What constitutes Misogyny?

[Stephen Morgan]

Of course I'm not inclined to denounce him as barbaric out of hand either.

okay, here's a good example of where Stephen Morgan is an off the rails misogynist.

In response to whether or not it is misogynistic to throw acid into the face of a woman who won't marry you, this is the closest he can come to saying it is a bad act. This is the extent to which he will go to NOT criticize a man's bad actions against a woman ... because he is a bigoted hate monger.

people, stop engaging with this (I have no noun that would be acceptable.)

I rather assumed that throwing acid into someone's face is something I wouldn't have to specifically state to be a bad thing. I just wanted to look at the issue of origins. But I suppose someone who thinks saying women are inherently morally superior is a form of misogyny is likely to see misogyny anywhere they look. I just try to understand the origins of evil acts and accept the human nature of the perpetrators, rather than just concluding that they're evil and going no further.

[charlie meadows]

Also, as we are in a thread on gender issues and misogyny, the effect of relative premature birth on the mother/child/father relationship and notions of masculinity and femininity.

Charlie this is a huge area of itself. I'm thinking distortions of the Oedipus/Electra complexes, -ie absent father so the boy's rivalrous and sexual impulses both get directed towards the mother. But I'm not getting a vivid image of how exactly that would work yet.

How about you? Any thoughts?

Nothing so psychological, but the somatic which informs it. Again, consider how the relative helplessness of the offspring might affect male and female human stereotypes. I don't know that I have an opinion on the matter, but my intuition tells me that there might be a connection. I was looking for reading material, hence my query. Thanks for Grof, which in turn led me to his sources.

[Plutonia]

Also I grabbed this from the "Who Killed the Deputy" thread because of the brilliant subtlety of it's implied paradox and Morgan's question is in context to the application of law:

"To live outside the law you must be honest". that's an imperative, a commandment if you will."
v.k.

- to live within the law requires dishonesty?

You are drawing an invalid conclusion. If vanlose kid had said "only by living outside the law can you be honest", then you would be correct in your conclusion. By the way, what is the brilliant subtlety of its implied paradox. It was too subtle for me. Thank you.

Perhaps.

If you reverse the sentence, the implicate is made explicate.

"To live outside the law you must be honest"

"To live within the law you must be dishonest."

"America" (Canada and other nations too of course) celebrates it's supposed "rule of law" social order, and yet it, an entity, it defies it's own laws as a matter of course. It's a paradox we don't allow into consciousness because it's too threatening, making all of us complicit when we avow to our personal lawfulness and that of the states, when what we see and experience is lawlessness; "the law favours the rich" = lawlessness.

[Plutonia]

There is no Fluffy only Zuul.

Lol! Quite right!

[charlie meadows]

Also I grabbed this from the "Who Killed the Deputy" thread because of the brilliant subtlety of it's implied paradox and Morgan's question is in context to the application of law:

"To live outside the law you must be honest". that's an imperative, a commandment if you will."
v.k.

- to live within the law requires dishonesty?

You are drawing an invalid conclusion. If vanlose kid had said "only by living outside the law can you be honest", then you would be correct in your conclusion. By the way, what is the brilliant subtlety of its implied paradox. It was too subtle for me. Thank you.

Perhaps.

If you reverse the sentence, the implicate is made explicate.

"To live outside the law you must be honest"

"To live within the law you must be dishonest."

"America" (Canada and other nations too of course) celebrates it's supposed "rule of law" social order, and yet it, an entity, it defies it's own laws as a matter of course. It's a paradox we don't allow into consciousness because it's too threatening, making all of us complicit when we avow to our personal lawfulness and that of the states, when what we see and experience is lawlessness; "the law favours the rich" = lawlessness.

I'm sorry, Plutonia. It's basic syllogistic logic. The statement (to live outside the law you must be honest) is simple, and it does not exclude in and of itself the possibility of acting honestly within the law.

[Plutonia]

This isn't the usual reaction PEOPLE have to other PEOPLE. Or even to THINGS, for that matter.

Actually, it is.

How many times have you ever heard of someone throwing acid onto the screen of a 50 inch LED television because they can't have it??????????

Never, but I' have heard of people destroying all sorts of things, just so that someone else couldn't have it. that is common as dirt. And people kill other people for money (including corporations and governments) so that they can have desirable things.

[Plutonia]

Also I grabbed this from the "Who Killed the Deputy" thread because of the brilliant subtlety of it's implied paradox and Morgan's question is in context to the application of law:

"To live outside the law you must be honest". that's an imperative, a commandment if you will."
v.k.

- to live within the law requires dishonesty?

You are drawing an invalid conclusion. If vanlose kid had said "only by living outside the law can you be honest", then you would be correct in your conclusion. By the way, what is the brilliant subtlety of its implied paradox. It was too subtle for me. Thank you.

Perhaps.

If you reverse the sentence, the implicate is made explicate.

"To live outside the law you must be honest"

"To live within the law you must be dishonest."

"America" (Canada and other nations too of course) celebrates it's supposed "rule of law" social order, and yet it, an entity, it defies it's own laws as a matter of course. It's a paradox we don't allow into consciousness because it's too threatening, making all of us complicit when we avow to our personal lawfulness and that of the states, when what we see and experience is lawlessness; "the law favours the rich" = lawlessness.

I'm sorry, Plutonia. It's basic syllogistic logic. The statement (to live outside the law you must be honest) is simple, and it does not exclude in and of itself the possibility of acting honestly within the law.

Okay. You are right. Just an interesting thought that caught my fancy; you know trying it on, seeing if it answers. I did state it as a question first. As in hmmm... ????

[Plutonia]

Also, as we are in a thread on gender issues and misogyny, the effect of relative premature birth on the mother/child/father relationship and notions of masculinity and femininity.

Charlie this is a huge area of itself. I'm thinking distortions of the Oedipus/Electra complexes, -ie absent father so the boy's rivalrous and sexual impulses both get directed towards the mother. But I'm not getting a vivid image of how exactly that would work yet.

How about you? Any thoughts?

Nothing so psychological, but the somatic which informs it. Again, consider how the relative helplessness of the offspring might affect male and female human stereotypes. I don't know that I have an opinion on the matter, but my intuition tells me that there might be a connection. I was looking for reading material, hence my query. Thanks for Grof, which in turn led me to his sources.

So you are going to come back and present you findings, i hope?

[Stephen Morgan]

And wintler, will you please desist in drive-by snipes at Morgan.

He is a least participating in the discussion, while I would characteristic what you are doing as disrupting.

And if you think that by "attacking him", you are "protecting us women" from "his hate", you would be wrong on all three counts.

I disagree and I support the "attacks," actually, since Morgan is fond of depositing demon seed into all manner of threads.

I've specifically tried not to get involved in any sort of feminist debate in other threads. The matriarchy thread, I considered a big long debunking post about Gimbutas and so on, but I refrained. The Economic Aspects of Love thread, a string of feminist propaganda articles, I held back. In fact in both of those threads I posted articles I disagreed with in a conciliatory spirit, and because I like to be interesting even if it means posting things I don't like. Even in other threads there are plenty of things I could disagree with, as the whole board is suffused with feminist orthodoxy and unexamined sexism, but I try to keep discussion of such topics in this thread here, so I try to ignore most of it.

Still, attack away if you must. I won't be responding to wintler any more, though, at least unless he comes up with something more interesting to say than to call me a troll in every post, with the occasional leavening of other insults about masculine self-pity and so on. He demonstrates a total lack of interest in actual engagement, so I shall desist from feeding the wintler.

I'd rather wintler attack him ONLY based on this thread, rather referring to the wind thread, but that's Wintler's prerogative imo.

[charlie meadows]

Okay. You are right. Just an interesting thought that caught my fancy; you know trying it on, seeing if it answers. I did state it as a question first. As in hmmm... ????

It sounded like an innocent question to me.

BTW (and I had to look it up of course) technically speaking it's called...

Denying the antecedent: the consequent in an indicative conditional is claimed to be false because the antecedent is false; if A, then B; not A, therefore not B. The proper form is if A, then B; not B, therefore not A.

Any deductive logicians out there, please feel free to correct me.

[charlie meadows]

So you are going to come back and present your findings, i hope?

I believe anything useful would be lost in the volume and the vitriol, figuratively speaking, in this thread. But I would surely post anything spongeworthy in the "Magick Mirror" thread. As it is, I will be coming at the issue from the viewpoint of neoteny/evolution (thank you for the above link) and my conclusions would likely transcend (in a value-neutral sense) the tightly monitored subject matter acceptable in this thread. There may even be data somehow affiliated with Esalen.

[Canadian_watcher]

I've specifically tried not to get involved in any sort of feminist debate in other threads.

you've made it a point to, in fact.

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=32013&start=45&hilit=checkpoint&p=401072&view=show#p401072

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=32029&hilit=FBI+porn&p=400983&view=show#p400983

just two recent examples

[Canadian_watcher]

So you are going to come back and present your findings, i hope?

I believe anything useful would be lost in the volume and the vitriol, figuratively speaking, in this thread. But I would surely post anything spongeworthy in the "Magick Mirror" thread. As it is, I will be coming at the issue from the viewpoint of neoteny/evolution (thank you for the above link) and my conclusions would likely transcend (in a value-neutral sense) the tightly monitored subject matter acceptable in this thread. There may even be data somehow affiliated with Esalen.

you know...

I don't doubt there's value in looking at these deep psychological things from an academic interest sort of perspective. But this is precisely why I don't think it's very practical to set up committees to deal with things like outbreaks of rapes on campuses, etc. The REAL misogyny that women experience needs more immediate responses. High-fallutin Freud and Girard and Esalen and Grof type talk is for the back rooms.

What about what you see happening right here, right now? Anything that doesn't have to do with woulds inflicted in the birth canal?

[Stephen Morgan]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43029928/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/

Bit of a gruesome one, so to summarise this woman had acid thrown in her face by some bloke who wanted to marry her, in Iran predictably. Didn't realise it would cause any harm, apparently. Do you think this is an example of misogyny? He is to be punished not in the traditional Iranian manner of paying a shedload of compensation to victims of violent crime but by being blinded by acid himself, on the insistence of the victim who refused to take the money instead. Opinions? Just punishment? Obviously the marry-or-acid approach the bloke took is a classic controlling abusive behaviour, but do you think it has origins in misogyny or just interpersonal relations? Seems like this isn't a one-off case.

Is it harder or easier to think about foreign socio-dynamics? I'm not sure.

The past, also, is a foreign country.

Hmmm... from the article:

The lawyer said that at noon Saturday, Ameneh Bahrami would drop acid in both eyes of Majid Movahedi, 30, after he is rendered unconscious at a judiciary hospital in Tehran, ...

Iranian officials have endorsed the sentence, hoping to stop an increase in acid attacks, the Guardian said.

The Washington Post reported that human rights groups and the British government had asked Bahrami to pardon Movahedi but that she had refused.

If it's meant to deter like crimes, then it not really about justice, for the State at least. As for Bahrami, dropping acid into her unconscious attackers eyes, may be as close to justice as she can get.

I think deterrence can be a part of justice. Or at least, a sentence influenced by the desire to deter isn't inherently unjust.

Though it's questionable whether it will deter further attacks and may provoke retaliatory violence against more women, for (what may be seen as) her infraction against the dominant social order. Tough one.

Well, I don't believe in deterrence. The desire to deter through sentencing is entirely reasonable, it just doesn't work. After America reintroduced the death penalty, for example, those states which took up killing again saw a big jump in murder rates. In fact the more extreme the punishment the less likely people are the imagine that it might happen to them, even if they commit the crime which may bring the punishment down upon their heads.

As for his crime arising from misogyny, yes, but I prefer a nuanced analysis (as you are probably all aware of by now! Lol) so I suspect that unseen psycho-social dynamics are at play, as always IMO.

Yes, you're something of a thinker. In a good way. Or an interesting way, at the very least.

I hesitate to apply a Girardian reading of the cultures of the Middle East because I'm really still feeling my way around it and it proposes such a massive paradigm shift that one reviewer has said that it "provides the Archemedian point from which all knowledge can be re-thought."

But, oh well, here goes. Warning! Gross generalizations to follow:

Islam, though it's a new religion, has it's feet in the archaic, which obscures the truth of sacrificial violence (scapegoating; identifiable by it's unifying and pacifying effect), which is that the victim is always an innocent reciever of our collective projections. Sacrificial violence only works if the innocence of the victim is collectively occluded.

The foundational myths of Xtianity expose the lie of the guilt of the victim to the collective, first in the old testament, where the prophets repeated speak out against sacrificial violence and are themselves scapegoated. The ten commandments themselves are a prescription for avoiding mimetic desire, which leads to mimetic violence and ultimately scapegoating (thou shalt not covet etc). In the new testament the old myth of the dying and resurrecting god is subverted, how? By showing that the victim (Jesus) is blameless and the projection of blame is reflected back to those that sacrificed him, including his disciples who abandoned him and joined the crowd. That's a new development in the collective psyche, and though it may not be apparent, it's influence is everywhere in the West as our collective identification with victims, including the Earth as victim.

Well, I'm not sure that fits with the orthodox view of Jesus as having taken on corrupted human flesh or the predestination of his death to redeem humanity, which seems to remove responsibility from his killers.

"The world becoming one culture is the fruit of this concern and not the reverse. In all the areas of activity – economic, scientific, artistic, and even religious – it is the concern for victims that determines what is most important. This new stage of culture has come about due neither to scientific progress nor to the market economy nor to the “history of metaphysics”.
Rene Girard, i See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 177."

The prescription against unconscious, collective violence provided by the myth of Jesus is to recognize the guilt (propensity to blame and do violence to others) within ourselves and "turn the other cheek", in other words, refuse to return violence with violence etc.

In the Middle East, they don't have that meme embedded in their collective psyche, so they are particularly vulnerable to their own violence and in fact they have instituted the opposing position of "eye for an eye" justice, or do return violence with violence.

I'm very non-violent and Christian myself, but the middle east is where Christianity started, as you know doubt know. Islam is really just a fancy-dan version of the Arianist heresy. But a desire to turn from violence is observable even before Christ's time, the "eye for an eye" of the old testament providing a limit, rather than a target, the pagan Norse and Saxon weregild, aimed as the Iranian law at replacing violence with financial compensation, feud with cash. A sacrifice of silver, if you like. Plata e plomo.

Rene Girard locates the roots of scapegoating violence in desire: One day, a long time ago, someone picked a yellow lump off the ground and said "hey! This is cool." The guy next to him perked up and said "yeah! That is cool." The first guy, seeing the interest of the second, thinks "hey! This is cooler than I thought!" The second guy, seeing the response of the first guy thinks "no! That really is cool!" And pretty soon others gather around, seeing how cool that thing is, want some for themselves. And then follows millenia of people fighting and killing for gold.

So in the case of Bahrami and her suitor, his desire for her is very, very dangerous to the community as a whole. His unfulfilled desire has the potential to infect his brother and set them against each other, which could (and probably has historically) infect the whole community with retaliatory violence. So his disfiguring of Bahrami, can be seen as a very coarse derailment of the process of escalating mimetic violence- by making her undesirable, he "saves" his community. This also explains the restrictions put on women in the Middle East, generally- the dress codes, prohibitions against showing hair, their virtual house imprisonment, the murder of adulteresses etc

I'm not convinced they work: The Islamist by Ed Husein posits that the sexual confinement in Saudi Arabia actually provokes a much larger number of sex crimes, lashing against restraint. "mimetic violence" is contagious violence, yes? I'm not big on the mimetic, somewhat beyond my ken. People tend to imitate others. Apparently it is a commonplace in the pick-up artist's repertoire to imitate the mannerisms of a woman to induce a receptive state of mind, although I read about it in one of Derren Brown's books. He also mentions that one way to tell if someone is lying is to watch their hands, if they lie about what happened they may act out what actually happened with their hands. I find myself acting out what I'm thinking of happening, which I notice as a result of reading that book. To see is to see within the mind, and to see within the mind is to do. What we see we see in our heads and what we do we do in our heads.

Anyway, that's me thinking. I hope no one is offended by it. Misogyny? Yes, but in a context that explicates without, I hope, justifying:

"I find it strange that women so badly want participation in the male power of archaic societies, for it is precisely their real superiority that women don’t appear, for the most part, as the primary agents of violence. If they want now to join the power games of the males, and that is understandable, are they not losing their real moral superiority?
As important as the apostles are in the Gospels, the women around Jesus are just as important but in a different way: they are that part of humanity which has nothing to do with scapegoating him. They are the ones who stick with him through the crucifixion…
If anything my hypothesis is pro-woman. It is peculiar how people moved by new ideologies want to be part of the power structure even retrospectively, and to be seen as responsible for some of the horrors that have left their mark on us. This greed to participate in violence of men is incomprehensible to me."
Rene Girard, ‘The Anthropology of the Cross: A Conversation with Rene Girard’, in James G. Williams (ed.), The Girard Reader, (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996), 275-276.

See, Girard is pro-women, after all! (apologies to Morgan, who seems oddly immune to mimesis):

I seem oddly immune to a lot of things. Makes for an amusing life, watching the foibles of others. Don't actually know what mimesis is, but I'm sure it doesn't get me. Much like illnesses.

___________________________

Here is Girard laying out the link between desire and violence much better than I have:


"The conflicts resulting from this double idolatry of self and other are the principal source of human violence. When we are devoted to adoring our neighbor, this adoration can easily turn to hatred because we seek desperately to adore ourselves, and we fall. In order to prevent all such predicaments, the book of Leviticus contains the famous commandment "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Lev. 19:18); that is, you shall love your neighbor neither more nor less than yourself. The rivalries of desires tend to become exasperated, and as they do, they tend to contaminate third parties who are just as addicted as we are to the entanglements of mimetic rivalries.

The principal source of violence between human beings is mimetic rivalry, the rivalry resulting from imitation of a model who becomes a rival or of a rival who becomes a model. Such conflicts are not accidental, but neither are they the fruit of an instinct of aggression or an aggressive drive. Mimetic rivalries can become so intense that the rivals denigrate each other, steal the other's possessions, seduce the other's spouse, and, finally, they even go as far as murder. "
....

"It begins with an obvious feature of post-Christian modernity. “The more desperately we seek to worship ourselves and to be good ‘individualists’,” says Girard, “the more compelled we are to worship our rivals in a cult that turns to hatred” (11). This contradiction of the commandment to love the neighbor as oneself results in numerous confusions concerning what is meant both by “love” and “neighbor.” Mimetic desire is confounded by narcissism to the degree to which “we feel that we are at the point of attaining autonomy as we imitate our models of power and prestige,” yet “the more ‘proud’ and ‘egoistic’ we are, the more enslaved we become to our mimetic models” (15)."

You know, when Jesus originally said that he was asked what it meant and gave the parable of the Good Samaritan in response. Of course not many people these days know the racial tensions between Jews and Samaritans in that time and place, so it's lost on a lot of people these days.

…

"The words that designate mimetic rivalry and its consequences are the noun skandalon and the verb skandalizein. Like the Hebrew word that it translates, "scandal" means, not one of those ordinary obstacles that we avoid easily after we run into it the first time, but a paradoxical obstacle that is almost impossible to avoid: the more this obstacle, or scandal, repels us, the more it attracts us. Those who are scandalized put all the more ardor in injuring themselves against it because they were injured there before.

The Greek word skandalizein comes from a verb that means "to limp." What does a lame person resemble? To someone following a person limping it appears that the person continually collides with his or her own shadow.

Understanding this strange phenomenon depends upon seeing in it what I have just described: the behavior of mimetic rivals who, as they mutually prevent each other from appropriating the object they covet, reinforce more and more their double desire, their desire for both the other's object of desire and for the desire of the other. Each consistently takes the opposite view of the other in order to escape their inexorable rivalry, but they always return to collide with the fascinating obstacle that each one has come to be for the other.

Scandals are responsible for the false infinity of mimetic rivalry. They secrete increasing quantities of envy, jealousy, resentment, hatred -- all the poisons most harmful not only for the initial antagonists but also for all those who become fascinated by their rivalistic desires. At the height of scandal each reprisal calls forth a new one more violent than its predecessor. If nothing stops it, the spiral has to lead to a series of acts of vengeance in a perfect fusion of violence and contagion. (2)

"Woe to the one by whom scandal comes!" Jesus reserves his most solemn warning for the adults who seduce children into the infernal prison of scandal. The more the imitation is innocent and trusting, the more the one who imitates is easily scandalized, and the more the seducer is guilty of abusing this innocence. Scandals are so formidable that to put us on guard against them, Jesus resorts to an uncharacteristic hyperbolic style: "If your hand scandalizes you, cut it off; if you eye scandalizes you, pull it out" (Matt. 18:8-9). "


Also I grabbed this from the "Who Killed the Deputy" thread because of the brilliant subtlety of it's implied paradox and Morgan's question is in context to the application of law:

"To live outside the law you must be honest". that's an imperative, a commandment if you will."
v.k.

- to live within the law requires dishonesty?

To live within the law confers protection, to live without the law is not to live without obeying the law but to live with the protection of the law. At least, that's the case with the medieval outlaw.

Still not sure what immunity to mimesis might bring. "to imitate". Does that mean I am inimitable, or incapable of imitating others?

[Stephen Morgan]

I've specifically tried not to get involved in any sort of feminist debate in other threads.

you've made it a point to, in fact.

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=32013&start=45&hilit=checkpoint&p=401072&view=show#p401072

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=32029&hilit=FBI+porn&p=400983&view=show#p400983

just two recent examples

I could probably give you a dozen examples of provocations deferred, too. Even Nordic's child porn nonsense I eventually brought over here.