Men v Women
TheAmazingAtheist is absolutely terrible. I can’t stand the guy. Since bbcity and others already did a fantastic job going over the more theoretical aspects of this guy’s blatant sexism and his misunderstandings of the most basic concepts of feminist equality, I thought it might be a good idea to address some factual inaccuracies:
“Domestic violence against men is nearly as common as domestic violence against women”
Wrong. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, domestic violence against women occurs far more frequently and is far more severe. Furthermore, more than 1 in 4 women have reported they’ve been physically assaulted by an intimate partner during some point in their lifetime and women are the victims of intimate partner violence homicides in over 75% of the cases.
I haven’t read all he’s got to say (just noticed he’s on tumblr), I’ll just address your points. To invalidate the claim you present in bold letters is not sufficient to show that women are targets in domestic violence, you have to compare it to how often men are targets of domestic violence. Furthermore, he states that it is “nearly as common” so you’d have to show that it is far more common. Maybe that info is in the paper you are quoting (I couldn’t find it while briefly looking), but then why do you quote only the first part of the proof?
A simple Google search took me to a text in BMJ which states:
The 1996 British crime survey asked a representative sample of 16 500 adults in England and Wales directly about their experiences of crime, and whether it was reported to the police. The survey included a computer assisted self interviewing questionnaire, designed to give findings on the extent of domestic violence in England and Wales. The results found that 4.2% of women and 4.2% of men said that they had been physically assaulted by a current or former partner in the past year.2
Many studies have found similar results. The work of Straus (a good example of which can be found at http://www.vix.com/menmag/straus21.htm) is particularly authoritative. Indeed, when one considers that most violence against children is committed by women, in terms of gender it is women who are most likely to be perpetrators of domestic violence.
Does this manner of presentation matter? I think it does. On a personal level it leads to the situation I encountered recently in my local police station. A man with quite severe injuries after an attack by his former (female) partner was in the cells for breach of the peace. On a broader level it adds to the negative image of men that is so widespread in parts of our popular culture. This does nothing to help the forging of a masculine identity in certain vulnerable young men, which Jewkes says is a risk factor for violence.
Why, I wonder, is domestic violence so often portrayed in such a partisan and unscientific way?
“Men are treated unfairly when it comes to child support”
Men typically pay more in child support than women do primarily because women are the care providers and raise the children. After a divorce, men are significantly advantaged when it comes to finances and suffer a far lesser decline in standard of living than women do. Furthermore, the income of women is significantly less than it is of men. Many courts, the majority of which are dominated by males, balance the lesser care men contribute to their children with financial support.
I did not listen / watch TAA, but if he said what you are quoting, it seems to me that you may have misunderstood his point - see my answer to your next point. The most difficult problem to solve for new parents is the problem of daycare. This seems to be confined mostly to common-law countries, where daycare is not subsidized by government and in practice, in divorced couples it is the father who is forced to pay for it (and other costs). The thinking behind it is that the government / taxpayer shouldn’t be saddled with the costs that come out of people being horny. This is obviously an approach that’s very lucrative for the lawyers who also wrote such laws, but it’s no what the rest of the civilized world is doing.
As for the income of women it is true that it is generally lower than that of men for similar circumstances. My personal view, proven by some studies and disproved by others, is that women prefer more flexible work arrangements and are not as focused as men are on salary. Looking back on my own work experience, this seems to be the case even though at the time I felt like I was “winning” most such negotiations. Now it seems that most of my female peers were the true winners; they adopted less confrontational, more cooperative strategies and, as a result, had greater on-the-job satisfaction even though they were paid less. My own obsession with the number on the pay cheque was dumb.
“Men are treated unfairly when it comes to reproductive rights”
Men should not have any reproductive rights when it comes to the decision to have an abortion. It’s not their body. They will never have a uterus or be pregnant. It’s time to move on. Come on.
I agree with you on this one. Men should have no say in whether a woman uses contraception or not, keeps her baby or has an abortion - it is entirely her decision. But then forcing a man to in a situation of bondage / slavery for a decision that is not and never was his to make is unfair.
“It’s only men who have to sign up for the selective service.”
This is not an issue of sexism against men but against women. The U.S. Supreme Court in Rostker v. Goldberg (1981), which considered the issue of the eligibility of women for the draft, ruled that since women are ineligible for combat, they are ineligible for the draft as well. The reasoning behind women being ineligible for combat rests in sexist generalizations about women’s bodies and their physical capacities, namely, that since most women are not as physically strong as men and are built smaller, they shouldn’t be eligible for combat at all. Instead of setting physical requirements for women which would put them on par with men, even those who are as physically strong or stronger than most men, are not allowed to serve. Read the language used. It’s beyond sexist.
I confess I don’t know much about this, but my impression was that in the meantime women were allowed to serve on equal footing with men. Anyway, it seems to me that if sexist reasons still hold for women to be ineligible for draft / combat, the same logic should apply to men’s eligibility for alimony / child support payments. If we do not draft women because they can’t serve, why do we force men to support the consequences of a decision that is not theirs to begin with?
“Women are sentenced to 40% less prison time than men”
This is actually pretty exaggerated. For juveniles, girls receive harsher legal treatment than boys for status offenses but somewhat more lenient treatment for more serious offenses. For adults, women appear to be treated more leniently than men at the sentencing stage only. “Overall, they are 10-25% less likely than men convicted of similar crimes to be sent to prison or jail, although the two sexes receive similar terms of incarceration once the decision is made to put them behind bars.” (Barkan, Steven E., Law and Society (2009), pg. 233)
I’m not going to check the numbers, but I’m sure you’ll agree that if there is more than one study on this topic, the numbers might actually vary. :)
“Men don’t sit around all day looking for ways to discriminate against women”
This guy is missing the point entirely. Sexism and
You are saying that he’s responding to an accusation that has not been made / was misunderstood. What he may be saying is that being a man often feels like being accused of that (even though the accusation was not explicitly made).
patriarchy are engrained into our very system. In addition to what others have already written, capitalist patriarchy plays a significant role in fundamentally setting up social systems such that women are inherently placed at a disadvantage. From Eitzen, Zinn, and Smith’s Social Problems (2009), to put it in simple to understand terms:
[Marx and Engels] wrote that
You lost me at the first word of this sentence and I doubt that with such examples you can reach outside your own group. And that’s fine if your intention is to preach to the converted.. :)
industrialism and the shift to a capitalist economy widened the gap between the power and value of men and women. As production moved out of the home, the gendered division of labor left men with the greater share of economic and other forms of power.
Macro-structural theories explain gender inequality as an outcome of how women and men are tied to the economic structure of society. These theories say that women’s economic role in society is a primary determinant of their overall
That’s not what I’ve seen around me. In many traditional / patriarchal families, where the man is the “breadwinner” and the woman is a stay-at-home mom, though the woman appears to be yielding to her man, using soft-power and other methods she seems to have full control not just over the household but also over the family finances.
status. The division between domestic and public spheres of activity gives men and women different positions of advantage and disadvantage. Their roles in the labor force and in the family are independent. Whether or not they work outside of the home, women do the vast majority of child care and household
Though few would dispute this fact, do you actually believe that women today are forced in this position? Can we actually claim that women who choose career over everything else are actually happier than women who are housewives or women who work and have kids as well and that such choice was not forced by the impossibility to find a committed S.O.?
labor. Men are freed from these responsibilities. Women’s responsibilities
Societal and cultural norms still require the man to contribute financially more to a household than the woman, while requiring the woman to put in more time and “effort”. The higher rates of graduation for women we are seeing today will most likely make this “arrangement” untenable in the future.
for domestic labor limit their association with the resources that are highly valued. Men’s economic obligations in the public sphere assume them control of highly valued resources and give rise to male privilege.
One simple solution would be to pay more for professions / careers women seem to gravitate towards, such as education. Sadly, the “market” values scarcity more than social good.
In capitalist societies, the domestic-public split is even more significant because highly valued goods and services are exchanged in the public, not the domestic, sphere. Women’s domestic labor, although important for survival, ranks low in prestige and power because it does not produce exchangeable
Wrong. It ranks low because a large number of women and some men are willing to do it. As more and more educated women choose not to, such labour will become more valuable. (and everyone will get a Roomba).
commodities. Because of the connections between the class relations of production (capitalism) and the hierarchical gender relations of its society (patriarchy), the United States is a capitalist patriarchy where male supremacy keeps women in subordinate roles at work and in the home.
Repeat after me: 4 legs women good, 2 legs men baaaaaaad. This is true to a certain extent, but then again, the inequality gap has definitely been greatly reduced in the past few decades. Such interpretations miss the point: most people over 30 have Conservative mindsets. It’s not just gender bias that makes our world unequal but a bevy of other “isms” such as racism. The collectivist thinking that is the basis of “patriarchy / class” arguments is also at the basis of most other inequality biases.
On an unrelated note, do you see anything wrong with the statement “Germans are biased against most other nations”?
You need to understand the very basics of capitalist patriarchy before you can even begin to understand the rest of gender discrimination because it lays the very foundations for such. This guy says that men have always historically done the vast majority of the work, they’ve been the “bread winners.” The position
Yeah, baby. Those were the days.. :) Now go on with the position.
women were put into was to maintain the home and raise the children. This is labor. This is work, as Marx perfectly described. In actuality, women perform 66% of the world’s work, but receive only 11% of the world’s income, and own only 1% of the world’s land. Furthermore, men may do the killing in war but 90% of all war causalities are civilians and over 75% of such are women and children.
Would you consider the research that generated these numbers “authoritative”? If yes, then perhaps I should call on some comic from the 80s. According to him, men do 98.5% of the work in bed and still have to pay 500% for it. OOOOOH!
Men really have it tough. Everyone else who contributed to this discussion nailed it.
Men DO have it hard. Here’s more Diceman (1, 2) You’re welcum. :)
(Source: sinidentidades)
