This'll be a long one, because I've been doing stuff all day, which for the long term unemployed like me is very inconvenient. Therefore I offer a mammoth post on the subject of misogyny, sort of, responding to other people talking about misogyny-not-really.
Wombaticus Rex wrote:Really, I think treating the noun "women" as if it has any inherent, objective qualities is right where it starts.
Women is a word of specific use, as is men. As we've seen you use the word men, I will consider you a hypocrite and disregard the rest of your statement.
JackRiddler wrote:Where it starts is surely in childhood conditioning - differential treatment and valuation based on sex, well beyond anything that could be come from biological differences alone. Categorical fallacies are always a part of the answer, but the categories are generated in the first place by a social consensus.
Well, on the one hand there is plentiful evidence of inherent biological difference in the brain having and effect on behaviour from toddlerhood. On the other hand I firmly believe anyone can change their brain through the application of conscious effort. Of course, this is nothing to do with misogyny. Maybe with how misogyny, were it not almost extinct in the west, were to come about in individuals, but this is not in itself misogyny.
I've come across all these websites being linked to before. Would you like more links? I'll put some at the bottom of the post, I've got a list somewhere from when I was most active in the online anti-feminist community. If you can find any I haven't seen they'll be new ones. I hear mensnewsdaily has shut down. Good, bunch of Tories. Unfortunately so has ukmm, which had a refreshing tendency to focus on specific issues.
As for those above, the second is just a wiki page. A quite objective assessment, simply listing significant writers, issues which the men's movement focuses on, that sort of thing.
The first, I think he probably used to post on soc.men on the Usenet. I say this because it was always being harrassed by feminists, having originally been set up, as was alt.feminism, when soc.women and soc.feminism went moderated and restricted discussion of gender issues. Certain posters, after hearing once too often the argument that women are less violent than men, that women commiting Domestic Violence must be acting in self-defence and so on started posting stories about women commiting violent crimes, and as far as I can tell haven't stopped since. This focus on trivia is clear on that site. Cite studies on domestic violence, child custody, wage disparities, cite egregious imbalance in the media, but don't post endless stories about some woman in Oklahoma killing her kid &c., it's unproductive.
Also the link at the top of the thread to "The thinking Man's Minefield", has a page called "what is a misogynist". For anyone who want to see what an alleged misogynist thinks one is. I have no opinion on it.
barracuda wrote:All's I know is some other women better chime in, 'cause as a guy, I can hardly claim authoriativeness in my response.
Are you not a human capable of reasoned argument? The ideas of a woman on the nature of misogyny are no more valid than those of a man, or even those of a misogynist. You can't claim authoritativeness only because you have only your own opinion, which doesn't embrace all possible views and eliminate those in conflict with established fact, not because of your self-assumed male inferiority.
Canadian_watcher wrote:sure, sure.. but who gets the money from the cosmetics and fashion industries. Even women are quick to believe that it is other women. Is it? I don't know that.. I can't find the info.
Pharma cos., shareholders, politicians they lobby, models they hire, film stars who advertise their stuff, Ukrainian doctors who murder new-borns then lie to their parents about their death to harvest body-parts, American hospitals which sell foreskins to have the fibroblasts extracted for use in face creams... saying it's women or saying it's men is nonsense. It is simply rich people. The same people who make money from any other industry.
I'm sorry now that I pointed that out, since two of you were eager to jump on the 'women pimp themselves' bandwagon.
Women pimp themselves, men pimp their cars. Both waste their money, look like idiots and shorten their life expectancy by doing so. Me, I stick to prettifying my desktop.
Canadian_watcher wrote:I looked at the site you linked to. That is not misogyny, IMHO. How could anyone deny the very profound effect absent fathers have on their sons? I agree that the nurturing boys need can not come exclusively from mothers/women. They need fathers. I agree that men are left in a vacuum .. what does it mean to be a man? It has become impossible for them to know that answer. Some might respond to that as if it is a positive: "Great! We can reform men! We can end violence and possessiveness!" Bullshit. Men need fathers or other strong male role-models and I'm not talking about Gordon Gekko or any rap stars or football players here.
But now we're getting into male-centered issues, which isn't what I'm asking about.
Men need self-respect and self-discipline just like women do. Biological fathers are the most reliable source thereof, and one of the main issues of the men's movement is that of access for fathers to their children, restraint of women's right to take their children to far off parts, stopping the belief that men are checkbooks to provide "child support" rather than proper support for children, a presumption of joint custody whenever possible, and so on. Organised feminists have uniformly opposed these moves.
I agree with everything written above, in fact, except that it isn't related to misogyny. The rappers and Gordon Gekkos of this world are the misogynists, although as they also hate most men the term loses some of its meaning. But they hate women, on the surface at least, for being women and men for other reasons. But they shouldn't be viewed as the wrongful father figures, but the wronged sons. They are the diseased minds produced by a diseased situation in their youth.
Canadian_watcher wrote:To be more specific about the first link.. I'll select the post about the CDN infanticide ruling first off.
My personal feeling about the validity of the defense of infanticide aside, the fact is that that defense exists in law. The law was not created by women, but by the ruling class, which at the time of the law's creation was made up of men, exclusive of one woman, I believe (Agnes MacPhail).
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-188057879.htmlThe web site you linked to makes it seem like this is 'just another way women have it over men' seeing that it is an men's advocacy web site.
It is an example of a defence women have in court that men don't. Clearly it is unjust to be particularly lenient specifically because you kill your own children. Certain members of the Men's Movement have the compulsion to catalogue such things, it gets very annoying. But the website is less sexist than you assume, they don't care if it was women who made the law, that doesn't concern them. Only that they don't like the law.
The second article I'll address from that site is: Miss. mom charged after son's body found in oven
There is absolutely no mention of a father in this article, so what this has to do with men's activism is beyond me, unless of course it is to simply portray women as demons. This article achieves that, handily, for those who are unable to separate the actions of one woman from those of the rest of the female population.
Bingo, ish. Like I say, what started out as an attempt to disprove the angelic nature of women has become a compulsion for some, there is no logical reason for this story to be on that site, it just is.
Why did I start the thread if not to debate Stephen? To debate the rest of you. Stephen is a lost cause, any woman can see that. The rest of you though, that's different.
As with barracuda above, I reject the contention that woman have better vision that men. You, my dear, are a sexist. So is barracuda.
JackRiddler wrote:Practically speaking, the intent sometimes may be benign. The effect is to encourage self-hatred among real human women and to get men and women generally measuring real women as wanting against the image. It's also ironic because super-man images don't (as often) translate into standards that men are supposed to meet. They aren't (as much) set up as ideals for the gender generally. But the super-woman images are specifically gendered and applied as the ideals to strive for.
You don't think the selfless hero thing is set up as an ideal for men generally? You think the action girl is a more important psycho-social motif than the badass wisecracking action hero? Or would you be any more accepting of a film poster with a fat miserable girl on it? This isn't misogyny, it's advertising. IT is a great crime which is a pollutant to the psyche of all mankind, but it isn't specifically targetted at women.
compared2what? wrote:Hatred of women as a cultural characteristic -- ie, in a misogynist culture, women are regarded as lesser, degraded, and simply not-quite-right-or-normal beings by most people, both male and female.
In which case we don't live in one, as far as I'm concerned. I suppose I could be parlaying my own attitude to women onto society as a whole.
Sexism = discrimination against women by the culture or an individual that's not necessarily representative of strongly held views if the latter. I mean, it might be. But it might just be situational, too. Like a battle-of-the-sexes-type thing, or whatever.
Sexism = defining a word which means discrimination on the basis of sex to mean discrimination AGAINST WOMEN on the basis of sex.
23 wrote:
Hmm. Is that actually a woman or a sex-doll?
Searcher08 wrote:Stephen's views might be really different than the vast majority of posters here, however, within the debate paradigm (cos that is where you want this, rather than exploration), describing someone as a 'lost cause' in this context comes across as "I cant engage him in debate without being pw0n3d". Seriously - he thinks that because he has thought about it, not because he is some Archie Bunker character.
I get that a lot.
compared2what? wrote: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).
I'm curious as to what you think about me. Not my political positions, but rather the interpersonal approach which I take to my interlocutrices, which I believe may be a real word.
wallflower wrote:Wow as a middle-aged white American male I know I'm stepping on thin ice trying to participate in this thread.
Don't worry, dear. This board is extremely hostile to women and therefore you obviously have nothing to worry about. While we're on the subject of who we are, I'm a young white English man with a fondness for rational argument and a disdain for formal education.
Economic systems seem excruciatingly designed to disfavor women.
In what sense? Ignoring the article in the other thread about how women are less likely to be unemployed, more likely to be university educated and so forth, ignoring that a capitalist system is designed to disfavour all poor people, in what way is out current economic system specifically designed to disfavour women?
As a guy I am too often oblivious to misogyny.
Alternatively as someone obviously caring about gender equality, as do we all, and who thinks women are worse off than men due to his cultural indoctrination, as don't we all, you may be overly zealous in seeking out misogyny, seeing it where it isn't and mentally objecting so as to lessen your subconscious guilt at being born into the alleged oppressor class.
Third, looking at gender as a fundamental way of negotiating through the world, misogyny may entail strongly identifying male gender with good and any other identified with bad.
I would argue that feminism, a gendered name for a gendered concept, reinforces the practice of seeing oneself primarily as a member of ones sex, the oppressed sex feminism supposedly seeks to liberate or the oppressor sex pressured to join up with feminism, a romantic notion to be Schindler. I don't see myself primarily as a man, not a woman, I see myself as a socialist, an poor person, a Christian, a football fan, a linux user, and several other things before being a man. A man I am but the mere fact of not being a woman isn't the defining aspect of my life.
Searcher08 wrote:The case of the Sky Sports reporters who were fired in the UK, who were a pair of deeply repulsive frikken tools
reveals a lot about this. The side of it I most detest is around information, and how they ignored anything from a particular female colleague, even if it was to their advantage, it had to come from their boss. Fuckers.
I'd just like to point out the most important, largely over looked aspect of that controversy: we finally found a linesman who proerly enforces the offside rule. The fact that she's a female linesmen is irrelevant, to me if not to the people who buy pictures for page 3 in some newspaper I don't read.
I also passionately disagree that woman cannot be misogynists (to me that is coming from the same bollocks that says black people cannot be racist).
I offer barracuda as an example, a man-hater par excellence, so much so as to exclude men from the same level of cognitive development as women, but also male.
barracuda wrote:Nordic wrote:There are men in my life I trust 100%.
Of course there are. But generally speaking, do you trust men?
I don't trust men, women, or you. Jesus normally, although I occasionally wonder what he might be up to. Myself, sometimes.
Right, back at the top I said I would post links. Some of these I don't approve of at all, others I quite like, ejfi for example.
http://feministhate.tripod.com/id35.htmhttp://www.ihatewomen.com/http://www.rulymob.com/http://www.menweb.org/http://www.menstribune.com/http://www.fact.on.ca/news/news0303/mnd030311.htmhttp://www.infowars.com/articles/nwo/ro ... lation.htmhttp://www.backlash.com/book/sexism.htmlhttp://web.archive.org/web/200008172324 ... /~s323363/http://www.coeffic.demon.co.uk/http://counterfem.blogspot.com/http://hereticalsex.blogspot.com/http://petepatriarch.wordpress.com/http://www.jtest28.com/Anti-feminismpage.htmlhttp://www.ejfi.org/http://www.sonic.net/~msnyder/per/Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible. -- Lawrence of Arabia
