What constitutes Misogyny?

[tru3magic]

just as the warped notions of masculinity hurt all of us. In a big way.

Not that it should necessarily be in this thread, and after reading your post I almost believe it could be something wholly different and beneficial to this whole conversation, but I feel you make an extremely valid point here. IMO these warped notions help further perpetuate this self imposed divide and form a society that is adamant on suppressing the feminine. They are different plights that are in purpose of a same goal.

There truly is a taboo about males expressing their emotion and it is definitely looked down upon in American society. Even a married man will get jokes thrown at them from friends for affection shown to wives. It has happened to me before too, where I was made fun of because my actions were not "traditional" of a "man".

It could also be considered adaptive behavior - men valuing the privileges they see accorded to women; women valuing the privileges they see accorded to men?

I think this is a major role in defining traits for each gender. It is unfortunate that our society looks to TV, movies, and other distorted media for these examples.



Also just because I am unclear, when you say us vs them, do you mean male vs female or oppressed vs suppressor?

[Canadian_watcher]

just as the warped notions of masculinity hurt all of us. In a big way.

Not that it should necessarily be in this thread, and after reading your post I almost believe it could be something wholly different and beneficial to this whole conversation, but I feel you make an extremely valid point here. IMO these warped notions help further perpetuate this self imposed divide and form a society that is adamant on suppressing the feminine. They are different plights that are in purpose of a same goal.

I would welcome the discussion of the warped view of masculinity in this thread - not sure if others would agree. ??

the imposed divide.. yes - that's what I mean when I say 'us' and 'them'. In this case (this thread) all too often posters have approached the subject as if it is a male vs female thing not realizing at all that this is not the same thing as oppressed vs oppressor.

There have been incidents on this thread, however, where males have acted as oppressor while feigning being oppressed. Those are the times I've gotten really angry. I shouldn't have, but I'm only human.

There truly is a taboo about males expressing their emotion and it is definitely looked down upon in American society. Even a married man will get jokes thrown at them from friends for affection shown to wives. It has happened to me before too, where I was made fun of because my actions were not "traditional" of a "man".

I see it all the time, too but with a bit of a twist. Basically it looks like this to me:

Acceptable Expressions of Emotion for Males:
-Anger
-Passion
-Lust
-Vengefulness
-Ambition
-Impatience
-Calculation
-Rebellion
-Assertiveness
-Ruthlessness
-Domination

Acceptable Expressions of Emotion for Females:
-Agreeableness
-Consensus-seeking
-Caring/Kindness
-Submissiveness
-Crying
-Helplessness
-Nurturing
-Craftiness


* clearly not a complete list for either gender. But I do believe that a male acting in one of the ascribed female ways receives social punishment, and vice versa. How can we be expected to operate as a whole community or even whole people if this is left unexamined and is never corrected?

[charlie meadows]

I see it all the time, too but with a bit of a twist. Basically it looks like this to me:

Acceptable Expressions of Emotion for Males:
-Anger
-Passion
-Lust
-Vengefulness
-Ambition
-Impatience
-Calculation
-Rebellion
-Assertiveness
-Ruthlessness
-Domination

Acceptable Expressions of Emotion for Females:
-Agreeableness
-Consensus-seeking
-Caring/Kindness
-Submissiveness
-Crying
-Helplessness
-Nurturing
-Craftiness


* clearly not a complete list for either gender. But I do believe that a male acting in one of the ascribed female ways receives social punishment, and vice versa. How can we be expected to operate as a whole community or even whole people if this is left unexamined and is never corrected?

Good starting point. But oversimplified to wrong. Necessarily so?

Any literature out there about the role of the relative bottleneck at the birth canal?

[Stephen Morgan]

Do you know much about matriarchal culture? I know a bit about it, and believe it or not 'matriarchal standards' are about harmony between the sexes with men doing a lot of the traditionally 'male' stuff. Hunting, slaughtering, having sex with multiple women ... seriously. Matriarchy isn't the female version of patriarchy.

Well, that's all about definitions, isn't it? If you pick the nicest equalest civs you can find and call them matriarchies, then arbitrarily decide Nazism to be patriarchal and compare the two, then you're right.

Here's something to think about though when you're looking at a culture and trying to determine whether it is matriarchal or patriarchal:

Whether a society be "matrilineally produced," "patriarchally" organized, or marked by complementary dualism the opposite sex always plays a crucial role. No sociopolitical order is single sexed. Even where males dominate, women are always heard from. Whatever the nature of the dynamic duo of male and female, whether the terms of the sex pair be posed in dialectical tension, benign opposition, or harmonious synthesis each member of the pair gives legitimacy to the other. Considerations of matriarchy, patriarchy, or diarchy should not be about which sex rules but how gender is represented in archetypal scenarios and reflected in social practices. Certain questions need to be asked: which sex bears the symbolic and social burden for conjugating the social universe? Which sex is imbued (naturally or socially) with the reproductive powers that recharge the sources of supernatural fecundity? What is the gender of the dominant symbols tying the archetypal to the social? How do males and females complement one another in the political arena and how is this arena tied to the cosmological order? As an examination of Antigone and the Trobriands suggests, in a strongly tradition-based society ultimate authority does not rest in political roles but in a cosmological order. If this cosmological order pivots around female oriented symbols and if this order is upheld by ritual acts coordinated by women whose social salience is also grounded in this order we can speak of matriarchy.

I submit that the cosmological order of catholicism centres around the Virgin Mary, in her supposed role interposed between man and god, intervening on man's behalf.

[Stephen Morgan]

I'm countering the OP artist herself, and others, that maintain we live in a predominantly misogynist culture,

afaik, no one has been arguing that we live in a predominantly misogynist culture, in the sense that it's more misogynist than it is any other kind of oppressive.

WRT the prison stuff, may I point out once again that the threat of prison does not affect men as a class. So it's not misandry. Do you get the distinction? It's this:

Men who haven't committed crimes do not go to prison for being men. The wrongfully convicted of both genders tend to end up in prison: (a) because they're poor; (b) because the cops and courts are fucked up; or (c) both.

That's not accurate, or not more so than saying that rape and so forth don't affect women as a class. Men aren't imprisoned for being men, but being men massively increases one's chances of being wrongfully imprisoned. To me that make it something which happens to men as a class.

Women who haven't done anything besides be women, on the other hand, are paid less than men of comparable experience for the same work;

That ain't so.

are charged more for the same services; are frequently subject to harassment and assault for being female;

That'll be why women constitute a large majority of victims of violent crime. Oh no wait that's men. Your position is that, because women allegedly earn less money than men, it's happening because they're women. But men being much more likely to be violently attacked is somehow not due to their being men.

So men and boys doing less well in education, being less likely to get into university, getting longer sentences for the same offences, being excluded from consideration for employment on the basis of sex and having a higher unemployment rate, obviously this list could get quite long, that somehow isn't discrimination against men "as a class" or "because they're men", but women choosing lower paying jobs, that's obvious evidence of misogyny and anti-female discrimination.

aren't considered authoritative enough to hold most positions of authority; and (on and on and on) just because they're women.

Ergo: Women are discriminated against as a class. So are numerous other groups of people who can be classified by a common characteristic. Obviously.

Common, but not to men, is what you seem to be saying.

Life is very rough for practically all people, including practically all men. No one denies it. But you can't fucking change that by changing how you think about men. Because the problem is that life is rough for practically all people. That does not have gender implications. It is not capable of a gender-oriented solution.

But there are those things which only, or disproportionately, effect men. These are men's issues and should be addressed as such.

You are sowing dissension. Please desist.

Life would be very boring if we all joined the choir, as you know very well.

[Canadian_watcher]

Stephen,

Do you see any value in discussion of society's view of what it means to be 'masculine' in this culture? I mean let's drop the 'women do this and women are guilty of that' bullshite for a little bit, can we please?

What pressures do the gender roles assigned to men put on the culture as a whole, and are men at a disadvantage by disassociating themselves with anything feminine? I'd like your input on it if you're so inclined.

[wallflower]

Very happy to see this thread still going on.

The problem with spring is how work piles up and so I haven't really had a chance to read the new posts well. I will tonight.

I certainly agree that there's a need to discuss how society screws men up, and agree that while the topic is quite relevant to this thread such discussion deserves another thread. This thread is already burdened with lots of weighty issues. It is interesting how the threads here relate to one another. But it's also a good discipline to remember that while it's reasonable to think that posters in a particular thread have read some or all of it, it's not so reasonable to think they're read other threads here which are related in some ways. Anyhow a thread about how society screws men up would be a good thing, except per Jeff's request it ought not to be labeled about misandry.

Recently in the USA the House passed HR3 called No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act. This legislation freaks me out because it opens wide a window to see how engrained misogynist attitudes are in the USA. As if I didn't already know that. But of course I already admit having to resit my tendency not to pay attention to stuff that doesn't seem to affect me directly. And there's my skepticism about the political process in the USA in general. Just what to do about the sorts of attitudes that make HR3 seem reasonable to people so that how radical the legislation is isn't noticed is a hard problem.

I tend to agree with Plutonia that the best thing to do is to participate as little as possible in the dominant culture and to pursue creating alternatives. That approach is necessarily a patchwork and the patterns one chooses rarely seem pleasing to others and even to us trying to piece things together. Sometimes the patterns are pleasing and in general I think those of us trying to create alternatives would do well to provide positive feedback to others when the patterns they create are nice.

I agree that opposing Matriarchy to Patriarchy is rather a wrong turn. I rather do like Riane Eisler's distinction between dominator and partnership models of social construction. Just by the nature of the roles women often take up like nurtue and caregiving, I think women often find it easier to imagine partnership models.

I mentioned Chris Dilley's piece about Laurie Penny's rant on the over fascination with princess fantasies and the Heresiarch's retort that the fantasies have a positive economic role in the development of girls to women. Dilley points out that the Heresiarch is probably correct about the sorts of traits which princess fantasies encourage do have a positive economic impact for low to mid level employment. But the traits which are encouraged tend not to be advantageous to higher level employment. More generally Dilley's point is princess fantasies restrict the rainge of imagination of the varieties of ways we can be.

I think it's possible to do a rough lumping together into two piles of temperaments in western societies. Some people are keen to restrict the range of human possibilities while others are more inclined to view diversity as a positive value and therefore want fewer restrictions on the range of possibilities. Both temperaments come with different sets of metaphors and different worldviews, making communication difficult. It takes some effort on both sides to make productive dialog.

[compared2what?]

And one more thing:

I have a theory that is coming to me ...

It seems that men badly want a space in which to speak about the cultural pressures on them

They have them already. Interested and/or qualified women can even participate in them, too, if they want to.

Such has not always been the case in Western culture-- due to, say, exclusionary practices, lack of interested and/or qualified women, and/or other factors -- and that legacy does still reassert itself from time to time, true. But it's definitely more equitable than it used to be. But I'm straying toward the topic. Sorry. My main point is that men have such spaces.

I can't really think of any one comprehensively representative example. In fact, I'm not sure that there is or even should be one: Male experience encompasses far too great a diversity of cultural pressures for any one space effectively to accommodate their alleviation, imo.

FWIW, though, here's a decent example. And here's another.

More power to them.
I think perhaps part of the dynamic at play here is that when men observe females in a group, organized and working towards social change a couple of things happen:

1. They worry that since they aren't included in the group that the group must be 'against them.'
2. They look around for their own group and find they are looking into a void.

I would be frustrated by that too if that's what I experienced. Unfortunately for men, they are not encouraged to get together and dissect the ways culturally manipulated ideas about masculinity hurt them. Talking about 'hurt' at all is taboo for men. (if I were inclined I could find three or four recent instances where I've said "you've got your feelings hurt" and the man in question will immediately deny it)

I do think it'd be worthwhile to have these discussions. Let's just not make it us vs. them. Believe it or not the idea of misogyny is not an us vs them thing the way I see it. I do get angry and hurt and frustrated when I witness individual men practice it (whether intentional or not) but it is a cultural phenomenon that is internalized and as people have said time and again here it hurts ALL of us, just as the warped notions of masculinity hurt all of us. In a big way.[/quote]

[compared2what?]

I'm countering the OP artist herself, and others, that maintain we live in a predominantly misogynist culture,

afaik, no one has been arguing that we live in a predominantly misogynist culture, in the sense that it's more misogynist than it is any other kind of oppressive.

WRT the prison stuff, may I point out once again that the threat of prison does not affect men as a class. So it's not misandry. Do you get the distinction? It's this:

Men who haven't committed crimes do not go to prison for being men. The wrongfully convicted of both genders tend to end up in prison: (a) because they're poor; (b) because the cops and courts are fucked up; or (c) both.

That's not accurate, or not more so than saying that rape and so forth don't affect women as a class. Men aren't imprisoned for being men, but being men massively increases one's chances of being wrongfully imprisoned. To me that make it something which happens to men as a class.

Yes, I know that's your view. I believe that you hold it at the expense of an informed understanding of wrongful imprisonment and -- more to the point -- the wrongfully imprisoned.

WRT to the rest of it, you're wrong on the facts. That's easily demonstrated, for the most part. But (and I say this affectionately) demonstrating is a pointless endeavor in your case. So I'm not going to bother, if that's okay with you.

Though I do agree with this in spirit, and sometimes also in letter:

You are sowing dissension. Please desist.

Life would be very boring if we all joined the choir, as you know very well.

I can't wait to get to that Marianology thing. But sadly, I got too much stuff to do right now.

[psynapz]

Hello?

Hello!

"your references are basically of one kind and fail to consider processes at work that seem to escape your awareness."

Wait... her references indicate a failure to consider processes she's unaware of?

DOUBLE SHAME ON YOU C_W!

(Failure to consider is no defense in the Judging Eyes of the Omniscient!)

[charlie meadows]

Why would you shame her for that?

[psynapz]

[Stephen Morgan]

Stephen,

Do you see any value in discussion of society's view of what it means to be 'masculine' in this culture?

Yes.

I mean let's drop the 'women do this and women are guilty of that' bullshite for a little bit, can we please?

Something of a mischaracterisation of my position.

What pressures do the gender roles assigned to men put on the culture as a whole, and are men at a disadvantage by disassociating themselves with anything feminine? I'd like your input on it if you're so inclined.

Hmm. I'm quite a prosaic sort of chap, to be honest, I have no trouble seeing that a disadvantage can accrue from, say a disinclination to hire men in the childcare sector, but the more existential results of the underlying beliefs are something I tend to steer clear of. I suppose I'm quite a stereotypically masculine man, apart from the long hair perhaps. I try to be stoical, I don't bother with showing emotions, emotions are something best left inside. Still waters run deep, that sort of thing. I especially hate it when women cry, makes me very uncomfortable. Men crying would make me uncomfortable too, but I've never seen it happen, now I think about it. Given all that I'm probably not the best one to ask, although I do like having my opinion solicited, so I'll give it a go.

I actually think the gender roles assigned to men relieve pressures from the society as a whole. Obviously they have a very negative effect on individual men, but men being pressured into being providers, into being "heroic", into not associating with children... if such pressures weren't there the culture would have to drastically change, probably not for the worse in my opinion, but drastic change isn't what most people want most of the time, even if it's for the better. Obviously there are aspects of these pressures which provide a challenge to the dominant culture, as when the "heroic" impulse takes the form of loyalty in gang warfare, or the provider impulse inspires profitable criminal activity. If men were to abandon the provider impulse, however, and women were to abandon any expectation to be provided for or paid for the pleasure of their company, there would be no spur to economic activity on the part of men. I read, I don't know how accurate the account was, about an effort in your country to equalise pay for cleaners and construction workers on some government project. Result: loads of new male cleaners, no builders. Project abandoned. Dangerous and highly unpleasant jobs would go undone, some of the causes of men making more money than women (more unpleasant jobs, longer hours, &c) would be removed. In fact in the short term the alleviation of such pressures might well constitute a disaster, streets going unswept, bodies unburied, wars unfought, drugs unsold, sewers un-unblocked, and so on. But in the long term a better society, although not so much better for women as for men. I know some young girls who have multiple children by different men, they say bad things about their previous partners but I only know the current partners. Very probably the earlier fathers don't show any interest and how much of that is due to a combination of men-don't-do-children social pressure and the knowledge that they can be cut from their children's lives by the mother at any time discouraging any great forming of emotional bonds is beyond any possibility of knowing. Certainly in my social strata families tend to focus entirely around the mothers because the mothers are the ones with the tenancies in council accomodation, due to their having children, and the men they live with, sometimes fathers of one or more of the children, live there entirely on the sufferance of the mother, providing income and being allowed to stay in the home and with the children. The removal of social pressures on men to follow traditional male paths in such a situation is literally beyond imagination, as the effects would be both unpredictable and of extreme but unknowable extent.

I think men are at a disadvantage from being expected to disassociate themselves from anything feminine. I don't approve of all that namby-pamby touchy-feely stuff myself, but I don't think less of other people if they do, as long as they don't do it around me. I much prefer traditional masculine traits like the aforementioned stoicism and equanimity and other things from Rudyard Kipling's "If...". Not so fond of the film version of If.... Of course those are the more enlightened traditionally masculine traits, I don't approve of any base ones. So I don't necessarily think there's an innate loss from disowning femininity, as a personal choice. When it's not a free personal choice but a result of societal expectations it's a different matter, especially if it's not a choice that individual would freely make. One thing Otto Weininger got right, going a dozen or so pages back through this thread, is that there are no "absolute" men or women, all people have aspects of maleness and femaleness about their psyches. I happen to find traditional masculinity more admirable, but I've more respect for someone who makes a conscious choice about such matters than someone who merely follows societal convention.

Also, I'd really like it to be acceptable to wear a skirt. They look really comfortable, not like these nasty constricting over heated trousers. ("I'm so straight I could suck a cock and it wouldn't bother me. I've eaten much worse things at football matches." -- Sean Lock, comedian.)

So what I'd basically like is for women to be more like (good) men and men to act more like women.

Hope that's the sort of thing you were looking for.

[charlie meadows]

:wallhead:

Your head, your wall.

I was not shaming her. You did that. Do you believe unawareness is cause for shame? I don't. Were you being sarcastic? If so, it was inappropriate.

Speak!

[psynapz]

Speak!

WOOF!