Swith Witherward wrote:Galloism wrote:I'll bite Ms Average Feminist.
According to the CDC reports, at least among adults, men are raped at about the same rate as women. Men also suffer DV at about the same rate as woman. Perpetrators are typically their opposite sex partner.
What implications does this have for you personally, and feminist policy in general?
Fixed that for you.
Thanks for asking, Gallo.
I honestly don't believe the reports regarding domestic violence are accurate. DV includes aggressive behavior. Men aren't as apt to report angry flareups from their spouses or significant others. "Yeah, she was pissed off, but it was my fault because I didn't do X" sort of mentality. Throwing things, smashing something the man holds important (tv, game system, computer, musical instrument etc), throwing clothing out of the door or a window, screaming obscenities at him... why does this aggressive behavior go unreported, thus getting a free pass?
Don't get me wrong. Men can and do exhibit aggressive behavior as well, but it's more likely to be reported when the man does it.
I'm a bit surprised to hear that the CDC states that rape occurs equally between men and women. If accurate, it reflects hard efforts on the part of rape victim support orgs and other groups to encourage men to come forward.
Misconceptions regarding male rape contribute to his suffering. "He was hard so he wanted it". "Against his will: Female-on-male rape", an article written by CNN's Sarah LeTrent, sheds a bit of light on that misconception.
I can't speak for all feminists, of course. However, DV and rape are a problem that affects both genders. As a feminist, I feel it is my responsibility to empower younger women, to reassure them that they can say, "no", that they have options for getting out of abusive relationships, and that they should have say over their own bodies. However, unlike the extremist feminists, I'm also very stern when it comes to respecting men. We have to be just as responsible as men are expected to be. We need to recognize when our playful flirting starts to stray into sexual pressuring and unwelcome harassment.
But our voices are drowned out by the barking spiders with fat book contracts and lucrative speaking engagements.
What's your take on it, Gallo? If I recall right, you live across the pond. Do you feel women there get a free pass regarding aggressive behavior towards men?
-prompted this reply from Ostro:
Ostroeuropa wrote:
Beyond a free pass, there is in many cases social pressure to join in on the violence or to assist her in destroying her victim, as well as institutional backing.
To address it, we have to replace the current dynamic and institutions/mindsets which cause it or defend it.
(The long post begins.)
That means fighting gynocentrism, which frankly, you can't do as a feminist. It's... it's part of the definition.
(Skip Why1 and 2 if you don't want the "Implications personally" part.
Why1.
I'm going to try and be polite, but i'm necessarily pointing out to you you're mistreating people in my opinion. I don't mean it as an attack or an insult. I am going to often compare what i'm talking about with other examples of demographic mistreatment to see if it clicks. These are not value judgements against your character or person, but attempts at a mirror. I don't doubt your intention is to help. I'm hoping that if i'm unclear, someone who is used to me might be able to get it across better.
Here we go.
Why didn't you say "empower young people to say no"? Your focus was on empowering young women because as you say, you're a feminist. You think, for some reason, that this is some kind of accomplishment, rather than a destabilizing and negative influence on society. That's what feminism is. It's an inherently exclusionary worldview, the ideology even at its most well meaning is simply not fit for purpose.
Rather than talk about people, you frame the issue around women and their perspective/experience and in so doing otherize men.
Like, say, "We should teach White People about the constitution and the bill of rights, and the protections these afford them." and then teaching them about those things from the context and frame of them being white people. You don't deny blacks are also covered, but do you still see how this kind of behavior is a problem? How that kind of thing being lauded would fuck up society?
Worse, people use your kind of talk on empowering women on these issues to justify demonizing mens sexuality and then waffling about how they're just teaching women to say no and don't need to teach others, someone else should. You're providing a platform by which many women are indoctrinated into a cult of suspicion and hatred.
Worse perhaps even than that, by providing that jumping off point for that kind of behavior, you're providing a platform by which women are indoctrinated into thinking they can rape men because all men want it all the time.
Can you answer this question:
If allowing your behavior necessarily enables all kinds of terrible social consequences, why should we allow your kind of behavior?
because you don't mean any harm?
You're doing harm. You're enabling others to do harm. You're also fucking with their victims by pretending it isn't reasonable for people to just assume a feminist is a sexist for their own safety, the safety of those around them, and the safety of our institutions and their clients.
It's like you're a firearm owner and we're telling you we fundamentally think this is a bad fucking idea to allow. Worse.
That open carry is a good thing and we're bad people for saying actually no, we're alright with automatically being suspicious when people turn up with firearms, they should be forced never to be allowed inside institutions while carrying, we should actively dispower their ability to influence society.
If we just treat you like a willful conspirator alongside these types of misandrists, we can do away with taking any of you seriously and move on to institutional purging and grassroots resistance and such instead of, what seems to me, to be an argument over reforming racism or embracing it (Fuck that, fight it, purge it.)
And you've seen how intellectually dishonest and gaslighty some of these types are. We really do have no way of knowing for sure whether you're doing it on purpose or not. If you are indistinguishable from someone deliberately enabling others to do harm, then don't you see how that's a problem?
All the good you can do can be done by other means, worldviews, and ideologies, and the feminist bit? it seems to be nothing but bad news.
You might feel offended by that.
Stop.
Compare and contrast charitable behavior, cults, etc, the obvious comparison being Hamas and their drug rehab programme.
You are not being drowned out.
You are letting in the flood, and drowning us, then getting mad when we demand you stop it.
That's your role, it's your contribution.
You could contribute something else to the overall dynamic, but never as a feminist unless you abandon your conscience and become a misandrist. That's why I think you should stop being one at all. It's not that you're a bad person, you're just using a terrible tool that doesn't work, never has, and only seems to fuck things up.
A gun is not an acceptable walking stick, and by insisting on using it as one, you and all the people doing it, are causing us problems as a society. At some point, whether you are genuine or not, it's simpler and better for all of us to just say "If you don't get it, that's tough. Feminists have to be marginalized and ostracized from institutions for everyones sake. Are you a feminist?"
You're trying to help, but take a look at the impact of allowing your "I'm Just Helping Women" mindset to be acceptable, the type of people it empowers and enables, the type of abuses other people have to put up with as a result. What are the social consequences of enabling and legitimizing a positive but exclusionary activity/mindset?
You may not mean to commit harm, but either you're knowingly doing it and you're just hoping that maybe somehow it'll end up with the good outweighing the bad, Or you're not considering or taking seriously how allowing your behavior necessarily empowers others to abuse the goodwill we are affording you.
"I'm just cooing at the babies in the maternity ward. This should be an acceptable thing for people to do without observation, and it's terrible you're angry at me and my friends who lobby and argue for this to be acceptable, for all those baby kidnappings, swappings, rapes, and murders that keep happening."
Seriously?
If i'm wrong, i'd like you to explain some other means by which we can as easily get rid of this "spate of shootings", and while you're doing so, consider that this does basically explain what the hell happened to turn feminist mainstream into such a mess.
What was always going to happen, because the very core of the worldview is necessarily flawed.
By the way, the CNN journalist you said was highlighting the issue?
Was doing the opposite.According to a 2010 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men in the United States have been raped.
They were minimizing it. Like if I talk about the tragedy of a racist police shooting and then say "It happens once a century." and repeated that until it stuck in peoples brains. This is your idea of somebody helping, and you didn't even notice I bet.
Gallo says it's 50/50, you say "Huh, that suprises me. I bet its due to the good work of people like X they feel comfy coming forward."
No, your surprise?
it's because you think these people are good people doing good work, and they slipped shit like that past you until your entire understanding of the issue got feminized. (tm)
Why2.
That's what convinces you to devote more of your time to an exclusionary mindset and ideology.Now you know it's 50/50, don't your efforts seem disproportionate? If not, perhaps are you saying material facts have no baring on your behavior? That even if it was every man and one woman you'd still feel exactly as you do and want to help her and leave the rest to someone else?
You weren't even aware. How many other instances of this kind of meme do you think you harbor? You can't know, can you.
That's the problem.
You've refused to accept our demands to abandon an infected building, hung around it trying to reclaim it from the ones who turn feral, and now you shouldn't even be asking us to think you're safe anymore. It's selfish. In the building you can stay, and far away from anyone outside it, as far as i'm concerned.
Go talk to the radicals, lest you accidentally spread the memes you caught from them to others, or accept that you need a total reboot of your view on this topic, because... what if you're riddled with it mate. And that's true of many "Average feminists" you'll come across, as Gallo routinely points out, though in his own words. Running with the infection analogy, I don't mean to imply anything about you as a person, think of them as foreign bodies, but think about the potential difference between these two concepts;
Someone who hates, and someone filled with hatred.
You're not the former, and it got you by presenting itself as the opposite.
You don't feel it? Congrats. I'm inclined to believe you. Different folks and all. But take whats in you, and spread it, and are you then so sure?
Do you think you ever spread one of these things and got someone hurt down the line when it spread to someone who reacts to it differently than you? Caused an extra doubt based on rarity, a shoulder to cry on denied and such? Perhaps that's too abstract.
Imagine a flu that left mothers perfectly aware male babies also need feeding and capable of sympathy for starving ones, just under the impression they need far less of it compared to female ones. That altered those mothers until they were blind to male babies starving, under the impression they turn blue in the face before they do.
If your goal is to nurture society, consider your area, and your prior actions on rape victims, the level of care you've afforded. If not you, then others who fell for it and whose reaction to the meme is different. How many male rape victims weren't "fed" so to speak, by people who otherwise would?
You didn't merely just "focus on women." you believe and probably spread something that deprived others of what others may have given them. That created others who view trying to help those rape victims proportionally as some sort of attack on women, even.
Ignorance and misinformation IS a huge part of the issue here. Consistent gynocentric thinking is a big reason why nobody spares the time to sympathize with men, instead kneejerk responding that they should toughen up or have it easy or whatever. Or causes people to not devote as much though to it, because it's "rarer"
And on policy:
1. On womens violence to men; we probably need asset seizure or to force split airtime/print time/funding for shelters, etc. Seperate but equal isn't equal, and we've known this a while.
2. We need to reform our view of justice abandon death penalty-esque focus on damage to victims and vengeance lust that fuels much of the current set up.
So women who get violent get less sentences and social consequences because they did less damage to a guy.
Who cares. Did she go all out, is the thing, because the victim isn't relevant, or shouldn't be, to our consideration on whether she is fit to walk among us in society, some of us will be weaker than she is. The mere fact she attacked the strong does not make the weak any safer, nor her any more fit. Criminal acts, criminal minds. That should be the focus. The victim is there as a witness to the crime, and nothing more.
Once we begin to see things this way in the courts, we can expect some backlash, until we start pushing that view in society too as how people judge what's fair or not.
I believe a purely perp focused view will also facilitate rehabilitative focuses instead of the constant outrage provokation and mistreatment of prisoners.
The victim can be dealt with by health and social services.
3. We need to set up an inquiry and hold... well, fuck it, let's cut to the chase, mccarthyist type hearings for an actual menace to our society (One you acknowledge exists) instead of an imaginary one.
Call up a bunch of feminist professors and media people, and get them on the record talking where they can't dodge. Find which ones are blatant misandrists and liars, and get rid of them, depower them, sack them, seize their property, whatever, when they inevitably get caught out on their lies, or jail them for perjury.
4. Demographic libel laws. This would mean The Guardian, for instance, can be told once about printing false stats, and then sued the fuck out of if they do it again without some kind of new argument.
5. In the UK and others like it, equalize rape laws and definitions.
6. Consider mock trials as a routine test against lawyers and judges, like mystery shoppers, and sting ones who fuck up rigged ones.
7. If a newspaper, for instance, calls it rape for a male teacher to fuck a female student, but calls it an "affair" for the reverse, we could write a law saying that they've "libeled" or something like that, the male teacher. (We could also make it so if they are serving a sentence for this thing, it just goes to the govt.). This is the case because the facts were reported either way, but included in the male teachers article is an extra heaping of reputation damage which seems pretty libelous to me. (Danger here being that newspapers start lowballing everything until murder is "A disagreement.")
8. Misandry needs to be as popularly understood as misogyny.
If you want to ignore Why1 and Why2, that's fine.
It's unwarranted, especially as
I won't presume to call it flaiming or baiting, though I certainly feel they flamed me and tried to bait me into quarreling with them. I feel the post was out of line and unnecessary, as well as a purposeful skewering of my support of male DV and rape victims.
edit: pronoun use. I can't recall Ostro's gender. I don't want to incorrectly use the wrong one.
