What constitutes Misogyny?

[compared2what?]

I believe the article is proposing that society is based on the competition between men, with some being winners and most losers.

It is. More precisely, it's proposing that:

Most cultures see individual men as more expendable than individual women, and this difference is probably based on nature, in whose reproductive competition some men are the big losers and other men are the biggest winners. Hence it uses men for the many risky jobs it has.

Wanna know what really outrages my sense of justice?

When someone who purports to give a fuck about humanity does something like assert that culture uses men for the many risky jobs it has on the basis of absolutely no fucking evidence at all except for a Department of Labor figure for on-the-job fatalities.

Because while that number could indeed be used to illustrate any number of issues of real cultural import and bearing in the lives of some men (and women) -- such as, to name just a couple, corporate non-compliance with safety regulations, or the use and abuse of culturally unassimilated male green-card workers from places like Vietnam in geographically isolated high-risk industrial sectors like agribusiness in the northwest corner of Kansas -- it has no value whatsoever as proof that the fundamental utility/expendability of men inheres in their innate willingness to gamble their lives in a high-stakes cultural competition that requires them to do many risky (but presumably potentially lucrative) jobs.

First of all, newsflash: There are no such jobs anywhere on earth outside of Ayn Rand novels. There never have been.

Second, and much more importantly:

By my individual lights, any person who has no problem exhuming the corpses of the men who lie buried in that Department of Labor statistic simply in order to exploit their posthumous rhetorical value as the Nameless Valiant Dead who didn't quite make it to the Crossing-the-Return-Threshold phase of the Hero's Journey has so conclusively demonstrated his cold-blooded indifference to the value of human life that he's totally and completely disqualified himself for the purposes of addressing that subject, solely on those grounds.

I mean, monomyth is very culturally compelling, and it has its legitimate rhetorical uses, no doubt. I'm not saying otherwise. But retroactively justifying the real expendability of all the real men who lost their lives doing non-lucrative, non-imaginary jobs of little mytho-narrative worth or interest before losing their identities to a Department of Labor statistic that someone who didn't give a fuck later decided to re-appropriate as a zombie-hero casualty figure is just not among them.

And that's that. It's not any more okay to advance your interests by treating dead men as if they were expendable than it is when they're living, if you think about it for a moment.

I hate that shit. And I also fear it, to be honest. Because someone who's willing to kill a dead man to score a rhetorical point is probably capable of anything, as far as I'm concerned. It doesn't really get much lower.

[Project Willow]

WHY forchrissakes WHY!!!???

There's really no big mystery here. You just have to denude yourself of certain levels of cultural and perhaps religious and/or moral indoctrination and look at the issue from a purely scientific point of view, as if you were analyzing the behavior in a pride of lions. I also get that some folks here will call me out on that and claim that the scientific view is itself a cultural construct of a sort and so cannot work as any kind of zero point reference. I'll accept a portion of that kind of criticism in that science almost always reflects a significant proportion of the biases of the culture in which it is created, but I don't believe that renders it useless as a tool. So, I'm going in for an evolutionary theory based analysis.

Plutonia, I'll assume you didn't mean to leave yourself questioning the general adaptiveness of mimetic behavior in infants, but if one stumbled upon that small portion of your post sans its context, that's what they'd get, and of course the answer to your exclamation would be obvious. That's how we learn. Period. OK, putting that aside, and perhaps even looking at things through your Girard-colored lenses at the moment, or at least not ignoring them completely, these behaviors exist because they're successful. It's really just as simple as that. All of these behaviors, no matter how you analyze them on an individual level, exist because they've been successful. (I'm repeating myself.)

More to come as time permits and as mind fleshes out the latest theory... the myth of the good person.

[Stephen Morgan]

But it could be argued that your experience constitutes an example of mimetic violence re Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, rather than of misogyny, in which case how or even that the news media reported the first incidents, could make them culpable, as is in the case of copy-cat suicides (the Werther Effect.)

Committing suicide and committing rape are another two things that aren't meaningfully comparable. Except that the media isn't culpable for any instance of either that I've ever heard of, they have nothing in common at all, in fact.

Also, wrt the Werther Effect: It doesn't actually inculpate the messenger, per se. No matter who spreads it or how it's spread, when information circulates about certain kinds of suicide, similar suicides and/or suicide attempts follow.

That's not a media thing, it's a social thing.

But the media is a loud-hailer. Just seeing a TV programme with a suicide in the opening credits has been shown to make people be more likely to attempt suicide. Obviously it's unlikely anyone gets up happy-go-lucky, sees a suicide and thinks "what a good idea, must try that", but for someone already thinking they have nothing to live for putting the motions of suicide in their skull might lead to them acting those out.

[Stephen Morgan]

Because while that number could indeed be used to illustrate any number of issues of real cultural import and bearing in the lives of some men (and women) -- such as, to name just a couple, corporate non-compliance with safety regulations, or the use and abuse of culturally unassimilated male green-card workers from places like Vietnam in geographically isolated high-risk industrial sectors like agribusiness in the northwest corner of Kansas -- it has no value whatsoever as proof that the fundamental utility/expendability of men inheres in their innate willingness to gamble their lives in a high-stakes cultural competition that requires them to do many risky (but presumably potentially lucrative) jobs.

I don't say willingly. After all, they've had the lesser value of their own lives drilled into them from childhood on. Perhaps we could look at fatalities in combat, or the emergency services, or funding for sex-specific illnesses, what would you consider evidence of the relative value placed on the lives of members of each sex?

I mean, monomyth is very culturally compelling, and it has its legitimate rhetorical uses, no doubt. I'm not saying otherwise. But retroactively justifying the real expendability of all the real men who lost their lives doing non-lucrative, non-imaginary jobs of little mytho-narrative worth or interest before losing their identities to a Department of Labor statistic that someone who didn't give a fuck later decided to re-appropriate as a zombie-hero casualty figure is just not among them.

I believe he's seeking to explain rather than justify.

I hate that shit. And I also fear it, to be honest. Because someone who's willing to kill a dead man to score a rhetorical point is probably capable of anything, as far as I'm concerned. It doesn't really get much lower.

Well, you could be killing live men for profit. No doubt it would be considered to be even lower, although I wouldn't think so, if you were to kill live women.

[compared2what?]

I believe he's seeking to explain rather than justify.

Then he should seek material evidence that the explanation he's offering applies to in reality.

[Plutonia]

First of all, newsflash: There are no such jobs anywhere on earth outside of Ayn Rand novels. There never have been.

Well, actually, there is. Growing and living within communities dependent on logging, it's been a normal feature of my life. And though actual fatalities are much fewer by comparison, the ranks of injured men were legion- missing fingers from mill work, chainsaw amputees, the back injured from being crushed by rolling/falling logs etc. What stood out for me as a child were all the missing fingers, and maybe that stood out for me because my mother nearly lost three fingers working our families placer mine and that made it difficult for her to play the piano anymore.

"Is your job killing you?" was the provocative cover title of Parade Magazine (Sunday supplement to United States newspapers), 8 January 1989, which looked into the risks associated with occupations in the United States. The research quoted in the journal identified forest workers as the occupational group whose answer to this question was most likely to be "yes". The current article confirms this disturbing situation in the majority of both industrialized and developing countries throughout the world. Perhaps even more disturbing is that, despite forestry's sad occupational accident and health record, the issue is not high on the list of priorities in most countries. Although many people and organizations use the slogan "safety first"; in reality, this is not the case.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/u8520e/u8520e03.htm

Second, and much more importantly:

By my individual lights, any person who has no problem exhuming the corpses of the men who lie buried in that Department of Labor statistic simply in order to exploit their posthumous rhetorical value as the Nameless Valiant Dead who didn't quite make it to the Crossing-the-Return-Threshold phase of the Hero's Journey has so conclusively demonstrated his cold-blooded indifference to the value of human life that he's totally and completely disqualified himself for the purposes of addressing that subject, solely on those grounds.

I mean, monomyth is very culturally compelling, and it has its legitimate rhetorical uses, no doubt. I'm not saying otherwise. But retroactively justifying the real expendability of all the real men who lost their lives doing non-lucrative, non-imaginary jobs of little mytho-narrative worth or interest before losing their identities to a Department of Labor statistic that someone who didn't give a fuck later decided to re-appropriate as a zombie-hero casualty figure is just not among them.

And that's that. It's not any more okay to advance your interests by treating dead men as if they were expendable than it is when they're living, if you think about it for a moment.

I hate that shit. And I also fear it, to be honest. Because someone who's willing to kill a dead man to score a rhetorical point is probably capable of anything, as far as I'm concerned. It doesn't really get much lower.

But this is precisely what's been done to rape victims repeated in this thread. In fact, they have been made to stand in, almost exclusively, for evidence of misogyny.

Sorry to be the one to do the thing that you hate and fear. But there it is.

[Canadian_watcher]

But this is precisely what's been done to rape victims repeated in this thread. In fact, they have been made to stand in, almost exclusively, for evidence of misogyny.

It seems that rape is the most "accessible" form of misogyny for some folks to get their heads around. Not all the folk, some don't need such a whomping example and others still do not accept that rape is prevalent or that it happens (in the adult world) mostly to women or why it happens to women at all.

Your tone throughout this whole exchange (this whole thread) has been quite patronizing. I'm not sure if you are aware of it. It has tended to make me feel defensive - it has put the dialogue into a place that I feel is combative, rather than sharing.

Can you tell me this - do you believe that there is such a thing as misogyny? If not, what do you think accounts for the lower status of women in the world? If so, please share an example of it as you see it.

[Plutonia]

Plutonia, I'll assume you didn't mean to leave yourself questioning the general adaptiveness of mimetic behavior in infants, but if one stumbled upon that small portion of your post sans its context, that's what they'd get, and of course the answer to your exclamation would be obvious. That's how we learn. Period. OK, putting that aside, and perhaps even looking at things through your Girard-colored lenses at the moment, or at least not ignoring them completely, these behaviors exist because they're successful. It's really just as simple as that. All of these behaviors, no matter how you analyze them on an individual level, exist because they've been successful. (I'm repeating myself.)

I agree with one reservation. Those adults are doing essentially what that baby is doing, not much difference besides the leotards, motor skills and the impulse to display, so is that infantile behavior and if so, might it not be considered maladaptive?

More to come as time permits and as mind fleshes out the latest theory... the myth of the good person.

That's funny because Girard's theory points to the opposite- that none of us is immune to the violence of our natures and that the unification and peace that civilization is built and sustained on, is due to sacrificial violence and scapegoating. The lie we tell ourselves is that we would never do it, that terrible thing that those other people over there did or are doing. But of course we do, in small difficult to see ways sure, but that impulse to persecute can easily flare into events like the Rwandan genocide. Mimesis makes us a danger to each other.

[Plutonia]

Your tone throughout this whole exchange (this whole thread) has been quite patronizing. I'm not sure if you are aware of it. It has tended to make me feel defensive - it has put the dialogue into a place that I feel is combative, rather than sharing.

I'm sorry you feel that way. I've been trying to present my thoughts as value-neutrally as I'm able so as to avoid provoking the sort of flame wars we had earlier in this thread. Perhaps that accounts for my "patronizing" tone.

Can you tell me this - do you believe that there is such a thing as misogyny? If not, what do you think accounts for the lower status of women in the world? If so, please share an example of it as you see it.

Oy vey. What do you think that I've been doing with all these posts other than unpacking what I think misogyny is. I've even included examples from my lived experience. Never-the-less, I will say this: "Misogyny=Hatred of Women" is a meaningless statement to me without looking at the context in which it occurs, which includes the exploitative culture we live in and our human psycho-social propensities. Also, as a neuro-diverse, and a highly ethical individual, I have a personal bias against the prescriptive remedy of simply including women more in the exploitative and destructive culture that has marginalized us. I think that maybe, just maybe, we are in a better position as outsiders, where we have an opportunity to create an alternative culture that eschews harm to others- like the inspirational Native way I posted. The Plains Peoples call it the Red Road. That may be my utopian delusion, but that is how I try to live.

[Canadian_watcher]

Your tone throughout this whole exchange (this whole thread) has been quite patronizing. I'm not sure if you are aware of it. It has tended to make me feel defensive - it has put the dialogue into a place that I feel is combative, rather than sharing.

I'm sorry you feel that way. I've been trying to present my thoughts as value-neutrally as I'm able so as to avoid provoking the sort of flame wars we had earlier in this thread. Perhaps that accounts for my "patronizing" tone.

"I'm sorry you feel that way."
Unpack that and see what you come up with.

Can you tell me this - do you believe that there is such a thing as misogyny? If not, what do you think accounts for the lower status of women in the world? If so, please share an example of it as you see it.

Oy vey. What do you think that I've been doing with all these posts other than unpacking what I think misogyny is. I've even included examples from my lived experience. Never-the-less, I will say this: "Misogyny=Hatred of Women" is a meaningless statement to me without looking at the context in which it occurs, which includes the exploitative culture we live in and our human psycho-social propensities. Also, as a neuro-diverse, and a highly ethical individual, I have a personal bias against the prescriptive remedy of simply including women more in the exploitative and destructive culture that has marginalized us. I think that maybe, just maybe, we are in a better position as outsiders, where we have an opportunity to create an alternative culture that eschews harm to others- like the inspirational Native way I posted. The Plains Peoples call it the Red Road. That may be my utopian delusion, but that is how I try to live.

[/quote]

You are ethically opposed to including women more?
Fill your boots - try to do it from a top-down approach, or a bottom up approach, or whatever it is you think you're accomplishing by saying that we can't examine in its own right the particular place of women in a culture.

IMO, saying that your way - which does not allow women a unique place to discuss the culture as it affects them - is intolerant. it isn't' helpful, in my opinion. You can't talk about child abuse without talking about the family. You can't talk about drug addiction without talking about drugs. If you want to believe that you've elevated yourself to some point of understanding that is far beyond what we are capable of understanding or seeing, that's your business to believe or not. I don't care.

I will remind you that you encouraged us to look into Michael Parenti. Here is is again:

Rather than being accepted at face value, Parenti says that all cultures should be subjected to critical investigation to be judged by “universal human rights standards” and by the criticisms voiced by those who are victimized within the various cultures of the world. Parenti gives extensive attention to those who are regularly victimized by their own cultures, providing examples in chapters entitled “Custom Against Women,” “The Global Rape Culture,” and “Racist Myths.” [13]

[Plutonia]

Your tone throughout this whole exchange (this whole thread) has been quite patronizing. I'm not sure if you are aware of it. It has tended to make me feel defensive - it has put the dialogue into a place that I feel is combative, rather than sharing.

I'm sorry you feel that way. I've been trying to present my thoughts as value-neutrally as I'm able so as to avoid provoking the sort of flame wars we had earlier in this thread. Perhaps that accounts for my "patronizing" tone.

"I'm sorry you feel that way."
Unpack that and see what you come up with.

I'm sorry C_W, I don't understand what you are saying here.

Can you tell me this - do you believe that there is such a thing as misogyny? If not, what do you think accounts for the lower status of women in the world? If so, please share an example of it as you see it.

Oy vey. What do you think that I've been doing with all these posts other than unpacking what I think misogyny is. I've even included examples from my lived experience. Never-the-less, I will say this: "Misogyny=Hatred of Women" is a meaningless statement to me without looking at the context in which it occurs, which includes the exploitative culture we live in and our human psycho-social propensities. Also, as a neuro-diverse, and a highly ethical individual, I have a personal bias against the prescriptive remedy of simply including women more in the exploitative and destructive culture that has marginalized us. I think that maybe, just maybe, we are in a better position as outsiders, where we have an opportunity to create an alternative culture that eschews harm to others- like the inspirational Native way I posted. The Plains Peoples call it the Red Road. That may be my utopian delusion, but that is how I try to live.

You are ethically opposed to including women more?

That's not what i said, which I'll rephrase as "who wants to be included in a culture that abuses and exploits (people/the planet) routinely?" I'm an outsider; I've tried to be an insider; I prefer to be out here.

Fill your boots - try to do it from a top-down approach, or a bottom up approach, or whatever it is you think you're accomplishing by saying that we can't examine in its own right the particular place of women in a culture.

IMO, saying that your way - which does not allow women a unique place to discuss the culture as it affects them - is intolerant. it isn't' helpful, in my opinion.

I'm not saying don't! I'm saying lets do!

You can't talk about child abuse without talking about the family. You can't talk about drug addiction without talking about drugs.

That's exactly my point!

If you want to believe that you've elevated yourself to some point of understanding that is far beyond what we are capable of understanding or seeing, that's your business to believe or not. I don't care.

Well, I have tried hard to understand...

I will remind you that you encouraged us to look into Michael Parenti. Here is is again:

Rather than being accepted at face value, Parenti says that all cultures should be subjected to critical investigation to be judged by “universal human rights standards” and by the criticisms voiced by those who are victimized within the various cultures of the world. Parenti gives extensive attention to those who are regularly victimized by their own cultures, providing examples in chapters entitled “Custom Against Women,” “The Global Rape Culture,” and “Racist Myths.” [13]

Parenti is a brilliant analyst. He lost his tenure as a result of his opposition to the Vietnam War. He chose the outside too you could say, being a Marxist in the USA.

[Canadian_watcher]

@Plutonia,

I'm going to take you at your word on all of that and proceed in good faith - if you are interested in dissecting the ways in which elements of our society are misogynistic then lets do it.

I would posit that women of all classes have a lower social standing than that of men. They are less represented in highly paid professions, they are less represented on Corporate Boards, their numbers are fewer in governments, crimes against the body are generally less harshly punished than those against property, more women than men are raped (outside of prison), governments routinely attempt to thwart female biological freedoms, and more women than men live in poverty.

[norton ash]

Constant reader clears his throat.

Awe-struck respect for those of you willing to engage here. This thread is changing my mind, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Namaste, sisters and brothers.

[compared2what?]

First of all, newsflash: There are no such jobs anywhere on earth outside of Ayn Rand novels. There never have been.

Well, actually, there is. Growing and living within communities dependent on logging, it's been a normal feature of my life. And though actual fatalities are much fewer by comparison, the ranks of injured men were legion- missing fingers from mill work, chainsaw amputees, the back injured from being crushed by rolling/falling logs etc. What stood out for me as a child were all the missing fingers, and maybe that stood out for me because my mother nearly lost three fingers working our families placer mine and that made it difficult for her to play the piano anymore.

"Is your job killing you?" was the provocative cover title of Parade Magazine (Sunday supplement to United States newspapers), 8 January 1989, which looked into the risks associated with occupations in the United States. The research quoted in the journal identified forest workers as the occupational group whose answer to this question was most likely to be "yes". The current article confirms this disturbing situation in the majority of both industrialized and developing countries throughout the world. Perhaps even more disturbing is that, despite forestry's sad occupational accident and health record, the issue is not high on the list of priorities in most countries. Although many people and organizations use the slogan "safety first"; in reality, this is not the case.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/u8520e/u8520e03.htm

I know those jobs exist, as my post clearly indicated. Baumeister shows no sign of doing so. Rather, he suggests that men compete against one another in risky jobs as part of a high-stakes game that has wins and losses. If you need a more thoroughly detailed and footnoted commentary on his text demonstrating that than I've already provided, I'd be happy to put one together for you.

Second, and much more importantly:

By my individual lights, any person who has no problem exhuming the corpses of the men who lie buried in that Department of Labor statistic simply in order to exploit their posthumous rhetorical value as the Nameless Valiant Dead who didn't quite make it to the Crossing-the-Return-Threshold phase of the Hero's Journey has so conclusively demonstrated his cold-blooded indifference to the value of human life that he's totally and completely disqualified himself for the purposes of addressing that subject, solely on those grounds.

I mean, monomyth is very culturally compelling, and it has its legitimate rhetorical uses, no doubt. I'm not saying otherwise. But retroactively justifying the real expendability of all the real men who lost their lives doing non-lucrative, non-imaginary jobs of little mytho-narrative worth or interest before losing their identities to a Department of Labor statistic that someone who didn't give a fuck later decided to re-appropriate as a zombie-hero casualty figure is just not among them.

And that's that. It's not any more okay to advance your interests by treating dead men as if they were expendable than it is when they're living, if you think about it for a moment.

I hate that shit. And I also fear it, to be honest. Because someone who's willing to kill a dead man to score a rhetorical point is probably capable of anything, as far as I'm concerned. It doesn't really get much lower.

But this is precisely what's been done to rape victims repeated in this thread. In fact, they have been made to stand in, almost exclusively, for evidence of misogyny.

As you may recall, it was during the discussion of rape that I remarked that we were no longer talking about what constituted misogyny. That was because in my view, we were not. We were talking about rape and/or rape culture, more or less as an inadvertent consequence of the response to barracuda's post having focused solely on the one sentence in it that was not about misogyny, but rather about the culpability of male rapists.

One could argue that response was natural, given the inflammatory terms in which that sentence was written, of course. In fact, I myself would argue that it almost certainly was, at least in part and/or for some. I'm not happy about making that qualification, but unfortunately, an honest reading of the thread would compel me to. Because otherwise, I'd be at a loss to explain all the other unprompted and unprovoked attempts to minimize, displace or otherwise deny the culpability of male rapists of women that have popped up here and there on this thread.

As (for example) when you suggested it was attributable to the media, after having straightforwardly gone directly to the heart of the matter by....Oh, right. By likening rape to suicide, without offering a single reason in support of that association as natural. And unsurprisingly so, since it isn't.

Indeed, it would be difficult for me to imagine how someone as smart as you are could go that far afield and remain serenely under the impression that she was loftily thinking about the information in front of them from the point of view of the greater good of all rather than selfishly focusing on the victims of the crime in question, if I didn't know that we were, as you said, only minimally rational creatures. But I do know that, as well as respect you for knowing it.

That's one of the reasons that you could never do something I feared and hated, even if you did something I feared and hated, although it's just one among many. For example, another, probably more operative one is that my heart just belongs to you, Plu. I like and sympathize with you. We're only minimally rational creatures, after all.

But quite apart from that, and above all other subsidiary reasons:

Sorry to be the one to do the thing that you hate and fear. But there it is.

No apologies are necessary. You didn't and couldn't do something I hate and fear, because I don't and can't hate and fear any person's sincere effort to formulate a system for redressing systematic injustices, which is quite clearly what you're doing, both first and foremost and first and last. Roy F. Baumeister, on the other hand, either (a) equally clearly is not; or (b) is too stupid to notice that he's accidentally committing acts of apparently intentional extreme intellectual dishonesty in every sentence he utters. So he's a whole other story. But never mind that for now.

I don't and can't hate and fear you, your words, or your conduct. But I can and do disagree with you, of course. And as it happens, I also object to something you wrote that I might hate and fear if if had been written by a person whose intention was to befog the minds of genuinely-justice-seeking others by emotionally manipulating their systematically ingrained cultural reflexes in a way that distorted their perception of the things that mattered most to them. But it wasn't! It was written by you! Yay.

More on that in a bit.

yr. pal, as felt on this side of the equation.

[Stephen Morgan]

I would posit that women of all classes have a lower social standing than that of men.

Out of interest, does this mean men of the same social level or that, say Hillary Clinton has a lower social standing than one of those ho-banging ghetto men we were talking about a few pages back?

They are less represented in highly paid professions, they are less represented on Corporate Boards, their numbers are fewer in governments, crimes against the body are generally less harshly punished than those against property, more women than men are raped (outside of prison), governments routinely attempt to thwart female biological freedoms, and more women than men live in poverty.

I'm sure we've covered all those on a dozen occasions earlier in the thread, you know. Positive of it.

Well, maybe not prison rape quite so explicitly ruled out, I must admit that if you exclude most of the men who get raped, who happen to be the most oppressed and disadvantaged men of all, then the number of women being raped would probably dwarf the remainder.

Also, the claim that crimes against the person are less punished than those against property: nonsense. Violent crimes are always considered the most serious, thence the rationale for heavier sentences for armed robbery than the much larger thefts which go on without the threat of violence. Then again, men form a rather large majority of the victims of crimes against the person anyway, so it wouldn't have anything to do with misogyny even if true. Sentences for violent crimes well over twice those for property crimes, according to this site. Only for Florida that, the first results I came across.

I don't think I've ever come across a government attack on women's biological freedoms, either. I assume, I'm open to correction, that this is about abortion. There was an open vote in parliament a few years ago on whether to reduce by two weeks the legal date until which abortions could be procured, but I believe it failed. Obviously the odd American right-winger grandstands on it, but they rarely even talk seriously about doing anything about it, it's just a wedge issue. It's certainly nothing like this, on the biological freedom and bodily integrity front.

Obviously it goes without say that your points are chosen specifically to reinforce the misogyny narrative, so, for example, the number of women in the professions is stated as being lower than the number of men, although the number of new entrants being mostly women isn't brought up. The topist complaints (my own neologism, I think, denoting a focus on the "winners" of society) about government and corporate boards seem a bit odd. I mean, you want female scumbags to replace some of the male scumbags, is that it?

The only decent point there, the only one which isn't topist, that is, is the one about poverty, which rather ignores those men removed from the poverty statistics by poverty itself, those men in prison (>90% male), in the army (>90% male), homeless (~90% male) or dead (specifically thinking of suicide, which is >80% male, but it's not just that). Obviously anything pointing to women being in a good position, such as lower unemployment rates, higher wages for the same work for never-married women, higher rates of access to higher education, that sort of thing, aren't mentioned. So I don't consider any of those examples of misogyny. Context, like C2w was lecturing me on when we were talking about barracuda, "most people in the professions aren't women" sounds bad for women, "most young people in the professions are women" sort of changes the meaning of the first statement a bit.