What constitutes Misogyny?

[compared2what?]

I think many women would be shocked if they could listen to what a group of seemingly garden variety sexist men say about women when women aren't around. It's probably worse than you think.

Why on earth would I think about that?

Hey! Wait a minute. I thought they were telling me the truth!!!!!
________________

Edited to make a little sense. Just a little. Very little.

[Pierre d'Achoppement]

Whereas when women talk about men when none are around it's like a gathering of angels... anyho, i was just clearing my thetans with that remark. Cleared!

[brainpanhandler]

Whereas when women talk about men when none are around it's like a gathering of angels... anyho, i was just clearing my thetans with that remark. Cleared!

[wintler2]

Anyone else carrying a crude generalisation they'd like get out there, while we're at it? Me, i like women, but i wish they were less keen on alpha males, and that men generally were less stupid.

[barracuda]

barracuda, why am I not surprised you go round picking fights and threatening to kill people?

I've been reading your posts for some time now, and I can't recall too many situations in which you expressed a great deal of surprise in the face of just about any circumstance. But I'm not particularly proud or happy that those things happened, or that there were periods of my life which were violent and pretty degraded. I simply thought it would be wrong to validate Riddler's experience without admitting my own complicity. Confess your sins to one anther, right?

[Plutonia]

A Psychological Solution to Bullying
When we advocate for laws against bullying, we declare the failure of psychology to solve the problem.
by Izzy Kalman

Mirror Neurons, Conscience Development and the Fallacy of Accountability for Bullying
What can possibly be wrong with holding bullies accountable?

The most dangerous ideas are not the ones that sound obviously bad, but the ones that sound obviously good [paraphrasing Charles Murray in What it Means to be a Libertarian]. When an idea sounds obviously good, no one challenges it and it catches on like wildfire. One such idea is accountability. It has such a ring of truth to it: accountability. What could possibly be wrong with holding people accountable?

Many people believe that the solution to bullying is to hold the bullies accountable for their behavior. The basic assumption is that it is our moral duty as adults to hold them accountable, and that if we do, they will stop being bullies. I have received countless comments similar to the following:

"I strongly agree with your approach to teach children the coping skills to deal with being bullied and I agree that this is a far more effective approach (as utilized in my clinical work). I still feel the bullies need to be held accountable for their behavior."

The idea of accountability has trickled down from the business world. If it's good enough for the big-bucks business world, it must be good for schools, too.

...

We want kids to stop being bullies. Bullying, as defined by the academic bullying experts and incorporated into our anti-bully policies, is any intentional act that can cause others physical, psychological or emotional pain. (I wonder, by the way, how they differentiate between psychological and emotional pain.) In other words, we are expecting kids to be saints. Only absolute saints never commit the kinds of acts the experts define as bullying.

The bullying experts tell us that bullies lack empathy, a necessary component for having a conscience. We need them to develop empathy so they will behave more morally. And we believe that holding them accountable for their behavior will promote this process.

But does holding children accountable to adults for the way they make each other feel indeed promote moral development?

There are two basic levels of morality. One is based on fear of punishment. The other is based on feeling remorse over hurting others.

Fear of punishment is not true morality. In fact, when we avoid committing specific actions because we don't want to get punished, we are acting from self-interest. People whose conscience is based on avoidance of punishment are more likely to act badly when they are in a situation in which they know they are not going to get caught.

When we have a true conscience, on the other hand, we avoid those actions because we are concerned not with ourselves but with others. That's why most of us feel sad and remorseful when we realize we hurt someone. We feel this way not because of parental training but because Mother Nature (or whatever you want to call the power or process that made us what we are) wants us to. Our survival both as individuals and as a group depends upon us feeling bad when we hurt one another.

What is the mechanism by which we feel bad when we hurt people? It's through the functioning of what neuroscientists have appropriately labeled mirror neurons. Brain imaging has revealed that our brains actually experience what others experience. When someone smiles at us, we spontaneously smile. When someone screams in pain, we cringe. We know that laughter is contagious, which is why TV sitcoms usually have laugh tracks. When we watch a dancer, the same areas of the brain that are active in the dancer are simultaneously triggered in our brains even though we are not dancing. The entertainment industry would not exist if people were not capable of feeling what others feel.

And without mirror neurons, it would be impossible to have empathy and thus a conscience. The mirror neurons did not get there because of adult training but because Mother Nature put them there.[/b]

People who don't have a conscience are either neurologically impaired or were raised under atypical conditions that prevented them from developing one. If you are neurologically incapable of feeling empathy, you can be punished and lectured to and trained 16/7 (I'm granting you 8 hours sleep per day) and you will still never develop a conscience. This point was made brilliantly in the movie, A Clockwork Orange.

The following is a typical event in the development of a conscience in a neurologically intact child.

You are five years old, an age by which you can observe and understand basic cause and effect relationships. Your younger sister is standing at the top of the staircase. Just for the heck of it, you give her a push when no parent is looking. She rolls down the stairs, and the next thing you know she is crying hysterically, blood flowing from her nose.

What happens to you? You feel horrified, knowing the blood is the result of injury. You feel her pain, thanks to your mirror neurons. And you feel guilty, knowing you are the one responsible for this terrible event. If you are not too frightened by the blood, you might even run over and hug her, apologizing profusely and trying to comfort her. And since the feeling of pain and guilt are so unpleasant, you never again push your sister down the stairs. This is the simple beauty and brilliance of nature's programming.

Parents, though, are often prevented from witnessing this elegant natural process-because they actually prevent it from happening. And they do it because they believe it is their moral duty to hold their children accountable for the way they treat each other. If you have had children of your own, the following scenario may ring a bell.

Your sister is covered with blood because you knocked her down the stairs. You immediately sense her pain. But now your parents come rushing in, screaming, "Look what you did to your sister! How could you be so cruel?!"

What happens? Are your mirror neurons still attuned to your sister's pain? Not any more. You are now facing your furious parents. You feel under attack, so you yell back, "I didn't push her! She jumped!" or perhaps "She pushed me first!"

Your parents are hoping you will feel remorse for what you did. Instead you are defending yourself and blaming your sister for your terrible deed! And if your parents don't believe you, they punish you even harder for lying, and then you really feel like an unfortunate victim. Victims don't feel remorse; they want revenge. You are left fuming at your mean, punitive parents who apparently care more for your sister than for you, and you are probably mad at your sister, too, for having gotten you in trouble with your parents. You are likely to be on the lookout for an opportunity to get revenge against both your sister and your parents by hurting her again. You are also looking for opportunities to complain to your parents that your sister hurt you so that they will punish her. Meanwhile your parents are tormenting themselves, wondering what they did to deserve such a cruel, callous child!

Why did this happen? Because your parents believed that it's their duty to hold their children accountable for the way they make each other feel.

Interventions that make matters worse among siblings at home are hardly likely to make matters better between students in school. When school authorities hold children accountable for the way they make each other feel, they actually hinder their development of a mature conscience, for the kids' motivation becomes avoidance of punishment. And when the school punishes them, it makes them mad at each other and at the school as well. Then they want revenge, so the next aggressive acts are set in motion. Often, one kid gets blamed repeatedly, so that kid becomes increasingly angry and aggressive and gets labeled a bully. The school thought it was making that kid stop being a bully. It actually made the kid become a bully.

Is there, then, room for accountability and punishment in life? Of course.

Regarding accountability: If I hurt you, to whom am I accountable? The government? Your employer? Your teacher? Your parent? No. I am accountable to you. It is you I hurt you, not them. If you face me directly with the pain I caused you, I am likely to feel remorseful. But if I am accountable to the authorities, I will seek to absolve myself of guilt and possibly to blame you. Therefore when our children or students hurt each other, it is far more effective if we have them deal with each other directly, and preferably without our intervention. Additionally, it can be helpful to instruct people (not just kids, because adults also need this) to express their pain to the aggressor rather than their anger. If I get angry with you for hurting me, you are likely to get angry back at me. But if I sincerely let you know how you hurt me, you are much more likely to feel sorry and apologize.

And if there is a Higher Power that holds us personally accountable for our behavior, then we are accountable to the Higher Power as well–but not to a human authority.

Regarding punishment:
1. When kids are too young to understand the harm they are causing, it may be necessary to punish them so they will be afraid to do the harmful behavior again. And for adults who truly are lacking in conscience, it may be necessary to punish them for the same reason.

2. When you punish, do so with regret, as in, "I'm really sorry I have to do this to you, but you need to pay for what you did," rather than saying angrily, "You broke the rules! You have to pay the consequences!"

3. When you punish, make the punishment fit the crime. Don't make it unrelated to the crime or a hundred times worse than the crime. (For a good understanding of how to punish effectively and morally, a good source is the movement for Restorative Justice.)

***************

If you would like to know how to get your kids to fight less while helping them develop responsibility for themselves, read my free online manual, A Revolutionary Guide to Reducing Aggression between Children at the following address: http://www.bullies2buddies.com/resource ... nuals#ad...

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/psy ... -ac?page=2

[JackRiddler]

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The face-palm is deserved, but what difference can it make to a comment like...

While I agree with JackRiddler that men are more inclined to use brute force, females are more inclined to manipulate, lie, deceit and trick.

This is complete nonsense, in fact an inversion of reality. Manipulations, lies and deceit come not only from individuals but from groups, in fact from whole industries devoted to manipulating populations. The most consequential individual lies and deceptions come from dominant and powerful people, mostly men, who have the status to get away with it. Certainly the practice of lying and deceiving is not as exclusively gendered as is the case with physical violence, but at most you could say: men and women both do a great deal of it, for many reasons.

But let's pretend for a moment you're right. Let's pretend women are more naturally liars and deceivers (like that damned Eve!), and men are less so (as counter-factual as that is). Tell us, do liars and deceivers earn a bit of pogrom in exchange? Is that it? Some women lie and deceive (more than men, you say, laughably), and some men beat up women or rape random "sluts" while the culture makes light of it. Tit for tat. What's the big deal?

In other words the means are different, which probably can be explained through evolutionary psychology, but this doesn't say anything about the goals of one sex vs the other being so much loftier. Or does it?!

Sexes don't have goals. (Attributes that arise by evolution are results of selection, because they happen to function for survival in a given habitat.) We live in cultures. One gender is conditioned to a violent ideal, and accounts for almost all of the actual, physical violence. This reality gets rationalized by ridiculous and yes, misogynist comments like yours.

No wonder this discussion has made several women despair. Talking about misogyny, rape and violence prompts denial, mockery, verbal harrassment, equivocation, trivialization. Perhaps the trivialization is the most indicative: the continuous appearance of comments that insist, stubbornly, on telling for the xth time how unimportant or unseemly this thread is.

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[brainpanhandler]

.

The face-palm is deserved, but what difference can it make to a comment like...

While I agree with JackRiddler that men are more inclined to use brute force, females are more inclined to manipulate, lie, deceit and trick.

About as much as the obvious refutations/counter observations you offered. Pierre's statement is so stunningly stupid that I didn't think anything else more elaborate was worth the trouble.

[compared2what?]

Whereas when women talk about men when none are around it's like a gathering of angels... anyho, i was just clearing my thetans with that remark. Cleared!

That should really be "none is," though since it would still be sitting there wrecking up your sentence like an indefinite pronoun modifying a mass noun if you changed it, you'd probably be better off just sidestepping the whole issue, imo.

Also, I'm not so sure that's true in the spirit as well as in the letter of the law. For all general conversational purposes, women talk about men when they're not around the exact same way that women talk about men to their faces, at least in my experience. I mean, locker-room-type talk is a whole other story, of course. But afaik, that's neither gender- nor gender-orientation-specific, it's just how locker-room-type talk is.

But I certainly very much hope that numerous other posters will now expound upon their furiously dissenting views of this very important, controversial and timely issue that's of great and urgent social concern not only to us, but also to the future generations of all presently known living species and potentially evolving life forms throughout the universe and beyond, and not at all the kind of subject that most people who aren't angry and unhappy fifth-graders might well go their whole entire lives without thinking about for long enough even to form a fully articulated opinion.

Because it would really be a shame to let all that stellar middle-innings relief work just go to waste, if you ask me. We've got a classic going on here, let's show some hustle, folks.

[Stephen Morgan]

I think many women would be shocked if they could listen to what a group of seemingly garden variety sexist men say about women when women aren't around. It's probably worse than you think.

Why on earth would I think about that?

Hey! Wait a minute. I thought they were telling me the truth!!!!!
________________

Edited to make a little sense. Just a little. Very little.

I honestly don't know how men talk about women, myself excluded. I mostly know women, those men I know I don't really know anything about and certainly don't talk about women with.

Whereas when women talk about men when none are around it's like a gathering of angels... anyho, i was just clearing my thetans with that remark. Cleared!

I hear women talking about men all the time, however, as I mostly hang about women and have good hearing and an unobtrusive manner. The women I know best aren't too bad, but their friends, I tell you, I've heard offensive things and scarifying things.

It would be more measurably accurate to say that women tend to be just as violent as men in certain environments, women more than fairly represented in Intimate Partner Violence and performing a majority of abuse of children and the elderly. Getting involved in random scuffles with strange men in the street is a different matter.

Anyone else carrying a crude generalisation they'd like get out there, while we're at it? Me, i like women, but i wish they were less keen on alpha males, and that men generally were less stupid.

I think blacks are better at dancing. So I've heard. Well, I say better, but I consider dancing a senseless waste of physical energy and a submission to our baser instincts which also makes us look undignified, so "better" is very much a subjective term. The only good dancer is he who doesn't dance. Also, the only black man I've ever really known was at school and he tucked his shirt into his underwear, which I believe to be uncool. Actually, is any of that sufficiently crude? I think black women tend to have nice big arses. That's crude, right?

barracuda, why am I not surprised you go round picking fights and threatening to kill people?

I've been reading your posts for some time now, and I can't recall too many situations in which you expressed a great deal of surprise in the face of just about any circumstance.

I'm constantly surprised by the way people other than myself behave. Tends to be irrational. Also by Arsenal's end of season collapse, which I should have come to expect by now.

But I'm not particularly proud or happy that those things happened, or that there were periods of my life which were violent and pretty degraded. I simply thought it would be wrong to validate Riddler's experience without admitting my own complicity. Confess your sins to one anther, right?

You gone Jesus-freak now? Nah.

I haven't hit anyone since I left school. Well, since I was supposed to leave school, my truancy means I was actually absent from school in a physical sense before that was legally acceptable. I was quite violent once upon a time, all angry and emotional, I was in fact a school bully when I was still at school, before I internalised the teachings of Jesus. I hit a few people, but it was mostly the verbals. Did a little bit of disorganised rugby, which was inexplicably popular with the schools in my area, so the usual handbags you get in schools never worried me. Now I don't even believe in self-defence. Not just confession of sins, but repentance and revision of your actions and instincts.

Also, I don't think we ought to be validating people's experiences. Makes me feel uncomfortable.

[Stephen Morgan]

For all general conversational purposes, women talk about men when they're not around the exact same way that women talk about men to their faces, at least in my experience.

Yes. I've been told right to my face by women that as a man I must inevitably be an idiot. Men certainly wouldn't say that sort of thing about women unless around people they knew to be like-minded.

[JackRiddler]

I think many women would be shocked if they could listen to what a group of seemingly garden variety sexist men say about women when women aren't around. It's probably worse than you think.

I doubt most women would be surprised, as they tend to hear it all directly sooner or later, and as has been suggested on this thread, they also have their devious ways of getting into the minds of their male wards, erm, boyfriends. I very much doubt black people would be surprised at what is said when white people think they're in the exclusive company of solid race-compatriots. Especially in towns where the races live side-by-side, if almost entirely segregated, as in New York, and so have contact frequently enough to keep each other in mind (and keep the resentment of the others' existence simmering). Long as I'm engaging in informed speculation, however, I do bet a lot of older gay people would be surprised at what gets said nowadays in (assumed-to-be) exclusively heterosexual company, at least in more urban and youthful contexts, because that has actually improved. A little bit.

On the brain activity studies, meaning those cited here by Plutonia, meant to measure empathy or at least identification with another person viewed in a film: I would expect blacks on average to be more attuned to a white person drinking a glass of water than vice-versa, and women to be more attuned to men that vice-versa. Do I really have to explain why? (Probably. If someone asks.)

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[lyrimal]

God! You people are so full of shit!! (excluding few exceptions)

Unsurprisingly, this thread continues to be downright sexist and offensive! Call men more criminal (a practice popularly and appropriately believed to be racist when applied to races), and responses are virtually all seconding. Call women more manipulative (something I have not done) and it's virtually all booing. That's just one contrast of many.

Plutonia, not to appear as if I'm soliciting you as an ally, but I offer respect where it is due. You are exercising determined good faith, which is a waste of time in this thread but to demonstrate you are a fair dealer. You are the only one remaining honestly trying bridge the divide, and others have been attempting to take advantage of that... Wallflower has shared some things that have stuck with me as well... Thank you both... And props to all the men who could not resist attempting to counter the prevailing acid in this thread. I have not strictly read every single post, but I have not found one yet that could honestly, objectively be construed as woman-hating. There are countless to the reverse

Believe it or not, obviously most of you won't, but I am an outstanding prospect for participating in a conversation that actually addresses "What constitutes misogyny?" without all the self-hate sexism and passive-aggressive sexism. My wife took an upper-tier womens' studies course last fall, and we had many fun conversations dealing with the subject matter. Not once did she become troubled with me during our discussions, but then again she doesn't believe we live in a singularly misogynist culture.

Alas, this thread is a lost cause. I have no more responses for the dishonest dealers, and I will not trouble the collective with more of my rants. I sincerely apologize for not being able to bite my tongue before this rant.

[JackRiddler]

God! You people are so full of shit!! (excluding few exceptions)

Unsurprisingly, this thread continues to be downright sexist and offensive! Call men more criminal (a practice popularly and appropriately believed to be racist when applied to races), and responses are virtually all seconding. Call women more manipulative (something I have not done) and it's virtually all booing. That's just one contrast of many.

Pure straw. Talk about macho culture and the way it encourages and condones violence by men, or list the plentiful examples of such violence, as I did, and watch the defensive reactions and wounded-boy accusations that you have called men as a class or by nature criminal. (Or that you're "self-hating." But I don't identify with the macho false image of what men should be, which I do, in fact, happen to hate, with cause.) Call "women" more manipulative, and what do you expect? Cheering? For the fable of Eve? For an assertion that holds up to no empirical scrutiny, and that has been used for centuries in the cause of justifying oppressions and violations? Maybe we should split the difference, give it two cheers and a boo? Would that satisfy your sense of fairness?

Here's a shout-out to Plutonia for the very same reasons you give, and to c2w?, wintler2, bph, a bunch of others I'm forgetting, and of course Canadian_watcher (requiescat en abstentia).

And here's a repeat film plug for "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" -- written and directed by a pair of male humans!

.

[Plutonia]

Thanks lyrimal.

I am trying to invite people to think about misogyny in new ways, rather than demand that they see things my way. I mean, I really don't understand it myself, so I am learning as I'm going and don't actually know where I'm going to end up. I'm doing this because I really care about our predicament and I orient towards practical solutions and I don't see good outcomes from simply shaming men who haven't abused and raped women by lumping all of them in with those who have. In my experience, most men actually care about their wives, sisters, mothers and daughters.

To be fair, I think what we are seeing is some confirmation bias here. Most people (and some animals) have an innate sense of fairness and when they see others behaving in ways they perceive as unfair, they react predictably un-cooperatively, or even defiantly.

There is also that mind-mend thing of mind-set contagion, so aggressiveness is returned with aggressiveness, empathy with empathy. Create inciting conditions and you get predictable incited reactions, which then validate the thinking of those that created the conditions ie subject Native kids to systemic abuse and when as adults they can't stop drinking, there you go, it's "proof" that Natives are inferior, drunkards, and incapable of benefiting from the "help" of our education system. The Stanford Prison Experiment is a good case study of that sort of thing. And there is actually a recent counter-example of a warden who reformed his prison by running it like a school, but I can't find the interview at the moment.

Also, people tend to stick with what they believe in the face of contrary evidence. We all know that one - 9/11. But I think some of what we are seeing here is cultural difference too and that's being disregarded. My guess is stress is a major factor.

So we are what we are. It's messy. But worth attempting to understand.

Here's links to back-up what I've said:

http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008 ... irness.ars
http://www.prisonexp.org/
http://scienceblogs.com/thoughtfulanima ... in_dog.php
http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports ... siness.jsp

One more thing. I think that some of us are having difficulty differentiating between the opinions and the intention of the person expressing them, I'm specifically talking about Morgan here whose opinions differ from virtually everyone else on this board, but who expresses them civilly and who seems to be one of the only contributors taking in and thinking about some of the things I've been expressing. C_W too, of course. So that to me is respectfulness in action. I mean, I'm in a similar position as him, having unusual opinions and I have been attacked for them as well. Opinions are really just opinions, formed by what we are exposed to, but they are not who we are or what we are being. If you see what I'm saying.