What constitutes Misogyny?

[Canadian_watcher]

If I were a ruler of slaves,
it would serve me greatly
to get my slaves to focus on
the differences in each other...
and to blame each other
for their common feelings
of enslavement...
then for them to see
that their commonality lies
in their enslavement to me.

Two words:
wage slavery.

fwiw, I believe class struggles are the most poignant struggles and that pitting men against women can distract from that, however, by looking at the ways in which women are oppressed we can begin to undo the ways in which we are all oppressed and the ways in which we cooperate with that oppression, too.

[norton ash]

Geezus H Christ, C_W....

The most part of humanity is poor. True!

The men and women who earn the most money are, for the most part... poor. Does not compute.

You weren't referring to my original sentence at all.

[Canadian_watcher]

-- the problem of inequality is entrenched when those who benefit refuse to acknowledge it, do not fight to balance it - or worse, justify it and use their advantage to prop up or become L.

The men and women who earn the most money are, for the most part, propping up and becoming L. But that's the class struggle with regard to money-and-power inequality, of course. Back to misogyny,

Not for the most part. The "most part" of humanity is poor and I don't think their oppression by a handful of rich could exist without their support and collusion.

C_W, you sure flunked THAT reading comprehension test... for the most part.

Geezus H Christ, C_W....

The most part of humanity is poor. True!

The men and women who earn the most money are, for the most part... poor. Does not compute.

You weren't referring to my original sentence at all.

You wrote the men and women who earn the most money are, for the most part, propping up and becoming L.
I countered by saying that the poor, since they ARE the most part of humanity, are propping up and becoming L, too.

Now do you want to knock off the serious hostility you're directing my way, please?

EDIT: This is me, C_W the regular poster sticking up for myself. This isn't a moderator thing and isn't a warning or anything like that.

[23]

If I were a ruler of slaves,
it would serve me greatly
to get my slaves to focus on
the differences in each other...
and to blame each other
for their common feelings
of enslavement...
then for them to see
that their commonality lies
in their enslavement to me.

Two words:
wage slavery.

fwiw, I believe class struggles are the most poignant struggles and that pitting men against women can distract from that, however, by looking at the ways in which women are oppressed we can begin to undo the ways in which we are all oppressed and the ways in which we cooperate with that oppression, too.

When you dine at the table of scraps, it is not surprising to see slaves oppress other slaves for a larger portion of the scraps. It is an endemic condition to accepting the imitations that are imposed by the wage slave masters.

Remove your willingness to accept scraps, and you remove much of the desire to shortchange another slave for a larger portion of them.

The master loves slaves who look to other slaves as the reason for their sorrow.

[norton ash]

[JackRiddler]

On the box last nite Joe Hockey, Kate Ellis and others were all talking about quotas for females in boardrooms.

I dunno if thats the answer, personally I'd prefer less boardrooms full stop, not more women in them. But it was interesting to see such bipartisan support, especially considering the cultural freak out over a woman as PM.

This would not be the magic solution to all things, but I honestly believe it would be a big improvement on a range of "women's issues" as defined in the corporate mindset. (This would hardly include all issues pertaining to women generally, let alone to justice and other human values, but would cover equity of treatment between the sexes by the employer and matters of harrassment and discrimination in the workplace.)

It's a very good idea that I am presuming (you tell me) is being expressed and thus limited by the typical technocratic mindset. To justify such a measure, I would expect that they'd look not for a cross section of stakeholder-women (i.e., including seamstresses and riveters and lucky housewives living downstream from the company drainage pipes) but for "qualified" women who fit the same profile of the present directors, who received Predators' Training (degrees in "Business") at the same schools and who accumulated "experience" enacting rationalization schemes (on the "business" side) or selling arsenic as a vegetable (on the "creative" side), etc. Obviously there are a lot of Margaret Thatchers and Cathie Blacks out there to fill the Lead Lizard positions with an externally female form, but if they had to fill a great many of these positions at once they might run into a shortage and have to pick some human women too.***

In Germany works councils choose almost half of corporate directors from among the company's employees. The majority still lies with ownership, but the presence of a workers' voice with an almost equal turn to speak changes how they are treated. (In some ways, it's more insidious than brilliant for obtaining their buy-in, creating an aristocracy of German labor against the world. At a company like Volkswagen, however, it has meant relatively better treatment of workers abroad. It is no panacea!)

In the States, if Congress were chosen by a lottery of all adults, I believe we'd be incomparably better off in comparison to the present system. It's not my idea of the ideal system of government, but random selection would produce better results than the present one-dollar, one-vote media campaign system and the Perpetual Riot of the Lobbyists at the Capitol. Most of the winners would take their duties very seriously and do their best to learn what they needed to get by. The general American ignorance of the world would become an advantage as they viewed most things with fresh eyes.******

Corporate boardrooms would be very different places if they included representation of all stakeholders: employees, consumers, residents of production site municipalities, local and state governments, people now and in the future (i.e., mechanisms for accounting for the externalized costs, impacts on related industries and the economy at large, at home and abroad) and, most ignored of all, the ecology. The next step would be for these bodies to move beyond "winning" in the narrow fight of the unit they control against its "competitors" within the system as it exists, but to have coordination amongst economic units (by feedback loops, not top-down direction), with a view to creating an equitable and ecological prosperity for all based on meeting the needs of all and minimizing the labor required. (But allowing a free-market sphere beyond that for all those who want to work to accumulate more stuff.)

........................

*** I guess on this board of all places for any readers who don't know me, which is rather unlikely on page 96 or whatever of this thread, I should add that I think of Lead Lizard as a metaphor for the human moral depths, not a reality of shape-shifting demon aliens.

******(I believe it would be a start, it would be at least a quarter of a Revolution, if they randomized committee assignments and picked committee chairs by lottery. The present practice is one of the most obvious corruptions we all suffer, and yet among the most rarely criticized, for it is seen as an immutable fact of life. To change it would not require an amendment or even a law, just a vote on different rules at the start of a Congress. Oh, and a huge and sudden awakening, so never mind.)


.

[charlie meadows]

Now do you want to knock off the serious hostility you're directing my way, please?

Wow.

Wow. Same as it ever was.

Meet your new mod, canadian_watcher.

Pornography for depressives? Impotent maenadic impulse with attendant eunuchs?

Well, thats about enough for me.

On second reading, I guess it was therapy after all.


You may think you are waiting for someone else to solve all of the problems for you and others of a similar persuasion, that it is someone else's fault and someone else's responsibiility, that you are only just one person, that you are really doing the heavy lifting here somehow at RI, in this thread, yada yada yada, but really...

You're waiting for a train.

[barracuda]

Impotent maenadic impulse with attendant eunuchs?

Care to be more specific?

You're waiting for a train.

I don't know about you, but I'm just waiting on a friend.

[JackRiddler]

Madonna's sexual presentation is so mannered it may as well be banana creme pie.

In comparison, with Lucinda Williams, sex seems so proximate that you can practicably smell it.

My opinion of course.

But guys, tell me this isn't just a little bit scary to you?

(BTW, "help me get fucked up" is the censored line.)





She's fuckin great.

Wow thanks.

.

[JackRiddler]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-467390/Househusband-backlash-high-flying-wives-ditch-men-em-em-wanted-stay-home.html#ixzz1FtLHLhSz
Househusband backlash as high-flying wives ditch men they wanted to stay at home

Obvious Warning Signs That No One At RI Should Be Missing:

1) In purporting to characterize 200,000 cases of house-husbands with career wives, the article treats a total of three different stories involving six principals.

2) In all three cases, only the man is interviewed, and his story is presented uncritically, as a tale of the injustices done to him. None of the three villainesses women is interviewed.

3) The article does not include a photo of anyone mentioned. This is not a requirement. However, it includes a photo of models -- hot ones! -- dressed and positioned in exaggerated manner to make a cliche-reinforcing point. This is extremely untrustworthy. (It may also be deceptive to a less sophisticated demographic, who may not absorb all too consciously that this "photo" is no more "real" than an ink-drawn caricature.)

4) Like the photo, the headline is a hysterical editorial.

5) It is said there are 200,000 house-husbands (or heterosexual families in which the male is the primary child-care giver) in the UK. This is the only concrete figure given in an article that claims "thousands" of families are having trouble as a result -- i.e., not due to any other problems with each other, the potential for which is not acknowledged, but as a direct consequence of the role-reversal, which leaves the men feeling useless and turns the women into classically sexist brutes who want their martini at the door and no chit-chat when they get home.

6) No effort is shown to come up with numbers for divorce rates in such households, as opposed to an anecdotally-based guesstimate from a... (drumroll please) divorce lawyer! No comparison is made to the situation in households with more traditional division of labor. If it was too much effort to find good stats (or if they're not available), they could have simply mentioned the general divorce rate as a baseline. They do not.

7) That doesn't mean I think they made up the stories -- far from it. Given the claim of 200,000 such cases, it should be a piece of cake to find three that ended in divorce due to unhappiness with the role-reversal. Or thirty. They could have also easily found three, or thirty, that were perfectly happy with their situations, and compared the two different kinds of cases. No such effort is shown.

8 ) In most newspapers, lifestyle and social trend stories are possibly the most bullshit-laden rubric of all. (At least sports and politics, no matter how distorted, relate to actual events in the real world covered by other papers at the same time, and cannot be manufactured entirely out of an assignment editors' ass.)

9) It's in the Daily Mail, one of the most bullshit-laden newspapers of all -- though hey: For Labour!

Conclusion: Classic bullshit on behalf of the purported male "backlash," that's for sure.

By now, old hat. Which should be #10 on the list.

10) Surely you've seen this thing before.

Now here comes my elitist misanthropy:

If you want to make a point about this, go find real statistics. Or else, studies involving more than three cases, preferably by real scholars (if not academically accredited as sociologists or psychologists who might actually employ valid empirical methodologies to make their points, then at least persons who have authored books on the subject).

And then defend these (since none of that is a guarantee that their findings are worth shit either).

-- Says a former househusband (househusbandry most emphatically not the reason for the divorce, matters relating to children still handled amicably and without conflict years later).

.

[Canadian_watcher]

ah yes, thanks for reminding me of that article, Jack. I had wanted to draw attention to this little bit:

Like Richard and James, [David] feels much of his masculinity and power in the relationship was lost when he gave up his job to become a househusband.

"It is ironic, given that for hundreds of years women have been perceived solely as housewives and mothers, and yet their role has been regarded as essential to society and they have been respected and valued for it," he says.

"But once I gave up my career, I lost prestige both in society and in the eyes of my wife. It was as if I had no value.

"There were times in our marriage when I felt as if I was being treated like a subservient Victorian housewife. I'd be criticised if the washing wasn't hung out exactly how my wife wanted it and she used to check to make sure that I had cleaned the house perfectly, checking for dust and badly-washed plates.

"My wife was a real control freak and she wanted everything to be done perfectly. My standards weren't good enough, even though I had run a house perfectly successfully on my own before I met her. I spent my days cooking and cleaning, as well as doing everything for our daughter."

Really, David, which is it? Have housewives been regarded as essential to society and respected for it for hundreds of years, or as a subservient class of people?

[charlie meadows]

ah yes, thanks for reminding me of that article, Jack. I had wanted to draw attention to this little bit:

Like Richard and James, [David] feels much of his masculinity and power in the relationship was lost when he gave up his job to become a househusband.

"It is ironic, given that for hundreds of years women have been perceived solely as housewives and mothers, and yet their role has been regarded as essential to society and they have been respected and valued for it," he says.

"But once I gave up my career, I lost prestige both in society and in the eyes of my wife. It was as if I had no value.

"There were times in our marriage when I felt as if I was being treated like a subservient Victorian housewife. I'd be criticised if the washing wasn't hung out exactly how my wife wanted it and she used to check to make sure that I had cleaned the house perfectly, checking for dust and badly-washed plates.

"My wife was a real control freak and she wanted everything to be done perfectly. My standards weren't good enough, even though I had run a house perfectly successfully on my own before I met her. I spent my days cooking and cleaning, as well as doing everything for our daughter."

Really, David, which is it? Have housewives been regarded as essential to society and respected for it for hundreds of years, or as a subservient class of people?

Both?!

That you imply those are mutually exclusive shows that you are unable presently to think clearly about the matter at hand.

[23]

Indeed.

Like compliance, subservience is strengthened when you attribute value, appreciation and importance to it.

It's a common method for strengthening subservience.

[Canadian_watcher]

ah yes, thanks for reminding me of that article, Jack. I had wanted to draw attention to this little bit:

Like Richard and James, [David] feels much of his masculinity and power in the relationship was lost when he gave up his job to become a househusband.

"It is ironic, given that for hundreds of years women have been perceived solely as housewives and mothers, and yet their role has been regarded as essential to society and they have been respected and valued for it," he says.

"But once I gave up my career, I lost prestige both in society and in the eyes of my wife. It was as if I had no value.

"There were times in our marriage when I felt as if I was being treated like a subservient Victorian housewife. I'd be criticised if the washing wasn't hung out exactly how my wife wanted it and she used to check to make sure that I had cleaned the house perfectly, checking for dust and badly-washed plates.

"My wife was a real control freak and she wanted everything to be done perfectly. My standards weren't good enough, even though I had run a house perfectly successfully on my own before I met her. I spent my days cooking and cleaning, as well as doing everything for our daughter."

Really, David, which is it? Have housewives been regarded as essential to society and respected for it for hundreds of years, or as a subservient class of people?

Both?!

That you imply those are mutually exclusive shows that you are unable presently to think clearly about the matter at hand.

subservient classes are not also respected classes. that subservience exists in a relationship in the first place demonstrates a power imbalance within the relationship. the power imbalance demonstrates a lack of respect for the inherent, equal worth of both parties within the relationship.

Are you capable of debate without derision?

[barracuda]