What constitutes Misogyny?

[82_28]

What with it being Sunday and all, I just thought I would humbly bring up I just got home from this:





Can't recommend the fellowship enough.

[barracuda]

Really? That's news to me. And I'm surprised, if it's true.

It works the same way for men. We're taught to keep our women happy. It's very important to keep them happy, at all costs.

A slightly different viewpoint: men are taught from birth to keep other men happy, or face the wrath of the system they control and that controls them. If making women happy happens to happen, it is an after-thoughtical by-product, if that. If your personal non-loser status and self-image is balanced on the point of making money and making your career fly, then it's generally not a woman you need to please in order to maintain. And by "generally not", I mean never.

Firstly you assume the professional sphere to be the only one of importance, as if no psychological health or happiness lay in inter-personal and social relations.

Secondly, you assert that no man has ever had a female boss. Fuck it, I've got a female boss.

Firstly, you assume I'm speaking in a vaccum. I'm not. I'm responding to Nordic's upthread assertion of how emotionally hurtful it is to criticize a man for his economic situation, his job, and his income. So try and keep up, if your going to respond to my comments made to others on the thread.

Secondly, what does the gender of your particular boss have to do with anything? I mean, aside from your general overiding resentfulness of women evidenced in virtually very single post on this and every similar thread which eventually adds up, in retrospect, to a pathological condition, albeit one that is merely a mirror of a slighly less diluted, but far more acted upon condition which defines our culture.

The reason that virtually all women in the United States from every walk of life are stone-guaranteed to be familiar with those concerns and very likely to be sympathetic to them is that girls and women are explicitly taught -- including as a part of their formal education -- to regard ever-mindful awareness of the major ego needs of men as inseparable from the female condition.

Not one of c2w's finest moments, also not connected in any way I can see to what we've been talking about.

You seem constitutionally incapable of looking her reality in the face, either.

What constitutes misogyny? Simply review this thread for the answer.
Spoiler:Blindness is part of the answer.

Perhaps you could be less oblique.

I'm not being "oblique" at all. I'm telling you in a very straightforward manner that you have not and perhaps cannot sincerely confront c2w's perspective, as your non-response to me here seems to demonstrate.

[Canadian_watcher]

So what I've done here is present to very most anti-female law I could find in England, DV-wise, and it still specifically forbids the use of violence against one's wife. If c_w would like to present evidence of a law in England, or for that matter any English speaking nation, which renders wife-beating legal, I would be interested to see it. The medieval legal position of women is quite fascinating.

Here's one for England:

In History of the Pleas of the Crown, Hale made the following classic statement:
101

But the husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful
wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up
herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract.

As a direct result of this passage, no prosecutions for marital rape were brought in England for the
next 200 years. Status as a husband provided absolute immunity from criminal proceedings that
would otherwise result in the death penalty or life imprisonment. Whether and to what extent a
prosecution for rape would have been available even before Hale's statement is certainly debatable.
Some have argued that Hale simply outlined the law at the time, and in fact erred in favour of being
somewhat restrictive in favour of the wife.
102

101
Hale, History of the Pleas of the Crown, supra, at p. 629. Hale's classic study was written around
1670, but was not published until 1736.
102
See David Lanham, "Hale, Misogyny and Rape" supra, at pp. 153-6; and see R. v. Lord Audley
(1631), 3 St. Tr. 401, where the accused was convicted for assisting another in the rape of his own..(page drops off)
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE OFFENCE OF RAPE
Bruce A. MacFarlane, Q.C.
Deputy Minister of Justice
Deputy Attorney General for the
Province of Manitoba

http://www.canadiancriminallaw.com/arti ... f_Rape.pdf

And Canada:

This tradition was abandoned when Canada enacted the first criminal code in the British
Commonwealth. Section 266 of the 1892 Criminal Code defined rape in the following manner:214

"Rape is the act of a man having carnal knowledge of a woman who is not his wife
without her consent, or with consent which has been extorted by threats or fear of
bodily harm, or obtained by personating the woman's husband, or by false and
fraudulent representation as to the nature and quality of the act."

The elements of this offence remained largely intact until 1983,(215) when Parliament enacted
legislation reclassifying the offence from rape to a sexual assault

[Canadian_watcher]

What with it being Sunday and all, I just thought I would humbly bring up I just got home from this:





Can't recommend the fellowship enough.

What with it being Sunday? The day of the Lord?
Men's Group. In a misogyny thread? you see no problem with this?

edit: on re-reading, that sounds much more defensive than I intended! I'm just messin.. sorta.. a little context would be helpful though.

[crikkett]

It's stupid to make absurd assertions without a basis in fact, but you're doing that.

*cough*lookinamirror*cough*

I've provided facts. If you'd like evidence for any of them just say. Always happy to oblige.

That's funny, when Canadian Watcher asked you for evidence you responded thus:

On the grounds both of extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence and of affirmative statements needing to be proven, as it is impossible to prove a negative, the burden of proof doesn't lie with me.

So I'll second her request, perhaps you're happy to oblige me

By the way, American Statute Law from the 1600's won't do the job.

Editing to provide the bit that Stephen may choose to substantiate. Statements #2 and #3 are clearly assertions, not fact.

The fact is (1)domestic violence against women has never been legal, and has always been grounds for divorce back when divorce needed special grounds. A situation analogous to that (2)prevalent today, where men who are victims of violence can be arrested simply because they are physically larger, for example, has never existed for women. (3)The police were once negligent, but they never formed an actively hostile force to female victims.

Actually - don't do it for me Stephen, I'm tired of this thread.

[charlie meadows]

Assertion not grounded in fact: To the truly androgynous, the eternal masculine and the eternal feminine polarities engender pathos equally.

[wallflower]

The suggestion to get a feminist book, and the particular suggestion "Revolution from Within" got me searching around the Internet. I found a long list at Good Reads "Best Feminist Books" http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/62.Best_Feminist_Books?page=1

From that list noted a link to Jack Holland's book, "Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice" which I'd never heard of before. The Web site http://www.jackholland.net/index.php provides some short excerpts from the book.

With my Amazon search I looked at a few books which seemed might be good introductions to feminism. As is my habit I clicked to read some of the 1-star reviews. Not surprising to find most of these reviews written mostly by men. The excerpts of Holland's book didn't "wow" me, but see advantages to looking at the subject of misogyny over history, and for that matter for taking a historical view in re feminism. What the 1-star reviews of the feminist books I looked at at Amazon seemed to have in common was the complaint: Women don't treat me right. It seems that the idea that ones idea of what's right treatment of men has some historical context seems strange to these 1-star reviewers.

I identify as a feminist. What this thread makes clear to me is that while I've identified as a feminist since I was a young adult I've certainly not paid my dues. For example I don't have a ready answer for what's a good first book on feminism. I've got to do some more homework.

That said I will offer a book suggestion, and the book is online, which while not about feminism, seems to me to offer something useful in how we think about the way things ought to be--how for example women ought to treat men and vice versus--and how an individual person can make changes. Maybe it's way off topic, but "Cultural Software" by Jack Balkin is an interesting read http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/cs.htm

Misogyny as a topic certainly can be usefully thought about as an ideology. I must admit that when I was first prompted by this thread to think about it my approach was more along the lines of thinking of it as an individual psychological pathology. The 1-star reviewers of feminist books at Amazon strike me as missing the point by criticizing the books on the basis of not liking how women treat them. I think my attempt to locate misogyny in individuals suffers from the same sort of myopic thinking their reviews make obvious to me.

Anyhow while surely many will not agree with how Balkin attempts to characterize "ideology" I think his book is very useful for identifying ways to think about the Gordian knot of relationships which inhabit our thinking.

[annie aronburg]

Nordic, Nordic Nordic, dude, just pick one, single, 2nd wave feminist text and read it. Please dude, if for only your daughter, it won't hurt you, it may very well help her.

Willow, in all seriousness, I could do that, but it would fall upon deaf ears in her case. She would not be remotely interested. Perhaps when she's in college and isn't just interested in her social life and shopping for clothes ..... And she's got a lot of homework, too, that she HAS to do .....

It's frustrating with her because she has father issues (due to her biological father) and although she has only been on one "sort-of" date and has never had a boyfriend, the issues are manifesting themselves already in some powerful ways as far as her relationships with boys, even as superficial as they are right now.

Having once been a teenage female, I can assure you that even the super-shallow ones from Southern California, have, you know, inner lives.

[Searcher08]

Fer shure, fer shure!

[wintler2]

Is that a tangled way of saying you overlook contrary evidence?

What the hell are you talking about?

Your text, read it again:

I feel that if I was to lament rape, while devoting most of my words to pointing out how many false accusations there are and how they shouldn't be allowed to abuse the system, without even supporting any sort of legal action against rape it wouldn't be seen as a great feminist statement on my part.

You were trying to justify being unbalanced/ignoring contrary evidence, remember? nice smokescreen, aping a feminist POV and all, but: bzzzzz, fail!

[wintler2]

Books that helped me...
Four ways to forgiveness, Ursula Le Guerin
Fire and ice, Andrea Dworkin
Woman at point Zero, Narwal Al Saadawi

[Canadian_watcher]

Is that a tangled way of saying you overlook contrary evidence?

What the hell are you talking about?

Your text, read it again:

I feel that if I was to lament rape, while devoting most of my words to pointing out how many false accusations there are and how they shouldn't be allowed to abuse the system, without even supporting any sort of legal action against rape it wouldn't be seen as a great feminist statement on my part.

You were trying to justify being unbalanced/ignoring contrary evidence, remember? nice smokescreen, aping a feminist POV and all, but: bzzzzz, fail!

i am really glad you called him on that.

[Canadian_watcher]

Editing to provide the bit that Stephen may choose to substantiate. Statements #2 and #3 are clearly assertions, not fact.

The fact is (1)domestic violence against women has never been legal, and has always been grounds for divorce back when divorce needed special grounds. A situation analogous to that (2)prevalent today, where men who are victims of violence can be arrested simply because they are physically larger, for example, has never existed for women. (3)The police were once negligent, but they never formed an actively hostile force to female victims.

Actually - don't do it for me Stephen, I'm tired of this thread.

I hope you'll reconsider. ... not the part about waiting for logical argument from some posters, but about not continuing to contribute in this thread. (edit: I know, it's not exactly what you said but that's how I took it.) Your voice is valuable to the discussion.

[marycarnival]

Books that helped me...
Four ways to forgiveness, Ursula Le Guerin
Fire and ice, Andrea Dworkin
Woman at point Zero, Narwal Al Saadawi

Four Ways to Forgiveness is an amazing book...author's name is LeGuin, tho

Another novel that might be of interest is The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.

[JackRiddler]

Nordic, Nordic Nordic, dude, just pick one, single, 2nd wave feminist text and read it. Please dude, if for only your daughter, it won't hurt you, it may very well help her.

Willow, in all seriousness, I could do that, but it would fall upon deaf ears in her case. She would not be remotely interested. Perhaps when she's in college and isn't just interested in her social life and shopping for clothes ..... And she's got a lot of homework, too, that she HAS to do .....

It's frustrating with her because she has father issues (due to her biological father) and although she has only been on one "sort-of" date and has never had a boyfriend, the issues are manifesting themselves already in some powerful ways as far as her relationships with boys, even as superficial as they are right now.

I think Willow didn't say you should get your daughter to read it or have a reading circle with her, rather that you should pick just one, single 2nd wave book and read it yourself.