What constitutes Misogyny?

[Stephen Morgan]

twist and poke and squirm and blah blah

Nice try troll boy, but i wont be joining you on your latest offtopic excursion on this thread (only 2 this page!). If you'd like to try and defend any of your less silly assertions on the wind thread ("geothermal is just like coal", rofl), they're still there waitin for ya.

Have you made any contribution to this thread other than abusing me? And you call me a troll.

[Stephen Morgan]

It's a longtime phenomenon in and around there (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc.) Like bride burning, or a somewhat different form of the bride-kidnapping-and-raping I posted about in the course of pointing out that there were reasons that an African woman would be uniquely qualified to oversee [whatever AIDS program it was], which is also pretty common in that general part of the world, though that one's more of a former-Soviet national practice, IIRC.

Yes, it's an odd part of the world. Of course once upon a time the same crime was very popular here in England, I have a book which mentions some cases. A quote:

From
The News of the World, 9th May 1909: A nurse
in Belfast sued her lost swain for breach of promise.
She obtained £100 damages although it was admitted
by her counsel that she had thrown vitriol over the
defendant, thereby injuring him, and the defendant
had not prosecuted her! Also it was admitted that
she had been "carrying on" with another man. From
The Morning Leader of 8th July 1905 I have
taken the following extraordinary facts as to the
varied punishment awarded in cases of vitriol-
throwing: That of a woman who threw vitriol
over a sergeant at Aldershot, and was sentenced
to six months' imprisonment without hard labour
while a man who threw it over a woman at Ports-
mouth was tried and convicted at the Hants
Assizes, on 7th July 1905, and sentenced by Mr
Justice Bigham to twelve years' penal servitude!

"Vitriol" being prussic acid, in this case. Pre-war book, hence archaic terminology. A remedy is suggested:

There is another case in which it seems probable
that, animated by the same fixed idea, those re-
sponsible for the framing of laws have flagrantly
neglected an obvious measure for public safety. We
refer to the unrestricted sale of sulphuric acid
(vitriol) which is permitted. Now here we have a
substance subserving only very special purposes in
industry, none in household economy, or in other
departments, save for criminal ends, which is never-
theless procurable without let or hindrance. Is it
possible to believe that this would be the case if men
were in the habit of using this substance in settling
their differences with each other, even still more
if they employed it by way of emphasising their
disapproval of the jilting of sweethearts? That it
should be employed by women in wreaking their
vengeance on recalcitrant lovers seems a natural
if not precisely a commendable action, in the eyes
of a Sentimental Feminist public opinion, and one
which, on the mildest hypothesis, "doesn't matter."
Hence a deadly substance may be freely bought
and sold as though it were cod-liver oil. A very
nice thing for dastardly viragoes for whom public
opinion has only the mildest of censures! In
any reasonable society the indiscriminate sale of
corrosive substances would in itself be a crime
punishable with a heavy term of imprisonment.

Just the sort of economic remedy for crimes I generally approve of, and obviously the sale of acid isn't a generally desirable happening. Of course, by the twentieth century there was no way a British court would allow blindings as a form of punishment.

Yes, it's misogyny.

I do like a concise answer. Elaboration is good, but when people include a simple yes or no I find it much easier.

---

Seriously tho how can you not see this as misogyny? Don't you understand that what you call "just interpersonal relations" is an expression of hatred for a woman because she was a woman?

I don't necessarily believe it specifically not to be misogyny, but I think it's a debatable proposition. I mean it's not like there aren't violent and controlling female abusers, it's not like this is an accepted part of the culture over there, hence the brutal punishment.

That was how that individual did his interpersonal thing. By considering a whole bunch of people as unworthy of the basic respect that he would need to have to let them live their lives without burning their faces with acid for not providing him whatever he wants on demand.

You see, that's not necessarily how I would interpret his motivations, not that I'm an expert. And of course he hasn't done anything to a whole group of people, only to an individual. He wouldn't have done it to a man, but he wouldn't have cared enough about being rejected in any other context to do such a thing. Emotions, very troublesome. Could even say that the emotional origin of the crime is an excessive philogyny, a sort of obsession with this women. Objectification in the sense Plutonia was talking about a few pages back.

BTW

I hope you're not implying she is as barbaric as him for the punishment she requested. I can understand it personally.

I'm not inclined to be judgemental, although her desire for vengeance is obviously understandable that doesn't make it admirable. Of course I'm not inclined to denounce him as barbaric out of hand either.

Stephen imagine a girl has just blinded you, burned your face off, because you didn't want to marry her. Then she offers money to get out of facing justice. How would you feel. Shes just told you what she thinks your life, your face and your eyesight are worth.

Put a figure on it.

Regardless if its high or low, how would that make you feel?

Reduced to some amount of money. It'd piss me right off.

Well, I'm very fond of money. Given that the damage is irreparable, I'd be inclined to go for the option which would make my life thereafter more bearable. With me being forgiving by religion and pragmatic by temperament I'd probably take the money.

[Canadian_watcher]

Of course I'm not inclined to denounce him as barbaric out of hand either.

okay, here's a good example of where Stephen Morgan is an off the rails misogynist.

In response to whether or not it is misogynistic to throw acid into the face of a woman who won't marry you, this is the closest he can come to saying it is a bad act. This is the extent to which he will go to NOT criticize a man's bad actions against a woman ... because he is a bigoted hate monger.

people, stop engaging with this (I have no noun that would be acceptable.)

[Plutonia]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43029928/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/

Bit of a gruesome one, so to summarise this woman had acid thrown in her face by some bloke who wanted to marry her, in Iran predictably. Didn't realise it would cause any harm, apparently. Do you think this is an example of misogyny? He is to be punished not in the traditional Iranian manner of paying a shedload of compensation to victims of violent crime but by being blinded by acid himself, on the insistence of the victim who refused to take the money instead. Opinions? Just punishment? Obviously the marry-or-acid approach the bloke took is a classic controlling abusive behaviour, but do you think it has origins in misogyny or just interpersonal relations? Seems like this isn't a one-off case.

Is it harder or easier to think about foreign socio-dynamics? I'm not sure. Hmmm... from the article:

The lawyer said that at noon Saturday, Ameneh Bahrami would drop acid in both eyes of Majid Movahedi, 30, after he is rendered unconscious at a judiciary hospital in Tehran, ...

Iranian officials have endorsed the sentence, hoping to stop an increase in acid attacks, the Guardian said.

The Washington Post reported that human rights groups and the British government had asked Bahrami to pardon Movahedi but that she had refused.

If it's meant to deter like crimes, then it not really about justice, for the State at least. As for Bahrami, dropping acid into her unconscious attackers eyes, may be as close to justice as she can get.

Though it's questionable whether it will deter further attacks and may provoke retaliatory violence against more women, for (what may be seen as) her infraction against the dominant social order. Tough one.

As for his crime arising from misogyny, yes, but I prefer a nuanced analysis (as you are probably all aware of by now! Lol) so I suspect that unseen psycho-social dynamics are at play, as always IMO.

I hesitate to apply a Girardian reading of the cultures of the Middle East because I'm really still feeling my way around it and it proposes such a massive paradigm shift that one reviewer has said that it "provides the Archemedian point from which all knowledge can be re-thought."

But, oh well, here goes. Warning! Gross generalizations to follow:

Islam, though it's a new religion, has it's feet in the archaic, which obscures the truth of sacrificial violence (scapegoating; identifiable by it's unifying and pacifying effect), which is that the victim is always an innocent reciever of our collective projections. Sacrificial violence only works if the innocence of the victim is collectively occluded.

The foundational myths of Xtianity expose the lie of the guilt of the victim to the collective, first in the old testament, where the prophets repeated speak out against sacrificial violence and are themselves scapegoated. The ten commandments themselves are a prescription for avoiding mimetic desire, which leads to mimetic violence and ultimately scapegoating (thou shalt not covet etc). In the new testament the old myth of the dying and resurrecting god is subverted, how? By showing that the victim (Jesus) is blameless and the projection of blame is reflected back to those that sacrificed him, including his disciples who abandoned him and joined the crowd. That's a new development in the collective psyche, and though it may not be apparent, it's influence is everywhere in the West as our collective identification with victims, including the Earth as victim.

"The world becoming one culture is the fruit of this concern and not the reverse. In all the areas of activity – economic, scientific, artistic, and even religious – it is the concern for victims that determines what is most important. This new stage of culture has come about due neither to scientific progress nor to the market economy nor to the “history of metaphysics”.
Rene Girard, i See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 177."

The prescription against unconscious, collective violence provided by the myth of Jesus is to recognize the guilt (propensity to blame and do violence to others) within ourselves and "turn the other cheek", in other words, refuse to return violence with violence etc.

In the Middle East, they don't have that meme embedded in their collective psyche, so they are particularly vulnerable to their own violence and in fact they have instituted the opposing position of "eye for an eye" justice, or do return violence with violence.

Rene Girard locates the roots of scapegoating violence in desire: One day, a long time ago, someone picked a yellow lump off the ground and said "hey! This is cool." The guy next to him perked up and said "yeah! That is cool." The first guy, seeing the interest of the second, thinks "hey! This is cooler than I thought!" The second guy, seeing the response of the first guy thinks "no! That really is cool!" And pretty soon others gather around, seeing how cool that thing is, want some for themselves. And then follows millenia of people fighting and killing for gold.

So in the case of Bahrami and her suitor, his desire for her is very, very dangerous to the community as a whole. His unfulfilled desire has the potential to infect his brother and set them against each other, which could (and probably has historically) infect the whole community with retaliatory violence. So his disfiguring of Bahrami, can be seen as a very coarse derailment of the process of escalating mimetic violence- by making her undesirable, he "saves" his community. This also explains the restrictions put on women in the Middle East, generally- the dress codes, prohibitions against showing hair, their virtual house imprisonment, the murder of adulteresses etc

Anyway, that's me thinking. I hope no one is offended by it. Misogyny? Yes, but in a context that explicates without, I hope, justifying:

"I find it strange that women so badly want participation in the male power of archaic societies, for it is precisely their real superiority that women don’t appear, for the most part, as the primary agents of violence. If they want now to join the power games of the males, and that is understandable, are they not losing their real moral superiority?
As important as the apostles are in the Gospels, the women around Jesus are just as important but in a different way: they are that part of humanity which has nothing to do with scapegoating him. They are the ones who stick with him through the crucifixion…
If anything my hypothesis is pro-woman. It is peculiar how people moved by new ideologies want to be part of the power structure even retrospectively, and to be seen as responsible for some of the horrors that have left their mark on us. This greed to participate in violence of men is incomprehensible to me."
Rene Girard, ‘The Anthropology of the Cross: A Conversation with Rene Girard’, in James G. Williams (ed.), The Girard Reader, (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996), 275-276.

See, Girard is pro-women, after all! (apologies to Morgan, who seems oddly immune to mimesis):
___________________________

Here is Girard laying out the link between desire and violence much better than I have:


"The conflicts resulting from this double idolatry of self and other are the principal source of human violence. When we are devoted to adoring our neighbor, this adoration can easily turn to hatred because we seek desperately to adore ourselves, and we fall. In order to prevent all such predicaments, the book of Leviticus contains the famous commandment "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Lev. 19:18); that is, you shall love your neighbor neither more nor less than yourself. The rivalries of desires tend to become exasperated, and as they do, they tend to contaminate third parties who are just as addicted as we are to the entanglements of mimetic rivalries.

The principal source of violence between human beings is mimetic rivalry, the rivalry resulting from imitation of a model who becomes a rival or of a rival who becomes a model. Such conflicts are not accidental, but neither are they the fruit of an instinct of aggression or an aggressive drive. Mimetic rivalries can become so intense that the rivals denigrate each other, steal the other's possessions, seduce the other's spouse, and, finally, they even go as far as murder. "
....

"It begins with an obvious feature of post-Christian modernity. “The more desperately we seek to worship ourselves and to be good ‘individualists’,” says Girard, “the more compelled we are to worship our rivals in a cult that turns to hatred” (11). This contradiction of the commandment to love the neighbor as oneself results in numerous confusions concerning what is meant both by “love” and “neighbor.” Mimetic desire is confounded by narcissism to the degree to which “we feel that we are at the point of attaining autonomy as we imitate our models of power and prestige,” yet “the more ‘proud’ and ‘egoistic’ we are, the more enslaved we become to our mimetic models” (15)."
…

"The words that designate mimetic rivalry and its consequences are the noun skandalon and the verb skandalizein. Like the Hebrew word that it translates, "scandal" means, not one of those ordinary obstacles that we avoid easily after we run into it the first time, but a paradoxical obstacle that is almost impossible to avoid: the more this obstacle, or scandal, repels us, the more it attracts us. Those who are scandalized put all the more ardor in injuring themselves against it because they were injured there before.

The Greek word skandalizein comes from a verb that means "to limp." What does a lame person resemble? To someone following a person limping it appears that the person continually collides with his or her own shadow.

Understanding this strange phenomenon depends upon seeing in it what I have just described: the behavior of mimetic rivals who, as they mutually prevent each other from appropriating the object they covet, reinforce more and more their double desire, their desire for both the other's object of desire and for the desire of the other. Each consistently takes the opposite view of the other in order to escape their inexorable rivalry, but they always return to collide with the fascinating obstacle that each one has come to be for the other.

Scandals are responsible for the false infinity of mimetic rivalry. They secrete increasing quantities of envy, jealousy, resentment, hatred -- all the poisons most harmful not only for the initial antagonists but also for all those who become fascinated by their rivalistic desires. At the height of scandal each reprisal calls forth a new one more violent than its predecessor. If nothing stops it, the spiral has to lead to a series of acts of vengeance in a perfect fusion of violence and contagion. (2)

"Woe to the one by whom scandal comes!" Jesus reserves his most solemn warning for the adults who seduce children into the infernal prison of scandal. The more the imitation is innocent and trusting, the more the one who imitates is easily scandalized, and the more the seducer is guilty of abusing this innocence. Scandals are so formidable that to put us on guard against them, Jesus resorts to an uncharacteristic hyperbolic style: "If your hand scandalizes you, cut it off; if you eye scandalizes you, pull it out" (Matt. 18:8-9). "


Also I grabbed this from the "Who Killed the Deputy" thread because of the brilliant subtlety of it's implied paradox and Morgan's question is in context to the application of law:

"To live outside the law you must be honest". that's an imperative, a commandment if you will."
v.k.

- to live within the law requires dishonesty?

[charlie meadows]

Esalen damn well can be disregarded when that's what the person affiliated with it should be, is what I guess I'm saying.

[Plutonia]

And wintler, will you please desist in drive-by snipes at Morgan.

He is a least participating in the discussion, while I would characteristic what you are doing as disrupting.

*And if you think that by "attacking him", you are "protecting us women" from "his hate", you would be wrong on all three counts.


Edit: *Speaking for myself, of course.

.. because he is a bigoted hate monger.

people, stop engaging with this (I have no noun that would be acceptable.)

[Canadian_watcher]

"I find it strange that women so badly want participation in the male power of archaic societies, for it is precisely their real superiority that women don’t appear, for the most part, as the primary agents of violence. If they want now to join the power games of the males, and that is understandable, are they not losing their real moral superiority?
As important as the apostles are in the Gospels, the women around Jesus are just as important but in a different way: they are that part of humanity which has nothing to do with scapegoating him. They are the ones who stick with him through the crucifixion…
If anything my hypothesis is pro-woman. It is peculiar how people moved by new ideologies want to be part of the power structure even retrospectively, and to be seen as responsible for some of the horrors that have left their mark on us. This greed to participate in violence of men is incomprehensible to me."
Rene Girard, ‘The Anthropology of the Cross: A Conversation with Rene Girard’, in James G. Williams (ed.), The Girard Reader, (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996), 275-276.

Cult of True Womanhood alert.

[Canadian_watcher]

And wintler, will you please desist in drive-by snipes at Morgan.

He is a least participating in the discussion, while I would characteristic what you are doing as disrupting.

And if you think that by "attacking him", you are "protecting us women" from "his hate", you would be wrong on all three counts.

I disagree and I support the "attacks," actually, since Morgan is fond of depositing demon seed into all manner of threads.

I'd rather wintler attack him ONLY based on this thread, rather referring to the wind thread, but that's Wintler's prerogative imo.

[Plutonia]

"I find it strange that women so badly want participation in the male power of archaic societies, for it is precisely their real superiority that women don’t appear, for the most part, as the primary agents of violence. If they want now to join the power games of the males, and that is understandable, are they not losing their real moral superiority?
As important as the apostles are in the Gospels, the women around Jesus are just as important but in a different way: they are that part of humanity which has nothing to do with scapegoating him. They are the ones who stick with him through the crucifixion…
If anything my hypothesis is pro-woman. It is peculiar how people moved by new ideologies want to be part of the power structure even retrospectively, and to be seen as responsible for some of the horrors that have left their mark on us. This greed to participate in violence of men is incomprehensible to me."
Rene Girard, ‘The Anthropology of the Cross: A Conversation with Rene Girard’, in James G. Williams (ed.), The Girard Reader, (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996), 275-276.

Please, C_W, read what I've written.

Cult of True Womanhood alert.

[Canadian_watcher]

"I find it strange that women so badly want participation in the male power of archaic societies, for it is precisely their real superiority that women don’t appear, for the most part, as the primary agents of violence. If they want now to join the power games of the males, and that is understandable, are they not losing their real moral superiority?
As important as the apostles are in the Gospels, the women around Jesus are just as important but in a different way: they are that part of humanity which has nothing to do with scapegoating him. They are the ones who stick with him through the crucifixion…
If anything my hypothesis is pro-woman. It is peculiar how people moved by new ideologies want to be part of the power structure even retrospectively, and to be seen as responsible for some of the horrors that have left their mark on us. This greed to participate in violence of men is incomprehensible to me."
Rene Girard, ‘The Anthropology of the Cross: A Conversation with Rene Girard’, in James G. Williams (ed.), The Girard Reader, (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996), 275-276.

Please, C_W, read what I've written.

I did read it. I saw the following phrases, which you can also see if you look:

"women so badly want participation in the male power of archaic societies, for it is precisely their real superiority"
"are they not losing their real moral superiority"

It is a peculiar type of misogyny - where the powers attribute this high moral ground to women and then hold them to it - thereby negating women's ability to be 'base' and fight like men when that is precisely what is needed.

By the way you told me that you hate emoticons.

[charlie meadows]

Also I grabbed this from the "Who Killed the Deputy" thread because of the brilliant subtlety of it's implied paradox and Morgan's question is in context to the application of law:

"To live outside the law you must be honest". that's an imperative, a commandment if you will."
v.k.

- to live within the law requires dishonesty?

You are drawing an invalid conclusion. If vanlose kid had said "only by living outside the law can you be honest", then you would be correct in your conclusion. By the way, what is the brilliant subtlety of its implied paradox. It was too subtle for me. Thank you.

[Plutonia]

Could even say that the emotional origin of the crime is an excessive philogyny, a sort of obsession with this women. Objectification in the sense Plutonia was talking about a few pages back.

This is exactly the point I attempted to explicate above ^^^.

What is desired, cannot be anything but objectified because the mechanism subsumes it into the psyche of the desirer as an extension of the one who desires ie "that is a part of me that will make me whole."

[Canadian_watcher]

What you own owns you


The problem, as I see it, no sense of humor and not realizing we are both man and woman. Where does that anger come from? Only place is inside one's own head. I ain't got the foggiest how my grandmothers got by without this thread. And they all were the keepers of the family not the men. This is one angry thread, fer ser.

Get up, stand up. Stand up for your rights.

Might I point out that saying "You are angry" is an act of aggression under these types of circumstances? It is negating, invalidating - it is gaslighting. Anger in the face of injustice is a normal response.

Interjecting into a discussion that you have denigrated as being useless and stupid in order to instigate further unrest is anti-social and unwelcome.

[Canadian_watcher]

Could even say that the emotional origin of the crime is an excessive philogyny, a sort of obsession with this women. Objectification in the sense Plutonia was talking about a few pages back.

This is exactly the point I attempted to explicate above ^^^.

What is desired, cannot be anything but objectified because the mechanism subsumes it into the psyche of the desirer as an extension of the one who desires ie "that is a part of me that will make me whole."

Well DUH! But that is the position a lot of men have wrt women in general. THAT'S misogyny. This isn't the usual reaction PEOPLE have to other PEOPLE. Or even to THINGS, for that matter.

How many times have you ever heard of someone throwing acid onto the screen of a 50 inch LED television because they can't have it??????????

[Plutonia]

"I find it strange that women so badly want participation in the male power of archaic societies, for it is precisely their real superiority that women don’t appear, for the most part, as the primary agents of violence. If they want now to join the power games of the males, and that is understandable, are they not losing their real moral superiority?
As important as the apostles are in the Gospels, the women around Jesus are just as important but in a different way: they are that part of humanity which has nothing to do with scapegoating him. They are the ones who stick with him through the crucifixion…
If anything my hypothesis is pro-woman. It is peculiar how people moved by new ideologies want to be part of the power structure even retrospectively, and to be seen as responsible for some of the horrors that have left their mark on us. This greed to participate in violence of men is incomprehensible to me."
Rene Girard, ‘The Anthropology of the Cross: A Conversation with Rene Girard’, in James G. Williams (ed.), The Girard Reader, (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996), 275-276.

Please, C_W, read what I've written.

I did read it. I saw the following phrases, which you can also see if you look:

"women so badly want participation in the male power of archaic societies, for it is precisely their real superiority"
"are they not losing their real moral superiority"

It is a peculiar type of misogyny - where the powers attribute this high moral ground to women and then hold them to it - thereby negating women's ability to be 'base' and fight like men when that is precisely what is needed.

By the way you told me that you hate emoticons.

I mean read the rest in order to understand what he is saying there.

And it's not that I "hate" emoticons, i don't think i said that. What I am is uncomfortable with effusive displays of emotion, which can be represented in huggy or hearty emoticons. I don't like being physically touched either so it goes beyond "displays of emotion" and has to do with how I can be easily overwhelmed by expression, my own and others.