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On June 19 2013 02:15 datcirclejerk wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 02:11 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 02:10 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:00 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 01:55 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 00:39 ComaDose wrote:On June 18 2013 10:39 sunprince wrote:
Women [...] had limited rights [...] but this does not equate to "oppression". I was surprised to see something so stupid till i noticed it was sunprince that wrote it. Yes throughout the global history of the planet women had limited rights and that does mean they were oppressed. Limited rights does not equate to "oppression". Children in the modern world have limited rights (along with limited responsibilities), but no reasonable person would argue that we "oppress" children. Oppression is much better suited to describe differential treatment such as racial discrimination, not merely differential treatment of any sort. Historically, women were simply treated similarly to the way we treat children today, with limited rights but also limited responsibilities, and a great emphasis on protecting and coddling them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OppressionRead up. Your definition of oppression is utterly ridiculous.Let me emphasize the relevant part: "Oppression is the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner" Just because we supposedly "coddled" women (which, by the way, is a massive generalization and fails to acknowledge the fact that we "protected" them in the same way that we protect golden treasure; you know, as objects) doesn't mean that we didn't oppress them, because such coddling doesn't make our denial of rights for women any more just. Limiting the rights of children isn't oppressive because children are children and therefore we have a good, sensible reason to limit their rights, and do so in their own best interests. Please tell me you're not going to argue that we denied women rights for their own good. Your inherent assumption here is that women didn't want to be coddled in such a manner. Yeah, that's enough sunprince for today. He's actually making some very interesting arguments here. Just because something is politically incorrect does not render it untrue.
His particular argument is incredibly sexist and insulting.
It's beyond ridiculous to say that women had a choice in any period of history but the most recent periods. Try to claim any kind of rights and you're simply shot down, beaten, raped, killed, socially ostracized, or some other manner of oppression. And of course women went along with it. Why? Because they were 1) trained to do it from their youngest memorable years and 2) didn't have any viable alternative paths. It's not like there were any education opportunities or paths for women to resist their oppressors throughout history.
You left out the rest of my posts, which already explained the reasoning for this argument.
Ultimately, I find it quite misogynistic of you and other posters here to insist on thinking of women as weak and helpless victims who spent millennia under an oppressive social system, rather than acknowledge that they may have perpetuated a system that benefited them. That's pretty much objectification to the fullest possible extent; instead of treating women as competent agents with the power to exercise their own choices, you reduce them to helpless objects.
This line of argument is disturbingly similar to a rape apologist or someone that tries to excuse slavery by saying it benefited blacks somehow. It's completely insulting and it blames the victim. You can't blame the victim for operating in the only way that's possible. What were women going to do back then, write about their oppression and change the minds of intellectuals? Fat chance when you 1) don't have any chance at an education and 2) your writing won't see the light of day simply because you're a woman. What else are you going to do, lead a revolt? Never mind the fact that men are biologically predisposed to develop more physically athletic capabilities than women, but where in the hell are women ever going to find even the most basic training or skills to physically resist their oppressors, especially when the culture specifically conditioned to be the antithesis of everything needed to actually fight? You're merely being intellectually dishonest and insulting by claiming that we are the misogynistic ones when you are the one blaming the victim.
Meanwhile, men were dying in droves from hard labor and slaughtered on the battlefield, yet women (who were twice as likely to survive to pass on their genes, despite the high mortality rate of childbirth prior to modern medicine) were unilaterally oppressed by men! /sarcasm
In any case, the historical records we do have completely demolish the popular myths that domestic violence was historically accepted (plenty of evidence to show that wife beaters in Western culture were flogged, tarred/feathered, and hanged). War rape, on the other hand, actually existed, but that's actually better treatment than what victorious armies did to the men...
However, I'll take this line of discourse as an admission that you have no legitimate arguments to make, since you are resorting to the fallacy of original male sin.
Survival is not the ultimate (or any, for that matter) metric of success or decent living. Never mind the fact that women survived merely to be objects of men for countless centuries.
A man's higher mortality rate was/is the product of all of the freedoms he enjoyed/enjoys and, consequentially, the responsibilities that come along with those freedoms.
Edited: Wording to be less combative.
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On June 19 2013 03:45 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 02:15 datcirclejerk wrote:On June 19 2013 02:11 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 02:10 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:00 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 01:55 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 00:39 ComaDose wrote:On June 18 2013 10:39 sunprince wrote:
Women [...] had limited rights [...] but this does not equate to "oppression". I was surprised to see something so stupid till i noticed it was sunprince that wrote it. Yes throughout the global history of the planet women had limited rights and that does mean they were oppressed. Limited rights does not equate to "oppression". Children in the modern world have limited rights (along with limited responsibilities), but no reasonable person would argue that we "oppress" children. Oppression is much better suited to describe differential treatment such as racial discrimination, not merely differential treatment of any sort. Historically, women were simply treated similarly to the way we treat children today, with limited rights but also limited responsibilities, and a great emphasis on protecting and coddling them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OppressionRead up. Your definition of oppression is utterly ridiculous.Let me emphasize the relevant part: "Oppression is the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner" Just because we supposedly "coddled" women (which, by the way, is a massive generalization and fails to acknowledge the fact that we "protected" them in the same way that we protect golden treasure; you know, as objects) doesn't mean that we didn't oppress them, because such coddling doesn't make our denial of rights for women any more just. Limiting the rights of children isn't oppressive because children are children and therefore we have a good, sensible reason to limit their rights, and do so in their own best interests. Please tell me you're not going to argue that we denied women rights for their own good. Your inherent assumption here is that women didn't want to be coddled in such a manner. Yeah, that's enough sunprince for today. He's actually making some very interesting arguments here. Just because something is politically incorrect does not render it untrue. His particular argument is stupid. It's pants-on-head retarded to say that women had a choice in any period of history but the most recent periods. Try to claim any kind of rights and you're simply shot down, beaten, raped, killed, socially ostracized, or some other manner of oppression. And of course women went along with it. Why? Because they were 1) trained to do it from their youngest memorable years and 2) didn't have any viable alternative paths. It's not like there were any education opportunities or paths for women to resist their oppressors throughout history.
This is true for any group claiming new rights, even today. And yet, women were clearly able to do so when the time came that they cared enough to fight for it (universal female suffrage was passed in the United States as soon as polls showed a majority of women wanted it), as were other marginalized groups throughout history. In fact, women had a far easier time of it than an actually oppressed group, African-Americans, did; the women's movement never faced fire hoses, hangings, and police brutality the way the African-American Civil Rights movement did.
You're essentially insisting that women were incompetent throughout most of human history. I don't buy it. I consider women to be strong, competent humans just like men who were capable of seizing their rights whenever they wanted, and that's exactly what they did once it was actually beneficial to do so. When universal male suffrage happened (in return for all the lives lost in WWI), women got the same soon after. When birth control became available and jobs became comfortable and safe enough that women could do it, women got access to the same jobs.
On June 19 2013 03:45 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +You left out the rest of my posts, which already explained the reasoning for this argument.
Ultimately, I find it quite misogynistic of you and other posters here to insist on thinking of women as weak and helpless victims who spent millennia under an oppressive social system, rather than acknowledge that they may have perpetuated a system that benefited them. That's pretty much objectification to the fullest possible extent; instead of treating women as competent agents with the power to exercise their own choices, you reduce them to helpless objects. You're really no better than a rape apologist or someone that tries to excuse slavery by saying it benefited blacks somehow. It's complete and utter B.S. You can't blame the victim for operating in the only way that's possible. What were women going to do back then, write about their oppression and change the minds of intellectuals? Fat chance when you 1) don't have any chance at an education and 2) your writing won't see the light of day simply because you're a woman. What else are you going to do, lead a revolt? Never mind the fact that men are biologically predisposed to develop more physically athletic capabilities than women, but where in the hell are women ever going to find even the most basic training or skills to physically resist their oppressors, especially when the culture specifically conditioned to be the antithesis of everything needed to actually fight? Your position is ridiculous. You're being intellectually dishonest and insulting by claiming that we are the misogynistic ones when you are the one blaming the victim.
It's misogynistic to portray women as victims instead of the strong, competent individuals with agency that they are. And that's exactly what you're doing.
On June 19 2013 03:45 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +Meanwhile, men were dying in droves from hard labor and slaughtered on the battlefield, yet women (who were twice as likely to survive to pass on their genes, despite the high mortality rate of childbirth prior to modern medicine) were unilaterally oppressed by men! /sarcasm
In any case, the historical records we do have completely demolish the popular myths that domestic violence was historically accepted (plenty of evidence to show that wife beaters in Western culture were flogged, tarred/feathered, and hanged). War rape, on the other hand, actually existed, but that's actually better treatment than what victorious armies did to the men...
However, I'll take this line of discourse as an admission that you have no legitimate arguments to make, since you are resorting to the fallacy of original male sin. Oh yes, because survival is the ultimate (or any, for that matter) metric of success or decent living. Never mind the fact that women survived merely to be objects of men for countless centuries.
Not just survival, survival to reproduce. The fact that most men died before successfully reproducing means that their lives were pretty awful, especially when you consider how high the childbirth mortality rate was prior to modern medicine.
On June 19 2013 03:45 Stratos_speAr wrote:
A man's higher mortality rate was/is the product of all of the freedoms he enjoyed/enjoys and, consequentially, the responsibilities that come along with those freedoms. To say that this actually means that women had it better than men in any way is just straight up stupid. I can't even be intellectually respectful to a person that says something so utterly ridiculous.
The freedom to be conscripted? The freedom to work in dangerous professions to support his family? You do realize that the "freedoms" enjoyed by the men at the apex of society mean very little to most of the men throughout human history, right?
Even today, most women prefer not to work if they can be married with a man who could support them. That's a basic trade off between freedom and responsibility.
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On June 19 2013 03:39 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 03:15 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 03:07 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 03:02 ComaDose wrote:On June 19 2013 02:50 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:38 ComaDose wrote:On June 19 2013 02:33 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:16 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 02:10 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:00 Shiori wrote:[quote] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OppressionRead up. Your definition of oppression is utterly ridiculous.Let me emphasize the relevant part: "Oppression is the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner" Just because we supposedly "coddled" women (which, by the way, is a massive generalization and fails to acknowledge the fact that we "protected" them in the same way that we protect golden treasure; you know, as objects) doesn't mean that we didn't oppress them, because such coddling doesn't make our denial of rights for women any more just. Limiting the rights of children isn't oppressive because children are children and therefore we have a good, sensible reason to limit their rights, and do so in their own best interests. Please tell me you're not going to argue that we denied women rights for their own good. The reality is that they chose to forego these rights [citation needed] You left out the rest of my posts, which already explained the reasoning for this argument. Ultimately, I find it quite misogynistic of you and other posters here to insist on thinking of women as weak and helpless victims who spent millennia under an oppressive social system, rather than acknowledge that they may have perpetuated a system that benefited them. I'm embarased my gender was the one raping and beating women for centuries. Meanwhile, men were dying in droves from hard labor and slaughtered on the battlefield, yet women (who were twice as likely to survive to pass on their genes, despite the high mortality rate of childbirth prior to modern medicine) were unilaterally oppressed by men! /sarcasm In any case, the historical records we do have completely demolish the popular myths that domestic violence was historically accepted (plenty of evidence to show that wife beaters in Western culture were flogged, tarred/feathered, and hanged). War rape, on the other hand, actually existed, but that's actually better treatment than what victorious armies did to the men... However, I'll take this line of discourse as an admission that you have no legitimate arguments to make, since you are resorting to the fallacy of original male sin. dude domestic violence is still a problem That doesn't mean domestic violence is socially or legally acceptable. Not to mention the fact that the majority of non-reciprocal (one-sided) domestic violence perpetrators are women, contrary to the lies that have been perpetuated on this topic. Incidence of violence: 75% low frequency. Injury percentage: 8.1%. I'd also like to point out that the authors of the paper offer a couple of potential explanations as to the discrepancy between men and women as perpetrators: "One possible explanation for this, assuming that men and women are equally likely to initiate physical violence,20 is that men, who are typically larger and stronger, are less likely to retaliate if struck first by their partner. Thus, some men may be following the norm that “men shouldn’t hit women” when struck first by their partner. A different explanation is that men are simply less willing to report hitting their partner than are women.2" I'd argue that both are true, to some extent. It's worth noting that the general reasoning for why female domestic abuse is such a huge issue is still represented by this study: 20% change of injury i.e. 1 in 5, while the rate for men is less than half that. While domestic violence against men definitely deserves more attention, men generally speaking aren't seriously injured by it and therefore tend to not fear for their lives. Also it's sorta disingenuous to cherry pick one study of a particular demographic (mean age of ~22 years old) when tonnes of research has been done demonstrating the opposite. I mean, I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's incredibly biased to characterize all research other than this one study as "lies." I mean, the BJS released this study, for example. Seems pretty legitimate. By "lies", I'm referring to the academically documented fact that certain groups have fought to suppress information on domestic violence. This perpetuates the popular misconception that domestic violence is a gendered male-on-female problem, when the reality is that it is that there is gender parity, and that it's often reciprocal. Here's several additional studies, including a scholarly review which examines 286 scholarly investigations which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, if not more aggressive, than men in domestic relationships: http://smu.edu/experts/study-documents/family-violence-study-may2006.pdfhttp://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2005.079020http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/ID41E2.pdfhttp://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V70 version N3.pdfhttp://www.nij.gov/journals/261/teen-dating-violence.htmhttp://lab.drdondutton.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/DUTTON-NICHOLLS-AND-SPIDEL-2005-FEMALE-PERPETRATORS-OF-INTIMATE-VIOLENCE.pdfhttp://www.fact.on.ca/Info/dom/heady99.htmhttp://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htmShow nested quote +On June 19 2013 03:15 Shiori wrote:
By the way, aside from ancient Rome (and even there I've only found clear sources for 50BC onward) I'm not seeing where domestic abuse was universally derided in the West. As a matter of fact, it wasn't criminalized in the UK or the US until the 1800's. My main argument is that there isn't evidence to show that domestic violence was socially accepted, and that this would, in fact, go against our understanding of historical Western society, which traditionally protected women and put them on a pedestal (chivalry, anyone?). Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 03:15 Shiori wrote:
Lol, I just realize this thread is about abortion wtf. Why are we arguing about this again o.0 Because people are dragging in this false notion that women were or are oppressed. Ironically, I've also been arguing strongly in favor of abortion rights in this thread, yet the insinuation remains that I am against women simply because I have a politically incorrect understanding of history.
It will take me some time to go through all those studies, but it does rather seem like we're just kinda posting contradictory research to each other. No idea how to draw a conclusion from that. 
Anyway, your assertion that women were held on a pedestal via chivalry is not exactly true. While it is plausible that women were viewed as a sort of (ideally) pure and noble creature, this does not appear to have been relevant when it mattered. Chivalry, properly understood, and free of the romanticizing that literature (both contemporary and modern) has attached to it, was basically a code that applied to knights, and, to some extent, nobility. It was not expressly directed at women, but rather to those who could not defend themselves (i.e. widows, children, the elderly, the sickly, etc.). By the same token, it's worth pointing out that there was undeniable vilifying of female sexuality during the middle ages, particularly from Christian inspiration (fetishization of virginity, moronic associations of purity and impurity that were more associated with female biology than male e.g. mensutration etc.). But more than this, the biggest indicator of female oppression has always been that, particularly during the middle ages and in the ancient world, women were legally pretty much property. This is so incredibly huge when it comes to oppression, because while it's true that women were granted limited autonomy depending on their culture (ranging from very good in ancient Rome to very bad in middle Christian Europe) they were also not actually considered people in a real sense.
Let me just stress that: they were not being safeguarded, protected, or anything else by this judgment. They were objects to be traded via marriage in exchange for payment (i.e. a dowry or some political equivalent). That was pretty much all they were. While your points about mortality and such are valid, they aren't sufficient to account for the disparity between men and women when it comes to things like education. If the reason women were prevented from doing hard jobs was because they would get hurt or endangered, why were they also generally discouraged from pursuing education, like in theology or philosophy or even literacy? Why do we have influential characters like Thomas Aquinas saying things like "The woman is subject to man on account of the weakness of her nature . . . Man is the beginning of woman and her end, just as God is the beginning and end of every creature. Children ought to love their Father more than they love their mother." ?
It's pretty clear that there was more going on here than some sort of veneration for women. Women weren't just viewed as being fragile; they were viewed as being fundamentally incapable of doing important things, and were treated as useful (depending on the woman and her husband/family, anyway) but ultimately subjugated beings on a definitively lower level than that of men, both practically and ontologically. If that's not oppression, I don't know what is. Sure, women weren't working in the cotton fields with the slaves, but they had scarcely better ontological position, even if they were used as baby machines rather than hard laborers.
EDIT: It doesn't really matter what "most women" thought. History is rife with examples of "most people" believing things that were fictions propagated by the wealthy/powerful for hundreds of years before tearing them down. Feminism is no different. Unlike the modern era, the ancient world simply did not allow women much of a platform or grounding to change anything even if they wanted to. I mean, if you have no education, not control over your family life on account of your family governing all your affairs until marriage, no voice in religious circles unless you become a nun, and are generally not even present when the important men discuss important things, what the fuck are you supposed to do? It's not like there weren't dissenters; feminist writings have existed for more than a thousand years, but they could never gain any traction, not because their arguments were unconvincing necessarily, but because there were massive, systemic, and powerful forces with a vested interest in the exact opposite of what these early feminists might have thought.
Like this is akin to suggesting that North Korea isn't really oppressive because the vast majority of its people are content to labour under the delusions advanced by its government's propaganda. Just because women in the ancient world didn't mass revolt against unfair laws doesn't mean that they weren't oppressed. It means that they honestly believed women were inferior to men, just as philosophy, literature, and culture dictated.
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On June 19 2013 03:54 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 03:45 Stratos_speAr wrote:On June 19 2013 02:15 datcirclejerk wrote:On June 19 2013 02:11 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 02:10 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:00 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 01:55 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 00:39 ComaDose wrote:On June 18 2013 10:39 sunprince wrote:
Women [...] had limited rights [...] but this does not equate to "oppression". I was surprised to see something so stupid till i noticed it was sunprince that wrote it. Yes throughout the global history of the planet women had limited rights and that does mean they were oppressed. Limited rights does not equate to "oppression". Children in the modern world have limited rights (along with limited responsibilities), but no reasonable person would argue that we "oppress" children. Oppression is much better suited to describe differential treatment such as racial discrimination, not merely differential treatment of any sort. Historically, women were simply treated similarly to the way we treat children today, with limited rights but also limited responsibilities, and a great emphasis on protecting and coddling them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OppressionRead up. Your definition of oppression is utterly ridiculous.Let me emphasize the relevant part: "Oppression is the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner" Just because we supposedly "coddled" women (which, by the way, is a massive generalization and fails to acknowledge the fact that we "protected" them in the same way that we protect golden treasure; you know, as objects) doesn't mean that we didn't oppress them, because such coddling doesn't make our denial of rights for women any more just. Limiting the rights of children isn't oppressive because children are children and therefore we have a good, sensible reason to limit their rights, and do so in their own best interests. Please tell me you're not going to argue that we denied women rights for their own good. Your inherent assumption here is that women didn't want to be coddled in such a manner. Yeah, that's enough sunprince for today. He's actually making some very interesting arguments here. Just because something is politically incorrect does not render it untrue. His particular argument is stupid. It's pants-on-head retarded to say that women had a choice in any period of history but the most recent periods. Try to claim any kind of rights and you're simply shot down, beaten, raped, killed, socially ostracized, or some other manner of oppression. And of course women went along with it. Why? Because they were 1) trained to do it from their youngest memorable years and 2) didn't have any viable alternative paths. It's not like there were any education opportunities or paths for women to resist their oppressors throughout history. This is true for any group claiming new rights, even today. And yet, women were clearly able to do so when the time came that they cared enough to fight for it (universal female suffrage was passed in the United States as soon as polls showed a majority of women wanted it), as were other marginalized groups throughout history. In fact, women had a far easier time of it than an actually oppressed group, African-Americans, did; the women's movement never faced fire hoses, hangings, and police brutality the way the African-American Civil Rights movement did. You're essentially insisting that women were incompetent throughout most of human history. I don't buy it. I consider women to be strong, competent humans just like men who were capable of seizing their rights whenever they wanted, and that's exactly what they did once it was actually beneficial to do so. When universal male suffrage happened (in return for all the lives lost in WWI), women got the same soon after. When birth control became available and jobs became comfortable and safe enough that women could do it, women got access to the same jobs.
Cared enough for it? It's not that they cared enough for it, it's that the situation was ripe for them to actually be able to take it. The same exact thing happened with any other group throughout history getting rights.
No, I'm not insisting that women were incompetent. That's a disingenuous line of thinking that you're branding us with to make us look like we're being misogynistic when you're actually just being incredibly condescending and warping reality to fit your sexist and victim-blaming views. Women weren't and have never been any more incompetent than blacks, Jews, indigenous peoples, or the masses of society that didn't have rights until the late modern periods of society. None of these groups were particularly incompetent, and to claim that they "didn't want" their rights or were "compliant" in their oppression demonstrates that you completely fail to understand the very concept of oppression or consent. Saying that women/blacks/fill-in-the-blank "consented" to their incredibly oppressed situation is to imply that they, at any point, in any way, had a choice, which is 100% factually incorrect.
The freedom to be conscripted? The freedom to work in dangerous professions to support his family? You do realize that the "freedoms" enjoyed by the men at the apex of society mean very little to most of the men throughout human history, right?
Even today, most women prefer not to work if they can be married with a man who could support them. That's a basic trade off between freedom and responsibility.
Ask any of the men throughout history and I'm sure they were happier in their position than they would be in a woman's position. Conscription/working in a dangerous profession are the consequences/responsibilities of having the freedom to work at all.
Oh, and women preferring not to work? 1) Give us some proof, 2) assuming that this is true, it is more than likely a product of our culture that is still very much unequal in terms of how we treat men and women, and 3) it's also very likely that this isn't something unique to women, but is merely indicative of every human's laziness. Give a man the opportunity to be married to a rich women that can give him all the necessary money to live and I guarantee you that he would take the opportunity. Really, who wouldn't?
Edit: Made wording slightly less combative.
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On June 19 2013 03:40 wherebugsgo wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 00:18 Reason wrote:On June 19 2013 00:08 wherebugsgo wrote:
I think the issue is pretty simple. There are no hard and fast rules for when a fetus becomes viable-Roe v Wade determined that the interim point is around 28 weeks, albeit the fetus would need external aid to live. However, one can simply defer to the opinion of the doctor taking care of the woman. If the fetus is viable according to the doctor, an abortion should not be performed.
There are some minor problems with this, but it's probably the simplest and least controversial way of dealing with the "matter". I put that in quotes because the "definition of life" controversy really has only been espoused and pushed forth by conservatives.
That's a really roundabout way of saying "there should be no exceptions or late term abortions because of rape/incest but, on a related issue, I do think the 20 week legal limit could be universally made a little less rigid". You haven't actually addressed the "matter" of rape/incest exceptions. There is no matter. Are we talking about late term rape/incest exceptions? e: I would say that regardless of circumstance, if the woman can provide evidence that she had difficulty accessing health services, she should be allowed an abortion regardless of how late she is able to finally access said services.
You would say it's okay to abort a baby at 8 months and 30 days? That's ridiculous.
And quoted directly from the OP:
As if abortion wasn't a complicated enough issue already, it just got a little more thorny after the US Congress proposal to amend the Anti-Abortion bill and include rape and incest as exceptions. Notwithstanding the House bill, this is an important issue that needs a careful discussion.
According to the US law, abortion is not allowed after the late-term of pregnancy. Medically speaking, this falls between from 16th and the 20th week of pregnancy, and the US has adopted the 20th term limit. This is the period when the foetus is still dependent on the uterus and will not survived if removed from it.
So yeah, I'd say we're talking about late term rape/incest exceptions O_O what did you think we were talking about?
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On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 03:39 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 03:15 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 03:07 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 03:02 ComaDose wrote:On June 19 2013 02:50 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:38 ComaDose wrote:On June 19 2013 02:33 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:16 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 02:10 sunprince wrote:
[quote]
The reality is that they chose to forego these rights [citation needed] You left out the rest of my posts, which already explained the reasoning for this argument. Ultimately, I find it quite misogynistic of you and other posters here to insist on thinking of women as weak and helpless victims who spent millennia under an oppressive social system, rather than acknowledge that they may have perpetuated a system that benefited them. I'm embarased my gender was the one raping and beating women for centuries. Meanwhile, men were dying in droves from hard labor and slaughtered on the battlefield, yet women (who were twice as likely to survive to pass on their genes, despite the high mortality rate of childbirth prior to modern medicine) were unilaterally oppressed by men! /sarcasm In any case, the historical records we do have completely demolish the popular myths that domestic violence was historically accepted (plenty of evidence to show that wife beaters in Western culture were flogged, tarred/feathered, and hanged). War rape, on the other hand, actually existed, but that's actually better treatment than what victorious armies did to the men... However, I'll take this line of discourse as an admission that you have no legitimate arguments to make, since you are resorting to the fallacy of original male sin. dude domestic violence is still a problem That doesn't mean domestic violence is socially or legally acceptable. Not to mention the fact that the majority of non-reciprocal (one-sided) domestic violence perpetrators are women, contrary to the lies that have been perpetuated on this topic. Incidence of violence: 75% low frequency. Injury percentage: 8.1%. I'd also like to point out that the authors of the paper offer a couple of potential explanations as to the discrepancy between men and women as perpetrators: "One possible explanation for this, assuming that men and women are equally likely to initiate physical violence,20 is that men, who are typically larger and stronger, are less likely to retaliate if struck first by their partner. Thus, some men may be following the norm that “men shouldn’t hit women” when struck first by their partner. A different explanation is that men are simply less willing to report hitting their partner than are women.2" I'd argue that both are true, to some extent. It's worth noting that the general reasoning for why female domestic abuse is such a huge issue is still represented by this study: 20% change of injury i.e. 1 in 5, while the rate for men is less than half that. While domestic violence against men definitely deserves more attention, men generally speaking aren't seriously injured by it and therefore tend to not fear for their lives. Also it's sorta disingenuous to cherry pick one study of a particular demographic (mean age of ~22 years old) when tonnes of research has been done demonstrating the opposite. I mean, I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's incredibly biased to characterize all research other than this one study as "lies." I mean, the BJS released this study, for example. Seems pretty legitimate. By "lies", I'm referring to the academically documented fact that certain groups have fought to suppress information on domestic violence. This perpetuates the popular misconception that domestic violence is a gendered male-on-female problem, when the reality is that it is that there is gender parity, and that it's often reciprocal. Here's several additional studies, including a scholarly review which examines 286 scholarly investigations which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, if not more aggressive, than men in domestic relationships: http://smu.edu/experts/study-documents/family-violence-study-may2006.pdfhttp://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2005.079020http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/ID41E2.pdfhttp://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V70 version N3.pdfhttp://www.nij.gov/journals/261/teen-dating-violence.htmhttp://lab.drdondutton.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/DUTTON-NICHOLLS-AND-SPIDEL-2005-FEMALE-PERPETRATORS-OF-INTIMATE-VIOLENCE.pdfhttp://www.fact.on.ca/Info/dom/heady99.htmhttp://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htmOn June 19 2013 03:15 Shiori wrote:
By the way, aside from ancient Rome (and even there I've only found clear sources for 50BC onward) I'm not seeing where domestic abuse was universally derided in the West. As a matter of fact, it wasn't criminalized in the UK or the US until the 1800's. My main argument is that there isn't evidence to show that domestic violence was socially accepted, and that this would, in fact, go against our understanding of historical Western society, which traditionally protected women and put them on a pedestal (chivalry, anyone?). On June 19 2013 03:15 Shiori wrote:
Lol, I just realize this thread is about abortion wtf. Why are we arguing about this again o.0 Because people are dragging in this false notion that women were or are oppressed. Ironically, I've also been arguing strongly in favor of abortion rights in this thread, yet the insinuation remains that I am against women simply because I have a politically incorrect understanding of history. It will take me some time to go through all those studies, but it does rather seem like we're just kinda posting contradictory research to each other. No idea how to draw a conclusion from that.
Just go through the literature review then, since that should sum up all of the research (including sources you've already read) pretty well.
On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:
Anyway, your assertion that women were held on a pedestal via chivalry is not exactly true. While it is plausible that women were viewed as a sort of (ideally) pure and noble creature, this does not appear to have been relevant when it mattered. Chivalry, properly understood, and free of the romanticizing that literature (both contemporary and modern) has attached to it, was basically a code that applied to knights, and, to some extent, nobility. It was not expressly directed at women, but rather to those who could not defend themselves (i.e. widows, children, the elderly, the sickly, etc.). By the same token, it's worth pointing out that there was undeniable vilifying of female sexuality during the middle ages, particularly from Christian inspiration (fetishization of virginity, moronic associations of purity and impurity that were more associated with female biology than male e.g. mensutration etc.). But more than this, the biggest indicator of female oppression has always been that, particularly during the middle ages and in the ancient world, women were legally pretty much property. This is so incredibly huge when it comes to oppression, because while it's true that women were granted limited autonomy depending on their culture (ranging from very good in ancient Rome to very bad in middle Christian Europe) they were also not actually considered people in a real sense.
As I've previously argued, women have been historically treated like children. You'll notice that this explains all of the aspects you described: they are treated as unable to defend themselves like children, they are expected to be pure and their sexuality is vilified like children, and they were legally property like children. By your logic, children were not actually considered people in a real sense; in reality, they certainly were treated like people (and protected better than other types of people), even if their role was solely domestic and therefore legally nonexistent.
On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:
Let me just stress that: they were not being safeguarded, protected, or anything else by this judgment. They were objects to be traded via marriage in exchange for payment (i.e. a dowry or some political equivalent). That was pretty much all they were. While your points about mortality and such are valid, they aren't sufficient to account for the disparity between men and women when it comes to things like education. If the reason women were prevented from doing hard jobs was because they would get hurt or endangered, why were they also generally discouraged from pursuing education, like in theology or philosophy or even literacy? Why do we have influential characters like Thomas Aquinas saying things like "The woman is subject to man on account of the weakness of her nature . . . Man is the beginning of woman and her end, just as God is the beginning and end of every creature. Children ought to love their Father more than they love their mother." ?
Male children were traded similarly. Boys didn't have much choice as to who they were to marry either, in theory. In practice, parents of both boys and girls generally tried to take into account their children's preferences when arranging marriages, if only because they didn't want their family alliances held together by terribly incompatible pairings.
Women were generally discouraged from pursuing advanced education because it would be useless to them given their social roles, not because they were being oppressed. To the contrary, nobility did provide education to their daughters (we know that Charlemagne's daughters, for example, were permitted to attend the school at his palace), something which would not have happened if the goal were oppression. Compare this to how black slaves were absolutely forbidden from having any sort of education, for a true example of oppression
On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:
It's pretty clear that there was more going on here than some sort of veneration for women. Women weren't just viewed as being fragile; they were viewed as being fundamentally incapable of doing important things, and were treated as useful (depending on the woman and her husband/family, anyway) but ultimately subjugated beings on a definitively lower level than that of men, both practically and ontologically. If that's not oppression, I don't know what is. Sure, women weren't working in the cotton fields with the slaves, but they had scarcely better ontological position, even if they were used as baby machines rather than hard laborers.
They were indeed viewed as fundamentally incapable of doing important things. But acting upon this doesn't imply subjugation, any more than treating children as fundamentally incapable of doing some important things (such as driving, or consenting to sex, etc) is a form of subjugation. It's merely a means of protecting them, however misguided it might be.
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On June 19 2013 04:09 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 03:39 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 03:15 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 03:07 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 03:02 ComaDose wrote:On June 19 2013 02:50 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:38 ComaDose wrote:On June 19 2013 02:33 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:16 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
[citation needed] You left out the rest of my posts, which already explained the reasoning for this argument. Ultimately, I find it quite misogynistic of you and other posters here to insist on thinking of women as weak and helpless victims who spent millennia under an oppressive social system, rather than acknowledge that they may have perpetuated a system that benefited them. I'm embarased my gender was the one raping and beating women for centuries. Meanwhile, men were dying in droves from hard labor and slaughtered on the battlefield, yet women (who were twice as likely to survive to pass on their genes, despite the high mortality rate of childbirth prior to modern medicine) were unilaterally oppressed by men! /sarcasm In any case, the historical records we do have completely demolish the popular myths that domestic violence was historically accepted (plenty of evidence to show that wife beaters in Western culture were flogged, tarred/feathered, and hanged). War rape, on the other hand, actually existed, but that's actually better treatment than what victorious armies did to the men... However, I'll take this line of discourse as an admission that you have no legitimate arguments to make, since you are resorting to the fallacy of original male sin. dude domestic violence is still a problem That doesn't mean domestic violence is socially or legally acceptable. Not to mention the fact that the majority of non-reciprocal (one-sided) domestic violence perpetrators are women, contrary to the lies that have been perpetuated on this topic. Incidence of violence: 75% low frequency. Injury percentage: 8.1%. I'd also like to point out that the authors of the paper offer a couple of potential explanations as to the discrepancy between men and women as perpetrators: "One possible explanation for this, assuming that men and women are equally likely to initiate physical violence,20 is that men, who are typically larger and stronger, are less likely to retaliate if struck first by their partner. Thus, some men may be following the norm that “men shouldn’t hit women” when struck first by their partner. A different explanation is that men are simply less willing to report hitting their partner than are women.2" I'd argue that both are true, to some extent. It's worth noting that the general reasoning for why female domestic abuse is such a huge issue is still represented by this study: 20% change of injury i.e. 1 in 5, while the rate for men is less than half that. While domestic violence against men definitely deserves more attention, men generally speaking aren't seriously injured by it and therefore tend to not fear for their lives. Also it's sorta disingenuous to cherry pick one study of a particular demographic (mean age of ~22 years old) when tonnes of research has been done demonstrating the opposite. I mean, I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's incredibly biased to characterize all research other than this one study as "lies." I mean, the BJS released this study, for example. Seems pretty legitimate. By "lies", I'm referring to the academically documented fact that certain groups have fought to suppress information on domestic violence. This perpetuates the popular misconception that domestic violence is a gendered male-on-female problem, when the reality is that it is that there is gender parity, and that it's often reciprocal. Here's several additional studies, including a scholarly review which examines 286 scholarly investigations which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, if not more aggressive, than men in domestic relationships: http://smu.edu/experts/study-documents/family-violence-study-may2006.pdfhttp://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2005.079020http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/ID41E2.pdfhttp://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V70 version N3.pdfhttp://www.nij.gov/journals/261/teen-dating-violence.htmhttp://lab.drdondutton.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/DUTTON-NICHOLLS-AND-SPIDEL-2005-FEMALE-PERPETRATORS-OF-INTIMATE-VIOLENCE.pdfhttp://www.fact.on.ca/Info/dom/heady99.htmhttp://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htmOn June 19 2013 03:15 Shiori wrote:
By the way, aside from ancient Rome (and even there I've only found clear sources for 50BC onward) I'm not seeing where domestic abuse was universally derided in the West. As a matter of fact, it wasn't criminalized in the UK or the US until the 1800's. My main argument is that there isn't evidence to show that domestic violence was socially accepted, and that this would, in fact, go against our understanding of historical Western society, which traditionally protected women and put them on a pedestal (chivalry, anyone?). On June 19 2013 03:15 Shiori wrote:
Lol, I just realize this thread is about abortion wtf. Why are we arguing about this again o.0 Because people are dragging in this false notion that women were or are oppressed. Ironically, I've also been arguing strongly in favor of abortion rights in this thread, yet the insinuation remains that I am against women simply because I have a politically incorrect understanding of history. It will take me some time to go through all those studies, but it does rather seem like we're just kinda posting contradictory research to each other. No idea how to draw a conclusion from that. Just go through the literature review then, since that should sum up all of the research (including sources you've already read) pretty well. Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:
Anyway, your assertion that women were held on a pedestal via chivalry is not exactly true. While it is plausible that women were viewed as a sort of (ideally) pure and noble creature, this does not appear to have been relevant when it mattered. Chivalry, properly understood, and free of the romanticizing that literature (both contemporary and modern) has attached to it, was basically a code that applied to knights, and, to some extent, nobility. It was not expressly directed at women, but rather to those who could not defend themselves (i.e. widows, children, the elderly, the sickly, etc.). By the same token, it's worth pointing out that there was undeniable vilifying of female sexuality during the middle ages, particularly from Christian inspiration (fetishization of virginity, moronic associations of purity and impurity that were more associated with female biology than male e.g. mensutration etc.). But more than this, the biggest indicator of female oppression has always been that, particularly during the middle ages and in the ancient world, women were legally pretty much property. This is so incredibly huge when it comes to oppression, because while it's true that women were granted limited autonomy depending on their culture (ranging from very good in ancient Rome to very bad in middle Christian Europe) they were also not actually considered people in a real sense. As I've previously argued, women have been historically treated like children. You'll notice that this explains all of the aspects you described: they are treated as unable to defend themselves like children, they are expected to be pure and their sexuality is vilified like children, and they were legally property like children. By your logic, children were not actually considered people in a real sense; in reality, they certainly were treated like people (and protected better than other types of people), even if their role was solely domestic and therefore legally nonexistent. Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:
Let me just stress that: they were not being safeguarded, protected, or anything else by this judgment. They were objects to be traded via marriage in exchange for payment (i.e. a dowry or some political equivalent). That was pretty much all they were. While your points about mortality and such are valid, they aren't sufficient to account for the disparity between men and women when it comes to things like education. If the reason women were prevented from doing hard jobs was because they would get hurt or endangered, why were they also generally discouraged from pursuing education, like in theology or philosophy or even literacy? Why do we have influential characters like Thomas Aquinas saying things like "The woman is subject to man on account of the weakness of her nature . . . Man is the beginning of woman and her end, just as God is the beginning and end of every creature. Children ought to love their Father more than they love their mother." ? Male children were traded similarly. Boys didn't have much choice as to who they were to marry either, in theory. In practice, parents of both boys and girls generally tried to take into account their children's preferences when arranging marriages, if only because they didn't want their family alliances held together by terribly incompatible pairings. Women were generally discouraged from pursuing advanced education because it would be useless to them given their social roles, not because they were being oppressed. To the contrary, nobility did provide education to their daughters (we know that Charlemagne's daughters, for example, were permitted to attend the school at his palace), something which would not have happened if the goal were oppression. Compare this to how black slaves were absolutely forbidden from having any sort of education, for a true example of oppression
Your conclusions are the result of cherry-picking, extreme interpretation, or a failure to find the root of the problem. Education wasn't necessary for a woman's social roles, that is true, but a women's social role was the product of oppression; and, by extension, a woman didn't receive education because of oppression.
A basic level of education was expected in all nobility, regardless of sex. However, education and/or survival are not markers of freedom from oppression. Just because a woman received an education doesn't mean she wasn't oppressed in how she lived her life, the way she expressed herself, or even what she learned.
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On June 19 2013 04:09 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 03:39 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 03:15 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 03:07 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 03:02 ComaDose wrote:On June 19 2013 02:50 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:38 ComaDose wrote:On June 19 2013 02:33 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:16 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
[citation needed] You left out the rest of my posts, which already explained the reasoning for this argument. Ultimately, I find it quite misogynistic of you and other posters here to insist on thinking of women as weak and helpless victims who spent millennia under an oppressive social system, rather than acknowledge that they may have perpetuated a system that benefited them. I'm embarased my gender was the one raping and beating women for centuries. Meanwhile, men were dying in droves from hard labor and slaughtered on the battlefield, yet women (who were twice as likely to survive to pass on their genes, despite the high mortality rate of childbirth prior to modern medicine) were unilaterally oppressed by men! /sarcasm In any case, the historical records we do have completely demolish the popular myths that domestic violence was historically accepted (plenty of evidence to show that wife beaters in Western culture were flogged, tarred/feathered, and hanged). War rape, on the other hand, actually existed, but that's actually better treatment than what victorious armies did to the men... However, I'll take this line of discourse as an admission that you have no legitimate arguments to make, since you are resorting to the fallacy of original male sin. dude domestic violence is still a problem That doesn't mean domestic violence is socially or legally acceptable. Not to mention the fact that the majority of non-reciprocal (one-sided) domestic violence perpetrators are women, contrary to the lies that have been perpetuated on this topic. Incidence of violence: 75% low frequency. Injury percentage: 8.1%. I'd also like to point out that the authors of the paper offer a couple of potential explanations as to the discrepancy between men and women as perpetrators: "One possible explanation for this, assuming that men and women are equally likely to initiate physical violence,20 is that men, who are typically larger and stronger, are less likely to retaliate if struck first by their partner. Thus, some men may be following the norm that “men shouldn’t hit women” when struck first by their partner. A different explanation is that men are simply less willing to report hitting their partner than are women.2" I'd argue that both are true, to some extent. It's worth noting that the general reasoning for why female domestic abuse is such a huge issue is still represented by this study: 20% change of injury i.e. 1 in 5, while the rate for men is less than half that. While domestic violence against men definitely deserves more attention, men generally speaking aren't seriously injured by it and therefore tend to not fear for their lives. Also it's sorta disingenuous to cherry pick one study of a particular demographic (mean age of ~22 years old) when tonnes of research has been done demonstrating the opposite. I mean, I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's incredibly biased to characterize all research other than this one study as "lies." I mean, the BJS released this study, for example. Seems pretty legitimate. By "lies", I'm referring to the academically documented fact that certain groups have fought to suppress information on domestic violence. This perpetuates the popular misconception that domestic violence is a gendered male-on-female problem, when the reality is that it is that there is gender parity, and that it's often reciprocal. Here's several additional studies, including a scholarly review which examines 286 scholarly investigations which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, if not more aggressive, than men in domestic relationships: http://smu.edu/experts/study-documents/family-violence-study-may2006.pdfhttp://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2005.079020http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/ID41E2.pdfhttp://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V70 version N3.pdfhttp://www.nij.gov/journals/261/teen-dating-violence.htmhttp://lab.drdondutton.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/DUTTON-NICHOLLS-AND-SPIDEL-2005-FEMALE-PERPETRATORS-OF-INTIMATE-VIOLENCE.pdfhttp://www.fact.on.ca/Info/dom/heady99.htmhttp://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htmOn June 19 2013 03:15 Shiori wrote:
By the way, aside from ancient Rome (and even there I've only found clear sources for 50BC onward) I'm not seeing where domestic abuse was universally derided in the West. As a matter of fact, it wasn't criminalized in the UK or the US until the 1800's. My main argument is that there isn't evidence to show that domestic violence was socially accepted, and that this would, in fact, go against our understanding of historical Western society, which traditionally protected women and put them on a pedestal (chivalry, anyone?). On June 19 2013 03:15 Shiori wrote:
Lol, I just realize this thread is about abortion wtf. Why are we arguing about this again o.0 Because people are dragging in this false notion that women were or are oppressed. Ironically, I've also been arguing strongly in favor of abortion rights in this thread, yet the insinuation remains that I am against women simply because I have a politically incorrect understanding of history. It will take me some time to go through all those studies, but it does rather seem like we're just kinda posting contradictory research to each other. No idea how to draw a conclusion from that. Just go through the literature review then, since that should sum up all of the research (including sources you've already read) pretty well. Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:
Anyway, your assertion that women were held on a pedestal via chivalry is not exactly true. While it is plausible that women were viewed as a sort of (ideally) pure and noble creature, this does not appear to have been relevant when it mattered. Chivalry, properly understood, and free of the romanticizing that literature (both contemporary and modern) has attached to it, was basically a code that applied to knights, and, to some extent, nobility. It was not expressly directed at women, but rather to those who could not defend themselves (i.e. widows, children, the elderly, the sickly, etc.). By the same token, it's worth pointing out that there was undeniable vilifying of female sexuality during the middle ages, particularly from Christian inspiration (fetishization of virginity, moronic associations of purity and impurity that were more associated with female biology than male e.g. mensutration etc.). But more than this, the biggest indicator of female oppression has always been that, particularly during the middle ages and in the ancient world, women were legally pretty much property. This is so incredibly huge when it comes to oppression, because while it's true that women were granted limited autonomy depending on their culture (ranging from very good in ancient Rome to very bad in middle Christian Europe) they were also not actually considered people in a real sense. As I've previously argued, women have been historically treated like children. You'll notice that this explains all of the aspects you described: they are treated as unable to defend themselves like children, they are expected to be pure and their sexuality is vilified like children, and they were legally property like children. By your logic, children were not actually considered people in a real sense; in reality, they certainly were treated like people (and protected better than other types of people), even if their role was solely domestic and therefore legally nonexistent. Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:
Let me just stress that: they were not being safeguarded, protected, or anything else by this judgment. They were objects to be traded via marriage in exchange for payment (i.e. a dowry or some political equivalent). That was pretty much all they were. While your points about mortality and such are valid, they aren't sufficient to account for the disparity between men and women when it comes to things like education. If the reason women were prevented from doing hard jobs was because they would get hurt or endangered, why were they also generally discouraged from pursuing education, like in theology or philosophy or even literacy? Why do we have influential characters like Thomas Aquinas saying things like "The woman is subject to man on account of the weakness of her nature . . . Man is the beginning of woman and her end, just as God is the beginning and end of every creature. Children ought to love their Father more than they love their mother." ? Male children were traded similarly. Boys didn't have much choice as to who they were to marry either, in theory. In practice, parents of both boys and girls generally tried to take into account their children's preferences when arranging marriages, if only because they didn't want their family alliances held together by terribly incompatible pairings. Women were generally discouraged from pursuing advanced education because it would be useless to them given their social roles, not because they were being oppressed. To the contrary, nobility did provide early education to their daughters (we know that Charlemagne's daughters, for example, were permitted to attend the school at his palace), something which would not have happened if the goal were oppression. Compare this to how black slaves were absolutely forbidden from having any sort of education, for a true example of oppression Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:
It's pretty clear that there was more going on here than some sort of veneration for women. Women weren't just viewed as being fragile; they were viewed as being fundamentally incapable of doing important things, and were treated as useful (depending on the woman and her husband/family, anyway) but ultimately subjugated beings on a definitively lower level than that of men, both practically and ontologically. If that's not oppression, I don't know what is. Sure, women weren't working in the cotton fields with the slaves, but they had scarcely better ontological position, even if they were used as baby machines rather than hard laborers. They were indeed viewed as fundamentally incapable of doing important things. But acting upon this doesn't imply subjugation, any more than treating children as fundamentally incapable of doing some important things (such as driving, or consenting to sex, etc) is a form of subjugation. It's merely a means of protecting them, however misguided it might be.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/subjugation
Bringing someone under your control by making all their important decisions for them is literally the definition of subjugation. And it matters a lot that their attempts were misguided. I'm not trying to suggest that everyone in the ancient world was possessed by an evil malice and informed hatred of women; I'm arguing that they were oppressive and immoral in practice.
Oppression is really nothing more than unjust subjugation. You need both parts. Children are subjugated to some extent, but it's not unjust because neuroscience and psychology have given us good reasons to believe that 5 year olds don't understand what life and death are and therefore shouldn't be allowed to run for political office. Conversely, a woman is, for all intents and purposes, just as capable as a man when it comes to decision making at an adult level. This is precisely why the treatment of women in the past was oppressive!
Let me give you a parallel: when the US was debating abolishing slavery, proponents of slavery argued that slaves were actually better off in America (as slaves) than they were in Africa. Was this a good line of reasoning? Fuck no. Whether or not slavery was actually done in the best interests of slaves (and it pretty obviously wasn't) it was still a monstrously oppressive institution, and not just because of the physical aspects that you keep playing up. Like it or not, treating a fully capable adult human being as literal property is oppression because it is both subjugation and completely unjust.
Basically, the reason slavery was oppressive wasn't because slave owners treated their slaves like shit. It was because slavery is oppressive by definition. It's literally legal oppression! Women had a lesser (again, varying from culture to culture) mistreatment than this, to be sure, but it was still definitely oppression because it was subjugating and unjust, which is the literal definition of oppression.
By the way, black slaves were not universally deprived of education. Only certain states prohibited it by law, but it didn't matter because black people were still heavily discouraged from getting an education if they were slaves, even if they somehow found a way to afford it.
Also, boys apparently did have some choice when it came to marriage (they also tended to marry older than girls, which meant they were considered as having more intelligence/maturity/autonomy/ability to make their own choices etc.) whereas girls tended to have literally none.
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Let me just stress that: they were not being safeguarded, protected, or anything else by this judgment. They were objects to be traded via marriage in exchange for payment (i.e. a dowry or some political equivalent)
A dowery is property either paid by the brides family to cover the costs of starting a new household or in some cases remained under the woman's control as an extra layer of security in case the husband died or was unable to support the family. It didn't always work out that way in practice but you are overstating it as evidence of women as "property". If two two people got married we don't equate one of the parents giving a toaster oven in the wedding as evidence that the bride is property. If you are going to use historical examples at least get the details right.
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On June 19 2013 02:33 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 02:16 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 02:10 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:00 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 01:55 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 00:39 ComaDose wrote:On June 18 2013 10:39 sunprince wrote:
Women [...] had limited rights [...] but this does not equate to "oppression". I was surprised to see something so stupid till i noticed it was sunprince that wrote it. Yes throughout the global history of the planet women had limited rights and that does mean they were oppressed. Limited rights does not equate to "oppression". Children in the modern world have limited rights (along with limited responsibilities), but no reasonable person would argue that we "oppress" children. Oppression is much better suited to describe differential treatment such as racial discrimination, not merely differential treatment of any sort. Historically, women were simply treated similarly to the way we treat children today, with limited rights but also limited responsibilities, and a great emphasis on protecting and coddling them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OppressionRead up. Your definition of oppression is utterly ridiculous.Let me emphasize the relevant part: "Oppression is the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner" Just because we supposedly "coddled" women (which, by the way, is a massive generalization and fails to acknowledge the fact that we "protected" them in the same way that we protect golden treasure; you know, as objects) doesn't mean that we didn't oppress them, because such coddling doesn't make our denial of rights for women any more just. Limiting the rights of children isn't oppressive because children are children and therefore we have a good, sensible reason to limit their rights, and do so in their own best interests. Please tell me you're not going to argue that we denied women rights for their own good. The reality is that they chose to forego these rights [citation needed] You left out the rest of my posts, which already explained the reasoning for this argument. Ultimately, I find it quite misogynistic of you and other posters here to insist on thinking of women as weak and helpless victims who spent millennia under an oppressive social system, rather than acknowledge that they may have perpetuated a system that benefited them. That's pretty much objectification to the fullest possible extent; instead of treating women as competent agents with the power to exercise their own choices, you reduce them to helpless objects.
The rest of your post contained absolutely zero evidence to support the idea that women willingly chose to subject themselves to having less rights and liberties. Zero. Hence the "citation needed". Arguing that it "seems logic" from your point of view does not make it true. In fact, both history and the contemporary world are full of examples of the exact opposite.
Your last paragraph is you essentially combining a strawman and a false premise. First, the strawman: arguing that women have historically not been the holders of the social power and authority that would have been needed to collectively change the very social structures that prevented them from being the equals of men in terms of rights and liberties (and obligations) certainly does not equate to objectifying them. Despite several examples of struggles of African Americans towards that end, slavery was not abolished in the United States until the Civil War - and it took half of the country fighting for that to achieve it. Does this mean we objectify African Americans? No, it means we recognize that, in their struggle for emancipation and recognition as perfectly equal human beings, alone they did not have sufficient power/authority to achieve the said change as early as they would have wanted (...from the start).
Next, the false premise: you assume that agents necessarily can "exercise their own choices". This is false on two levels, with regards to resources and ideas. First, like we've seen, agents do not necessarily have the material, social or political resources to exercise their own choices. This doesn't mean that they're not "competent agents"; it simply means that agents are not omnipotent and are restrained in the choices that they can actually translate into action/change, in particular at the societal level.
Second, you are assuming that agents necessarily prevail over, and more precisely are completely independent of, structure. I dispute that assumption, and so do plenty of social science scholars. As a constructivist, I consider agent and structure to be co-constitutive, meaning that structure plays a role in shaping the decisions, and even identity, of agents, but that agents can also shape their own identity and in turn bring about structural change (to make it quick). More concretely and to come back to the issue at hand, you'll find plenty of examples of people who have internalized social norms that do not necessarily benefit them and do not attempt (or even think about attempting) to challenge them, precisely because that internalization "prevents them" from reaching the kind of costs/benefits calculation you speak of, or makes them discard such calculation as inappropriate. Of course, this certainly does not mean that personal reflections, external events, interactions with others, acquisition of new knowledge and plenty of other mechanisms cannot bring about a questioning and possibly a rejection of these norms, and you'll again find plenty of such examples throughout history. The point, however, is that you can't simply assert an agent is completely independent in the choices he considers, or even in the bringing about of a consideration of choice in the first place, as if this was necessarily true. If you're going to defend that position (namely that certain accepted social norms play no role in determining in part the position and decisions of certain agents, in this case women with regards to their place in society), you're again going to need to provide evidence.
To sum up, your idea of an agent free to exercise his "own choices" is flawed with regards to the debate at hand both in terms of the various types of resources (or lack thereof) at the disposition of the agent in question and in terms of your assertion of how agents necessarily have access to, and can exercise, choice on an ideational level.
(In addition, I'd like to point out that you are only speaking of choice at the aggregate level for women. For example, when you write that women's suffrage came about when "a majority of women wanted it" (emphasis mine), you're conveniently not mentioning that the women which already wanted to vote previously could not - i.e. they could not translate their choice of wanting to vote into actual votes.)
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Holy shit this thread got derailed :O
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On June 19 2013 04:31 kwizach wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 02:33 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:16 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 02:10 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:00 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 01:55 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 00:39 ComaDose wrote:On June 18 2013 10:39 sunprince wrote:
Women [...] had limited rights [...] but this does not equate to "oppression". I was surprised to see something so stupid till i noticed it was sunprince that wrote it. Yes throughout the global history of the planet women had limited rights and that does mean they were oppressed. Limited rights does not equate to "oppression". Children in the modern world have limited rights (along with limited responsibilities), but no reasonable person would argue that we "oppress" children. Oppression is much better suited to describe differential treatment such as racial discrimination, not merely differential treatment of any sort. Historically, women were simply treated similarly to the way we treat children today, with limited rights but also limited responsibilities, and a great emphasis on protecting and coddling them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OppressionRead up. Your definition of oppression is utterly ridiculous.Let me emphasize the relevant part: "Oppression is the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner" Just because we supposedly "coddled" women (which, by the way, is a massive generalization and fails to acknowledge the fact that we "protected" them in the same way that we protect golden treasure; you know, as objects) doesn't mean that we didn't oppress them, because such coddling doesn't make our denial of rights for women any more just. Limiting the rights of children isn't oppressive because children are children and therefore we have a good, sensible reason to limit their rights, and do so in their own best interests. Please tell me you're not going to argue that we denied women rights for their own good. The reality is that they chose to forego these rights [citation needed] You left out the rest of my posts, which already explained the reasoning for this argument. Ultimately, I find it quite misogynistic of you and other posters here to insist on thinking of women as weak and helpless victims who spent millennia under an oppressive social system, rather than acknowledge that they may have perpetuated a system that benefited them. That's pretty much objectification to the fullest possible extent; instead of treating women as competent agents with the power to exercise their own choices, you reduce them to helpless objects. The rest of your post contained absolutely zero evidence to support the idea that women willingly chose to subject themselves to having less rights and liberties. Zero. Hence the "citation needed". Arguing that it "seems logic" from your point of view does not make it true. In fact, both history and the contemporary world are full of examples of the exact opposite. Your last paragraph is you essentially combining a strawman and a false premise. First, the strawman: arguing that women have historically not been the holders of the social power and authority that would have been needed to collectively change the very social structures that prevented them from being the equals of men in terms of rights and liberties (and obligations) certainly does not equate to objectifying them. Despite several examples of struggles of African Americans towards that end, slavery was not abolished in the United States until the Civil War - and it took half of the country fighting for that to achieve it. Does this mean we objectify African Americans? No, it means we recognize that, in their struggle for emancipation and recognition as perfectly equal human beings, alone they did not have sufficient power/authority to achieve the said change as early as they would have wanted (...from the start).
The historical treatment of women does not even remotely approach the historical treatment of African-Americans. And yet, in spite of that, African-Americans achieved emancipation in a few centuries despite being a small minority of the population.
Your argument rests on the assumption that women are so weak and helpless that they were unable to prevail in far easier conditions despite having millennia to do so and being slightly more than half of the population. I refuse to buy this misogynistic assumption.
On June 19 2013 04:31 kwizach wrote:
Next, the false premise: you assume that agents necessarily can "exercise their own choices". This is false on two levels, with regards to resources and ideas. First, like we've seen, agents do not necessarily have the material, social or political resources to exercise their own choices. This doesn't mean that they're not "competent agents"; it simply means that agents are not omnipotent and are restrained in the choices that they can actually translate into action/change, in particular at the societal level.
My argument is that you consider women non-agents because they weren't actually restrained in the choices they made, they were easily capable of subverting and overthrowing the social order but chose not to do so.
On June 19 2013 04:31 kwizach wrote:For example, when you write that women's suffrage came about when "a majority of women wanted it" (emphasis mine), you're conveniently not mentioning that the women which already wanted to vote previously could not - i.e. they could not translate their choice of wanting to vote into actual votes.)
Actually, I was referring to polls here. When the women's suffrage movement began, many of the people opposed to it were women. The biggest battle for women was convincing other women, while men stood by to accept whatever they decided. As soon as a majority of women supported women's suffrage, lawmakers quickly enacted it into law. Compare this with the violent resistance against black suffrage.
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On June 19 2013 04:19 Shiori wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 04:09 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 03:39 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 03:15 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 03:07 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 03:02 ComaDose wrote:On June 19 2013 02:50 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:38 ComaDose wrote:On June 19 2013 02:33 sunprince wrote:
[quote]
You left out the rest of my posts, which already explained the reasoning for this argument.
Ultimately, I find it quite misogynistic of you and other posters here to insist on thinking of women as weak and helpless victims who spent millennia under an oppressive social system, rather than acknowledge that they may have perpetuated a system that benefited them. I'm embarased my gender was the one raping and beating women for centuries. Meanwhile, men were dying in droves from hard labor and slaughtered on the battlefield, yet women (who were twice as likely to survive to pass on their genes, despite the high mortality rate of childbirth prior to modern medicine) were unilaterally oppressed by men! /sarcasm In any case, the historical records we do have completely demolish the popular myths that domestic violence was historically accepted (plenty of evidence to show that wife beaters in Western culture were flogged, tarred/feathered, and hanged). War rape, on the other hand, actually existed, but that's actually better treatment than what victorious armies did to the men... However, I'll take this line of discourse as an admission that you have no legitimate arguments to make, since you are resorting to the fallacy of original male sin. dude domestic violence is still a problem That doesn't mean domestic violence is socially or legally acceptable. Not to mention the fact that the majority of non-reciprocal (one-sided) domestic violence perpetrators are women, contrary to the lies that have been perpetuated on this topic. Incidence of violence: 75% low frequency. Injury percentage: 8.1%. I'd also like to point out that the authors of the paper offer a couple of potential explanations as to the discrepancy between men and women as perpetrators: "One possible explanation for this, assuming that men and women are equally likely to initiate physical violence,20 is that men, who are typically larger and stronger, are less likely to retaliate if struck first by their partner. Thus, some men may be following the norm that “men shouldn’t hit women” when struck first by their partner. A different explanation is that men are simply less willing to report hitting their partner than are women.2" I'd argue that both are true, to some extent. It's worth noting that the general reasoning for why female domestic abuse is such a huge issue is still represented by this study: 20% change of injury i.e. 1 in 5, while the rate for men is less than half that. While domestic violence against men definitely deserves more attention, men generally speaking aren't seriously injured by it and therefore tend to not fear for their lives. Also it's sorta disingenuous to cherry pick one study of a particular demographic (mean age of ~22 years old) when tonnes of research has been done demonstrating the opposite. I mean, I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's incredibly biased to characterize all research other than this one study as "lies." I mean, the BJS released this study, for example. Seems pretty legitimate. By "lies", I'm referring to the academically documented fact that certain groups have fought to suppress information on domestic violence. This perpetuates the popular misconception that domestic violence is a gendered male-on-female problem, when the reality is that it is that there is gender parity, and that it's often reciprocal. Here's several additional studies, including a scholarly review which examines 286 scholarly investigations which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, if not more aggressive, than men in domestic relationships: http://smu.edu/experts/study-documents/family-violence-study-may2006.pdfhttp://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2005.079020http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/ID41E2.pdfhttp://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V70 version N3.pdfhttp://www.nij.gov/journals/261/teen-dating-violence.htmhttp://lab.drdondutton.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/DUTTON-NICHOLLS-AND-SPIDEL-2005-FEMALE-PERPETRATORS-OF-INTIMATE-VIOLENCE.pdfhttp://www.fact.on.ca/Info/dom/heady99.htmhttp://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htmOn June 19 2013 03:15 Shiori wrote:
By the way, aside from ancient Rome (and even there I've only found clear sources for 50BC onward) I'm not seeing where domestic abuse was universally derided in the West. As a matter of fact, it wasn't criminalized in the UK or the US until the 1800's. My main argument is that there isn't evidence to show that domestic violence was socially accepted, and that this would, in fact, go against our understanding of historical Western society, which traditionally protected women and put them on a pedestal (chivalry, anyone?). On June 19 2013 03:15 Shiori wrote:
Lol, I just realize this thread is about abortion wtf. Why are we arguing about this again o.0 Because people are dragging in this false notion that women were or are oppressed. Ironically, I've also been arguing strongly in favor of abortion rights in this thread, yet the insinuation remains that I am against women simply because I have a politically incorrect understanding of history. It will take me some time to go through all those studies, but it does rather seem like we're just kinda posting contradictory research to each other. No idea how to draw a conclusion from that. Just go through the literature review then, since that should sum up all of the research (including sources you've already read) pretty well. On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:
Anyway, your assertion that women were held on a pedestal via chivalry is not exactly true. While it is plausible that women were viewed as a sort of (ideally) pure and noble creature, this does not appear to have been relevant when it mattered. Chivalry, properly understood, and free of the romanticizing that literature (both contemporary and modern) has attached to it, was basically a code that applied to knights, and, to some extent, nobility. It was not expressly directed at women, but rather to those who could not defend themselves (i.e. widows, children, the elderly, the sickly, etc.). By the same token, it's worth pointing out that there was undeniable vilifying of female sexuality during the middle ages, particularly from Christian inspiration (fetishization of virginity, moronic associations of purity and impurity that were more associated with female biology than male e.g. mensutration etc.). But more than this, the biggest indicator of female oppression has always been that, particularly during the middle ages and in the ancient world, women were legally pretty much property. This is so incredibly huge when it comes to oppression, because while it's true that women were granted limited autonomy depending on their culture (ranging from very good in ancient Rome to very bad in middle Christian Europe) they were also not actually considered people in a real sense. As I've previously argued, women have been historically treated like children. You'll notice that this explains all of the aspects you described: they are treated as unable to defend themselves like children, they are expected to be pure and their sexuality is vilified like children, and they were legally property like children. By your logic, children were not actually considered people in a real sense; in reality, they certainly were treated like people (and protected better than other types of people), even if their role was solely domestic and therefore legally nonexistent. On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:
Let me just stress that: they were not being safeguarded, protected, or anything else by this judgment. They were objects to be traded via marriage in exchange for payment (i.e. a dowry or some political equivalent). That was pretty much all they were. While your points about mortality and such are valid, they aren't sufficient to account for the disparity between men and women when it comes to things like education. If the reason women were prevented from doing hard jobs was because they would get hurt or endangered, why were they also generally discouraged from pursuing education, like in theology or philosophy or even literacy? Why do we have influential characters like Thomas Aquinas saying things like "The woman is subject to man on account of the weakness of her nature . . . Man is the beginning of woman and her end, just as God is the beginning and end of every creature. Children ought to love their Father more than they love their mother." ? Male children were traded similarly. Boys didn't have much choice as to who they were to marry either, in theory. In practice, parents of both boys and girls generally tried to take into account their children's preferences when arranging marriages, if only because they didn't want their family alliances held together by terribly incompatible pairings. Women were generally discouraged from pursuing advanced education because it would be useless to them given their social roles, not because they were being oppressed. To the contrary, nobility did provide early education to their daughters (we know that Charlemagne's daughters, for example, were permitted to attend the school at his palace), something which would not have happened if the goal were oppression. Compare this to how black slaves were absolutely forbidden from having any sort of education, for a true example of oppression On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:
It's pretty clear that there was more going on here than some sort of veneration for women. Women weren't just viewed as being fragile; they were viewed as being fundamentally incapable of doing important things, and were treated as useful (depending on the woman and her husband/family, anyway) but ultimately subjugated beings on a definitively lower level than that of men, both practically and ontologically. If that's not oppression, I don't know what is. Sure, women weren't working in the cotton fields with the slaves, but they had scarcely better ontological position, even if they were used as baby machines rather than hard laborers. They were indeed viewed as fundamentally incapable of doing important things. But acting upon this doesn't imply subjugation, any more than treating children as fundamentally incapable of doing some important things (such as driving, or consenting to sex, etc) is a form of subjugation. It's merely a means of protecting them, however misguided it might be. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/subjugationBringing someone under your control by making all their important decisions for them is literally the definition of subjugation. And it matters a lot that their attempts were misguided. I'm not trying to suggest that everyone in the ancient world was possessed by an evil malice and informed hatred of women; I'm arguing that they were oppressive and immoral in practice. Oppression is really nothing more than unjust subjugation. You need both parts. Children are subjugated to some extent, but it's not unjust because neuroscience and psychology have given us good reasons to believe that 5 year olds don't understand what life and death are and therefore shouldn't be allowed to run for political office. Conversely, a woman is, for all intents and purposes, just as capable as a man when it comes to decision making at an adult level. This is precisely why the treatment of women in the past was oppressive!
Contemporary science tells us that children aren't capable of doing those things. Similarly, the prevailing wisdom which passed for "science" in the past told societies that women were not capable of doing those things, and accordingly both men and women accepted that treatment as normal, the way both parents and children (well, most children) accept their treatment as normal today.
On June 19 2013 04:19 Shiori wrote:
Let me give you a parallel: when the US was debating abolishing slavery, proponents of slavery argued that slaves were actually better off in America (as slaves) than they were in Africa. Was this a good line of reasoning? Fuck no. Whether or not slavery was actually done in the best interests of slaves (and it pretty obviously wasn't) it was still a monstrously oppressive institution, and not just because of the physical aspects that you keep playing up. Like it or not, treating a fully capable adult human being as literal property is oppression because it is both subjugation and completely unjust.
My whole argument is that it's up to the individuals to decide. Slavery was oppressive because the slaves did not consent to it. By contrast, my argument is that women consented to the societies that they were part of and helped to perpetuate.
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On June 19 2013 05:14 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 04:19 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 04:09 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 03:39 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 03:15 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 03:07 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 03:02 ComaDose wrote:On June 19 2013 02:50 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:38 ComaDose wrote:
[quote]
I'm embarased my gender was the one raping and beating women for centuries. Meanwhile, men were dying in droves from hard labor and slaughtered on the battlefield, yet women (who were twice as likely to survive to pass on their genes, despite the high mortality rate of childbirth prior to modern medicine) were unilaterally oppressed by men! /sarcasm In any case, the historical records we do have completely demolish the popular myths that domestic violence was historically accepted (plenty of evidence to show that wife beaters in Western culture were flogged, tarred/feathered, and hanged). War rape, on the other hand, actually existed, but that's actually better treatment than what victorious armies did to the men... However, I'll take this line of discourse as an admission that you have no legitimate arguments to make, since you are resorting to the fallacy of original male sin. dude domestic violence is still a problem That doesn't mean domestic violence is socially or legally acceptable. Not to mention the fact that the majority of non-reciprocal (one-sided) domestic violence perpetrators are women, contrary to the lies that have been perpetuated on this topic. Incidence of violence: 75% low frequency. Injury percentage: 8.1%. I'd also like to point out that the authors of the paper offer a couple of potential explanations as to the discrepancy between men and women as perpetrators: "One possible explanation for this, assuming that men and women are equally likely to initiate physical violence,20 is that men, who are typically larger and stronger, are less likely to retaliate if struck first by their partner. Thus, some men may be following the norm that “men shouldn’t hit women” when struck first by their partner. A different explanation is that men are simply less willing to report hitting their partner than are women.2" I'd argue that both are true, to some extent. It's worth noting that the general reasoning for why female domestic abuse is such a huge issue is still represented by this study: 20% change of injury i.e. 1 in 5, while the rate for men is less than half that. While domestic violence against men definitely deserves more attention, men generally speaking aren't seriously injured by it and therefore tend to not fear for their lives. Also it's sorta disingenuous to cherry pick one study of a particular demographic (mean age of ~22 years old) when tonnes of research has been done demonstrating the opposite. I mean, I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's incredibly biased to characterize all research other than this one study as "lies." I mean, the BJS released this study, for example. Seems pretty legitimate. By "lies", I'm referring to the academically documented fact that certain groups have fought to suppress information on domestic violence. This perpetuates the popular misconception that domestic violence is a gendered male-on-female problem, when the reality is that it is that there is gender parity, and that it's often reciprocal. Here's several additional studies, including a scholarly review which examines 286 scholarly investigations which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, if not more aggressive, than men in domestic relationships: http://smu.edu/experts/study-documents/family-violence-study-may2006.pdfhttp://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2005.079020http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/ID41E2.pdfhttp://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V70 version N3.pdfhttp://www.nij.gov/journals/261/teen-dating-violence.htmhttp://lab.drdondutton.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/DUTTON-NICHOLLS-AND-SPIDEL-2005-FEMALE-PERPETRATORS-OF-INTIMATE-VIOLENCE.pdfhttp://www.fact.on.ca/Info/dom/heady99.htmhttp://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htmOn June 19 2013 03:15 Shiori wrote:
By the way, aside from ancient Rome (and even there I've only found clear sources for 50BC onward) I'm not seeing where domestic abuse was universally derided in the West. As a matter of fact, it wasn't criminalized in the UK or the US until the 1800's. My main argument is that there isn't evidence to show that domestic violence was socially accepted, and that this would, in fact, go against our understanding of historical Western society, which traditionally protected women and put them on a pedestal (chivalry, anyone?). On June 19 2013 03:15 Shiori wrote:
Lol, I just realize this thread is about abortion wtf. Why are we arguing about this again o.0 Because people are dragging in this false notion that women were or are oppressed. Ironically, I've also been arguing strongly in favor of abortion rights in this thread, yet the insinuation remains that I am against women simply because I have a politically incorrect understanding of history. It will take me some time to go through all those studies, but it does rather seem like we're just kinda posting contradictory research to each other. No idea how to draw a conclusion from that. Just go through the literature review then, since that should sum up all of the research (including sources you've already read) pretty well. On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:
Anyway, your assertion that women were held on a pedestal via chivalry is not exactly true. While it is plausible that women were viewed as a sort of (ideally) pure and noble creature, this does not appear to have been relevant when it mattered. Chivalry, properly understood, and free of the romanticizing that literature (both contemporary and modern) has attached to it, was basically a code that applied to knights, and, to some extent, nobility. It was not expressly directed at women, but rather to those who could not defend themselves (i.e. widows, children, the elderly, the sickly, etc.). By the same token, it's worth pointing out that there was undeniable vilifying of female sexuality during the middle ages, particularly from Christian inspiration (fetishization of virginity, moronic associations of purity and impurity that were more associated with female biology than male e.g. mensutration etc.). But more than this, the biggest indicator of female oppression has always been that, particularly during the middle ages and in the ancient world, women were legally pretty much property. This is so incredibly huge when it comes to oppression, because while it's true that women were granted limited autonomy depending on their culture (ranging from very good in ancient Rome to very bad in middle Christian Europe) they were also not actually considered people in a real sense. As I've previously argued, women have been historically treated like children. You'll notice that this explains all of the aspects you described: they are treated as unable to defend themselves like children, they are expected to be pure and their sexuality is vilified like children, and they were legally property like children. By your logic, children were not actually considered people in a real sense; in reality, they certainly were treated like people (and protected better than other types of people), even if their role was solely domestic and therefore legally nonexistent. On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:
Let me just stress that: they were not being safeguarded, protected, or anything else by this judgment. They were objects to be traded via marriage in exchange for payment (i.e. a dowry or some political equivalent). That was pretty much all they were. While your points about mortality and such are valid, they aren't sufficient to account for the disparity between men and women when it comes to things like education. If the reason women were prevented from doing hard jobs was because they would get hurt or endangered, why were they also generally discouraged from pursuing education, like in theology or philosophy or even literacy? Why do we have influential characters like Thomas Aquinas saying things like "The woman is subject to man on account of the weakness of her nature . . . Man is the beginning of woman and her end, just as God is the beginning and end of every creature. Children ought to love their Father more than they love their mother." ? Male children were traded similarly. Boys didn't have much choice as to who they were to marry either, in theory. In practice, parents of both boys and girls generally tried to take into account their children's preferences when arranging marriages, if only because they didn't want their family alliances held together by terribly incompatible pairings. Women were generally discouraged from pursuing advanced education because it would be useless to them given their social roles, not because they were being oppressed. To the contrary, nobility did provide early education to their daughters (we know that Charlemagne's daughters, for example, were permitted to attend the school at his palace), something which would not have happened if the goal were oppression. Compare this to how black slaves were absolutely forbidden from having any sort of education, for a true example of oppression On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:
It's pretty clear that there was more going on here than some sort of veneration for women. Women weren't just viewed as being fragile; they were viewed as being fundamentally incapable of doing important things, and were treated as useful (depending on the woman and her husband/family, anyway) but ultimately subjugated beings on a definitively lower level than that of men, both practically and ontologically. If that's not oppression, I don't know what is. Sure, women weren't working in the cotton fields with the slaves, but they had scarcely better ontological position, even if they were used as baby machines rather than hard laborers. They were indeed viewed as fundamentally incapable of doing important things. But acting upon this doesn't imply subjugation, any more than treating children as fundamentally incapable of doing some important things (such as driving, or consenting to sex, etc) is a form of subjugation. It's merely a means of protecting them, however misguided it might be. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/subjugationBringing someone under your control by making all their important decisions for them is literally the definition of subjugation. And it matters a lot that their attempts were misguided. I'm not trying to suggest that everyone in the ancient world was possessed by an evil malice and informed hatred of women; I'm arguing that they were oppressive and immoral in practice. Oppression is really nothing more than unjust subjugation. You need both parts. Children are subjugated to some extent, but it's not unjust because neuroscience and psychology have given us good reasons to believe that 5 year olds don't understand what life and death are and therefore shouldn't be allowed to run for political office. Conversely, a woman is, for all intents and purposes, just as capable as a man when it comes to decision making at an adult level. This is precisely why the treatment of women in the past was oppressive! Contemporary science tells us that children aren't capable of doing those things. Similarly, the prevailing wisdom which passed for "science" in the past told societies that women were not capable of doing those things, and accordingly both men and women accepted that treatment as normal, the way both parents and children (well, most children) accept their treatment as normal today. Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 04:19 Shiori wrote:
Let me give you a parallel: when the US was debating abolishing slavery, proponents of slavery argued that slaves were actually better off in America (as slaves) than they were in Africa. Was this a good line of reasoning? Fuck no. Whether or not slavery was actually done in the best interests of slaves (and it pretty obviously wasn't) it was still a monstrously oppressive institution, and not just because of the physical aspects that you keep playing up. Like it or not, treating a fully capable adult human being as literal property is oppression because it is both subjugation and completely unjust. My whole argument is that it's up to the individuals to decide. Slavery was oppressive because the slaves did not consent to it. By contrast, my argument is that women consented to the societies that they were part of and helped to perpetuate.
So North Korea isn't oppressive? I mean that's literally what you're arguing, given that there hasn't been a massive revolt in NK.
It's not just contemporary science that tells us children aren't capable of things...it's fucking obvious. Nobody in the history of forever has considered a toddler to be on par with a functioning adult in terms of decision making. Conversely, there has never been any obvious reason beyond institutionalized sexism to think that women are less capable of making choices than men.
Prevailing wisdom here means shit that a bunch of male-dominated societies dreamed up based on anything from misogynistic philosophy to theology. I have no idea why you're treating it as if its supposed reasonableness means that it wasn't oppressive. I'm sure that someone who has been raised to believe that Kim Jong-Il is literally a god wouldn't have any problems with being his servant...but that doesn't mean it's not horribly oppressive. It's oppressive because Kim Jong-Il was not a god, and therefore, even if he actually believed he was, and even if everyone believed he was, his subjugation of his people was not justified because it was based on a premise that wasn't actually true.
You're conflating consent with informed consent, fundamentally, which is why your argument makes no sense. Unlike African-Americans, women were not seized from a society in which they had enjoyed greater freedoms and thrown into slavery. They were born into a specific, gender-based class, and they never knew anything else. That's why it took so agonizingly long for women to gain equal rights. It wasn't because the arguments weren't there (because the arguments basically boil down to women are people because they're cogent human beings with sophisticated experiences, which has been obvious since the beginning of our species) but because people weren't just told the opposite, but told the opposite in such a fashion that it wasn't even a point of view; it was just the way things are.
If we're actually living in the Matrix, we're being oppressed even if we don't know it, because we can't consent to something we're not even aware of. You have to actually know what the circumstances are and be free from restrictive systems to actually consent to a restrictive system (if such a thing is even really possible; I remain skeptical that consenting to slavery is not necessarily irrational, but whatever).
tl;dr women didn't give informed consent to oppression because they were given biased information, pressured from birth to conform to certain roles, led to believe that their place in society was divinely mandated, and because the situation was presented as about as much of a choice as deciding whether the sky is blue. If the sky actually turned out to be pink, and you've been the victim of an illusion all your life, it wouldn't make any sense to say you consented to the illusion just because you didn't resist...because you didn't know it was an illusion to start with!
Like you can talk about how women are "strong agents" or whatever all you want, but if they don't even know that they are, how the fuck are they supposed to exercise this agency? The human race has a long, long history of buying into oppressive ideologies. It's not a slight against women to suggest they were duped in the same manner. Even a cursory glance at history shows this. Variously unjust legal systems were gradually deposed by the citizenry once it became clear that they were unjust. That doesn't mean that the thousands of years preceding the overthrow of oppressive political systems were indicative of widespread consent, but just that nobody knew any better. If you're told from birth that Pharaoh is actually a god who will roam the afterlife when he dies and who is literally incapable of losing a battle because the gods love him, why in the fuck would you resist servitude? If that shit is actually true, then you'd be retarded not to serve, and since everyone seems to agree with it, it must be true!
Do you seriously think the average woman in 800AD sat there thinking to herself "well, I know that I, and all women, am just as good as any man, but I'm going to not ever exercise my agency because I'd rather men do everything which actually affects society." I'm pretty sure the invention of birth control was not singlehandedly responsible for every woman in the entire universe waking up and deciding "hey! now that I'm not raising children literally all the time, I can actually do things :D." Nevermind that many women had nannies, governesses, tutors, etc. which relieved them of this supposed constant work. And what about old or unmarried women? Why didn't they get important societal stations, given that they were not burdened with child-rearing (setting aside the fact that, while it is plausible though unsubstantiated that women have a slight predisposition toward raising children vs. working, the model of the family that laid the entirety of this responsibility on women as a matter of necessity was necessarily sexist)?
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On June 19 2013 05:10 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 04:31 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 02:33 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:16 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 02:10 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:00 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 01:55 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 00:39 ComaDose wrote:On June 18 2013 10:39 sunprince wrote:
Women [...] had limited rights [...] but this does not equate to "oppression". I was surprised to see something so stupid till i noticed it was sunprince that wrote it. Yes throughout the global history of the planet women had limited rights and that does mean they were oppressed. Limited rights does not equate to "oppression". Children in the modern world have limited rights (along with limited responsibilities), but no reasonable person would argue that we "oppress" children. Oppression is much better suited to describe differential treatment such as racial discrimination, not merely differential treatment of any sort. Historically, women were simply treated similarly to the way we treat children today, with limited rights but also limited responsibilities, and a great emphasis on protecting and coddling them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OppressionRead up. Your definition of oppression is utterly ridiculous.Let me emphasize the relevant part: "Oppression is the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner" Just because we supposedly "coddled" women (which, by the way, is a massive generalization and fails to acknowledge the fact that we "protected" them in the same way that we protect golden treasure; you know, as objects) doesn't mean that we didn't oppress them, because such coddling doesn't make our denial of rights for women any more just. Limiting the rights of children isn't oppressive because children are children and therefore we have a good, sensible reason to limit their rights, and do so in their own best interests. Please tell me you're not going to argue that we denied women rights for their own good. The reality is that they chose to forego these rights [citation needed] You left out the rest of my posts, which already explained the reasoning for this argument. Ultimately, I find it quite misogynistic of you and other posters here to insist on thinking of women as weak and helpless victims who spent millennia under an oppressive social system, rather than acknowledge that they may have perpetuated a system that benefited them. That's pretty much objectification to the fullest possible extent; instead of treating women as competent agents with the power to exercise their own choices, you reduce them to helpless objects. The rest of your post contained absolutely zero evidence to support the idea that women willingly chose to subject themselves to having less rights and liberties. Zero. Hence the "citation needed". Arguing that it "seems logic" from your point of view does not make it true. In fact, both history and the contemporary world are full of examples of the exact opposite. Your last paragraph is you essentially combining a strawman and a false premise. First, the strawman: arguing that women have historically not been the holders of the social power and authority that would have been needed to collectively change the very social structures that prevented them from being the equals of men in terms of rights and liberties (and obligations) certainly does not equate to objectifying them. Despite several examples of struggles of African Americans towards that end, slavery was not abolished in the United States until the Civil War - and it took half of the country fighting for that to achieve it. Does this mean we objectify African Americans? No, it means we recognize that, in their struggle for emancipation and recognition as perfectly equal human beings, alone they did not have sufficient power/authority to achieve the said change as early as they would have wanted (...from the start). The historical treatment of women does not even remotely approach the historical treatment of African-Americans. And yet, in spite of that, African-Americans achieved emancipation in a few centuries despite being a small minority of the population.
Nobody tried to argue that the historical treatment of women was equal to the historical treatment of African Americans. The analogy was there to highlight that pointing out that a group does not hold the social/political power and authority to achieve structural change at a given point does not equate to demeaning/objectifying that group.
On June 19 2013 05:10 sunprince wrote:
Your argument rests on the assumption that women are so weak and helpless that they were unable to prevail in far easier conditions despite having millennia to do so and being slightly more than half of the population. I refuse to buy this misogynistic assumption.
I pointed out why that was a strawman and I responded to it. Try answering my argument instead of repeating yours.
On June 19 2013 05:10 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 04:31 kwizach wrote:
Next, the false premise: you assume that agents necessarily can "exercise their own choices". This is false on two levels, with regards to resources and ideas. First, like we've seen, agents do not necessarily have the material, social or political resources to exercise their own choices. This doesn't mean that they're not "competent agents"; it simply means that agents are not omnipotent and are restrained in the choices that they can actually translate into action/change, in particular at the societal level. My argument is that you consider women non-agents because they weren't actually restrained in the choices they made, they were easily capable of subverting and overthrowing the social order but chose not to do so.
You are again repeating your initial argument, which I debunked, instead of addressing my (lengthy) reply to you (you're in particular leaving out the second part of my argument in quoting me). Citation also still needed for your claim that women "chose" not to overthrow the social order.
On June 19 2013 05:10 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 04:31 kwizach wrote:For example, when you write that women's suffrage came about when "a majority of women wanted it" (emphasis mine), you're conveniently not mentioning that the women which already wanted to vote previously could not - i.e. they could not translate their choice of wanting to vote into actual votes.) Actually, I was referring to polls here. When the women's suffrage movement began, many of the people opposed to it were women. The biggest battle for women was convincing other women, while men stood by to accept whatever they decided. As soon as a majority of women supported women's suffrage, lawmakers quickly enacted it into law. Compare this with the violent resistance against black suffrage.
Yes, I know you were referring to polls. That remark was there to point out that you are only speaking of choice at the aggregate level for women, instead of the choice granted to women as individuals.
Good job, you managed to avoid addressing any of the points I made in my post. Refer back to it if you want to actually respond to them.
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On June 16 2013 01:49 farvacola wrote:
I don't know what the big deal is with incestuous birth; congenial birth defects don't sound so bad.
User was temp banned for this post.
temp banned for this post, this is an other thing that shows to me that you should not speak your mind on teamliquid... just stupid
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On June 19 2013 05:46 E.L.V.I.S wrote:Show nested quote +On June 16 2013 01:49 farvacola wrote:
I don't know what the big deal is with incestuous birth; congenial birth defects don't sound so bad.
User was temp banned for this post. temp banned for this post, this is an other thing that shows to me that you should not speak your mind on teamliquid... just stupid
It was a misunderstanding and the ban was revoked. If you'd done any research on the matter you'd have found that out for yourself.
Speaking your mind is welcome, though preferably if you are informed on the matter of which you speak.
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Germany25649 Posts
On June 19 2013 05:46 E.L.V.I.S wrote:Show nested quote +On June 16 2013 01:49 farvacola wrote:
I don't know what the big deal is with incestuous birth; congenial birth defects don't sound so bad.
User was temp banned for this post. temp banned for this post, this is an other thing that shows to me that you should not speak your mind on teamliquid... just stupid
Take it to Website Feedback next time.
Also, the ban was revoked about 30 minutes later. Next time check first, then complain 
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On June 19 2013 05:14 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 04:19 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 04:09 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 03:39 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 03:15 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 03:07 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 03:02 ComaDose wrote:On June 19 2013 02:50 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:38 ComaDose wrote:
[quote]
I'm embarased my gender was the one raping and beating women for centuries. Meanwhile, men were dying in droves from hard labor and slaughtered on the battlefield, yet women (who were twice as likely to survive to pass on their genes, despite the high mortality rate of childbirth prior to modern medicine) were unilaterally oppressed by men! /sarcasm In any case, the historical records we do have completely demolish the popular myths that domestic violence was historically accepted (plenty of evidence to show that wife beaters in Western culture were flogged, tarred/feathered, and hanged). War rape, on the other hand, actually existed, but that's actually better treatment than what victorious armies did to the men... However, I'll take this line of discourse as an admission that you have no legitimate arguments to make, since you are resorting to the fallacy of original male sin. dude domestic violence is still a problem That doesn't mean domestic violence is socially or legally acceptable. Not to mention the fact that the majority of non-reciprocal (one-sided) domestic violence perpetrators are women, contrary to the lies that have been perpetuated on this topic. Incidence of violence: 75% low frequency. Injury percentage: 8.1%. I'd also like to point out that the authors of the paper offer a couple of potential explanations as to the discrepancy between men and women as perpetrators: "One possible explanation for this, assuming that men and women are equally likely to initiate physical violence,20 is that men, who are typically larger and stronger, are less likely to retaliate if struck first by their partner. Thus, some men may be following the norm that “men shouldn’t hit women” when struck first by their partner. A different explanation is that men are simply less willing to report hitting their partner than are women.2" I'd argue that both are true, to some extent. It's worth noting that the general reasoning for why female domestic abuse is such a huge issue is still represented by this study: 20% change of injury i.e. 1 in 5, while the rate for men is less than half that. While domestic violence against men definitely deserves more attention, men generally speaking aren't seriously injured by it and therefore tend to not fear for their lives. Also it's sorta disingenuous to cherry pick one study of a particular demographic (mean age of ~22 years old) when tonnes of research has been done demonstrating the opposite. I mean, I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's incredibly biased to characterize all research other than this one study as "lies." I mean, the BJS released this study, for example. Seems pretty legitimate. By "lies", I'm referring to the academically documented fact that certain groups have fought to suppress information on domestic violence. This perpetuates the popular misconception that domestic violence is a gendered male-on-female problem, when the reality is that it is that there is gender parity, and that it's often reciprocal. Here's several additional studies, including a scholarly review which examines 286 scholarly investigations which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, if not more aggressive, than men in domestic relationships: http://smu.edu/experts/study-documents/family-violence-study-may2006.pdfhttp://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2005.079020http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/ID41E2.pdfhttp://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V70 version N3.pdfhttp://www.nij.gov/journals/261/teen-dating-violence.htmhttp://lab.drdondutton.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/DUTTON-NICHOLLS-AND-SPIDEL-2005-FEMALE-PERPETRATORS-OF-INTIMATE-VIOLENCE.pdfhttp://www.fact.on.ca/Info/dom/heady99.htmhttp://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htmOn June 19 2013 03:15 Shiori wrote:
By the way, aside from ancient Rome (and even there I've only found clear sources for 50BC onward) I'm not seeing where domestic abuse was universally derided in the West. As a matter of fact, it wasn't criminalized in the UK or the US until the 1800's. My main argument is that there isn't evidence to show that domestic violence was socially accepted, and that this would, in fact, go against our understanding of historical Western society, which traditionally protected women and put them on a pedestal (chivalry, anyone?). On June 19 2013 03:15 Shiori wrote:
Lol, I just realize this thread is about abortion wtf. Why are we arguing about this again o.0 Because people are dragging in this false notion that women were or are oppressed. Ironically, I've also been arguing strongly in favor of abortion rights in this thread, yet the insinuation remains that I am against women simply because I have a politically incorrect understanding of history. It will take me some time to go through all those studies, but it does rather seem like we're just kinda posting contradictory research to each other. No idea how to draw a conclusion from that. Just go through the literature review then, since that should sum up all of the research (including sources you've already read) pretty well. On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:
Anyway, your assertion that women were held on a pedestal via chivalry is not exactly true. While it is plausible that women were viewed as a sort of (ideally) pure and noble creature, this does not appear to have been relevant when it mattered. Chivalry, properly understood, and free of the romanticizing that literature (both contemporary and modern) has attached to it, was basically a code that applied to knights, and, to some extent, nobility. It was not expressly directed at women, but rather to those who could not defend themselves (i.e. widows, children, the elderly, the sickly, etc.). By the same token, it's worth pointing out that there was undeniable vilifying of female sexuality during the middle ages, particularly from Christian inspiration (fetishization of virginity, moronic associations of purity and impurity that were more associated with female biology than male e.g. mensutration etc.). But more than this, the biggest indicator of female oppression has always been that, particularly during the middle ages and in the ancient world, women were legally pretty much property. This is so incredibly huge when it comes to oppression, because while it's true that women were granted limited autonomy depending on their culture (ranging from very good in ancient Rome to very bad in middle Christian Europe) they were also not actually considered people in a real sense. As I've previously argued, women have been historically treated like children. You'll notice that this explains all of the aspects you described: they are treated as unable to defend themselves like children, they are expected to be pure and their sexuality is vilified like children, and they were legally property like children. By your logic, children were not actually considered people in a real sense; in reality, they certainly were treated like people (and protected better than other types of people), even if their role was solely domestic and therefore legally nonexistent. On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:
Let me just stress that: they were not being safeguarded, protected, or anything else by this judgment. They were objects to be traded via marriage in exchange for payment (i.e. a dowry or some political equivalent). That was pretty much all they were. While your points about mortality and such are valid, they aren't sufficient to account for the disparity between men and women when it comes to things like education. If the reason women were prevented from doing hard jobs was because they would get hurt or endangered, why were they also generally discouraged from pursuing education, like in theology or philosophy or even literacy? Why do we have influential characters like Thomas Aquinas saying things like "The woman is subject to man on account of the weakness of her nature . . . Man is the beginning of woman and her end, just as God is the beginning and end of every creature. Children ought to love their Father more than they love their mother." ? Male children were traded similarly. Boys didn't have much choice as to who they were to marry either, in theory. In practice, parents of both boys and girls generally tried to take into account their children's preferences when arranging marriages, if only because they didn't want their family alliances held together by terribly incompatible pairings. Women were generally discouraged from pursuing advanced education because it would be useless to them given their social roles, not because they were being oppressed. To the contrary, nobility did provide early education to their daughters (we know that Charlemagne's daughters, for example, were permitted to attend the school at his palace), something which would not have happened if the goal were oppression. Compare this to how black slaves were absolutely forbidden from having any sort of education, for a true example of oppression On June 19 2013 03:57 Shiori wrote:
It's pretty clear that there was more going on here than some sort of veneration for women. Women weren't just viewed as being fragile; they were viewed as being fundamentally incapable of doing important things, and were treated as useful (depending on the woman and her husband/family, anyway) but ultimately subjugated beings on a definitively lower level than that of men, both practically and ontologically. If that's not oppression, I don't know what is. Sure, women weren't working in the cotton fields with the slaves, but they had scarcely better ontological position, even if they were used as baby machines rather than hard laborers. They were indeed viewed as fundamentally incapable of doing important things. But acting upon this doesn't imply subjugation, any more than treating children as fundamentally incapable of doing some important things (such as driving, or consenting to sex, etc) is a form of subjugation. It's merely a means of protecting them, however misguided it might be. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/subjugationBringing someone under your control by making all their important decisions for them is literally the definition of subjugation. And it matters a lot that their attempts were misguided. I'm not trying to suggest that everyone in the ancient world was possessed by an evil malice and informed hatred of women; I'm arguing that they were oppressive and immoral in practice. Oppression is really nothing more than unjust subjugation. You need both parts. Children are subjugated to some extent, but it's not unjust because neuroscience and psychology have given us good reasons to believe that 5 year olds don't understand what life and death are and therefore shouldn't be allowed to run for political office. Conversely, a woman is, for all intents and purposes, just as capable as a man when it comes to decision making at an adult level. This is precisely why the treatment of women in the past was oppressive! Contemporary science tells us that children aren't capable of doing those things. Similarly, the prevailing wisdom which passed for "science" in the past told societies that women were not capable of doing those things, and accordingly both men and women accepted that treatment as normal, the way both parents and children (well, most children) accept their treatment as normal today. Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 04:19 Shiori wrote:
Let me give you a parallel: when the US was debating abolishing slavery, proponents of slavery argued that slaves were actually better off in America (as slaves) than they were in Africa. Was this a good line of reasoning? Fuck no. Whether or not slavery was actually done in the best interests of slaves (and it pretty obviously wasn't) it was still a monstrously oppressive institution, and not just because of the physical aspects that you keep playing up. Like it or not, treating a fully capable adult human being as literal property is oppression because it is both subjugation and completely unjust. My whole argument is that it's up to the individuals to decide. Slavery was oppressive because the slaves did not consent to it. By contrast, my argument is that women consented to the societies that they were part of and helped to perpetuate.
You need to do some more reading in the areas of law, politics, psychology, philosophy, etc. You're dealing with a phenomenon called "adaptive preferences." Arab women are, quite literally, the perfect example of what you're talking about. Your logic would dictate that they are at fault for their situation and aren't oppressed. However, adaptive preferences explains this phenomenon, and there are countless pages on the topic that explain why it is incredibly insulting to blame the victim for being subject to adaptive preferences.
Oh, and by claiming that women could have just thrown off the shackles of their oppression at any point, you demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of cultural history, and it explains how you've come to this bizarre view that you have.
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On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 05:10 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 04:31 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 02:33 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:16 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 02:10 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 02:00 Shiori wrote:On June 19 2013 01:55 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 00:39 ComaDose wrote:On June 18 2013 10:39 sunprince wrote:
Women [...] had limited rights [...] but this does not equate to "oppression". I was surprised to see something so stupid till i noticed it was sunprince that wrote it. Yes throughout the global history of the planet women had limited rights and that does mean they were oppressed. Limited rights does not equate to "oppression". Children in the modern world have limited rights (along with limited responsibilities), but no reasonable person would argue that we "oppress" children. Oppression is much better suited to describe differential treatment such as racial discrimination, not merely differential treatment of any sort. Historically, women were simply treated similarly to the way we treat children today, with limited rights but also limited responsibilities, and a great emphasis on protecting and coddling them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OppressionRead up. Your definition of oppression is utterly ridiculous.Let me emphasize the relevant part: "Oppression is the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner" Just because we supposedly "coddled" women (which, by the way, is a massive generalization and fails to acknowledge the fact that we "protected" them in the same way that we protect golden treasure; you know, as objects) doesn't mean that we didn't oppress them, because such coddling doesn't make our denial of rights for women any more just. Limiting the rights of children isn't oppressive because children are children and therefore we have a good, sensible reason to limit their rights, and do so in their own best interests. Please tell me you're not going to argue that we denied women rights for their own good. The reality is that they chose to forego these rights [citation needed] You left out the rest of my posts, which already explained the reasoning for this argument. Ultimately, I find it quite misogynistic of you and other posters here to insist on thinking of women as weak and helpless victims who spent millennia under an oppressive social system, rather than acknowledge that they may have perpetuated a system that benefited them. That's pretty much objectification to the fullest possible extent; instead of treating women as competent agents with the power to exercise their own choices, you reduce them to helpless objects. The rest of your post contained absolutely zero evidence to support the idea that women willingly chose to subject themselves to having less rights and liberties. Zero. Hence the "citation needed". Arguing that it "seems logic" from your point of view does not make it true. In fact, both history and the contemporary world are full of examples of the exact opposite. Your last paragraph is you essentially combining a strawman and a false premise. First, the strawman: arguing that women have historically not been the holders of the social power and authority that would have been needed to collectively change the very social structures that prevented them from being the equals of men in terms of rights and liberties (and obligations) certainly does not equate to objectifying them. Despite several examples of struggles of African Americans towards that end, slavery was not abolished in the United States until the Civil War - and it took half of the country fighting for that to achieve it. Does this mean we objectify African Americans? No, it means we recognize that, in their struggle for emancipation and recognition as perfectly equal human beings, alone they did not have sufficient power/authority to achieve the said change as early as they would have wanted (...from the start). The historical treatment of women does not even remotely approach the historical treatment of African-Americans. And yet, in spite of that, African-Americans achieved emancipation in a few centuries despite being a small minority of the population. Nobody tried to argue that the historical treatment of women was equal to the historical treatment of African Americans. The analogy was there to highlight that pointing out that a group does not hold the social/political power and authority to achieve structural change at a given point does not equate to demeaning/objectifying that group.
The problem is that you've started your argument with the assumption that women were oppressed, instead of concluding this after providing evidence. In reality, virtually all of the objective metrics that we use to conclude that African Americans are oppressed and discriminated against such as the sentencing gap, the prosecution gap, the likelihood of violent crime victimization, the percentage of workplace deaths, the suicide rate, the homelessness percentage, the amount of federal aid given, etc. are all reversed when it comes to women, and have been historically as far as we have data.
What objective metric do you have to conclude that women are or were oppressed in the first place, when all of the common measures used to determine quality of life show that women are and have been ahead?
On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 05:10 sunprince wrote:
Your argument rests on the assumption that women are so weak and helpless that they were unable to prevail in far easier conditions despite having millennia to do so and being slightly more than half of the population. I refuse to buy this misogynistic assumption. I pointed out why that was a strawman and I responded to it. Try answering my argument instead of repeating yours. Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 05:10 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 04:31 kwizach wrote:
Next, the false premise: you assume that agents necessarily can "exercise their own choices". This is false on two levels, with regards to resources and ideas. First, like we've seen, agents do not necessarily have the material, social or political resources to exercise their own choices. This doesn't mean that they're not "competent agents"; it simply means that agents are not omnipotent and are restrained in the choices that they can actually translate into action/change, in particular at the societal level. My argument is that you consider women non-agents because they weren't actually restrained in the choices they made, they were easily capable of subverting and overthrowing the social order but chose not to do so. You are again repeating your initial argument, which I debunked, instead of addressing my (lengthy) reply to you (you're in particular leaving out the second part of my argument in quoting me). Citation also still needed for your claim that women "chose" not to overthrow the social order.
The fact that they didn't, when they could (given that they were in better circumstances than other groups that did) means that they chose not to.
On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 05:10 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 04:31 kwizach wrote:For example, when you write that women's suffrage came about when "a majority of women wanted it" (emphasis mine), you're conveniently not mentioning that the women which already wanted to vote previously could not - i.e. they could not translate their choice of wanting to vote into actual votes.) Actually, I was referring to polls here. When the women's suffrage movement began, many of the people opposed to it were women. The biggest battle for women was convincing other women, while men stood by to accept whatever they decided. As soon as a majority of women supported women's suffrage, lawmakers quickly enacted it into law. Compare this with the violent resistance against black suffrage. Yes, I know you were referring to polls. That remark was there to point out that you are only speaking of choice at the aggregate level for women, instead of the choice granted to women as individuals.
Gender roles, including rights and responsibilities, are determined at the aggregate level by societies. Exceptions exist, but for those people there are also exceptions to gender roles too.
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