes that experience as well.
As a general rule, if you have a large society where there is an opportunity for one group to victimize another (suspect this applies more generally than victimization but have not thought through), the experiences of potential victim group will be drawn disproportionately from those with the most extreme tendency to victimize others (at least if that tendency to victimize is a normally distributed trait, which I suspect it is: a combination of high aggression and low agreeableness).
The goal of these movements (regardless of their rhetoric) becomes the minimization of the universal negative experience. This is also the reason the Men's Right's movement has consistently failed to take off, despite having objectively some quite good arguments. Men, as a group, do not have universal experiences around the issues MRAs tend to bring up. I adore Scott Alexander's work, but his experience (not being on a date by 25) is way outside the norm for a man in a country where the average age to lose your virginity is ~17. Without a salient experience to join people together and focus on, there's much less cohesion and groups seem to tend toward falling apart.
At a normative level, I think it's worth having sympathy for the feminists. Despite the obviously false claims of standing for gender equality, they are actually trying (at least in the sexual safety case) to reduce the odds of an experience--that in many cases scarred them for life--happening as frequently to other women. Personally, I find their methods deeply misguided and lacking in any nuance or sense of tradeoffs, but the goal is admirable in and of itself.
However, and this is something I think is shared between your piece and Scott's and in a couple of other pieces I've read, the movement has clearly done irreparable harm to a certain subgroup of men: mainly, nerds. As someone who was also terrified of making the wrong move with a woman, tried to take their words at face value, and regularly failed as a result; only to start succeeding once I began ignoring their statements, I have some personal bitterness on the subject. That being said, I don't think the solution for that issue is a society-wide Men's Rights Movement (though there are some issues that may be worth taking up under that banner), rather a concerted and consistent effort on the part of those of us who have experienced both sides of that coin to educate younger male nerds.
Mainly, by shouting "NO, DO NOT LISTEN TO THE FEMINISTS IN YOUR PERSONAL RELATIONS. THEY ARE NOT TALKING ABOUT YOU. YES, THIS INCLUDES IF THEY SAY THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT YOU. THIS IS ABOUT THEIR EXPERIENCE NOT YOURS. THEY ARE MISGUIDED, NOT EVIL. BE DECENT, BE GOOD, BUT DON'T BE AFRAID OF BEING A MAN."
>This is also the reason the Men's Right's movement has consistently failed to take off, despite having objectively some quite good arguments. Men, as a group, do not have universal experiences around the issues MRAs tend to bring up.<
I think this is false. If you were to ask how many white people have had some sort of negative experience relating to DEI garbage, even if it's something as simple as having to sit through a DEI training that is dedicated to explaining why white people are badmeanstupidwrongevil, it seems extremely likely that there would a huge portion of white people out there who could identify with this. Yet there is still no movement centered around white ethnicity with any sort of purchase. There may be an anti-DEI movement, but this is not the same thing as a white ethnocentrism movement.
Why is that? Why do negative experiences for women result in a woman-centered identity movement, instead of a movement that is restricted to being anti- whatever thing caused the negative experience?
I actually think you are seeing at least the possibility of a movement centered around white identity. Up until George Floyd, I suspect the vast majority of white people had never experienced the DEI apparatus (having worked in construction previously it's still yet to really penetrate there), but since then there's been a growing backlash (at least in my perception). Whether the DEI stuff will maintain itself long enough to make the backlash large enough to sustain a movement is yet to be seen. Understand if this is frustratingly vague, but just my read on the currents.
Once again, I disagree. I consider myself so far right that I prefer the term "reactionary" over "conservative." Yet I still do not consider myself a white nationalist and even within the circles that I follow, white nationalism is extremely controversial. Most people right of center will recognize injustices done against whites without themselves deciding to become white nationalists because of it. This is fundamentally different from the way in which identity interacts with left-wing politics, with left-wingers literally defining themselves by their membership in various identity groups.
We could have a discussion about why this difference exists but there is clearly a difference. Younger people who skew left will adopt a bunch of these identities and their associated grievance politics without ever leaving their house often enough to have personally experienced any of the supposed horrors that they are protesting against--just reading on the Internet that, for example, there is some kind of huge murder spree against trans people will be enough for them. Meanwhile, those who skew right are extremely hesitant to form such identity-based interest groups even after going through negative personal experiences based on the identity.
This is mostly fairly insightful, but the claim that feminism is not based in a ground-up philosophy is ludicrous. Feminist philosophers have been developing a ground-up philosophy of sexual difference and patriarchy since the eighteenth century.
Conceded, ground-up philosophy was not the right phrase to use, was trying to differentiate from the more total philosophical worldviews that try to derive all of what the world should be structured and how one ought to act in it (utilitarianism, Marxism, etc.). Feminist theory seems much more narrowly focused, though admittedly I'm not very well versed.
Everyone out there is tempted to assign their failings to something wrong to society.
There might be something wrong with society, or there might not, or there might be something that is wrong but it doesn’t apply differently to some identity group, or have a solution that is better then the problem.
I’ve met plenty of women that blame discrimination against women for what are really their own personal failings or just facts of life that have nothing to do with their being a woman.
And I would also note that some of the biggest bullies of women are other women. This morning I had a woman tell me that she had the worst day of her career yesterday. Why? Another woman bullied her at work. I’m sure she considers herself a tough girlboss, I just think she’s an incompetent blowhard trying to silence people who criticize the bad decisions she’s making. What does feminism have to say about this? Probably it would jump down my throat if I confronted her.
I think men's interest groups can be useful to battle feminist encroachment, but this is conditional on the empirical facts. My feeling is that this usually leads to balkanization, which is even worse for society long term than having 1 group with mostly unchecked power.
Regarding gender discrimination in hiring, surely you can do better than a throwaway paragraph that just links a (biased sounding) article and just asserts it as the whole truth.
So way back in prehistoric times I decided that I (a male) would no longer call myself a feminist, not because I didn't agree with the broad, historically important project of gendered emancipation from restrictive power structures, but because feminism was starting to become what in the subsequent decade has been dubbed and mocked as "white girl feminism", and like most successful movements - and let's make no mistake: the broader project that can be loosely called "feminism" has been spectacularly successful over the past 150 years or so - its pockets of insular privilege devolve into self-parody or, which you criticize mostly here, a focus on some circumstantial injustices at the exclusion of others. And we are getting butt-hurt to the degree that we (not you or me personally, but the culture at large) is starting to flirt with electing JD Vance with his Trad-Wife infused weirdness because such a massive historical movement hasn't been perfect these past two decades? Several decades ago in the United States the concept of "marriage rape" was not legitimate.
Here is the point, and it has been made by many thinkers and become clouded by the crass demagogy of both right wing reaction and privileged liberal "I drink male tears" snark alike: The patriarchy does not mean "men"; the patriarchy is a set of power relations that privileges men in the abstract in many ways, but cuts deeply into the lived experiences of both men and women insofar as how injustices manifest in the lives of individual men and women? Marriage rape was not a legitimate concept a few decades ago in the states? Patriarchy. Women are conditioned not to speak out and are labeled "difficult" and socially shamed in subtle ways for behavior that is appealing in men? Patriarchy. Helps women, right? Yep. But guess what - Male suicides spikes because we all want to keep feelings closed in? Patriarchy. Women given preferential treatment in child custody and men lose access? Patriarchy. Men are shamed by women partners for being too sentimental? Patriarchy.
The conditioning of it influences the behavior of both men and women, and it seems to be missing the point entirely when we point to "how women behave" as a barometer of what feminism is. I think the behavior of early 21st century media savvy privileged folks advocating for "feminism" is going to be one of the lower points in the larger history of feminism, if it isn't already becoming clear. But feminism ain't over. Not by a long shot. And if it's a choice between the imperfections you lay out in this essay, vs the world as it existed for millennia before about 100 years ago, not to mention the trad-wife adjacent nonsense that comes from Vance's immensely weird worldview, I'm happy to start calling myself a feminist again, if only to signal larger historical proportionalities.
"Scott also notes that during #MeToo, sexual harassment of men was completely ignored." This is untrue. Kevin Spacey got his career cancelled, George Takei faced significant backlash, Terry Crews received significant sympathy.
What are some pressing examples of women sexually exploiting men they have power over in a way that would reflect any sort of systemic issue that needs to be addressed?
That's what #MeToo was all about? Women exploited their sexual power over men to sleep their way into jobs they would otherwise not have been qualified for, then years or decades later turned around and used the power of their feminist ally networks to punish the MEN for it. In the recent past, women were shamed for such behavior rather than celebrated.
I suspect what you're going to say is that this can't be exploitation by women, that in such a sex/power trade only men can "exploit". But that's a feminist perspective on things, and incorrect as such.
I'm not sure what possible understanding of "power" would make what you're saying coherent. How was Harvey Weinstein exploited when he chose to pressure women into sex in exchange for him providing opportunities those women didn't have?
He was exploited for the jobs he was handed out. That's what exploitation is, Oxford Languages: "the fact of making use of a situation to gain unfair advantage for oneself", which the actresses certainly did. The vast majority of the claims were not allegations of rape, but rather seemed to be from women who willingly traded sex for jobs and then later (much later) decided maybe they shouldn't have done that. After they were famous.
There were also allegations that he did genuinely use force to get sex too, but that conviction was overturned on the grounds that the trial had been a show trial. He's now heading to a complete retrial, although how you give the man a fairer trial now than before is unclear.
This is obviously not what most people mean when they say "exploitation." In fact, I don't even see that as the definition from Oxford. I see: "To exploit someone or something is to make use of him, her, or it for your own ends by playing on some weakness or vulnerability in the object of your exploitation." It seems obvious to me that no woman did that to Harvey Weinstein. What was his "weakness or vulnerability?" He's the one who offered it, because he had the power to control who got roles and the women didn't. Do you think Harvey Weinstein was actually a victim here because women agreed to the arrangement he suggested, which was only possible because he had immense power over them?
It does seem like the Mariah Carey allegation was ignored, but what were any other examples of woman-on-man celebrity sexual harassment of men that were ignored? I'm worried we're stretching one point too far to turn it into a pattern, and then inaccurately summing it up as "sexual harassment of men was completely ignored."
“Virtually no one denies men and women should have equal rights.”
This is a poor assumption that you could not have made growing up in my generation at the tail end of Gen X, among older generations and my contemporaries.
I think the mistake here is seeing feminism as a sort of general welfare program for women, as opposed to a political movement against the specific oppression women face *as women.* For example, I'm pretty sure every feminist would admit that men are murdered more often than women. But the vast majority of men's murders aren't the sort of thing where their maleness is central to the act - it's not like most men are murdered because the other man murdering them is biased against men and wants to harm them. But a huge amount of the violence women face *does* stem directly from specific social factors where gender is a central factor. So when feminists focus on things that impact women, it's not because they're broad utilitarians who just have a false belief that women are suffering much more. It's just that they're specifically interested in harms that come to women *as women.* That's also why feminists don't spend time on things like, I don't know, fighting malaria or something - obviously those things harm millions of women all the time, but the mosquitos aren't seeking out women specifically so it's not considered a feminist issue.
Rape is a great example of this. Feminists focus on rape because it's a very central aspect of women's oppression as a class - they've done a huge amount of work over the years showing how rape isn't just an isolated crime that takes place between individuals, but overwhelmingly something that's deeply intertwined with patriarchal power structures and cultural practices and involves one class of people targeting another. When a man is raped, that's obviously a tragic instance of violence, but the number of women who are seeking out male strangers to rape is essentially zero and men as a class clearly don't have their social and political position constrained by the practice of rape. That's what matters to feminists, not just general suffering.
Of course, the reason a lot of people miss this is that modern feminism is often very depoliticized and doesn't always have a good framework for explaining this class analysis. But that's definitely what's going on behind the scenes to bring about the dynamics you're talking about. And I don't think it's an uncommon thing, either - you don't see immigrant rights groups advocating for things that help native-born citizens, even though there are probably some immigrants who are doing better than many native-born citizens, right?
Why is this seen as so morally important though? Is the idea that people have some kind of right not to be harmed qua member of a gender, that makes it way worse to inflict or permit such harms?
No, I don’t think Feminists have ever argued that sexist crimes are intrinsically worse than other crimes. The idea is just that sexist crimes are rooted in social attitudes (patriarchy) that can be changed for the better by activism and people should do that.
I've never seen them argue that either. But many of them judge people very negatively who are more concerned with larger scale harms, like EAs. So those feminists seem to believe that sexism is objectively worse than non gendered harms, at least from their behavior.
Almost nobody subjectively cares about issues in proportion to their social harms. Most feminists are just normal in that respect. That some feminists are unfair to EA is neither here nor there: it says nothing about feminism as an ideology. Feminism is perfectly compatible with effective altruism.
I agree that it is compatible, but also I'm not talking about fringe figures here. If you were to ask someone like Manne or MacKinnon or Srinivasan, "Is it ok that resisting what remains of patriarchal oppression is not very high on my list of priorities?" they would not say that that's ok. These are sophisticated thinkers, not laypeople. I think the most charitable interpretation of their beliefs is that they do think sexist oppression in the western world has a moral importance of comparable scale to war or factory farming.
I’m struggling to see why we should care, if true. ‘Feminists disproportionately likely to think feminist issues are important, news at 11.’ Besides, I’m not even sure your suggestion is correct, if its that they will chide you for prioritizing other issues as more important: feminists of my acquaintance are not angry at environmentalists or people donating to malaria nets for diverting attention from women’s issues. Where they WILL chide you, rightly in my view, is for using poor arguments like BB’s above to argue that patriarchy is over or that women do not face important discrimination on the basis of their sex.
The feminist notion of "the paytreearkee" is non-falsifiable in the same way that DEI activists have made "racial bias" into a non-falsifiable omni-cause. When people do this, they are engaging in dishonest grift, not in altruistic problem-solving. Serious attempts at problem-solving do not start from an unfalsifiable premise in this way.
omg just shut up
Dude, have you ever read any history in your life? Because if you had, I would have thought you would be familiar with the historical reality of patriarchy for nearly every culture since people started writing shit down. We can disagree about how much of it is left in countries like Canada and the US in the present but saying that it’s unfalsifiable is… uh.. no, it definitely is not. Patriarchy is a real, objective observable phenomenon and one reason people like you and BB don’t realise it is because feminism was objectively successful in reducing it a huge amount so today we can argue about how much is left. Thanks, feminism!
Things that existed in the past are not evidence of things existing today. This is such a strange error in basic logic that I'm honestly not sure how to respond to it. Thousands of years ago, Christians were burned alive as human torches for the amusement of the Roman Emperor Nero. If I go around today talking about how horribly oppressed I am as a Christian because of this, and demanding that you show deference to my victim status, are you going to take that seriously? No, of course not, as well you shouldn't.
A five year old should be able to grasp this. Not sure why you're having such trouble with it.
>Patriarchy is a real, objective observable phenomenon and one reason people like you and BB don’t realise it is because feminism was objectively successful in reducing it a huge amount so today we can argue about how much is left.<
This is also unfalsifiable. I can just as easily claim that paytreearkee went away because men were willing to listen to the concerns of women, and women should therefore be grateful that men have learned to restrain themselves and no longer abuse their advantages in strength and aggression. I can posit to you that if men truly wished to, they could reduce women to the status of sex slaves, and just point at Afghanistan as evidence of this fact.
You seem to have a really poor understanding of the concept of falsifiability. Some light reading that you might find helpful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
Ok, I have a bad habit of getting snarky and I know that it is never productive, so I apologise for the snarky tone. I will try to be less snarky.
So, the claim is not that 'patriarchy existed in the past, therefore it must exist today". It is "Patriarchy verifiably existed in the past, therefore the existence of patriarchy is verifiable in general, therefore patriarchy is not an unfalsifiable concept." You claimed it is, you are wrong. Obviously wrong because we can also make falsifiable claims about it right now. If I claim "Sweden is more patriarchal than Saudi Arabia", you will find it easy to provide lots of evidence that my claim is false.
What you really want to say, which is actually defensible, is that feminists SOMETIMES make claims about patriarchy that are divorced from evidence and even unfalsifiable in principle. That sometimes patriarchy in feminism becomes a magical evil force that cannot be observed but is always there. I agree! Feminism is a popular and influential intellectual movement and consequently there are plenty of idiots who have made ridiculous feminist claims. But we probably disagree about how prevalent that tendency is, because I think it is pretty unimportant conceptually since there is lots of good evidence supporting active and relevant discrimination happening today in western countries.
Much less than there used to be, thankfully. Which we can say since it's measurable and not an unfalsifiable concept.
>It's just that they're specifically interested in harms that come to women *as women.*
I don't understand the distinction you're drawing here or why it's relevant. This is still an accurate description of feminism and still an accurate description of why it's bad. Having special interest groups that work to benefit one group of people at the expense of others is bad. You seem to be operating under the exact mistaken utilitarian paradigm you outlined - are you aware of the numerous attempts feminist groups have made to shut down men's interest groups, men's domestic abuse shelters, etc, in order to preserve women's better status in these areas? This is why feminism is still clearly bad no matter how you characterize it.
I don't think people who blame feminists for shutting down men's groups or programs that exist to help men are understanding the situation accurately. What's an example you have in mind?
I can grant that because there's still a mountain of evidence that feminist bias is entrenched in our social systems and working against men's interests. From BB's post above that I haven't seen anybody address yet:
>In computing its Global Gender Gap, the much-quoted annual report, the World Economic Forum has explicitly ignored male disadvantages: if men fare worse on a particular dimension, a country still gets a perfect score for equality on that measure. Prodded by the federal Title IX law banning sexual discrimination in schools, educators have concentrated on eliminating disparities in athletics but not in other extracurricular programs, which mostly skew female. The fact that there are now three female college students for every two males is of no concern to the White House Gender Policy Council. Its “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality” doesn’t even mention boys’ struggles in school, instead focusing exclusively on new ways to help female students get further ahead.
This seems to me much less open to interpretation, and is indicative of feminists outright refusing to address gender inequality that disadvantages men... in gender equality reports.
I'll also add that I think you should be very skeptical in general that a special interest group is going to toe the line of what you in particular think is acceptable practice in a liberal society. It's more likely going to keep accumulating power and fighting for more, like public unions requesting more privileges from your taxes each year after securing what they called a "fair wage" the year before or BLM groups not just wanting an end to police brutality but an end to police.
The idea that male murder is not gendered is absurd on face. An awful lot of murder is gang related and/or in other contexts where males solving interpersonal violence is considered in some sense acceptable, while doing the same to women would be condemnable.
Ironically, you’re basically assuming male culture as “default” and inherently non-gendered, when it very much is.
I agree male murder is "gendered," in the sense that gender plays a huge role in what's happening. But what I mean to say is that murder between men has no class dimension - men don't go out and target men *as men* to maim or kill. There's a fundamental difference between members of a dominant social group killing each other for interpersonal slights and one member of a dominant social group killing a member of the subjugated social group in a completely one-sided pattern.
“Men don’t target men as men” - of course they do. You ascribe reason to someone who commits murder as a rational act. Men target men because if they are offended by a man the punishment is murder. Being female is startlingly protective for murder.
I think you're failing to understand what I mean by "as a man." I don't just mean that their gender plays some sort of role in the exchange. I'm saying the interpersonal exchange isn't influenced by inter-class dynamics. But if you don't recognize the basic concept of social classes, that's not going to appear to you.
Again, of course they do. In fact it’s an extremely old trope - men who go out looking for trouble - with men; and men - as men.
Men patrol the boundaries of their territory and look for men to harass.
Men go into a new area and assert dominance - “competitive aggression”, “machismo” or “honor culture”. It’s something I don’t understand, men who go to a bar or a car race or sports event specifically to get into a fight _with other men_ qua “men”. Watch any old machismo movie - “The Dirty Dozen” or “Paint Your Wagon” I imagine, and there’s a fight scene for no reason other than men to fight and hurt men. The end of “Blazing Saddles” has a spectacularly long “fight sequence”; “Victor / Victoria” has a perfect one; James Garner and his outed bodyguard Alex Karras go to a bar specifically to get in a fight - with men - so they feel manly. In the end they sit around arm in arm with the men beaten to a pump singing.
It’s not just movies.
Certainly I understand it. Men primarily fight men, as men.
So, then why exactly are inter-class dynamics notably different than inter-class dynamics in this context?
>I think the mistake here is seeing feminism as a sort of general welfare program for women, as opposed to a political movement against the specific oppression women face *as women.*<
1. If true, it still means feminists should stop lying when they say their movement is about "equality."
2. By obsessing over things like "women in STEM," feminists reveal themselves to be the former (a general welfare program for women), not the latter option that you are proposing. There was probably never a good case that female under-representation in STEM was due to some sort of malicious sex-based oppression, but such a case certainly isn't plausible now and hasn't been plausible for decades at this point. Feminists make no attempt to prove that case, they simply assume it as true and go from there, in much the same way that race-based agitators assume that all racial disparities must be the result of malicious racism.
The majority of feminist activism, both globally and in the west, is *not* stuff like Women in STEM. I agree that sort of bourgeois representation politics can be overemphasized, but most feminists are still working on traditional issues like rape, domestic violence, sexual exploitation, etc. It's just not the sort of thing your average man would encounter in their daily lives, so you probably don't notice it.
I can only draw reference from the people I interact with. If nearly every feminist I speak with talks about things like women in STEM or the so-called "gender pay gap," I have to conclude that these are some of the primary things feminists care about. If we are being honest, feminists moving in highly-educated circles in first-world nations probably talk about these things instead of rape because there simply is not very much rape going on to whinge about in that sub-population. I don't necessarily blame them for that, I think they're just wrong on the merits. There was somewhat of an attempt to make things about rape again with #MeToo, but I'm not sure if that really went the way that feminists would have liked it to.
If it were really true that most feminists are primarily concerned with something like sex slavery, then I have to ask why someone like me, who is extremely far removed from that world, seems to keep encountering so many of them.
I also must point out that feminists do not by any means have a monopoly on not liking and wanting to end practices such as rape and sexual slavery. Believe it or not, people were against these things long before the term feminism was ever invented. No one is in favor of violent sexual crimes. The beliefs about representation in STEM and gender pay gaps are the distinguishing views of the feminist, the views she holds that the average person doesn't.
I mean, between this comment and your earlier admission that you don't really have any experience reading prominent feminist works or understanding feminist theory, I think it's just clear that you aren't the sort of person who's in an epistemic situation where you can properly evaluate a movement you don't know much about.
Alright, well, you're welcome to present some kind of actual evidence or argumentation to try and change my mind. But if you're just going to make hollow assertions then obviously you aren't worth the time of day, and I'd even cite your behavior as yet another example of intellectual laziness from self-proclaimed feminists.
I think what you see as "intellectual laziness" is better understood as feminists correctly assessing that you aren't interested in considering what they actually say and deciding it's not worth the effort.
Given that men are murdered so much more often than women, I’m not following how maleness is not central to the act? Central is a strong word, but maleness has to be in some way a major contributing factor, given the disparity.
In some sense a gang member may not be killing a man because he is a man, but given the nature of financial disputes or turf wars, these seem to be majority male domains of conflict.
Insofar as men are killing men, feminists will say, persuasively enough, that this is due to patriarchy and men are violence victims and perpetrators because they are socialized to solve problems with violence. So reducing the socialization of men into toxic norms would be a good way of alleviating this problem. And if you reject the feminist analysis, it’s not like you have an argument why feminists should care about it: they are activists about specific issues and they’re under no obligation to care about everything equally. Social movements focus on specific problems. You want to deal with male-on-male violence outside a feminist framework found your own social movement.
This implies that men should able to identify as "meninists" who don't care about women and respond to their concerns with laughter and mockery, joking about women getting raped the same way that the rape of men in prison is made light of. And if anyone is bothered by such an attitude, the response of "Well we're meninists, of course we don't care what happens to women!" would be justified.
Yet men who actually do attempt to engage in a sort of "reverse feminism," in much milder forms than what I've outlined above ("men's rights activists"), seem to be met with vilification and extreme hostility from feminists. Why is that? Would you agree that feminists, and people in general, have an obligation to shut up and let the "men's rights activists" focus on their specific problems?
No, it doesn’t because I never said feminists shouldn’t or don’t care about men at all, just that men’s issues that are not connected to gender, discrimination, (most are not) have no special interest to them AS FEMINISTS. Because there is nothing wrong with focusing on specific issues that you want to be active about.
Some men do identify as men’s rights activists. Sometimes those dudes were made fun of or criticized by feminists. So? A lot of men’s rights stuff is cringe and dumb and feminists are right to mock it. Also some feminists are mean and dumb, and they were wrong to mock some things they mocked. That’s life. But none of this has any bearing on feminism’s overall plausibility and importance.
>No, it doesn’t because I never said feminists shouldn’t or don’t care about men at all<
Yes you did. Quote:
"Social movements focus on specific problems. You want to deal with male-on-male violence outside a feminist framework found your own social movement."
This goes both ways. If this is your attitude, all men (and also non-feminist women I suppose) would be justified in dismissing feminists with "well, we're not feminists, so we don't care."
I think it was pretty clear, but I will lay it out more explicitly. Feminism as a social movement cares about discrimination due to gender. Feminists as activists may permissibly care disproportionately about their ‘pet cause’. This does not imply that feminists do not care about any other issues, and it would be wrong for feminists to care about NOTHING but feminism. Insofar as they care about other issues, it will not be AS feminists unless they think the issue is importantly connected to feminism. Similarly , it is perfectly fine to say ‘I am a men’s rights activist and my activism is not about women’s rights so I am not going to march in your march or donate to your campaign.’ But going on to say “Lol feminism sucks I don’t have to care about women” is cringe and also morally impermissible because we are obligated to care about everyone, even women.
But the feminist analysis is not presented as “patriarchy is fine as long as it doesn’t hurt women”. Feminists specifically use “patriarchy is bad for everyone” as a defense against the argument that they don’t care about gender discrepancies that disfavor men. This is specifically addressed in the OP, it’s a motte and bailey argument. If feminists only care about women, fine, but they need to be honest about it (and accept that people who actually want equity will therefore not be feminists).
Of course feminists don’t think patriarchy is fine. Why would they? They say patriarchy sucks for everyone, but especially for women because men have many benefits from it. And when people like BB complain, ‘men have it rough too’ they present a whole bunch of things that have nothing to do with discrimination. Patriarchy is discriminatory. That’s the main problem with it. Feminist oppose patriarchy. The fact that some things are bad for men is not an argument against feminism. The only relevant points here in this entire discussion concern whether or not there are still some patriarchal aspects of society that are discriminatory to either men or women, and if so to what extent and what can we do about it. Unfortunately, BB’s article does a terrible job of actually addressing that.
>Patriarchy is discriminatory. That’s the main problem with it. Feminist oppose patriarchy... Unfortunately, BB’s article does a terrible job of actually addressing that.
People are free to question and disagree with controversial theoretical posits. For example, I don't think people would disagree from within their reference frame that people who blame "black culture" are acting rationally - they identified a problem (e.g. high gang involvement in black neighborhoods), and constructed coherent ways of identifying the problem (e.g. adoration of gang culture in rap songs). The question then is - are there better theories that address this? I think the answer in the black culture example is obviously yes, snd for the feminist example BB listed ways in which feminists mistake discrepancies as evidence of discrimination and have a tendency to neglect or discount male discrepancies in favor of female ones.
You're not distinguishing between what feminists care about in a broad moral sense and what feminism exists to address. And I think that distinction would be pretty clear elsewhere. No one would accuse animal rights activists of "only caring about animals" because they don't, I don't know, do blood drives, and someone who cared about both animal welfare and blood drives shouldn't feel uncomfortable calling themselves an animal rights activist!
You're right that those are majority-male domains of conflict, but that doesn't mean there's a specific cultural arrangement that leads men to target and kill other men *as men.* Or, to put it another way, when two men get in a fight outside a bar and one ends up shooting the other, there's no class conflict, only an individual one - how could there be? It's a man killing a man. But if you see men and women as distinct social groups with a specific sociopolitical relationship, then obviously something like domestic violence or rape is going to be very different. Of course, I recognize that some people don't accept a class-based analysis of society. But the vast majority of feminists do, and that obviously explains why they prioritize what they prioritize.
Sure, and they're often trying to get money to be attractive to women at some level. (Though you do find the occasional gay gangster.)
I think part of the issue there is you often have a male perpetrator as well, so it's hard to claim it's some kind of global oppression of men. Same with the draft, though that's less of an issue in recent decades, and most young people probably don't realize it was ever a major issue at all.
Great point. The other thing I would point to is path dependency. Obviously, historical conditions are not as relevant as current ones, but you don't disband the idea just because its main original goal ("feminism is the belief that men and women are equal") has been achieved; you keep it around so that it can guard against backsliding. Naturally, to help keep it around, you continue to target remaining issues even if they are of much less salience than the issues you won on. In an integral over Western history, it's likely that the sum of women's welfare or fair treatment has yet to exceed that of men's.
>Obviously, historical conditions are not as relevant as current ones, but you don't disband the idea just because its main original goal ("feminism is the belief that men and women are equal") has been achieved<
If we are able to observe that the adherents of this idea are lying in the present (i.e. when they say "feminism is about equality"), we now must call into question whether its adherents were also lying in the past, from the very start. A cursory look at these sorts of movements suggests that this is likely to be the case--people hammer on about "equality" while they feel that they are the underdog, but their true motivation is always just self-interest, plain and simple.
The "Civil Rights" movement did not rest on its laurels and retire after its original goals were achieved, it kept going and morphed into DEI. Liberals were perceived as the party of "free speech" for decades until they finally gained the levers of power, at which time the discourse surrounding "free speech" flipped sides completely. Conservatives who whine about censorship today will probably turn out to be no different. And so forth and so on.
>In an integral over Western history, it's likely that the sum of women's welfare or fair treatment has yet to exceed that of men's.<
This is the same sort of logic used to suggest that black people today are still owed reparations for things that happened long in the past. Are you seriously suggesting that sanctions should be imposed on men who have never lived under "paytreearkee" to benefit women who have never lived under it, because of things that happened before any of them are born?
>In an integral over Western history, it's likely that the sum of women's welfare or fair treatment has yet to exceed that of men's
This is very stupid on two fronts. The first is that women were never drafted in the West, and many denials of opportunity were on the basis of "Women are too stupid/weak/whatever else to work 12+ hours a day in a coal mine with no workers' protections." It's not obvious to nonfeminists at all that women have a net suffering integral across Western history.
The second is that history is irrelevant to present circumstances. Some proto-Caucasoid hunter-gatherer has no relevance to my present day suffering or happiness as a white dude in America. It would reek of grievance-farming if I tried to compare myself to this hypothetical historical ancestor.
On the first point, that’s of course just one social policy among many. Women also died in childbirth at very high rates, etc. I pre-conceded that it is only likely rather than certain for this reason. But I would suggest that one attempt at a fairer metric would be revealed preference. When given the opportunity, did men seek to claim the rights and responsibilities of women or did women seek to claim those of men?
I suppose the meaning of your second point is that the “integral of welfare over time” doesn’t necessarily determine its current distribution (rather than that our societal structure should be based around what maximizes your personal welfare). Sure, but it’s also not uncorrelated. Moreover, and more to the original point, it’s simply a good reason for feminists to believe that they need to continue to have a feminist movement lest their position backslide to the historical norm.
> When given the opportunity, did men seek to claim the rights and responsibilities of women or did women seek to claim those of men?
Does this demonstrate that one is better than the other, or that there is more pressure to do one than the other? Not only that, but there are serious problems of both record and opportunity here.
If you're a woman who goes out, disguises herself as a man to join the army out of a sense of duty, it is much more likely to be recorded, but if you are a man who disguises himself as a woman to dodge having to serve, then it is unlikely this will get written down anywhere.
If you're being provided for economically by a man, it is easier to then also try and strike out on your own economically and provide more, whereas if you provide for a woman it is harder / impossible to give up and stop providing.
Yeah, this is something that really bugs me - a lot of anti-feminists will admit that, from about 10,000 years ago to maybe the 1960's, women were obviously a subjugated social class. But it seems to me that, if 99.9% of human history has been explicitly patriarchal, it's probably a bad idea to hang up our hats and relax once we go a few decades with marital rape being illegal and women being allowed to work outside the home. And of course once you bring in the traditional class analysis, it becomes even more obvious that these social dynamics have real inertia over time.
>from about 10,000 years ago to maybe the 1960's, women were obviously a subjugated social class
So were men, unless you believe feminist folk history that all men were rich property owners who treated women like slaves and never had to do manual labor in their lives. This is obviously wrong though, so whether or not you believe that there are still persistent inequalities or everything magically got fixed, it still doesn't justify a bias that works in favor of women and excludes men.
This comment shows a serious misunderstanding of the basic concepts you are discussing. The fact that there were lower class men who were oppressed does not contradict the fact that women were an oppressed class vis-a-vis men! Yes, a noblewoman was privileged relative to peasant men. But she was oppressed by her make relatives and relative to elite men, and peasant women were systematically oppressed by the men in their life and the social structures of society. Peasant men didn’t have much power, but they DID have power over their female relatives.
The original commenter only said women were a subjugated class, not what you wrote. I also disagree again with the 1 sided framing -husbands and teenage sons were forced to work their lives away and become breadwinners to support female family members. Framing male-female relationships as master-slave is misleading, and probably results from reifying gender classes and telling a grand narrative through them, rather than paying attention to the particular instances of discrimination that would constitute said class conflict.
Don’t try to run ‘things weren’t that patriarchal in the past’. Yes, yes they were. Women did not swan about supported by men. They worked, hard, while men made almost all the decisions and held the power and beat them if they were ‘disobedient’. Patriarchy is about who has power in the context of the family: it was men. Men, men, men. Read a book. Men patted themselves on the back about how superior they were, treated women like property, didn’t educate them, and made them legal second class citizens. Rape was a property crime against MEN. This is history, well known history.
The original commenter said women were a subjugated class, and I explained what that MEANS in feminist thought. That is also what the original commentator meant, because that is what the concept is.
What cultures are you thinking of where men were forced to work so they could support female family members who didn't work? And in those arrangements (if they did exist), were the men desiring the abolition of that social arrangement or did they desire its continuation?
At what time in human history do you believe men *as a class* were socially subjugated? Can you point to cultures where women as a class held significant social, political, and economic power over men as a class? Of course, throughout history men have been oppressed due to their existence in other social classes - slaves, serfs, workers, various racial castes, etc - but I can't think of any culture where men were historically disadvantaged on the basis of their gender, such that they would be worse off than a woman who was equally situated in every other respect.
>At what time in human history do you believe men *as a class* were socially subjugated?
When you ask questions like these where you're allowed to build in any presupposition and stipulate any definition of "class" or "social subjugation," you get whatever conclusion you want for free out of it. It's also not remotely a serious attempt to understanding anything (and is a criticism I frequently make not just of feminism but of the style of analytic philosophy that gets done on this blog where God is defined as the simplest perfect being and by stipulation can explain the universe, so atheist naturalism is "worse" as an explanatory theory because it's stipulated to not explain the universe or to be simple).
When you perform this class based social subjugation analysis, you are ascending from the analysis of individual cases of gender inequality and coarsegraining over particulars to establish some sort of metanarrative about which gender is worse off. Here is what I take to be a pretty convincing summary using these argumentation tools that states the opposite of what you probably believe: Men were historically a separate legal class compared to women, which meant that they had special legal obligations that women didn't have like mandatory military service, forced labor to provide for women who didn't have to to work, forced legal responsibility for any crimes their married female partners would commit, forced drafts where they had to die for their country while women stayed at home, all while facing an endless barrage of social stigma from women - don't you know it's *your* fault women can't vote, *your* fault you're not doing enough to support women, *your* fault your wife is starving, all while those men were working 12-16 hour days in coal mines and steel factories.
This analysis of course 1) picks out whatever I want to grievance-farm over, 2) doesn't compare or contrast the rights and privileges and interactions between men and women, 3) was written while entirely discounting any negative thing that might have affected women and explicitly blamed them for the social stigma men faced and implicitly blamed them for making life worse for men in general, 4) doesn't include any statistical data that quantifies how likely it was for men to die in wars or what hours they worked, 5) paints over every male's lived experience with a brush, 6) doesn't address men's complicity in the situations they suffered in, 7) is biased towards social events with high legibility to be turned into examples like "a draft occurring" rather than the intricacies of male-female social deliberation and localized (whether by geography or political party or whatever) factors, and so on.
There's so many weaknesses to this style of analysis that it can be used to convincingly argue for anything as long as you're dedicated enough to painting a picture where x class is oppressed, because there's a never ending amount of particular cases that you can cherry pick to form into a narrative rather than trying to understand the variability in the set of particular cases you're looking at. In other words, feminists are largely using the wrong tools for the job - understanding gender discrimination - and instead using the right tools to optimize for heat and outrage.
No, this just shows that an attempt to build a narrative where men were oppressed falls apart and doesn’t work.
By contrast, the narrative that women are a historically oppressed class is easy to build and convincing because it is true. You try to make really strong relativist claims here that nobody serious ever accepts. It is not that hard to make historical sociological claims! We look at the actual way people lived in ancient greece and say: hmm, Aristotle says women are deformed men, respectable women were segregated from men, only men could vote, men made decisions for the family including whether to keep children or expose them, women had lesser legal status in numerous ways, this society was very patriarchal. Your counterpoint is bad undergrad relativism, which is not actually looking at the evidence, it is putting your fingers in your ears and saying ‘in MY interpretation, I’m right and you’re wrong’. People have done the work on this snd it is not some big mystery: almost every historical is patriarchal and the differences are in detail and degree.
So no, this ‘style of analysis’ can NOT be used to convincingly argue for anything. On the contrary, this style of analysis is how we learn about any society, past or present. It is just history and sociology. You can close your eyes and say ‘you can’t prove anything’ all you want, but no serious scholars reject the reality of historical patriarchy.
I'm not stipulating any sort of arbitrary or capricious definition of social subjugation (or class) here. I'm using the very straightforward one that all social scientists would use, relating to relative political, social, and economic power. Can you point me to a society in history where, if you fixed every other quality between a man and a woman, the woman would have significantly more political, social, and economic power than the man?
From about 10,000 years ago up to maybe 1800, every society on Earth accepted slavery as a natural and necessary institution, the natural right of the powerful and victorious over the weak and defeated.
But there's no abolitionist movement in modern America, for the simple reason that the abolitionists won and almost everyone now agrees with them. Why would anyone join such a movement today? What would be the point? Because slavery lasted 10,000 years and we need 10,000 year of abolitionist activism to make up for it? No, continued activism only makes sense if there is some further change they want, beyond the abolition already accomplished, and it would be entirely fair to criticise (or support) them on that basis, and disingenuous for them to appeal to the successes of their predecessors as cover.
Much the same goes for the feminist movement. It's not a movement for granting women the right to vote, or for banning marital rape, or any other victory already accomplished, and it doesn't make sense to give ongoing support to a movement for those causes. (It can be a movement for abortion rights though, since there is an ongoing fight there)
I mean, movements have a hard time disbanding once their goals are achieved--the March of Dimes was supposed to fight polio--and forming a pressure group to achieve your goals is always useful. Disparities that favor men? Bad, get rid of them. Disparities that favor women? Well, the men are being toxically masculine in some fashion.
Feminists actually argue that patriarchy harms both men and women and the harms to men are one more reason to get rid of it. But a lot of the disadvantages men face (and that BB complains about) are not due to patriarchy or discrimination: expecting feminists to care about that qua feminists is foolish and unfair. It’s like complaining that environmentalists don’t do enough to alleviate poverty.
>Feminists actually argue that patriarchy harms both men and women and the harms to men are one more reason to get rid of it.
Feminists reify patriarchy like it's something over and above the attitudes of humans engaged in a social system. Do you agree or disagree that part of getting rid of patriarchy would involve disbanding feminist movements that instill attitudes into their adherents to the effect that they should shut down men's interest groups and men's domestic abuse shelters - for the obvious reason that these are sexist attitudes and actions that are backed by said feminist groups?
No, I don’t think they do, not in general. Feminists are very clear that patriarchy is a social system. Social systems are instantiated in human minds and the rules, beliefs and expectations humans live by. However they are often studied and discussed at a higher level of abstraction. That is how feminists mostly conceive patriarchy: sociologically.
I have no opinion about whether some feminists have been unfair to men’s rights groups. If they have been, they should stop. That said, I know at least some historical men’s rights groups that were founded on explicitly anti-feminist principles and it is unsurprising they ran into feminist opposition.
This is a thoughtful response, but I actually do think you could say that men face specific repression *as men* through violence because men are more likely to be put in that position. There's a "women and children should be thought of first" mindset in society, and men are more likely to be victims of many of these things because of their biological makeup as men putting them in more dangerous situations. So it's not clear how these situations involving women are different.
One of the most persistent dogmas I see within the modern movement is the idea that women simply do not fail, they are only failed. The question of female agency seems to constantly be in flux despite at least the forward face of the movement asserting (rightly) that women are full people with just as much agency and capability as men and society should treat them as such.
When women triumph it is because the women were the smartest and most talented, when a man triumphs it is only due to societal handouts. When a woman fails it is because society is stacked against her, when a man fails it is because he himself was incompetent. When women or feminism fails to achieve something, it is never because the woman or the movement’s approach was flawed, it is that the world is simply too hostile to their undeniable truth (it is of course never asked why if the feminist argument itself is so inherently undeniable it is unable to anticipate and adjust for the landscape). Our failures and successes are of course determined by an infinitely complex intersection of both skill and circumstance, as well as sheer luck, but this seems to be roundly ignored by the movement.
The most prescient example of this in recent history is of course the Clinton campaign’s failure, which blamed everything from Russian Interference to a deeply held misogyny as the reason for her failure, John Kerry by comparison simply failed in his duty to correctly politic to win.
This has also manifested itself in a very interesting way as the metoo movement has chugged along. Oddly nobody feels that the movement has failed more or is more sensitive to the backlash than the most ardent supporters of the movement, but there is a very narrow window of reasons why you’re allowed to acknowledge that failure according to them. If one points out that say the legal victories over people like Cosby and Weinstein relied to heavily on blatant civil rights violations or that the larger movement seemed too dismissive of concepts like discernment, fairness, and forgiveness that the larger society seems to hold important that caused the movement to stall you’ll simply be called an apologist. But of course when asked why the movement has failed or the backlash exist, their response is always that the same society that has basically spent 7+ years banishing anyone even slightly accused of a whole range of sexual impropriety at their insistence simply loves rape too much.
In practice the very concept of the patriarchy turns not into historical or political reality but an almost supernatural conspiratorial force. The only other group of people I’ve met who believe their group constantly loses due to an all powerful group controlling every lever of the world and are constantly beset upon at all times by criminals society fails to reign in to the same extent are White Nationalists.
I describe the patriarchy as the most prominent leftist conspiracy theory. The left believes only the right has conspiracy theories but something like half of the left fervently believes one. It’s just mainstream.
If the patriarchy is a group of rich and powerful men who meet every Tuesday to decide how to make the world worse for women then I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist.
But if you mean a society where political leaders are disproportionately male then yes we live in a patriarchy, but we also live in a plutocracy, a gerontocracy, and a bunch of other problematic ocracies.
I think the term is mostly used as a mildly inflammatory way of telling people to make it easier and more socially acceptable for women to run for office.
Yeah but we can’t have gender parity in positions of power without systemically disadvantaging men. Men vary more than women and have more incentive to gain power. Even in a perfectly equal world, we’d be ruled mostly by men.
So if a feminist believes that’s sufficient to justify feminism then they are fighting against reality, not oppression. The only solutions are tyranny or genocide (of various forms).
"Men vary more than women and have more incentive to gain power."
The first part of this sentence probably isn’t true - see this article
https://defendingfeminism.substack.com/p/why-its-irrational-to-believe-the
as for the second part everyone likes money, prestige and power I don't see why men have a bigger incentive to purse political careers then women do.
"So if a feminist believes that’s sufficient to justify feminism then they are fighting against reality, not oppression."
I'm really not sure what you mean by feminism here - I think on the margin encouraging women to go into politics probably makes the world a better place. Is this a feminist policy by your lights or do you mean more extreme stuff like affirmative action?
Women like powerful men but men are mostly agnostic to power in women. That’s all it takes for a massive skew in behavior.
I’ll read your link
Women are *attracted* to powerful men. It's not clear why that would stop them from organizing to protect their interests like any other group. Indeed, you see this dynamic where you have young men complaining women expect them to succeed in a system the women have rigged against them through lobbying for affirmative action! Hey, a couple of guys did it, and that's the ones they want--too bad for the rest of you scrubs.
>encouraging women to go into politics probably makes the world a better place. Is this a feminist policy by your lights?
If we're spending societal resources, yes, this policy should be opposed. If we're integrating it into common parlance like a greeting, saying "Women should go into politics" rather than saying "Hi how are you?" that would be weird, but as long as no social pressure is exerted to conform or to adopt feminist policies, that would be OK. I think shibboleths like these are generally used to enforce conformity and kick out dissenters though, like pronouns or even identifying as a feminist, so probably not practically possible.
"I'm really not sure what you mean by feminism here - I think on the margin encouraging women to go into politics probably makes the world a better place. Is this a feminist policy by your lights or do you mean more extreme stuff like affirmative action?"
I mean extreme like, anything we do to get more women into positions of power is justified because literally the only reason it's otherwise is evil men or systematic favoring of men over women from our culture.
Affirmative action is justified on these grounds but what happens when affirmative action fails? Ideologues have a justification for any level of extreme action because literally the only way they will see the world as fair is if they make it overwhelmingly unfair in their favor.
Slightly nudging women to get into politics is fine. Once the law is involved, you're using violence in support of your beliefs. If your rage can never be sated then the violence grows. Feminist rage can never be sated because their dissatisfaction is with biology, not culture.
It's clear the author of that article started with the conclusion and worked backward. If they'd gone on a journey of learning the truth, they'd have cited other research. Not a one-off that has no bearing on gender.
The core problem is they make a strawman of GMV to take down: the idea that there's gotta be a gene on the Y chromosome simply makes men either smarter or dumber. Yet there is a genetic difference: men have way more testosterone than women. Men vary more than women mostly because testosterone gives us different behaviors. Even a small difference accumulates over time but the difference is often not small.
Testosterone pushes men to gain status, whatever that means in their culture. Like, the son of WASPs and a boy from a favela have very different ideas of status. This makes perfect sense because women prefer high-status men while men barely care about female status. If the women in your culture want gangsters then boys become gangsters. If they want barristers then boys become barristers. When there's no hierarchy of status, boys follow erratic and contradictory paths.
So I am not surprised he was able to train his daughters to be chess grandmasters. But the other chess grandmasters did not have the same level of parental involvement and, what they had, was not specifically formulated to make them chess grandmasters. It didn't need to be because boys do weird things because testosterone pushes them to be exceptional, to take risks, because that's how they convince women they're worthy fathers.
Women need to convince men they'll be worthy wives but they can be mothers any time they want... and being a worthy wife is only a little bit a matter of status. Men mostly marry within their class so a woman who wants a genius husband needs to attend university but she doesn't need to be a genius or even do particularly well.
Using the Polgar experiment to claim that the greater male variability hypothesis is not true is beyond wrong. Psychometrics is perhaps the most robustly replicated area of psychology. There are databases of IQs and other scholastic tests that would span N's in the mid millions if put together. Those show a standard deviation that is 10-25% larger for males than for females.
<<as for the second part everyone likes money, prestige and power I don't see why men have a bigger incentive to purse political careers then women do.>>
Everyone likes being better off if everything else is held equal, but of course you don't get power or money by random allotment. It requires grit, competency, will to power and the willingness to engage in high risk strategies. Men are less risk-averse than women, probably by nature. But even if we were all blank slates, the fact is that most females start off being socially and sexually desirable, while young men would struggle to attract a mate if they don't have something going for them. Ie: Females have median advantage (the median female being more coveted that the median male) but males have marginal advantage (since they have more room to exchange societal success for personal success). The differences in strategies that would follow from this are obvious.
I think the term "patriarchy" in current discourse pretty clearly implies not only that it's the case that positions of political power are disproportionately held by men, but also that this condition is almost entirely socially constructed in a historically contingent way, such that it could be substantially eliminated culturally without some major biological intervention (extensive artificial selection and/or genetic engineering to change the beings that (re)create the patriarchal systems). Even if an evopsych academic were to acknowledge that men predominate in positions of extreme power, and that this fact sucks for many women, they're not going to be considered feminists in good standing if they argue that the primary cause is a set of biological adaptations.
Feminism is more diverse than you give it credit for. Mainstream liberal feminism is generally hostile to claims of biological difference being the root of patriarchy, but many radical feminists accept that there are relevant biological differences and the idea has become more accepted in mainstream feminism as more evidence supports it. What you don’t get (and rightfully so) is feminists accepting that male domination in politics or the family is desirable.
I should have said biologically based psychological differences. Liberal feminists often argue that biological differences such as childbearing and physical strength explain patriarchy.
It really wasn't a conspiracy theory until let's say 35 years ago. (not a precise number) I've always assumed that a tipping point world be reached eventually where some course correction would be needed and a male version of feminism (masculinism?? sounds... odd) would become necessary and palatable.
I think we've reached that tipping point where men and boys need institutions which advocate for and are supportive of the male gender. The trick is making sure it's not a bunch of regressive assholes like Andrew Tate who just want to rewind the clock. To my knowledge there isn't even a forward looking model of what masculinity looks like in an equal world.
I call this phenomenon "Schrodinger's Agency." You can observe the same effect across left-wing, victim-based politics in general. Black people for instance--always victims if they are met with a negative outcome, brave stunning heroes who overcame adversity when met with a positive outcome.
A few comments.
One, I would take issue with the idea that "virtually nobody denies that men and women should have equal rights."~ 60% of the world's population is Christian, Jewish, or Muslim; around 15% of the world's population is Hindu; and *all* of these religions endorse horrifically and uncontroversially sexist ideas about women and deny their equality to men in their primary texts. Smaller religions, like Jainism and Zoroastrianism, are no different, and quasi-religious doctrines in East Asia like Confucianism and degenerate forms of Buddhism also clearly espouse that women are not equal to men. I can easily find you unambiguous passages in the Bible, Torah, Quran, and Bhagavad Gita that state truly horrific things about women and endorse male superiority - and most of the world considers these texts to be the undeniable word of God(s)! I simply can't take seriously the view that claims that institutions like the Catholic Church have zero influence on how societies view women and their place relative to men, even in "Western" countries. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the fact people don't view the Quran or Torah or Bible with instant revulsion, considering how these texts portray women, suggests that belief in women's equality and dignity is not a deeply held value even in the secular West.
Of course, you may mean by "virtually everybody" just "virtually everybody like me", a statement not about the world at large but about relatively small numbers of secular (or secular-adjacent) people in liberal areas of primarily Western countries. Of course, feminism doesn't simply work for women in those environments.
But even within those environments, I don't think these arguments work. For instance, you say that it's not possible to say which sex is treated worse, because certain statistics and surveys favor women. The idea seems to be that perhaps sexism (by women?) against men may be just as bad as sexism (if it even exists) against women by men.
The problem is that this reasoning would suggest that it's impossible to say whether any groups have ever been treated unfairly. In the early 20th century, in at least parts of the U.S., Jewish people tended to be more academically successful than gentiles. Can we say, then, that anti-Semitism couldn't have been a major issue in early 20th century America, and that anti-gentile discrimination (by Jews (?)) in that period may have been as bad or worse than anti-Semitism? Was it unfair or unreasonable for Jewish people at that time to focus on fighting anti-Semitism, since gentiles didn't do as well on college entrance tests? Obviously not, since the fact Jewish people did better in certain domains does not "cancel out" the effects of larger anti-Semitic sentiment, and in fact Jewish success in academics in that period may have been a *consequence* of certain anti-Semitic policies that forced them to work harder in certain fields. Many racists have endorsed the idea that Black people are naturally stronger or more athletic than non-Black people, but nobody would say that means that white athletes in the 1950s were victims of unfair anti-white bias.
Rather, analyses of racism and anti-semitism show that these individual "positive" stereotypes or outcomes for oppressed groups are deeply intertwined with the larger oppression of those groups. The same is true for women. Girls in Iran, for instance, frequently outperform Iranian boys in STEM and make up the majority of graduates in STEM fields there. But this may be (among other things) a consequence of the fact girls aren't allowed to participate in public life to the same degree as men, and therefore have more time at home to study, as there simply isn't that much else for them to do. The point being that positive outcomes for certain groups relative to the supposed oppressor do not prove that there is no larger oppression at work; in fact, a careful analysis shows that these successes often themselves are a consequence of this oppression.
Yeah I would beware the bubble effect of being from an upper class british environment. Outside of this environment sexism is still rampant, both among elites and more importantly among the people. It wasn't that long ago that the prime minister of the world's 7th largest economy - Italy - was calling Angela Merkel "an unfuckable fat arse"; and while Italy does have a female prime minister now, her looks have definitely been the subject of political attention.
Meanwhile, women are regularly fired for being pregnant, or not hired it they're over 30 and married (Italy has amongst the lowest female labour participation rate in Europe - hilariously, this results in one of the lowest gender paygap figures which goes to show how stupid of a measurement that is, but I digress).
OK, but there are definitely ways men are treated worse. Even feminists will admit men get more severe sentences for the same crimes, they used to send us to die in wars (and still do in countries like Ukraine that are fighting wars), and we tend to get worse settlements in divorce and family court (a big reason I avoided starting a family).
As for the Jews...that's true, but you see that in Asians as well, who face a lot less discrimination than Jews did in the 20s. There most definitely was anti-Asian discrimination--Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese internment being the most famous cases--but it had significantly decreased by the time the children of Chinese and Indian engineers and scientists started making their way upward through academia. How is that possible under the system of intersectionality?
(BTW, I'm technically Jewish by ancestry, and think academic success was partly a way to get around antisemitism, but as most Jews will tell you also a previously existing value--look at all those debating Talmudic rabbis. Most Jews will NOT also tell you this, but I think the gene pool may have been changed by years of sexual selection--women usually don't like nerds, but marrying the rabbi to the merchant's daughter is going to have an effect over time. 138 Nobels don't just come out of nowhere.)
I would quibble over some of these "ways in which men are treated worse" - there is definitely controversy over whether men actually are less likely to receive custody or if men are simply less likely to ask for custody in the first place, for example.
Nevertheless, this doesn't really challenge my main point, which is that the privileged class can sometimes have worse individual outcomes *due to their overall privileges*, and this does not change the overall power dynamic.
For example, the NYT did an excellent piece on the terrible outcomes boys have in extremist Yeshivas in NYC. Jewish girls in these communities often outperform boys in academia and to some degree economically. Is this because Hasidic communities privilege girls over boys? No; Hasidic Judaism is one of the most patriarchal religions to exist. It's because boys, as the chosen community/cultural leaders, are expected to obsessively study the Torah all day long whereas girls are not. The privileged status boys and men have in Hasidic communities ironically results in them having worse outcomes in certain practical domains. It's not because rabbis there are systematically prejudiced against boys in favor of girls; quite the opposite.
So too we might think about why women and girls weren't drafted. Is it because radical feminists convinced the U.S. military to not draft women? No, it's because historically combat realms have been closed to women due to patriarchal attitudes about women being incapable of performing in those areas. This "boon" to women is simply a side product of larger patriarchal attitudes, just as the success of Hasidic girls in academics (relative to boys, anyway) is a side effect of the larger patriarchal attitudes there.
Finally, is Jewish success biological? I don't think so, in part because it seems Jewish exceptionalism (in prominent math/science/engineering competitions, anyways) seems to be fading as those arenas are increasingly dominated by Asian Americans. This isn't to say Jewish young people are slouches these days; it's just that as anti-Semitic WASP attitudes towards Jews fade, the cultural pressures that led to Jewish exceptionalism are also fading, as secular Jews become more integrated with the larger white/Christian culture. (By contrast, it seems Harvard and similar institutions do discriminate pretty hardcore against East Asians.)
[Speaking as a feminist, I can say that while radical feminism in the 1960s/1970s was dominated by genius Jewish-American women, the epicenter of feminism today is undeniably South Korea rather than NYC. This has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with specific cultural pressures that have changed over the decades.]
Just because an inequality isn't created by radical feminists doesn't mean it favors men; radical feminists are not responsible for all the problems of men, biological or social. (We can assume they will usually make things *worse* for men, but not necessarily; it's not clear increased abortion rights hurt men, for instance, and may save some from having to pay for an unwanted child.)
Apart from weird outliers like boys in extremist yeshivas, men are disproportionately represented in dirty, dangerous jobs like lumberjacks, garbage collectors, and roofers, and in jails and as homeless people. Is that patriarchy? It's entirely possible for a group to be overrepresented at the top *and* bottom of society, in which case what's going on is not patriarchy or matriarchy but a situation where different roles are allocated to different sexes with pluses and minuses to each. However, if only one sex has an organized group to advocate for its interests, it will tend to do better with time, as we are seeing now.
Also, there are biological reasons they didn't put women in the military, not just patriarchal attitudes--the heavy artillery and so on are, well, heavy. It's very physically taxing in a way men are better at--unfortunately for us!
(I'm not sure further discussion of nurture versus nature in Jewish success is relevant, though I do agree my relatives are getting lazy. Oh well.)
>> Just because an inequality isn't created by radical feminists doesn't mean it favors men; radical feminists are not responsible for all the problems of men, biological or social.
Of course, my entire point is that patriarchal policies can sometimes result in men being disadvantaged in certain ways relative to women.
>>Apart from weird outliers like boys in extremist yeshivas, men are disproportionately represented in dirty, dangerous jobs like lumberjacks, garbage collectors, and roofers, and in jails and as homeless people. Is that patriarchy? It's entirely possible for a group to be overrepresented at the top *and* bottom of society, in which case what's going on is not patriarchy or matriarchy but a situation where different roles are allocated to different sexes with pluses and minuses to each.
This logic would suggest that women in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan are not really oppressed and do not live in a patriarchy, because men there also make up the majority of privileged *and* shitty jobs. That's absurd. As I've been saying, patriarchy doesn't have to uniformly benefit every man relative to women to exist.
It's also not really clear why it would matter to feminists whether men were overrepresented in the worst jobs or roles. It's not as if this compensates, in some karmic way, for women being underrepresented in the most powerful roles. I imagine that in the Confederate South, some of the worst jobs were not available to slaves; maybe slaves weren't allowed to be cannon fodder in the Confederate army, for instance. But that doesn't mean that this lack of representation in the absolute worst jobs somehow makes up for slaves' lack of power or autonomy in their own lives.
OK, but who's better off now, in the society we live in? Women live longer, and nobody seems to care about that. Their health is better. I think it's kind of a wash here in the West, honestly, and the younger generation of women may actually be better off.
We don't live in Taliban Afghanistan. It's the inverse of the argument Richard Dawkins made that Rebecca Watson couldn't complain about some guy making her feel creeped out in an elevator because she didn't live in an Islamic dictatorship. You can't just point at some random culture that has aspects you don't like--is the Taliban patriarchal? Sure. Was the Confederacy racist? Absolutely. I could go on about men among the Mosuo or something if I really wanted to go digging.
I wouldn't expect feminists to care about men at all. It's a movement made to advocate for the interests of women. We're the enemy gender and the author of all your misfortunes. But if you're talking about people in general who aren't ideologically committed one way or the other, well... perhaps, if you care about people in general, low-status men have some problems low-status women don't. And maybe we need our own movement, one with better ideas than Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson ('clean your room' is an important beginning and likely one a lot of young men needed to hear, but it's not an end.)
You made good points here. Thanks.
1. As mentioned in other comments, it is false that almost everyone agrees men and women should be treated equally. That statement is only true of educated secular westernized people.
2. The only reason educated secular western people believe women and men should be treated equally is because of the feminist movement. The starting point for the feminist movement was a society where the view you incorrectly say is universal was held by almost no-one.
3. Because feminism was fairly successful in changing attitudes and much of this happened many decades ago, many people such as yourself have accepted the core feminist ideals without recognizing they are feminist or identifying as feminists.
4. Yes, men's issues should be taken seriously, and sometimes are not. However, there has been LOTS of public attention paid to all of the issues you mention, including and especially the college attendance gap.
5. Further, we should distinguish between problems that affect men and women demographically, as the result of different free choices, versus problems that affect them as the result of discrimination. Feminism and any men's rights activism rightly concerns itself with the second type of problem, not the first. Men suffer more workplace-related injuries because they choose to work at more dangerous occupations. This is not an equity issue. What issues do men face that result from discrimination? What out of your laundry list are things that men's rights activists should actually be concerned about? Not lifespan. Not being victims of violence. Is discrimination a problem for men in any significant way?
6. The comparison of male sexual assault versus female is complex. I concede that male victims of sexual violence are discriminated against by society in ways that female victims are not. However, feminists argue, in my view plausibly, that male on female sexual violence is caused/enabled by patriarchal power structures in ways that male sexual victimization is not. Furthermore, it is plausible that societal minimization of male victimization is ALSO caused by patriarchy. If that is accurate, we may censure some feminists for not paying enough attention to the negative consequences of the patriarchy for men: at the same time it is hardly a point against feminism that males are victimized by patriarchy. Feminists generally insist on that. In any case, patriarchy is implicated in aspects of sexual violence against both men and women, .
>Further, we should distinguish between problems that affect men and women demographically, as the result of different free choices, versus problems that affect them as the result of discrimination.<
The same thought process disarms most or all of the things that feminists complain about ("gender pay gap," women in STEM, etc.). Feminists rarely if ever even attempt to present any serious case that there is any systemic anti-female discrimination left in first world nations. Just like left-wing race agitators, they instead take disparate outcomes as de facto evidence of discrimination.
Actually, feminists often present evidence about these topics. You’re confusing lame pop-culture feminism and bad feminist analysis with feminism. Try actually steel-manning the opposition instead of being lazy about it.
For example, contra what you probably believe, the wage gap is not explained by career choice and part time work, and there is plenty of evidence that systematic discrimination inhibits female employment in STEM. These are complex questions and I certainly wouldn’t say that it’s unreasonable to argue that the differences are small or even negligible. But its a genuine argument and there is plenty of evidence that supports the continued relevance of patriarchal discrimination.
Is patriarchy gone from America? You’re familiar with trads, quiverfull, redpills, and the southern baptist church, no? Is patriarchy gone from the world? Don’t make me laugh. So the fact that feminism has made enough progress that we can argue about whether STEM representation is just preferences or also discrimination is great, but there’s still CLEARLY a long way to go.
>Actually, feminists often present evidence about these topics. You’re confusing lame pop-culture feminism and bad feminist analysis with feminism. Try actually steel-manning the opposition instead of being lazy about it.<
You accuse me of being lazy then proceed to provide zero evidence in favor of your viewpoint. Strange!
>Is patriarchy gone from America? You’re familiar with trads, quiverfull, redpills, and the southern baptist church, no? Is patriarchy gone from the world? Don’t make me laugh.<
The logic here appears to be that if anyone exists who holds a certain viewpoint, one is now justified in claiming to be oppressed by that viewpoint. This means that, because black supremacists and feminists exist, I am now justified in claiming that I as a white man am oppressed, and everyone else needs to treat me as the victim that I am. Correct?
If you really believe that feminists "rarely if ever try to present any serious case that there is anti-female discrimination left in first world nations" you aren't looking. So here's a freebie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_inequality_in_the_United_States
Scroll down that one wikipedia article and you will find 180 references to various journal articles and policy papers, many based on crunchy economic or statistical analysis.
Or if you prefer, here's a lovely statistics canada piece analysing the gender wage gap in great detail, accounting for every measurable cause of difference between men and women's wages and finding that there is still an unexplained pay gap (9.3% for canadian-born women). https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/45-20-0002/452000022023002-eng.htm
There is SO much research out there. So much. Not all of it is good, but lots is. Is it definitive? No, one can contest the conclusions in various ways. But please don't say that feminists haven't done the work, because they have. There is tons of good research out there. What IS true is a lot of public journalism on the topic is bad, because the simple yet misleading narratives are much easier and most journalists and pundits aren't very well informed. But boy, neither are the anti-feminists either.
Ah yes, Wikipedia. I am sure this is going to be a great source for serious inquiry and will not at all reflect the "lame pop-culture feminism" and "bad feminist analysis" that you reference. Let's take a look at the second sentence....
"However, despite this progress, gender inequality in the United States continues to persist in many forms, including the disparity in women's political representation and participation, occupational segregation, and the unequal distribution of household labor."
"Political representation and participation," meaning the common "lame pop-culture feminist" notion that women are somehow excluded from politics because of sexism. The evidence for this will be that women are less likely to run for office than men, which is exactly the sort of fallacy described at the beginning of this comment thread, a failure to distinguish between choices made freely vs those enforced by discriminatory coercion. Since you're pretending to care about academic studies and the like, here's something for you:
https://www.amazon.com/Women-Run-Political-Campaigns-Polarized/dp/1107535867
In which it is demonstrated that not only do women not actually face any sexism in the modern political environment, but that it is specifically the false feminist narrative that they do which is instrumental in dissuading them from running for office (after all, why would you want to try it if you believe that a bunch of sexist men will abuse you for it?). Who woulda thunk it!
Let's look at the other thing you shared. It has "Intersectional" in the title and is published in "Studies on Gender and Intersecting Identities," funding by the "Department for Women and Gender Equality." Absolutely ridiculous. This alone should disqualify it from consideration. I may as well present you with a study about why hens actually love being eaten from the Center for the Advancement of Foxes in Farmhouse Equity.
Putting that aside, the idea that malicious anti-female discrimination can be demonstrated in this way is yet another category error of the same kind that we've been discussing. You are doing the typical "bad feminist analysis" whereby you demonstrate that an earnings gap exists, control for a bunch of things, and conclude that the remaining difference must necessarily be due to hatred of women. This is not how causal inference works. The remaining variation in earnings remains unexplained--it does not simply default to hatred of women.
For instance, this line of reasoning discounts the possibility that gender itself is the explanatory variable, in the sense that women are simply less driven to pursue higher-paying job opportunities due to innate psychological differences. Proof of discrimination requires exactly that--you need to find an employer who is actually paying a woman less than a man for the same job specifically because he has an irrational dislike of women, and then you need to extrapolate from there that this is somehow happening on a massive scale despite being illegal in Canada, the United States, and probably every other white country.
Unsurprisingly you fail to read either source well. The statistics canada piece controls for every measurable variable: the remainder is termed ‘unexplained’. It does NOT say that this unexplained remainder must be purely due to bias. And neither did I! I called it the unexplained pay gap.
In your discussion, you say that the only way the unexplained pay gap would be due to patriarchy would be if it is because bosses pay women less because of irrational dislike. No, obviously no. Jesus. What if hiring committees are less likely to hire women because of fears they will get pregnant? What if women get worse customer feedback because of sexism? I could go on and on. Feminist analysts RECOGNIZE that it is hard to show causality here!
As for wikipedia, the point was the numerous sources, not whether you agree with them. You seem to jump from ‘I disagree with these conclusions cuz of one source I read and my pre-existing biases’ to ‘this is poor research’. No, get over yourself.
>Is patriarchy gone from America?
There isn't a uniform usage of patriarchy across feminists, but for what I consider to be among the bad things that are called "patriarchy," yes. For the inconsequential things like e.g. more men politicians existing than women ones, no, but that's inconsequential so I don't think anybody should care about that. In general feminists will slide from inconsequential characteristics of patriarchy to e.g. marital rape, and I interpret this dishonestly. Kind of like how pro Palestinians consider the Gaza war a genocide, even though the death count is quite low for a Middle Eastern war and humanitarian aid is let inside. Obviously they are right that some things like murder in warfare can constitute genocide, but I think it's disingenuous to call the Gaza war a genocide. Feminists and pro Palestinians are better off stating explicitly what they're concerned about so we can have a productive discussion on it, but I think a large part of support for these movements relies on obscurantism and bait and switching terms and definitions.
Your 3 is true, but it’s not like feminists packed up and went home after they got suffrage, no-fault divorce, anti-discrimination law, and Title IX. They continue to push for more beyond that, and it’s in precisely those are additional demands that the clear “men are oppressors, women are oppressed” narrative starts to break down.
Which is why comparatively few people who believe in 90%+ of the 1955 feminist agenda self-identify as feminists anymore.
Sure. But spend some time in Saudi Arabia and you might find yourself self-identifying as a feminist once more.
I’m definitely not claiming feminists are correct about everything. That’s impossible because they contradict one another a ton. But the basic idea that patriarchy is bad and important is still quite correct, and the VAST majority of anti-feminist stuff is just so fucking dumb (not all! Almost all). It’s cope for teenage boys/failsons/divorced dudes. And for most of the complaints that have any merit, the best solution is: we shouldn’t put unfair oppressive gendered expectations on men. Which is EXACTLY WHAT THE FEMINISTS HAVE BEEN SAYING FOR 50 YEARS.
I don’t think anyone here intended for this specific conversation to apply to the Saudis, so I’ll concede that as a given.
Everyone agrees with you that feminists have been saying that patriarchy is bad for everyone. The argument is over whether feminists actually give a shit about negative gender expectations placed on men, or if it’s just a thing they say to deflect criticism that they are misandrists.
Is that really an argument? Because, like, there are a lot of feminists so probably some don't care much about men's problems. You can always find some jerks. But I think caring about men's problems is much more common.
Speaking from personal experience, I know plenty of feminists and the number that I would call misandrist is 0, and the number I know that don't care at all about the impact of patriarchy on men is also 0. Rather, if anything it's a cliche that feminists talk about how patriarchy is bad for men because we can't talk to friends or access our feelings and so on. Do people really think that's just a snow job? Really? In my experience they think it's a real problem. And, like, there is tons of feminist analysis that discusses this. Why wouldn't feminists think that men matter?
Most feminists are heterosexual women who have plenty of men they care about in their lives. Why wouldn't they care about men's issues? Not, by the way, that the lesbian feminists I know don't care about men's issues either: I've heard them talk about these kind of things with sincere concern. So, if that's the argument, I don't think it's a very interesting one. Feminist theory cares because it talks about it all over the place, and many actual feminists care, so... yeah?
Even men barely care about other men's problems. To say that most feminists actually do care about men's problems is so cheeky. It's obviously not true
All true but not a single mind will be changed by this article
No, but it can be useful for men organizing to defend our interests as the beginning of a framework.
Nothing could be less useful then men organizing to defend their interests.
I do think that people don't make light of male prison rape so easily anymore. I do recall it being an example of an edgy joke that made it into children's cartoons in my youth to make adults laugh, but there's no way that kids watching SpongeBob tell his pet to not drop the soap understood the joke was about rape without that context.
But that was two decades ago. There's no way that a decade ago, such a joke would have made it into Adventure Time or Steven Universe. There would be a huge backlash against such a joke now.
Season 5 of Fargo - a season that dealt with domestic violence against women - ended with prison rape as an appropiate form of justice served against the perpetrator, presented as a cheerworthy moment and met with acclaim by audiences. Fargo used to be one of the smartest and most sociologically adept shows on TV and still chose to do this.
The article made an argument that male-on-male prison rape is taken so unseriously that it is a joke in children's cartoons. I would say that Fargo does not fit this pattern. Fargo S5 ends with a violent rapist and murderer being raped in prison, and this is depicted as a cheerworthy moment. I would argue that this is a different issue than the issue being treated unseriously- this seems like more of an extension of "bad guy gets an eye for an eye" or "vigilante justice is cool sometimes." I strongly disagree ethically with both of those statements, but I am not so sure that either issue is gendered.
I think there shouldn't be any limits on humor whatsoever, and that this should be the obvious default attitude in society. It's also not like there's a shortage of rape jokes where women are the punchline, so I am deeply unmoved on both counts.
"Of course, if any of the above statistics went the other way—if people cared more about harms to **women** than men"
dynamite article
The question isn’t why women politic to get advantages for themselves. That’s natural.
The question is why men put up with it. An equal and opposite reaction would cancel it out.
I think men are just too wired to compete with one another. Top men also know that a lot of this stuff won’t apply to them.
I think evolutionary psychology programs us to see men who adopt a victim mindset as expendable losers. The same is not true for women.
Our evolutionary psychology has no experience with women being able to wield "male power". That is to say women voters can command the "monopoly of violence" of the modern state to a degree we are totally unaccustomed to.
They said the same about women in the fifties.
For the first time, there is a big gender gap among the young, with majorities of young Republican and even *Democratic* men saying feminism has done more harm than good. Young men with no memory of patriarchy are starting to wake up. The situation is not hopeless.
Taking a more descriptive view of the movement, I think it's useful to think about how interest groups form, regardless of their moral claims. If you look at some of the biggest interest groups within the Democratic Party: blacks, feminists, and LGBT activists; all three movements have their locus in shared experience based on that identity rather than a ground-up philosophy. They glom on to a handful of negative experiences (being pulled over, being perved on, sexual shame, etc.) as a way of creating a shared, politcially-salient identity; with the goal of minimizing what they perceive as the harm from those experiences.
In terms of the feminist movement, by splitting it into two different focuses, sexual safety and being overlooked (particularly in the workplace), you can derive the goals of the movement from the shared experiences. On sexual safety, nearly every women I've ever met has some story about a man who groped them in public, or tailed them home, or didn't take no for an answer, or worse. These men are not representative of the overall male population (being largely the most aggressive and disagreeable men), but due to selection effects are an almost universal part of the female experience. These incidents also carry much higher risks for the average woman than the average man, as they are far less likely to be physically able to control the situation.
Being overlooked in the workplace is a similar experience. Though more women are succeeding than ever today, to the extent they are now outpacing man, every woman in a corporate environment can regale you with stories about being overlooked for promotion because of a lack of golf skills, or shouted down in a meeting, etc. The source of said issue is invariably, a man. The same selection effects that universalize the experience of women dealing with overly aggressive creeps applies in the corporate scenario (though selecting for different traits), and universalizes that experience as well.
As a general rule, if you have a large society where there is an opportunity for one group to victimize another (suspect this applies more generally than victimization but have not thought through), the experiences of potential victim group will be drawn disproportionately from those with the most extreme tendency to victimize others (at least if that tendency to victimize is a normally distributed trait, which I suspect it is: a combination of high aggression and low agreeableness).
The goal of these movements (regardless of their rhetoric) becomes the minimization of the universal negative experience. This is also the reason the Men's Right's movement has consistently failed to take off, despite having objectively some quite good arguments. Men, as a group, do not have universal experiences around the issues MRAs tend to bring up. I adore Scott Alexander's work, but his experience (not being on a date by 25) is way outside the norm for a man in a country where the average age to lose your virginity is ~17. Without a salient experience to join people together and focus on, there's much less cohesion and groups seem to tend toward falling apart.
At a normative level, I think it's worth having sympathy for the feminists. Despite the obviously false claims of standing for gender equality, they are actually trying (at least in the sexual safety case) to reduce the odds of an experience--that in many cases scarred them for life--happening as frequently to other women. Personally, I find their methods deeply misguided and lacking in any nuance or sense of tradeoffs, but the goal is admirable in and of itself.
However, and this is something I think is shared between your piece and Scott's and in a couple of other pieces I've read, the movement has clearly done irreparable harm to a certain subgroup of men: mainly, nerds. As someone who was also terrified of making the wrong move with a woman, tried to take their words at face value, and regularly failed as a result; only to start succeeding once I began ignoring their statements, I have some personal bitterness on the subject. That being said, I don't think the solution for that issue is a society-wide Men's Rights Movement (though there are some issues that may be worth taking up under that banner), rather a concerted and consistent effort on the part of those of us who have experienced both sides of that coin to educate younger male nerds.
Mainly, by shouting "NO, DO NOT LISTEN TO THE FEMINISTS IN YOUR PERSONAL RELATIONS. THEY ARE NOT TALKING ABOUT YOU. YES, THIS INCLUDES IF THEY SAY THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT YOU. THIS IS ABOUT THEIR EXPERIENCE NOT YOURS. THEY ARE MISGUIDED, NOT EVIL. BE DECENT, BE GOOD, BUT DON'T BE AFRAID OF BEING A MAN."
Something like that.
>This is also the reason the Men's Right's movement has consistently failed to take off, despite having objectively some quite good arguments. Men, as a group, do not have universal experiences around the issues MRAs tend to bring up.<
I think this is false. If you were to ask how many white people have had some sort of negative experience relating to DEI garbage, even if it's something as simple as having to sit through a DEI training that is dedicated to explaining why white people are badmeanstupidwrongevil, it seems extremely likely that there would a huge portion of white people out there who could identify with this. Yet there is still no movement centered around white ethnicity with any sort of purchase. There may be an anti-DEI movement, but this is not the same thing as a white ethnocentrism movement.
Why is that? Why do negative experiences for women result in a woman-centered identity movement, instead of a movement that is restricted to being anti- whatever thing caused the negative experience?
I actually think you are seeing at least the possibility of a movement centered around white identity. Up until George Floyd, I suspect the vast majority of white people had never experienced the DEI apparatus (having worked in construction previously it's still yet to really penetrate there), but since then there's been a growing backlash (at least in my perception). Whether the DEI stuff will maintain itself long enough to make the backlash large enough to sustain a movement is yet to be seen. Understand if this is frustratingly vague, but just my read on the currents.
Once again, I disagree. I consider myself so far right that I prefer the term "reactionary" over "conservative." Yet I still do not consider myself a white nationalist and even within the circles that I follow, white nationalism is extremely controversial. Most people right of center will recognize injustices done against whites without themselves deciding to become white nationalists because of it. This is fundamentally different from the way in which identity interacts with left-wing politics, with left-wingers literally defining themselves by their membership in various identity groups.
We could have a discussion about why this difference exists but there is clearly a difference. Younger people who skew left will adopt a bunch of these identities and their associated grievance politics without ever leaving their house often enough to have personally experienced any of the supposed horrors that they are protesting against--just reading on the Internet that, for example, there is some kind of huge murder spree against trans people will be enough for them. Meanwhile, those who skew right are extremely hesitant to form such identity-based interest groups even after going through negative personal experiences based on the identity.
This is mostly fairly insightful, but the claim that feminism is not based in a ground-up philosophy is ludicrous. Feminist philosophers have been developing a ground-up philosophy of sexual difference and patriarchy since the eighteenth century.
Conceded, ground-up philosophy was not the right phrase to use, was trying to differentiate from the more total philosophical worldviews that try to derive all of what the world should be structured and how one ought to act in it (utilitarianism, Marxism, etc.). Feminist theory seems much more narrowly focused, though admittedly I'm not very well versed.
Everyone out there is tempted to assign their failings to something wrong to society.
There might be something wrong with society, or there might not, or there might be something that is wrong but it doesn’t apply differently to some identity group, or have a solution that is better then the problem.
I’ve met plenty of women that blame discrimination against women for what are really their own personal failings or just facts of life that have nothing to do with their being a woman.
And I would also note that some of the biggest bullies of women are other women. This morning I had a woman tell me that she had the worst day of her career yesterday. Why? Another woman bullied her at work. I’m sure she considers herself a tough girlboss, I just think she’s an incompetent blowhard trying to silence people who criticize the bad decisions she’s making. What does feminism have to say about this? Probably it would jump down my throat if I confronted her.
I think men's interest groups can be useful to battle feminist encroachment, but this is conditional on the empirical facts. My feeling is that this usually leads to balkanization, which is even worse for society long term than having 1 group with mostly unchecked power.
Regarding gender discrimination in hiring, surely you can do better than a throwaway paragraph that just links a (biased sounding) article and just asserts it as the whole truth.
This recent meta-analysis seems reasonable to me: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade7979
Basically, it's not so straightforward, and it especially isn't just a flat advantage to women.
Uses studies dating back to the 1980s? Not a very effective way of assessing the state of gender discrimination in hiring in 2024
Feminism was never about equality, it's a demographic special interest movement. Feminism is to women as Nazism was to Germans.
I think this might be the dumbest comment I have ever read.
It's true.
It's certainly inflammatory.
This comment is nonsensical because demographic special interest movements can be about equality. There is no contradiction here.
So way back in prehistoric times I decided that I (a male) would no longer call myself a feminist, not because I didn't agree with the broad, historically important project of gendered emancipation from restrictive power structures, but because feminism was starting to become what in the subsequent decade has been dubbed and mocked as "white girl feminism", and like most successful movements - and let's make no mistake: the broader project that can be loosely called "feminism" has been spectacularly successful over the past 150 years or so - its pockets of insular privilege devolve into self-parody or, which you criticize mostly here, a focus on some circumstantial injustices at the exclusion of others. And we are getting butt-hurt to the degree that we (not you or me personally, but the culture at large) is starting to flirt with electing JD Vance with his Trad-Wife infused weirdness because such a massive historical movement hasn't been perfect these past two decades? Several decades ago in the United States the concept of "marriage rape" was not legitimate.
Here is the point, and it has been made by many thinkers and become clouded by the crass demagogy of both right wing reaction and privileged liberal "I drink male tears" snark alike: The patriarchy does not mean "men"; the patriarchy is a set of power relations that privileges men in the abstract in many ways, but cuts deeply into the lived experiences of both men and women insofar as how injustices manifest in the lives of individual men and women? Marriage rape was not a legitimate concept a few decades ago in the states? Patriarchy. Women are conditioned not to speak out and are labeled "difficult" and socially shamed in subtle ways for behavior that is appealing in men? Patriarchy. Helps women, right? Yep. But guess what - Male suicides spikes because we all want to keep feelings closed in? Patriarchy. Women given preferential treatment in child custody and men lose access? Patriarchy. Men are shamed by women partners for being too sentimental? Patriarchy.
The conditioning of it influences the behavior of both men and women, and it seems to be missing the point entirely when we point to "how women behave" as a barometer of what feminism is. I think the behavior of early 21st century media savvy privileged folks advocating for "feminism" is going to be one of the lower points in the larger history of feminism, if it isn't already becoming clear. But feminism ain't over. Not by a long shot. And if it's a choice between the imperfections you lay out in this essay, vs the world as it existed for millennia before about 100 years ago, not to mention the trad-wife adjacent nonsense that comes from Vance's immensely weird worldview, I'm happy to start calling myself a feminist again, if only to signal larger historical proportionalities.
Excellent piece as always
Here’s a thought: perhaps we stop giving any preferences except for merit and ability.
"Scott also notes that during #MeToo, sexual harassment of men was completely ignored." This is untrue. Kevin Spacey got his career cancelled, George Takei faced significant backlash, Terry Crews received significant sympathy.
Only when done by men.
What are some pressing examples of women sexually exploiting men they have power over in a way that would reflect any sort of systemic issue that needs to be addressed?
That's what #MeToo was all about? Women exploited their sexual power over men to sleep their way into jobs they would otherwise not have been qualified for, then years or decades later turned around and used the power of their feminist ally networks to punish the MEN for it. In the recent past, women were shamed for such behavior rather than celebrated.
I suspect what you're going to say is that this can't be exploitation by women, that in such a sex/power trade only men can "exploit". But that's a feminist perspective on things, and incorrect as such.
I'm not sure what possible understanding of "power" would make what you're saying coherent. How was Harvey Weinstein exploited when he chose to pressure women into sex in exchange for him providing opportunities those women didn't have?
He was exploited for the jobs he was handed out. That's what exploitation is, Oxford Languages: "the fact of making use of a situation to gain unfair advantage for oneself", which the actresses certainly did. The vast majority of the claims were not allegations of rape, but rather seemed to be from women who willingly traded sex for jobs and then later (much later) decided maybe they shouldn't have done that. After they were famous.
There were also allegations that he did genuinely use force to get sex too, but that conviction was overturned on the grounds that the trial had been a show trial. He's now heading to a complete retrial, although how you give the man a fairer trial now than before is unclear.
This is obviously not what most people mean when they say "exploitation." In fact, I don't even see that as the definition from Oxford. I see: "To exploit someone or something is to make use of him, her, or it for your own ends by playing on some weakness or vulnerability in the object of your exploitation." It seems obvious to me that no woman did that to Harvey Weinstein. What was his "weakness or vulnerability?" He's the one who offered it, because he had the power to control who got roles and the women didn't. Do you think Harvey Weinstein was actually a victim here because women agreed to the arrangement he suggested, which was only possible because he had immense power over them?
It does seem like the Mariah Carey allegation was ignored, but what were any other examples of woman-on-man celebrity sexual harassment of men that were ignored? I'm worried we're stretching one point too far to turn it into a pattern, and then inaccurately summing it up as "sexual harassment of men was completely ignored."
“Virtually no one denies men and women should have equal rights.”
This is a poor assumption that you could not have made growing up in my generation at the tail end of Gen X, among older generations and my contemporaries.