What constitutes Misogyny?

[Jeff]

(OT: Jeff, this almost makes up for you not giving us a hug smilie)

Thank justdrew for that. He jumped on Jack's request for a Guy Fawkes emoticon.

As for hugs, we do have this one if you click "View more smilies":

[Jeff]

[

She calls RI pornography for depressives.

So does my husband!

My wife, something similar.

Well, we do have one sexy, sexy century.

[Canadian_watcher]

Actually, 23, that video you posted above does seem to illustrate a level of hatred towards women. That is inasmuch as hate can be unconscious. The video demonstrates that some people become so comfortable with their disdain for others that they don't feel any shame in objectifying, denigrating and harassing those others. That's pretty close to hate, imo.

In my past life, CW, I dealt with many managers and executives.

They exhibited generous portions of condescending, differentiated behavior towards the female members of their staff. It was quite apparent, to me, that they viewed them as subordinate to them.

I also got to know their wives at certain functions. Saw the same transaction between them and their wives.

Did not see evidence of hatred so much, though. Rather, they viewed women as subordinate objects.

Just saying that subordination/objectification is what ails my male counterparts more than hatred.

yeah, I get it. I am having a hard time really finding the line between them, that's all. Like I said in the OP, everyone is going to have their different personal feelings about it. When I have been objectified, I have felt hated.

Actually, 23, that video you posted above does seem to illustrate a level of hatred towards women. That is inasmuch as hate can be unconscious. The video demonstrates that some people become so comfortable with their disdain for others that they don't feel any shame in objectifying, denigrating and harassing those others. That's pretty close to hate, imo.

Don't you think that hate is a stronger emotion than disdain? Hate is obsessive, hate rages, hate is irrational. Disdain, well, meh.

yes, definitely. But you can't "treat someone with hate" as much as you can treat them with disdain. Maybe the one is the manifestation of the other?

[wallflower]

Hammer of Los writes:

The Mind is ultimately free of gender.

I'm skeptical about that. It seems to me that people often think in terms of dichotomies and that gender seems a universal dichotomy for people. It also seems to me that the solution for misogyny as an ideology often proposed is to abandon the dichotomy of gender in favor of an ideology of universal persons. The practical problem with such a solution is that the pretense of no-difference can obscure the disadvantaging of women and girls which result from people actually making a distinction about gender.

[Luposapien]

It seems to me that the line between disdain and hatred is drawn based on one's sense of emotional connection to the person or thing towards whom the feeling (or lack thereof) is being directed. Real, gut-wrenching hatred, whether justified or not, requires that someone feels personally wronged (threatened, betrayed, etc.), and is always most intense when focused on someone or thing for which a person, at a deeper level, feels a strong attraction.

[23]

As an aside, hate, like love, is highly overrated, IMO.

I rarely see hate as the motivator for someone's abusive conduct towards someone else.

Instead, I see insecurity... fueled by the most predominant catalyst for abusive action: fear.

Fear deserves our attention more than hatred, IMO. As the primary instigator of abusive treatment.

The same can be said for subjugating women to men.

Is hatred of women what motivates the Bible's god to subjugate women to men?

I'm inclined to believe that it's fear more than hatred.

We tend to subjugate that which/whom we fear.

[Canadian_watcher]

As an aside, hate, like love, is highly overrated, IMO.

I rarely see hate as the motivator for someone's abusive conduct towards someone else.

Instead, I see insecurity... fueled by the most predominant catalyst for abusive action: fear.

Fear deserves our attention more than hatred, IMO. As the primary instigator of abusive treatment.

word.

[Nordic]

No.

Rhetorical question.

But I do have a new response to the OP.

A misogynist culture is one in which it's so normal to look down on women that no man need feel shame for complacently answering a question about misogyny with a post that represented women exclusively in terms of hackneyed stereotypes (ie -- nurturing and pleasant companions, objects of male sexual desire, emotionally needy and/or bitchy).

As well as one in which he doesn't have to worry that anyone will perceive him as overly emotional when he makes a point of irritably standing by the self-indulgence, vanity and overall disregard for the OP that led him to write a post purportedly about how much he loves women and how diminished misogyny is that reaches its hackneyed and stereotypical conclusions about women's experience by considering it exclusively from the perspective of his own emotional centrality and superiority.

I mean: There they are, raising him, or providing an occasion for him to protect their honor and feel big, or validating how exceptionally and loftily non-hostile-toward-women he is really is by obligingly being petty and catty enough to hate each other, or having no discernible personalities or features apart from boobs, an occasional annoying need to talk and a strong devotion to and/or trust in him. What's not to love? It's almost as if the highest role on earth to which women could aspire was "supporting player in Life, starring A Guy."

And why doesn't he have to worry about that, you may wonder? Because, even though what he wrote was thoughtlessly sexist and the topic justified pointing that out, and the poster who did so didn't do it in particularly angry or hysterical or personal terms, he's a guy. And therefore normal. Whereas she's a woman doing something that would make most guys uncomfortable. And therefore either a bitch or crazy or both.

That's misogyny. It's much too much the rule for it to feel like there even is one. Or to feel like hatred of women, for that matter. But that's what it is. Just your basic, normal hatred (or fear) of women. And it's just about always there, really. You just get too used to it to notice it most of the time.

Kind of a shame, imo.
___________________________

Nordic's no more of a misogynist than I am. That's not what I'm saying. We all live in a misogynist culture. And that is.

Well, if you were a guy, I might call you an asshole for that.

The fact that you call what I wrote "sexist" is just disgraceful, and reflects so extremely poorly on your angry little self that I don't even know what to say to you.

You obviously don't like me, well, that's fine. I really don't care. I don't like you, either, but it has zero to do with your gender. Zero. And, hey, BTW, didn't we all say a dramatic, wrenching goodbye to you a while back? Wait, I think that happened twice. What was that all about? Some need for attention and drama?

Whereas she's a woman doing something that would make most guys uncomfortable. And therefore either a bitch or crazy or both.

What kind of bullshit strawman is that? I mean that's some SERIOUS BULLSHIT.

[barracuda]

Remarkable how the confines and areas of the question are demonstrated by the above exchange. c2w seems to be telling you how she feels about your comments, and you respond by attempting corrections of her perception of them, followed by a series of attacks on her behaviour of several months ago, which I can only read in the context of this discussion as having something to do with "typical" female behaviors - mostly because, as you suggest, you have no idea what that was about, except possibly "attention-seeking" or "drama". All of which has zero to do with gender.

[Canadian_watcher]

hold on a sec! Nordic, it's never nice to be the one whose argument gets picked to pieces especially when the post was something that I'm sure you felt was gentle and unimpeachable. BUT... she has some points that bear consideration.

Mostly I agree with her that you were pretty glib making one of your points. Here I go putting words in other people's mouths again, but correct me if I got this wrong. You seemed to say "Hey! I like black people! In fact I like black people more than black people like each other!"

Did I type 'black people?' I meant women. (aside: I am not comparing the struggles of race to those of gender, I am replacing the word to show how awful it sounds when applied to another group) Not to mention that I think your premise is wrong in the first place. I know lots of women that like women. This whole 'women naturally hate each other due to biological competitiveness' thing is almost entirely mythological.

And I can see how your response of "No." to her insightful post would be taken as dismissive and kind of, in a way, illustrative of her points in the first place.

EDIT: barracuda and I agree.

Edit 2: this is not coming from a place of hostility.. not from me. Try not to get your back up.

[JackRiddler]

Ah yes, recalling the classics...

Un-PC Men Are Attacked By Bitches for No Reason.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=18613

[Nordic]

Okay, I've now read the rest of the thread, after posting an immediate response to C2W's flamebait.

She calls RI pornography for depressives.

That's just fucking hilarious. That should be on the title page of the site itself.


Part of what's annoying about threads like these is the generalizations that automatically follow. Like "men" are some homogenous mass who all agree on how people should be treated. A lot of men are assholes. Probably a majority of them. And depending on what circles you travel in, that percentage can go wildly up or wildly down.

If you're talking business executives, yeah, the percentage who see women as weaker beings that they can control in their playing field is probably approaching 100%. When they go home it's a different story. I don't know how many guys, even in my world, who, when the phone rings and it's their wife, they say "it's the boss calling". At home it's usually the women who control just about everything.

A hell of a lot of men are competetive creatures who put down, and walk all over, anyone weaker than they, regardless of gender. If you're a weak male in the same situation, you're gonna get stomped all over, ridiculed, subjugated, all of it, because it's not about gender it's about strength and weakness. Most men are tribal creatures who respond to an alpha male and the resulting heirarchy. It's extremely difficult for a woman to become an alpha male. These kinds of men are usually looking for a weakness in the alpha male, and if the alpha male is a female, there are automatically a lot of perceived "weaknesses" not the least of which is usually physical.

Men really aren't that complicated. That's where women often go very wrong in trying to figure is out. Most of us are pretty fucking simple. Think of dogs, think of a wolf pack, and that's how we interact with each other for the most part.

I tend to disagree with Jeff's post about the origins of men's fear of women. Although I think my theory is related, and that's that women control men, and men KNOW this and they resent it.

Men are brought up to control not only the world around them, but other men, and the environment itself. AND their own emotions. It's all about controlling yourself, controlling nature around you, controlling other guys in your tribe in your climbing of the "ladder of success". So women can make men lose control of their emotions, lose control of themselves physically, etc.

Women can make men cry, fly into rages, have utterly uncontrollable hard-ons (which are damned embarrassing sometimes) and can make us completely lose ourselves to the orgasm.

There's part of men that resent this. Some more than others.

I know a guy who recently confided in me that he never comes inside a woman. Even when he's using a condom. He never wants to "give her" that. Yes, he's a very weird guy, but on the outside he's about as straight an arrow as you'd ever want to see.

Men know that women control them. Some men have a problem with that. So some men take it out on the women in their lives when and where they can. If it's in the workplace, they want to be clear that they control the woman who works under them. They also make it extremely clear to the men who work under them that they control them, too.

That's what women forget and usually fail to notice. Men treat other men in the workplace in an extremely dominant fashion, too, even to the point of joking about fucking them up the ass (constantly sometimes). Hell, if you play Halo, after you kill somebody you can hump their dead body. It's a guy thing. Yes, it's disgusting. Guys mostly think it's funny.

If there's one thing I can point out to women (and I know I'll get slammed for this, but I'm gonna get slammed no matter what I say in this thread), it's that where women and men go wrong so often, at least in sofar as how women respond, is that women take everything personally. I mean, everything, word choice, tone of voice, the look on your face, your body language, whatever. They're always trying to "read" us, and really it's not that complicated. Usually we say what we think and that's that. We're not that complicated.

My wife has gotten mad at me for washing dishes. At these times she thinks I'm making a statement by washing them, that I'm trying to communicate to her that I'm fed up with her not doing the dishes, and am therefore, martyr-like, doing the dishes. I'm just washing some freaking dishes!

The other is that women wonder why we don't like to "talk". Well, this thread is a perfect example. I "talked" and was called a sexist for what I said, not only that, I was thrown a flaming strawman that accused me of thinking women were "bitches" and whatnot.

It's better just to STFU. That's how most men look at it. Just don't say anything, because it WILL be used against you, no matter what you say.

[23]

Remarkable how the confines and areas of the question are demonstrated by the above exchange. c2w seems to be telling you how she feels about your comments, and you respond by attempting corrections of her perception of them, followed by a series of attacks on her behaviour of several months ago, which I can only read in the context of this discussion as having something to do with "typical" female behaviors - mostly because, as you suggest, you have no idea what that was about, except possibly "attention-seeking" or "drama". All of which has zero to do with gender.

Re. the above...



and...

[Searcher08]

Remarkable how the confines and areas of the question are demonstrated by the above exchange. c2w seems to be telling you how she feels about your comments, and you respond by attempting corrections of her perception of them, followed by a series of attacks on her behaviour of several months ago, which I can only read in the context of this discussion as having something to do with "typical" female behaviors - mostly because, as you suggest, you have no idea what that was about, except possibly "attention-seeking" or "drama". All of which has zero to do with gender.

Oh just stop It!, you great big Girly Man, you!

[Canadian_watcher]

oooh Nordic. Nordic nordic nordic.
I like you, and I don't want to fight with you. And I'm way too tired to dissect that immense post that has just .. well.. SO much ammunition in it. Mostly it's because none of what you say is indecent, so .. I'll leave it be.

the one thing I will say though it that it's absolutely unfair to claim that you'd "get slammed no matter what you said." There are lots of males who have posted on this thread already who didn't get slammed, and it's not because they agreed with every point the women made.

I really hate that I started this now, although hopefully we will all find some enlightenment from it eventually.