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I would never say the father has to sign off on the deal. He is not an equal stakeholder, but he is clearly a stakeholder in it and his rights should be protected too (although it is very hard to do so; if the woman doesn't want the father involved she can simply lie and say she doesn't know who the father is, and nobody has time or money to figure out whether that is the truth or not).
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On June 20 2013 02:25 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 02:21 Acrofales wrote:On June 20 2013 00:05 Dark_Chill wrote:
So, concerning abortion. I really dislike the measurements going on to see if it's okay for it to happen at whatever time. It definitely feels so strange to say at which point something stops being just some cells and becomes a human being, and it feels entirely pointless to me. Morality and ethics should substitute for logic and reasoning only when we have no idea about things, since they can lead us to a usually safe route for humanity.
If we were to change the measurements to make it so that what was taken into account was the safety of the person carrying the child, then things would be much easier. For instance, what if was made so that the limit for abortion times were based on the safety of the mother? If we were to establish a certain risk threshold at some value (again just drawing a line in the sand but I can't really think of anything better) that would give a flexible way to judge whether abortions are okay. If the threshold was passed, then the safer option of having the child and putting it up for adoption would come. But the risk for a woman bearing an unwanted child (whether she is a rape victim or not) is no larger than the risk for any other pregnant woman. We're not talking about abortion for medical reasons here, which (correct me if I'm wrong) even pro-lifers agree with. We're talking about the choice of aborting pregnancy DESPITE there being no (abnormal) risk to the mother, because the mother (or parents) do not want the child. In this case the ethical viewpoint is necessary, because there IS no objective way of qualifying the risk to either the mother or the child and deciding a priori what is best (the child isn't born yet. Maybe you're aborting the next Einstein, Van Gogh or Ghandi). All you can do is decide who has what rights, and why, and that is precisely where ethics enters with such questions as what constitutes a human being, where does one's right to bodily autonomy begin/end and should we differentiate between different reasons for aborting a pregnancy (rape, genetical defects, poverty, underaged, simply not wanting a baby, etc. etc.). There are two patients. Child and Mother. Child is not of age, so mother has say on his medical procedures. Mother has say on her own medical procedures. Father has no say on the mother's medical procedures. Father *could* have say in the child's decisions--but not the mothers. Mother gives the yes/no for the child and for herself--father unnecessary.
If you are talking about a super early delivery where the child is then unable to survive for long outside of the womb, then that is fine, but this rational would not justify intentionally killing a child while it is in the womb. Also the Doctor would presumably be compelled to do what she could to save the child's life.
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On June 20 2013 02:56 meadbert wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 02:25 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 02:21 Acrofales wrote:On June 20 2013 00:05 Dark_Chill wrote:
So, concerning abortion. I really dislike the measurements going on to see if it's okay for it to happen at whatever time. It definitely feels so strange to say at which point something stops being just some cells and becomes a human being, and it feels entirely pointless to me. Morality and ethics should substitute for logic and reasoning only when we have no idea about things, since they can lead us to a usually safe route for humanity.
If we were to change the measurements to make it so that what was taken into account was the safety of the person carrying the child, then things would be much easier. For instance, what if was made so that the limit for abortion times were based on the safety of the mother? If we were to establish a certain risk threshold at some value (again just drawing a line in the sand but I can't really think of anything better) that would give a flexible way to judge whether abortions are okay. If the threshold was passed, then the safer option of having the child and putting it up for adoption would come. But the risk for a woman bearing an unwanted child (whether she is a rape victim or not) is no larger than the risk for any other pregnant woman. We're not talking about abortion for medical reasons here, which (correct me if I'm wrong) even pro-lifers agree with. We're talking about the choice of aborting pregnancy DESPITE there being no (abnormal) risk to the mother, because the mother (or parents) do not want the child. In this case the ethical viewpoint is necessary, because there IS no objective way of qualifying the risk to either the mother or the child and deciding a priori what is best (the child isn't born yet. Maybe you're aborting the next Einstein, Van Gogh or Ghandi). All you can do is decide who has what rights, and why, and that is precisely where ethics enters with such questions as what constitutes a human being, where does one's right to bodily autonomy begin/end and should we differentiate between different reasons for aborting a pregnancy (rape, genetical defects, poverty, underaged, simply not wanting a baby, etc. etc.). There are two patients. Child and Mother. Child is not of age, so mother has say on his medical procedures. Mother has say on her own medical procedures. Father has no say on the mother's medical procedures. Father *could* have say in the child's decisions--but not the mothers. Mother gives the yes/no for the child and for herself--father unnecessary. If you are talking about a super early delivery where the child is then unable to survive for long outside of the womb, then that is fine, but this rational would not justify intentionally killing a child while it is in the womb. Also the Doctor would presumably be compelled to do what she could to save the child's life.
And hence my long post in the previous page comes to life.
I'm talking about medical consent, you're talking about infanticide.
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On June 20 2013 02:43 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 02:25 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 02:21 Acrofales wrote:On June 20 2013 00:05 Dark_Chill wrote:
So, concerning abortion. I really dislike the measurements going on to see if it's okay for it to happen at whatever time. It definitely feels so strange to say at which point something stops being just some cells and becomes a human being, and it feels entirely pointless to me. Morality and ethics should substitute for logic and reasoning only when we have no idea about things, since they can lead us to a usually safe route for humanity.
If we were to change the measurements to make it so that what was taken into account was the safety of the person carrying the child, then things would be much easier. For instance, what if was made so that the limit for abortion times were based on the safety of the mother? If we were to establish a certain risk threshold at some value (again just drawing a line in the sand but I can't really think of anything better) that would give a flexible way to judge whether abortions are okay. If the threshold was passed, then the safer option of having the child and putting it up for adoption would come. But the risk for a woman bearing an unwanted child (whether she is a rape victim or not) is no larger than the risk for any other pregnant woman. We're not talking about abortion for medical reasons here, which (correct me if I'm wrong) even pro-lifers agree with. We're talking about the choice of aborting pregnancy DESPITE there being no (abnormal) risk to the mother, because the mother (or parents) do not want the child. In this case the ethical viewpoint is necessary, because there IS no objective way of qualifying the risk to either the mother or the child and deciding a priori what is best (the child isn't born yet. Maybe you're aborting the next Einstein, Van Gogh or Ghandi). All you can do is decide who has what rights, and why, and that is precisely where ethics enters with such questions as what constitutes a human being, where does one's right to bodily autonomy begin/end and should we differentiate between different reasons for aborting a pregnancy (rape, genetical defects, poverty, underaged, simply not wanting a baby, etc. etc.). There are two patients. Child and Mother. Child is not of age, so mother has say on his medical procedures. Mother has say on her own medical procedures. Father has no say on the mother's medical procedures. Father *could* have say in the child's decisions--but not the mothers. Mother gives the yes/no for the child and for herself--father unnecessary. There are no patients, because there is no illness. There is a choice to be made, and it is an ethical choice. The father (as long as he isn't a rapist) has a say in the matter, although I agree with you that the mother has more say, because it is 9 months of her life that are being spent to bear the baby, even if she after that gives it to the father and never sees it again.
Patient doesn't refer to just illnesses. A broken bone is not an illness. Pregnancy obviously has serious medical consequences, and referring to the pregnant woman as a patient is perfectly fine.
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On June 19 2013 20:24 marvellosity wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 08:57 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote: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:
[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. 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? No, the problem is that you're refusing to address the points I'm making, in this case going as far as completely changing the topic. The analogy was there to respond to your assertion that we were demeaning women. My reply to you was 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". Except that your argument is that women never had the power to achieve structural change, when the reality is that they did. [Citation again needed] On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:
You're demeaning them by calling them incapable, when in fact they were capable, but chose not to. No, I'm not demeaning them, because I just explained to you why remarking a group has limited power to achieve structural change, and is affected by social norms that make it harder to challenge its inferior place in society, is not the same as demeaning that group. Regarding "choice", see below (again). On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote: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: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. Why are you even replying to me if all you're going to do is repeat your initial statement which I thoroughly debunked? Here, let me copy/paste the entire relevant section of my initial post: 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. Feel free to reply when you have actual counter-arguments to put forward. There is nothing to answer here, because you are once again arguing with the assumption that women were powerless in the first place. I disagree with that fundamental assumption, so there is no point in arguing further down the line of reasoning when it's broken near the beginning. No, see, that's you reducing my argument to a caricature and calling it an "assumption" to avoid having to discuss the actual argument. It's also not even a matter of "arguing further down the line" since I directly replied to your assertion that they had a choice and chose willingly to have an inferior place in society. You, on the other hand, have been shutting your ears and repeating that they had a choice without ever providing any evidence (or even logic) to support that claim. Again, here is my response to you : 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. If you have no counter-argument, no need to reply. You've already stated your position several times. On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote: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. Yes, and socially-accepted gender roles can prevent individuals from exercising their choices the way they would want to - for example by voting. Thank you for agreeing with me. Except that this doesn't support your argument that women as a group were oppressed. Except that I already told you that's not what I was discussing with you - I was discussing access to choice and possibility to act upon choice. You just agreed with me that individual women could not act upon their choices, thanks! sunprince, you'd do well to actually directly address his points that he's bringing up, because kwizach is right, you keep skirting around them without directly addressing what he's actually written. Otherwise this (interesting) conversation will keep going round in pointless circles. Edit: for example, you tell kwizach "you're demeaning them by saying they're incapable" - this simply is nowhere near the thrust of his argument, yet you keep repeating it. It's not what he's saying.
Alright, let's see if I can clarify my argument:
Premise: Every other (read: actually) oppressed groups throughout history successfully revolted within a few centuries.
Premise: Unlike those oppressed groups, women were unable to achieve "freedom" for nearly all of human history.
Conclusion #1: There must be some reason that, unlike all other marginalized groups, women did not revolt.
Premise: Women are just as capable of revolting and achieving freedom when they want to.
Premise: Women as a group have had substantially better treatment than the aforementioned oppressed groups.
Premise: When women did eventually revolt, they faced minimal resistance, especially compared to oppressed groups.
Conclusion #2: Women did not fail to revolt because they were too oppressed, nor because there was too much resistance. In other words, they did not lack resources, as kwizach argues, since other groups demonstrated you need less than what women had.
If we put those all together, we can see that women chose not to revolt. kwizach's argument on agency is that women didn't actually have a free choice because they were too oppressed or something (or, in his words, too constrained in their choices), but we know that other marginalized groups, who were treated substantially worse, apparently had a free choice. In light of the fact that women are just as capable as those other marginalized groups, and that they had easier circumstances and eventually faced less resistance when they did revolt, one can only conclude that it is because they made the choice not to. Furthermore, attempts to deny these women their agency by arguing that they didn't have a free choice is perpetuating a misogynistic view of gender issues, in which the poor wittle wimminz are merely helpless objects without choice since they are so oppressed by the big, bad menz.
TL;DR: Women either perpetuated gender roles because they were too oppressed to do anything about it, or because they chose not to (most likely because it benefitted them). kwizach is arguing that they had no choice, therefore he is arguing for the former. This is not only incorrect (because groups who were treated worse than women managed), but misogynistic (because he's implicitly considering women helpless objects).
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On June 20 2013 04:25 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 20:24 marvellosity wrote:On June 19 2013 08:57 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 05:10 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 04:31 kwizach 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. 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? No, the problem is that you're refusing to address the points I'm making, in this case going as far as completely changing the topic. The analogy was there to respond to your assertion that we were demeaning women. My reply to you was 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". Except that your argument is that women never had the power to achieve structural change, when the reality is that they did. [Citation again needed] On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:
You're demeaning them by calling them incapable, when in fact they were capable, but chose not to. No, I'm not demeaning them, because I just explained to you why remarking a group has limited power to achieve structural change, and is affected by social norms that make it harder to challenge its inferior place in society, is not the same as demeaning that group. Regarding "choice", see below (again). On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote: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: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. Why are you even replying to me if all you're going to do is repeat your initial statement which I thoroughly debunked? Here, let me copy/paste the entire relevant section of my initial post: 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. Feel free to reply when you have actual counter-arguments to put forward. There is nothing to answer here, because you are once again arguing with the assumption that women were powerless in the first place. I disagree with that fundamental assumption, so there is no point in arguing further down the line of reasoning when it's broken near the beginning. No, see, that's you reducing my argument to a caricature and calling it an "assumption" to avoid having to discuss the actual argument. It's also not even a matter of "arguing further down the line" since I directly replied to your assertion that they had a choice and chose willingly to have an inferior place in society. You, on the other hand, have been shutting your ears and repeating that they had a choice without ever providing any evidence (or even logic) to support that claim. Again, here is my response to you : 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. If you have no counter-argument, no need to reply. You've already stated your position several times. On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote: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. Yes, and socially-accepted gender roles can prevent individuals from exercising their choices the way they would want to - for example by voting. Thank you for agreeing with me. Except that this doesn't support your argument that women as a group were oppressed. Except that I already told you that's not what I was discussing with you - I was discussing access to choice and possibility to act upon choice. You just agreed with me that individual women could not act upon their choices, thanks! sunprince, you'd do well to actually directly address his points that he's bringing up, because kwizach is right, you keep skirting around them without directly addressing what he's actually written. Otherwise this (interesting) conversation will keep going round in pointless circles. Edit: for example, you tell kwizach "you're demeaning them by saying they're incapable" - this simply is nowhere near the thrust of his argument, yet you keep repeating it. It's not what he's saying. Alright, let's see if I can clarify my argument: Premise: Every other (read: actually) oppressed groups throughout history successfully revolted within a few centuries. Premise: Unlike those oppressed groups, women were unable to achieve "freedom" for nearly all of human history. Conclusion #1: There must be some reason that, unlike all other marginalized groups, women did not revolt. Premise: Women are just as capable of revolting and achieving freedom when they want to. Premise: Women as a group have had substantially better treatment than the aforementioned oppressed groups. Premise: When women did eventually revolt, they faced minimal resistance, especially compared to oppressed groups. Conclusion #2: Women did not fail to revolt because they were too oppressed, nor because there was too much resistance. In other words, they did not lack resources, as kwizach argues, since other groups demonstrated you need less than what women had. If we put those all together, we can see that women chose not to revolt. kwizach's argument on agency is that women didn't actually have a free choice because they were too oppressed or something (or, in his words, too constrained in their choices), but we know that other marginalized groups, who were treated substantially worse, apparently had a free choice. In light of the fact that women are just as capable as those other marginalized groups, and that they had easier circumstances and eventually faced less resistance when they did revolt, one can only conclude that it is because they made the choice not to. Furthermore, attempts to deny these women their agency by arguing that they didn't have a free choice is perpetuating a misogynistic view of gender issues, in which the poor wittle wimminz are merely helpless objects without choice since they are so oppressed by the big, bad menz. TL;DR: Women either perpetuated gender roles because they were too oppressed to do anything about it, or because they chose not to (most likely because it benefitted them). kwizach is arguing that they had no choice, therefore he is arguing for the former. This is not only incorrect (because groups who were treated worse than women managed), but misogynistic (because he's implicitly considering women helpless objects).
You're missing two key points.
1) Women were not uniformly oppressed by one oppressor. Every culture had different ways of treating women, and the degree of oppression changed dramatically from one to another.
2) Oppression comes in a variety of ways. Just because one group is oppressed in every way possible (black slavery in America) doesn't mean that another group that is simply not allowed to express their religion is no oppressed.
Furthermore, you are drawing your conclusion as if it's the only logical step, when in fact it is not. It's disingenuous and rather arrogant to do this. You're missing a possibility.
Just like black slaves, the "untouchables" of India, peasants/serfs of Europe, and countless others, women were oppressed through indoctrination. They were conditioned to think that the limited lifestyles they had were the only ones for them and that this was ok.
Like I've said before, you continue to show that you fail to understand the intricacies of oppression. You are operating under this incredibly narrow idea of oppression and dismissing anything else as "choice", when this is not the case at all.
Even if they "chose" to perpetuate the gender stereotypes that they had no choice in participating in (disregarding the fact that this choice may have been forced upon them by conditioning and culture), your stance that it is because it "benefited" them shows just how incredibly sexist and naive your position is. No sane person believes that women had it better back then than they do now, so obviously it wasn't to their benefit in an absolute sense concerning rights. As to if it was a benefit compared to the other option then (living like men do, with more freedoms but a higher likelihood of accident/injury/death), I've already addressed this; living is not a very meaningful metric of freedom/happiness/life success/etc, and living is the only metric that they had better than men; a man of equal social stature had it better off than a woman in pretty much every other way aside from life expectancy. Human history is riddled with examples of how life alone isn't what people value; people fight for far more than life on a regular basis, and to reduce the metric of value to living/reproducing is to be incredibly short-sighted and, quite frankly, ignorant. I guarantee you that any man from various points in history would much rather be a man and have a shorter life expectancy than be a women, and I bet you that many women from the time periods would agree as well.
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On June 20 2013 04:25 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 19 2013 20:24 marvellosity wrote:On June 19 2013 08:57 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 05:10 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 04:31 kwizach 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. 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? No, the problem is that you're refusing to address the points I'm making, in this case going as far as completely changing the topic. The analogy was there to respond to your assertion that we were demeaning women. My reply to you was 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". Except that your argument is that women never had the power to achieve structural change, when the reality is that they did. [Citation again needed] On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:
You're demeaning them by calling them incapable, when in fact they were capable, but chose not to. No, I'm not demeaning them, because I just explained to you why remarking a group has limited power to achieve structural change, and is affected by social norms that make it harder to challenge its inferior place in society, is not the same as demeaning that group. Regarding "choice", see below (again). On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote: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: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. Why are you even replying to me if all you're going to do is repeat your initial statement which I thoroughly debunked? Here, let me copy/paste the entire relevant section of my initial post: 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. Feel free to reply when you have actual counter-arguments to put forward. There is nothing to answer here, because you are once again arguing with the assumption that women were powerless in the first place. I disagree with that fundamental assumption, so there is no point in arguing further down the line of reasoning when it's broken near the beginning. No, see, that's you reducing my argument to a caricature and calling it an "assumption" to avoid having to discuss the actual argument. It's also not even a matter of "arguing further down the line" since I directly replied to your assertion that they had a choice and chose willingly to have an inferior place in society. You, on the other hand, have been shutting your ears and repeating that they had a choice without ever providing any evidence (or even logic) to support that claim. Again, here is my response to you : 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. If you have no counter-argument, no need to reply. You've already stated your position several times. On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote: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. Yes, and socially-accepted gender roles can prevent individuals from exercising their choices the way they would want to - for example by voting. Thank you for agreeing with me. Except that this doesn't support your argument that women as a group were oppressed. Except that I already told you that's not what I was discussing with you - I was discussing access to choice and possibility to act upon choice. You just agreed with me that individual women could not act upon their choices, thanks! sunprince, you'd do well to actually directly address his points that he's bringing up, because kwizach is right, you keep skirting around them without directly addressing what he's actually written. Otherwise this (interesting) conversation will keep going round in pointless circles. Edit: for example, you tell kwizach "you're demeaning them by saying they're incapable" - this simply is nowhere near the thrust of his argument, yet you keep repeating it. It's not what he's saying. Alright, let's see if I can clarify my argument: Premise: Every other (read: actually) oppressed groups throughout history successfully revolted within a few centuries. Premise: Unlike those oppressed groups, women were unable to achieve "freedom" for nearly all of human history. Conclusion #1: There must be some reason that, unlike all other marginalized groups, women did not revolt. Premise: Women are just as capable of revolting and achieving freedom when they want to. Premise: Women as a group have had substantially better treatment than the aforementioned oppressed groups. Premise: When women did eventually revolt, they faced minimal resistance, especially compared to oppressed groups. Conclusion #2: Women did not fail to revolt because they were too oppressed, nor because there was too much resistance. In other words, they did not lack resources, as kwizach argues, since other groups demonstrated you need less than what women had. If we put those all together, we can see that women chose not to revolt. kwizach's argument on agency is that women didn't actually have a free choice because they were too oppressed or something (or, in his words, too constrained in their choices), but we know that other marginalized groups, who were treated substantially worse, apparently had a free choice. In light of the fact that women are just as capable as those other marginalized groups, and that they had easier circumstances and eventually faced less resistance when they did revolt, one can only conclude that it is because they made the choice not to. Furthermore, attempts to deny these women their agency by arguing that they didn't have a free choice is perpetuating a misogynistic view of gender issues, in which the poor wittle wimminz are merely helpless objects without choice since they are so oppressed by the big, bad menz. TL;DR: Women either perpetuated gender roles because they were too oppressed to do anything about it, or because they chose not to (most likely because it benefitted them). kwizach is arguing that they had no choice, therefore he is arguing for the former. This is not only incorrect (because groups who were treated worse than women managed), but misogynistic (because he's implicitly considering women helpless objects).
I just watched someone go from victim blaming to gender blaming in one single post. I never realized people would actually argue that "since women didn't complain as a gender, they obviously must like what we're doing to them."
I'd be impressed if I wasn't horrified.
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On June 20 2013 04:54 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 04:25 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 20:24 marvellosity wrote:On June 19 2013 08:57 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 05:10 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 04:31 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
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? No, the problem is that you're refusing to address the points I'm making, in this case going as far as completely changing the topic. The analogy was there to respond to your assertion that we were demeaning women. My reply to you was 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". Except that your argument is that women never had the power to achieve structural change, when the reality is that they did. [Citation again needed] On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:
You're demeaning them by calling them incapable, when in fact they were capable, but chose not to. No, I'm not demeaning them, because I just explained to you why remarking a group has limited power to achieve structural change, and is affected by social norms that make it harder to challenge its inferior place in society, is not the same as demeaning that group. Regarding "choice", see below (again). On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote: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: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. Why are you even replying to me if all you're going to do is repeat your initial statement which I thoroughly debunked? Here, let me copy/paste the entire relevant section of my initial post: 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. Feel free to reply when you have actual counter-arguments to put forward. There is nothing to answer here, because you are once again arguing with the assumption that women were powerless in the first place. I disagree with that fundamental assumption, so there is no point in arguing further down the line of reasoning when it's broken near the beginning. No, see, that's you reducing my argument to a caricature and calling it an "assumption" to avoid having to discuss the actual argument. It's also not even a matter of "arguing further down the line" since I directly replied to your assertion that they had a choice and chose willingly to have an inferior place in society. You, on the other hand, have been shutting your ears and repeating that they had a choice without ever providing any evidence (or even logic) to support that claim. Again, here is my response to you : 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. If you have no counter-argument, no need to reply. You've already stated your position several times. On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote: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. Yes, and socially-accepted gender roles can prevent individuals from exercising their choices the way they would want to - for example by voting. Thank you for agreeing with me. Except that this doesn't support your argument that women as a group were oppressed. Except that I already told you that's not what I was discussing with you - I was discussing access to choice and possibility to act upon choice. You just agreed with me that individual women could not act upon their choices, thanks! sunprince, you'd do well to actually directly address his points that he's bringing up, because kwizach is right, you keep skirting around them without directly addressing what he's actually written. Otherwise this (interesting) conversation will keep going round in pointless circles. Edit: for example, you tell kwizach "you're demeaning them by saying they're incapable" - this simply is nowhere near the thrust of his argument, yet you keep repeating it. It's not what he's saying. Alright, let's see if I can clarify my argument: Premise: Every other (read: actually) oppressed groups throughout history successfully revolted within a few centuries. Premise: Unlike those oppressed groups, women were unable to achieve "freedom" for nearly all of human history. Conclusion #1: There must be some reason that, unlike all other marginalized groups, women did not revolt. Premise: Women are just as capable of revolting and achieving freedom when they want to. Premise: Women as a group have had substantially better treatment than the aforementioned oppressed groups. Premise: When women did eventually revolt, they faced minimal resistance, especially compared to oppressed groups. Conclusion #2: Women did not fail to revolt because they were too oppressed, nor because there was too much resistance. In other words, they did not lack resources, as kwizach argues, since other groups demonstrated you need less than what women had. If we put those all together, we can see that women chose not to revolt. kwizach's argument on agency is that women didn't actually have a free choice because they were too oppressed or something (or, in his words, too constrained in their choices), but we know that other marginalized groups, who were treated substantially worse, apparently had a free choice. In light of the fact that women are just as capable as those other marginalized groups, and that they had easier circumstances and eventually faced less resistance when they did revolt, one can only conclude that it is because they made the choice not to. Furthermore, attempts to deny these women their agency by arguing that they didn't have a free choice is perpetuating a misogynistic view of gender issues, in which the poor wittle wimminz are merely helpless objects without choice since they are so oppressed by the big, bad menz. TL;DR: Women either perpetuated gender roles because they were too oppressed to do anything about it, or because they chose not to (most likely because it benefitted them). kwizach is arguing that they had no choice, therefore he is arguing for the former. This is not only incorrect (because groups who were treated worse than women managed), but misogynistic (because he's implicitly considering women helpless objects). I just watched someone go from victim blaming to gender blaming in one single post. I never realized people would actually argue that "since women didn't complain as a gender, they obviously must like what we're doing to them." I'd be impressed if I wasn't horrified.
When the discussion about "is it right to not respect an opinion?" comes up, I point to people like this. It makes me sick to my stomach and it reminds me of people blaming rape victims for being raped.
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On June 20 2013 04:54 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 04:25 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 20:24 marvellosity wrote:On June 19 2013 08:57 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 05:10 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 04:31 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
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? No, the problem is that you're refusing to address the points I'm making, in this case going as far as completely changing the topic. The analogy was there to respond to your assertion that we were demeaning women. My reply to you was 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". Except that your argument is that women never had the power to achieve structural change, when the reality is that they did. [Citation again needed] On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:
You're demeaning them by calling them incapable, when in fact they were capable, but chose not to. No, I'm not demeaning them, because I just explained to you why remarking a group has limited power to achieve structural change, and is affected by social norms that make it harder to challenge its inferior place in society, is not the same as demeaning that group. Regarding "choice", see below (again). On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote: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: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. Why are you even replying to me if all you're going to do is repeat your initial statement which I thoroughly debunked? Here, let me copy/paste the entire relevant section of my initial post: 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. Feel free to reply when you have actual counter-arguments to put forward. There is nothing to answer here, because you are once again arguing with the assumption that women were powerless in the first place. I disagree with that fundamental assumption, so there is no point in arguing further down the line of reasoning when it's broken near the beginning. No, see, that's you reducing my argument to a caricature and calling it an "assumption" to avoid having to discuss the actual argument. It's also not even a matter of "arguing further down the line" since I directly replied to your assertion that they had a choice and chose willingly to have an inferior place in society. You, on the other hand, have been shutting your ears and repeating that they had a choice without ever providing any evidence (or even logic) to support that claim. Again, here is my response to you : 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. If you have no counter-argument, no need to reply. You've already stated your position several times. On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote: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. Yes, and socially-accepted gender roles can prevent individuals from exercising their choices the way they would want to - for example by voting. Thank you for agreeing with me. Except that this doesn't support your argument that women as a group were oppressed. Except that I already told you that's not what I was discussing with you - I was discussing access to choice and possibility to act upon choice. You just agreed with me that individual women could not act upon their choices, thanks! sunprince, you'd do well to actually directly address his points that he's bringing up, because kwizach is right, you keep skirting around them without directly addressing what he's actually written. Otherwise this (interesting) conversation will keep going round in pointless circles. Edit: for example, you tell kwizach "you're demeaning them by saying they're incapable" - this simply is nowhere near the thrust of his argument, yet you keep repeating it. It's not what he's saying. Alright, let's see if I can clarify my argument: Premise: Every other (read: actually) oppressed groups throughout history successfully revolted within a few centuries. Premise: Unlike those oppressed groups, women were unable to achieve "freedom" for nearly all of human history. Conclusion #1: There must be some reason that, unlike all other marginalized groups, women did not revolt. Premise: Women are just as capable of revolting and achieving freedom when they want to. Premise: Women as a group have had substantially better treatment than the aforementioned oppressed groups. Premise: When women did eventually revolt, they faced minimal resistance, especially compared to oppressed groups. Conclusion #2: Women did not fail to revolt because they were too oppressed, nor because there was too much resistance. In other words, they did not lack resources, as kwizach argues, since other groups demonstrated you need less than what women had. If we put those all together, we can see that women chose not to revolt. kwizach's argument on agency is that women didn't actually have a free choice because they were too oppressed or something (or, in his words, too constrained in their choices), but we know that other marginalized groups, who were treated substantially worse, apparently had a free choice. In light of the fact that women are just as capable as those other marginalized groups, and that they had easier circumstances and eventually faced less resistance when they did revolt, one can only conclude that it is because they made the choice not to. Furthermore, attempts to deny these women their agency by arguing that they didn't have a free choice is perpetuating a misogynistic view of gender issues, in which the poor wittle wimminz are merely helpless objects without choice since they are so oppressed by the big, bad menz. TL;DR: Women either perpetuated gender roles because they were too oppressed to do anything about it, or because they chose not to (most likely because it benefitted them). kwizach is arguing that they had no choice, therefore he is arguing for the former. This is not only incorrect (because groups who were treated worse than women managed), but misogynistic (because he's implicitly considering women helpless objects). You're missing two key points. 1) Women were not uniformly oppressed by one oppressor. Every culture had different ways of treating women, and the degree of oppression changed dramatically from one to another.
Yes, but in all of them, actually oppressed groups were treated far worse. Black slaves were treated far worse than white women, Jews were treated far worse than German women, etc.
On June 20 2013 04:54 Stratos_speAr wrote:
2) Oppression comes in a variety of ways. Just because one group is oppressed in every way possible (black slavery in America) doesn't mean that another group that is simply not allowed to express their religion is no oppressed.
Women currently and have historically outperformed men (and especially oppressed groups like slaves and other underclass groups) by substantial margins in all quality of life indicators used to determine oppression. There is no way to treatment of women from the dominant group in any society is even remotely close to the treatment of oppressed religions, be it Jews in Europe, Christians in Islamic societies, etc.
On June 20 2013 04:54 Stratos_speAr wrote:
Furthermore, you are drawing your conclusion as if it's the only logical step, when in fact it is not. It's disingenuous and rather arrogant to do this. You're missing a possibility.
Just like black slaves, the "untouchables" of India, peasants/serfs of Europe, and countless others, women were oppressed through indoctrination. They were conditioned to think that the limited lifestyles they had were the only ones for them and that this was ok.
But so were the other marginalized groups which were indoctrinated far worse, and often had their indoctrination reinforced with torture and homicide for those who stepped out of line (see slaves, untouchables, peasants, etc). So this was already considered under my fourth premise: women were treated far better than the actually oppressed groups.
Your argument here is essentially that women didn't have a choice because they were too oppressed. However, that's clearly wrong because other groups were oppressed far worse, and yet apparently had a choice.
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On June 20 2013 04:54 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 04:25 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 20:24 marvellosity wrote:On June 19 2013 08:57 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 05:10 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 04:31 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
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? No, the problem is that you're refusing to address the points I'm making, in this case going as far as completely changing the topic. The analogy was there to respond to your assertion that we were demeaning women. My reply to you was 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". Except that your argument is that women never had the power to achieve structural change, when the reality is that they did. [Citation again needed] On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:
You're demeaning them by calling them incapable, when in fact they were capable, but chose not to. No, I'm not demeaning them, because I just explained to you why remarking a group has limited power to achieve structural change, and is affected by social norms that make it harder to challenge its inferior place in society, is not the same as demeaning that group. Regarding "choice", see below (again). On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote: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: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. Why are you even replying to me if all you're going to do is repeat your initial statement which I thoroughly debunked? Here, let me copy/paste the entire relevant section of my initial post: 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. Feel free to reply when you have actual counter-arguments to put forward. There is nothing to answer here, because you are once again arguing with the assumption that women were powerless in the first place. I disagree with that fundamental assumption, so there is no point in arguing further down the line of reasoning when it's broken near the beginning. No, see, that's you reducing my argument to a caricature and calling it an "assumption" to avoid having to discuss the actual argument. It's also not even a matter of "arguing further down the line" since I directly replied to your assertion that they had a choice and chose willingly to have an inferior place in society. You, on the other hand, have been shutting your ears and repeating that they had a choice without ever providing any evidence (or even logic) to support that claim. Again, here is my response to you : 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. If you have no counter-argument, no need to reply. You've already stated your position several times. On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote: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. Yes, and socially-accepted gender roles can prevent individuals from exercising their choices the way they would want to - for example by voting. Thank you for agreeing with me. Except that this doesn't support your argument that women as a group were oppressed. Except that I already told you that's not what I was discussing with you - I was discussing access to choice and possibility to act upon choice. You just agreed with me that individual women could not act upon their choices, thanks! sunprince, you'd do well to actually directly address his points that he's bringing up, because kwizach is right, you keep skirting around them without directly addressing what he's actually written. Otherwise this (interesting) conversation will keep going round in pointless circles. Edit: for example, you tell kwizach "you're demeaning them by saying they're incapable" - this simply is nowhere near the thrust of his argument, yet you keep repeating it. It's not what he's saying. Alright, let's see if I can clarify my argument: Premise: Every other (read: actually) oppressed groups throughout history successfully revolted within a few centuries. Premise: Unlike those oppressed groups, women were unable to achieve "freedom" for nearly all of human history. Conclusion #1: There must be some reason that, unlike all other marginalized groups, women did not revolt. Premise: Women are just as capable of revolting and achieving freedom when they want to. Premise: Women as a group have had substantially better treatment than the aforementioned oppressed groups. Premise: When women did eventually revolt, they faced minimal resistance, especially compared to oppressed groups. Conclusion #2: Women did not fail to revolt because they were too oppressed, nor because there was too much resistance. In other words, they did not lack resources, as kwizach argues, since other groups demonstrated you need less than what women had. If we put those all together, we can see that women chose not to revolt. kwizach's argument on agency is that women didn't actually have a free choice because they were too oppressed or something (or, in his words, too constrained in their choices), but we know that other marginalized groups, who were treated substantially worse, apparently had a free choice. In light of the fact that women are just as capable as those other marginalized groups, and that they had easier circumstances and eventually faced less resistance when they did revolt, one can only conclude that it is because they made the choice not to. Furthermore, attempts to deny these women their agency by arguing that they didn't have a free choice is perpetuating a misogynistic view of gender issues, in which the poor wittle wimminz are merely helpless objects without choice since they are so oppressed by the big, bad menz. TL;DR: Women either perpetuated gender roles because they were too oppressed to do anything about it, or because they chose not to (most likely because it benefitted them). kwizach is arguing that they had no choice, therefore he is arguing for the former. This is not only incorrect (because groups who were treated worse than women managed), but misogynistic (because he's implicitly considering women helpless objects). I just watched someone go from victim blaming to gender blaming in one single post. I never realized people would actually argue that "since women didn't complain as a gender, they obviously must like what we're doing to them." I'd be impressed if I wasn't horrified.
The entire notion of "victim blaming" is based on misogynistic notions of women as helpless objects who aren't responsible for any of their circumstances, while men are agents responsible for everything that happens.
Just look at how you describe society as something that men do to women (once again, women as objects and men as agents), instead of something that both men and women perpetuate.
It's also ironic that you talk about gender blaming when you're blaming the male gender for the historical organization of society.
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On June 20 2013 05:04 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 04:54 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 04:25 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 20:24 marvellosity wrote:On June 19 2013 08:57 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 05:10 sunprince wrote:
[quote]
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? No, the problem is that you're refusing to address the points I'm making, in this case going as far as completely changing the topic. The analogy was there to respond to your assertion that we were demeaning women. My reply to you was 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". Except that your argument is that women never had the power to achieve structural change, when the reality is that they did. [Citation again needed] On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:
You're demeaning them by calling them incapable, when in fact they were capable, but chose not to. No, I'm not demeaning them, because I just explained to you why remarking a group has limited power to achieve structural change, and is affected by social norms that make it harder to challenge its inferior place in society, is not the same as demeaning that group. Regarding "choice", see below (again). On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote: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:
[quote]
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. Why are you even replying to me if all you're going to do is repeat your initial statement which I thoroughly debunked? Here, let me copy/paste the entire relevant section of my initial post: 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. Feel free to reply when you have actual counter-arguments to put forward. There is nothing to answer here, because you are once again arguing with the assumption that women were powerless in the first place. I disagree with that fundamental assumption, so there is no point in arguing further down the line of reasoning when it's broken near the beginning. No, see, that's you reducing my argument to a caricature and calling it an "assumption" to avoid having to discuss the actual argument. It's also not even a matter of "arguing further down the line" since I directly replied to your assertion that they had a choice and chose willingly to have an inferior place in society. You, on the other hand, have been shutting your ears and repeating that they had a choice without ever providing any evidence (or even logic) to support that claim. Again, here is my response to you : 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. If you have no counter-argument, no need to reply. You've already stated your position several times. On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 05:10 sunprince wrote:
[quote]
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. Yes, and socially-accepted gender roles can prevent individuals from exercising their choices the way they would want to - for example by voting. Thank you for agreeing with me. Except that this doesn't support your argument that women as a group were oppressed. Except that I already told you that's not what I was discussing with you - I was discussing access to choice and possibility to act upon choice. You just agreed with me that individual women could not act upon their choices, thanks! sunprince, you'd do well to actually directly address his points that he's bringing up, because kwizach is right, you keep skirting around them without directly addressing what he's actually written. Otherwise this (interesting) conversation will keep going round in pointless circles. Edit: for example, you tell kwizach "you're demeaning them by saying they're incapable" - this simply is nowhere near the thrust of his argument, yet you keep repeating it. It's not what he's saying. Alright, let's see if I can clarify my argument: Premise: Every other (read: actually) oppressed groups throughout history successfully revolted within a few centuries. Premise: Unlike those oppressed groups, women were unable to achieve "freedom" for nearly all of human history. Conclusion #1: There must be some reason that, unlike all other marginalized groups, women did not revolt. Premise: Women are just as capable of revolting and achieving freedom when they want to. Premise: Women as a group have had substantially better treatment than the aforementioned oppressed groups. Premise: When women did eventually revolt, they faced minimal resistance, especially compared to oppressed groups. Conclusion #2: Women did not fail to revolt because they were too oppressed, nor because there was too much resistance. In other words, they did not lack resources, as kwizach argues, since other groups demonstrated you need less than what women had. If we put those all together, we can see that women chose not to revolt. kwizach's argument on agency is that women didn't actually have a free choice because they were too oppressed or something (or, in his words, too constrained in their choices), but we know that other marginalized groups, who were treated substantially worse, apparently had a free choice. In light of the fact that women are just as capable as those other marginalized groups, and that they had easier circumstances and eventually faced less resistance when they did revolt, one can only conclude that it is because they made the choice not to. Furthermore, attempts to deny these women their agency by arguing that they didn't have a free choice is perpetuating a misogynistic view of gender issues, in which the poor wittle wimminz are merely helpless objects without choice since they are so oppressed by the big, bad menz. TL;DR: Women either perpetuated gender roles because they were too oppressed to do anything about it, or because they chose not to (most likely because it benefitted them). kwizach is arguing that they had no choice, therefore he is arguing for the former. This is not only incorrect (because groups who were treated worse than women managed), but misogynistic (because he's implicitly considering women helpless objects). I just watched someone go from victim blaming to gender blaming in one single post. I never realized people would actually argue that "since women didn't complain as a gender, they obviously must like what we're doing to them." I'd be impressed if I wasn't horrified. The entire notion of "victim blaming" is based on misogynistic notions of women as helpless objects who aren't responsible for any of their circumstances, while men are agents responsible for everything that happens. Just look at how you describe society as something that men do to women (once again, women as objects and men as agents), instead of something that both men and women perpetuate.
You're not telling them how to dress, you're just telling them they'll get raped if they practice free will. I'm sure that makes sense to you dude.
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On June 20 2013 05:08 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 05:04 sunprince wrote:On June 20 2013 04:54 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 04:25 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 20:24 marvellosity wrote:On June 19 2013 08:57 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
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? No, the problem is that you're refusing to address the points I'm making, in this case going as far as completely changing the topic. The analogy was there to respond to your assertion that we were demeaning women. My reply to you was 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". Except that your argument is that women never had the power to achieve structural change, when the reality is that they did. [Citation again needed] On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:
You're demeaning them by calling them incapable, when in fact they were capable, but chose not to. No, I'm not demeaning them, because I just explained to you why remarking a group has limited power to achieve structural change, and is affected by social norms that make it harder to challenge its inferior place in society, is not the same as demeaning that group. Regarding "choice", see below (again). On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
I pointed out why that was a strawman and I responded to it. Try answering my argument instead of repeating yours.
[quote]
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. Why are you even replying to me if all you're going to do is repeat your initial statement which I thoroughly debunked? Here, let me copy/paste the entire relevant section of my initial post: 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. Feel free to reply when you have actual counter-arguments to put forward. There is nothing to answer here, because you are once again arguing with the assumption that women were powerless in the first place. I disagree with that fundamental assumption, so there is no point in arguing further down the line of reasoning when it's broken near the beginning. No, see, that's you reducing my argument to a caricature and calling it an "assumption" to avoid having to discuss the actual argument. It's also not even a matter of "arguing further down the line" since I directly replied to your assertion that they had a choice and chose willingly to have an inferior place in society. You, on the other hand, have been shutting your ears and repeating that they had a choice without ever providing any evidence (or even logic) to support that claim. Again, here is my response to you : 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. If you have no counter-argument, no need to reply. You've already stated your position several times. On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
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. Yes, and socially-accepted gender roles can prevent individuals from exercising their choices the way they would want to - for example by voting. Thank you for agreeing with me. Except that this doesn't support your argument that women as a group were oppressed. Except that I already told you that's not what I was discussing with you - I was discussing access to choice and possibility to act upon choice. You just agreed with me that individual women could not act upon their choices, thanks! sunprince, you'd do well to actually directly address his points that he's bringing up, because kwizach is right, you keep skirting around them without directly addressing what he's actually written. Otherwise this (interesting) conversation will keep going round in pointless circles. Edit: for example, you tell kwizach "you're demeaning them by saying they're incapable" - this simply is nowhere near the thrust of his argument, yet you keep repeating it. It's not what he's saying. Alright, let's see if I can clarify my argument: Premise: Every other (read: actually) oppressed groups throughout history successfully revolted within a few centuries. Premise: Unlike those oppressed groups, women were unable to achieve "freedom" for nearly all of human history. Conclusion #1: There must be some reason that, unlike all other marginalized groups, women did not revolt. Premise: Women are just as capable of revolting and achieving freedom when they want to. Premise: Women as a group have had substantially better treatment than the aforementioned oppressed groups. Premise: When women did eventually revolt, they faced minimal resistance, especially compared to oppressed groups. Conclusion #2: Women did not fail to revolt because they were too oppressed, nor because there was too much resistance. In other words, they did not lack resources, as kwizach argues, since other groups demonstrated you need less than what women had. If we put those all together, we can see that women chose not to revolt. kwizach's argument on agency is that women didn't actually have a free choice because they were too oppressed or something (or, in his words, too constrained in their choices), but we know that other marginalized groups, who were treated substantially worse, apparently had a free choice. In light of the fact that women are just as capable as those other marginalized groups, and that they had easier circumstances and eventually faced less resistance when they did revolt, one can only conclude that it is because they made the choice not to. Furthermore, attempts to deny these women their agency by arguing that they didn't have a free choice is perpetuating a misogynistic view of gender issues, in which the poor wittle wimminz are merely helpless objects without choice since they are so oppressed by the big, bad menz. TL;DR: Women either perpetuated gender roles because they were too oppressed to do anything about it, or because they chose not to (most likely because it benefitted them). kwizach is arguing that they had no choice, therefore he is arguing for the former. This is not only incorrect (because groups who were treated worse than women managed), but misogynistic (because he's implicitly considering women helpless objects). I just watched someone go from victim blaming to gender blaming in one single post. I never realized people would actually argue that "since women didn't complain as a gender, they obviously must like what we're doing to them." I'd be impressed if I wasn't horrified. The entire notion of "victim blaming" is based on misogynistic notions of women as helpless objects who aren't responsible for any of their circumstances, while men are agents responsible for everything that happens. Just look at how you describe society as something that men do to women (once again, women as objects and men as agents), instead of something that both men and women perpetuate. You're not telling them how to dress, you're just telling them they'll get raped if they practice free will. I'm sure that makes sense to you dude.
Strawman more bro. Still, I'll entertain your bullshit argument:
"You're not telling them to lock their doors, you're just telling them they'll get robbed if they practice free will".
Can you spot the logic error with the above? Should someone not lock their door and be robbed, most people would say "well, you're an idiot for not locking your door". What they don't usually say is "you deserved to be robbed for not locking your door".
Continuing to argue that offering advice to limit one's risk of being victim is something to be discouraged because it's sometimes unpleasant, and labeling it something as negatively-charged as victim-blaming, will discourage people from not managing their risks properly, and actually does a disservice to people, putting them more at risk of being a victim out of ignorance.
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Alright, let's see if I can clarify my argument:
Premise: Every other (read: actually) oppressed groups throughout history successfully revolted within a few centuries.
Premise: Unlike those oppressed groups, women were unable to achieve "freedom" for nearly all of human history.
Conclusion #1: There must be some reason that, unlike all other marginalized groups, women did not revolt.
Premise: Women are just as capable of revolting and achieving freedom when they want to.
Premise: Women as a group have had substantially better treatment than the aforementioned oppressed groups.
Premise: When women did eventually revolt, they faced minimal resistance, especially compared to oppressed groups.
Conclusion #2: Women did not fail to revolt because they were too oppressed, nor because there was too much resistance. In other words, they did not lack resources, as kwizach argues, since other groups demonstrated you need less than what women had.
If we put those all together, we can see that women chose not to revolt. kwizach's argument on agency is that women didn't actually have a free choice because they were too oppressed or something (or, in his words, too constrained in their choices), but we know that other marginalized groups, who were treated substantially worse, apparently had a free choice. In light of the fact that women are just as capable as those other marginalized groups, and that they had easier circumstances and eventually faced less resistance when they did revolt, one can only conclude that it is because they made the choice not to. Furthermore, attempts to deny these women their agency by arguing that they didn't have a free choice is perpetuating a misogynistic view of gender issues, in which the poor wittle wimminz are merely helpless objects without choice since they are so oppressed by the big, bad menz.
TL;DR: Women either perpetuated gender roles because they were too oppressed to do anything about it, or because they chose not to (most likely because it benefitted them). kwizach is arguing that they had no choice, therefore he is arguing for the former. This is not only incorrect (because groups who were treated worse than women managed), but misogynistic (because he's implicitly considering women helpless objects).
You're missing two key points.
1) Women were not uniformly oppressed by one oppressor. Every culture had different ways of treating women, and the degree of oppression changed dramatically from one to another.[/Quote]
Yes, but in all of them, actually oppressed groups were treated far worse. Black slaves were treated far worse than white women, Jews were treated far worse than German women, etc.[/quote]
I'm sorry, I didn't know that you had Ph.D's in both history and women's studies so you could uniformly tell us that every culture treated their women better than any other oppressed group throughout all of history.
On June 20 2013 04:54 Stratos_speAr wrote:
2) Oppression comes in a variety of ways. Just because one group is oppressed in every way possible (black slavery in America) doesn't mean that another group that is simply not allowed to express their religion is no oppressed.
Women currently and have historically outperformed men (and especially oppressed groups like slaves and other underclass groups) by substantial margins in all quality of life indicators used to determine oppression. There is no way to treatment of women from the dominant group in any society is even remotely close to the treatment of oppressed religions, be it Jews in Europe, Christians in Islamic societies, etc.
Source. What metric besides life expectancy/general health did women perform better on? It's already well known that men had every conceivable legal and societal advantage, so your argument is pretty slim here.
On June 20 2013 04:54 Stratos_speAr wrote:
Furthermore, you are drawing your conclusion as if it's the only logical step, when in fact it is not. It's disingenuous and rather arrogant to do this. You're missing a possibility.
Just like black slaves, the "untouchables" of India, peasants/serfs of Europe, and countless others, women were oppressed through indoctrination. They were conditioned to think that the limited lifestyles they had were the only ones for them and that this was ok.
But so were the other marginalized groups which were indoctrinated far worse, and often had their indoctrination reinforced with torture and homicide for those who stepped out of line (see slaves, untouchables, peasants, etc). So this was already considered under my fourth premise: women were treated far better than the actually oppressed groups.
Your argument here is essentially that women didn't have a choice because they were too oppressed. However, that's clearly wrong because other groups were oppressed far worse, and yet apparently had a choice.
If you're fairly educated, it's more or less common knowledge that if you push humans too far, they push back. This is a perfect example. Women were fed with one hand while they were oppressed with the other. The groups that you are talking about (such as black slaves in America) were simply oppressed with both hands. When you do this, you cause backlash.
Furthermore, you are acting as if every oppressed group in history freed themselves, which is hardly the case. Blacks would not have become free in America if it wasn't for widespread public support (among the white community), namely in the north. Plenty of history's examples show that it isn't the oppressed group alone that wins their freedom, but they frequently get support (in one way or another) from outside forces.
The entire notion of "victim blaming" is based on misogynistic notions of women as helpless objects who aren't responsible for any of their circumstances, while men are agents responsible for everything that happens.
Just look at how you describe society as something that men do to women (once again, women as objects and men as agents), instead of something that both men and women perpetuate.
It's also ironic that you talk about gender blaming when you're blaming the male gender for the historical organization of society.
Society as something that "men do to women". Of course it is. Society is forced upon those that do not control society by those that control society. Historically, men have controlled society, shaped its culture, and forced that on women. This relationship is completely regardless of which parties occupy which positions (and this has been shown time and time again throughout history). YOU are the one making a strawman by claiming that, by pointing this out, we are saying that women are somehow intrinsically inferior. That is not what we are saying.
Strawman more bro. Still, I'll entertain your bullshit argument:
"You're not telling them to lock their doors, you're just telling them they'll get robbed if they practice free will".
Can you spot the logic error with the above? Should someone not lock their door and be robbed, most people would say "well, you're an idiot for not locking your door". What they don't usually say is "you deserved to be robbed for not locking your door".
Continuing to argue that offering advice to limit one's risk of being victim is something to be discouraged because it's sometimes unpleasant, and labeling it something as negatively-charged as victim-blaming, will discourage people from not managing their risks properly, and actually does a disservice to people, putting them more at risk of being a victim out of ignorance.
Failing on two points.
1) Victim-blaming isn't merely "advice on how to avoid getting raped". Victim-blaming specifically aims at putting the blame on the woman for getting raped because she wore certain types of close. This is the definition of victim-blaming, it is incredibly common, and to try to play semantics to make yourself look superior and try to make this position look credible is laughable.
2) Psychologists have documented rape very well. It is pretty well known that rape is NOT driven by sexual drive and is, instead, a psychological play on power. So no, you are not giving women "safety advice". The only thing that anyone is doing any time they ask a rape victim "what was she wearing" is supporting the ability for a culture to blame the victim.
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On June 20 2013 05:04 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 04:54 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 04:25 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 20:24 marvellosity wrote:On June 19 2013 08:57 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 05:10 sunprince wrote:
[quote]
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? No, the problem is that you're refusing to address the points I'm making, in this case going as far as completely changing the topic. The analogy was there to respond to your assertion that we were demeaning women. My reply to you was 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". Except that your argument is that women never had the power to achieve structural change, when the reality is that they did. [Citation again needed] On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:
You're demeaning them by calling them incapable, when in fact they were capable, but chose not to. No, I'm not demeaning them, because I just explained to you why remarking a group has limited power to achieve structural change, and is affected by social norms that make it harder to challenge its inferior place in society, is not the same as demeaning that group. Regarding "choice", see below (again). On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote: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:
[quote]
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. Why are you even replying to me if all you're going to do is repeat your initial statement which I thoroughly debunked? Here, let me copy/paste the entire relevant section of my initial post: 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. Feel free to reply when you have actual counter-arguments to put forward. There is nothing to answer here, because you are once again arguing with the assumption that women were powerless in the first place. I disagree with that fundamental assumption, so there is no point in arguing further down the line of reasoning when it's broken near the beginning. No, see, that's you reducing my argument to a caricature and calling it an "assumption" to avoid having to discuss the actual argument. It's also not even a matter of "arguing further down the line" since I directly replied to your assertion that they had a choice and chose willingly to have an inferior place in society. You, on the other hand, have been shutting your ears and repeating that they had a choice without ever providing any evidence (or even logic) to support that claim. Again, here is my response to you : 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. If you have no counter-argument, no need to reply. You've already stated your position several times. On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 05:10 sunprince wrote:
[quote]
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. Yes, and socially-accepted gender roles can prevent individuals from exercising their choices the way they would want to - for example by voting. Thank you for agreeing with me. Except that this doesn't support your argument that women as a group were oppressed. Except that I already told you that's not what I was discussing with you - I was discussing access to choice and possibility to act upon choice. You just agreed with me that individual women could not act upon their choices, thanks! sunprince, you'd do well to actually directly address his points that he's bringing up, because kwizach is right, you keep skirting around them without directly addressing what he's actually written. Otherwise this (interesting) conversation will keep going round in pointless circles. Edit: for example, you tell kwizach "you're demeaning them by saying they're incapable" - this simply is nowhere near the thrust of his argument, yet you keep repeating it. It's not what he's saying. Alright, let's see if I can clarify my argument: Premise: Every other (read: actually) oppressed groups throughout history successfully revolted within a few centuries. Premise: Unlike those oppressed groups, women were unable to achieve "freedom" for nearly all of human history. Conclusion #1: There must be some reason that, unlike all other marginalized groups, women did not revolt. Premise: Women are just as capable of revolting and achieving freedom when they want to. Premise: Women as a group have had substantially better treatment than the aforementioned oppressed groups. Premise: When women did eventually revolt, they faced minimal resistance, especially compared to oppressed groups. Conclusion #2: Women did not fail to revolt because they were too oppressed, nor because there was too much resistance. In other words, they did not lack resources, as kwizach argues, since other groups demonstrated you need less than what women had. If we put those all together, we can see that women chose not to revolt. kwizach's argument on agency is that women didn't actually have a free choice because they were too oppressed or something (or, in his words, too constrained in their choices), but we know that other marginalized groups, who were treated substantially worse, apparently had a free choice. In light of the fact that women are just as capable as those other marginalized groups, and that they had easier circumstances and eventually faced less resistance when they did revolt, one can only conclude that it is because they made the choice not to. Furthermore, attempts to deny these women their agency by arguing that they didn't have a free choice is perpetuating a misogynistic view of gender issues, in which the poor wittle wimminz are merely helpless objects without choice since they are so oppressed by the big, bad menz. TL;DR: Women either perpetuated gender roles because they were too oppressed to do anything about it, or because they chose not to (most likely because it benefitted them). kwizach is arguing that they had no choice, therefore he is arguing for the former. This is not only incorrect (because groups who were treated worse than women managed), but misogynistic (because he's implicitly considering women helpless objects). I just watched someone go from victim blaming to gender blaming in one single post. I never realized people would actually argue that "since women didn't complain as a gender, they obviously must like what we're doing to them." I'd be impressed if I wasn't horrified. The entire notion of "victim blaming" is based on misogynistic notions of women as helpless objects who aren't responsible for any of their circumstances, while men are agents responsible for everything that happens. Just look at how you describe society as something that men do to women (once again, women as objects and men as agents), instead of something that both men and women perpetuate. It's also ironic that you talk about gender blaming when you're blaming the male gender for the historical organization of society.
Lovely edit--has a presumption that Patriarchy is only perpetuated by men. (It's not)
Patriarchy puts the masculine above the feminine because it is assumed that the masculine is superior. Being male is a not a requirement to perpetuate patriarchy. But its interesting that you constantly try to frame this image that feminists are against men when feminists don't really care what gender the other side is.
Here's an example of patriarchy.
Woman dresses in a suite--no one laughs and she's called professional.
Man dresses in a gown--people laugh and he's defined as weird. Why? Because to dress like a man is superior to dressing as a woman, so a man dressing as woman is funny while a woman dressing as a man is "normal."
Notice how the person attacked in that patriarchal structure is the man? Because patriarchy isn't Men vs Women, patriarchy is ranking the masculine over the feminine.
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On June 20 2013 05:12 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 05:08 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 05:04 sunprince wrote:On June 20 2013 04:54 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 04:25 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 20:24 marvellosity wrote:On June 19 2013 08:57 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:
[quote]
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? No, the problem is that you're refusing to address the points I'm making, in this case going as far as completely changing the topic. The analogy was there to respond to your assertion that we were demeaning women. My reply to you was 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". Except that your argument is that women never had the power to achieve structural change, when the reality is that they did. [Citation again needed] On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:
You're demeaning them by calling them incapable, when in fact they were capable, but chose not to. No, I'm not demeaning them, because I just explained to you why remarking a group has limited power to achieve structural change, and is affected by social norms that make it harder to challenge its inferior place in society, is not the same as demeaning that group. Regarding "choice", see below (again). On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:
[quote]
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. Why are you even replying to me if all you're going to do is repeat your initial statement which I thoroughly debunked? Here, let me copy/paste the entire relevant section of my initial post: 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. Feel free to reply when you have actual counter-arguments to put forward. There is nothing to answer here, because you are once again arguing with the assumption that women were powerless in the first place. I disagree with that fundamental assumption, so there is no point in arguing further down the line of reasoning when it's broken near the beginning. No, see, that's you reducing my argument to a caricature and calling it an "assumption" to avoid having to discuss the actual argument. It's also not even a matter of "arguing further down the line" since I directly replied to your assertion that they had a choice and chose willingly to have an inferior place in society. You, on the other hand, have been shutting your ears and repeating that they had a choice without ever providing any evidence (or even logic) to support that claim. Again, here is my response to you : 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. If you have no counter-argument, no need to reply. You've already stated your position several times. On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:
[quote]
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. Yes, and socially-accepted gender roles can prevent individuals from exercising their choices the way they would want to - for example by voting. Thank you for agreeing with me. Except that this doesn't support your argument that women as a group were oppressed. Except that I already told you that's not what I was discussing with you - I was discussing access to choice and possibility to act upon choice. You just agreed with me that individual women could not act upon their choices, thanks! sunprince, you'd do well to actually directly address his points that he's bringing up, because kwizach is right, you keep skirting around them without directly addressing what he's actually written. Otherwise this (interesting) conversation will keep going round in pointless circles. Edit: for example, you tell kwizach "you're demeaning them by saying they're incapable" - this simply is nowhere near the thrust of his argument, yet you keep repeating it. It's not what he's saying. Alright, let's see if I can clarify my argument: Premise: Every other (read: actually) oppressed groups throughout history successfully revolted within a few centuries. Premise: Unlike those oppressed groups, women were unable to achieve "freedom" for nearly all of human history. Conclusion #1: There must be some reason that, unlike all other marginalized groups, women did not revolt. Premise: Women are just as capable of revolting and achieving freedom when they want to. Premise: Women as a group have had substantially better treatment than the aforementioned oppressed groups. Premise: When women did eventually revolt, they faced minimal resistance, especially compared to oppressed groups. Conclusion #2: Women did not fail to revolt because they were too oppressed, nor because there was too much resistance. In other words, they did not lack resources, as kwizach argues, since other groups demonstrated you need less than what women had. If we put those all together, we can see that women chose not to revolt. kwizach's argument on agency is that women didn't actually have a free choice because they were too oppressed or something (or, in his words, too constrained in their choices), but we know that other marginalized groups, who were treated substantially worse, apparently had a free choice. In light of the fact that women are just as capable as those other marginalized groups, and that they had easier circumstances and eventually faced less resistance when they did revolt, one can only conclude that it is because they made the choice not to. Furthermore, attempts to deny these women their agency by arguing that they didn't have a free choice is perpetuating a misogynistic view of gender issues, in which the poor wittle wimminz are merely helpless objects without choice since they are so oppressed by the big, bad menz. TL;DR: Women either perpetuated gender roles because they were too oppressed to do anything about it, or because they chose not to (most likely because it benefitted them). kwizach is arguing that they had no choice, therefore he is arguing for the former. This is not only incorrect (because groups who were treated worse than women managed), but misogynistic (because he's implicitly considering women helpless objects). I just watched someone go from victim blaming to gender blaming in one single post. I never realized people would actually argue that "since women didn't complain as a gender, they obviously must like what we're doing to them." I'd be impressed if I wasn't horrified. The entire notion of "victim blaming" is based on misogynistic notions of women as helpless objects who aren't responsible for any of their circumstances, while men are agents responsible for everything that happens. Just look at how you describe society as something that men do to women (once again, women as objects and men as agents), instead of something that both men and women perpetuate. You're not telling them how to dress, you're just telling them they'll get raped if they practice free will. I'm sure that makes sense to you dude. Strawman more bro. Still, I'll entertain your bullshit argument: "You're not telling them to lock their doors, you're just telling them they'll get robbed if they practice free will". Can you spot the logic error with the above? Should someone not lock their door and be robbed, most people would say "well, you're an idiot for not locking your door". What they don't usually say is "you deserved to be robbed for not locking your door". Continuing to argue that offering advice to limit one's risk of being victim is something to be discouraged because it's sometimes unpleasant, and labeling it something as negatively-charged as victim-blaming, will discourage people from not managing their risks properly, and actually does a disservice to people, putting them more at risk of being a victim out of ignorance.
It's illegal to rob someone whether their door is locked or not... them leaving it unlocked =/= mean they're asking to be robbed. Many neighborhoods don't lock their doors. Many people have accidentally left their doors unlocked. Many lock their doors, but not their windows. None of them ask to be robbed/raped. But it's funny that you think they are.
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On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 05:03 sunprince wrote:On June 20 2013 04:54 Stratos_speAr wrote:On June 20 2013 04:25 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 20:24 marvellosity wrote:On June 19 2013 08:57 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
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? No, the problem is that you're refusing to address the points I'm making, in this case going as far as completely changing the topic. The analogy was there to respond to your assertion that we were demeaning women. My reply to you was 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". Except that your argument is that women never had the power to achieve structural change, when the reality is that they did. [Citation again needed] On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:
You're demeaning them by calling them incapable, when in fact they were capable, but chose not to. No, I'm not demeaning them, because I just explained to you why remarking a group has limited power to achieve structural change, and is affected by social norms that make it harder to challenge its inferior place in society, is not the same as demeaning that group. Regarding "choice", see below (again). On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
I pointed out why that was a strawman and I responded to it. Try answering my argument instead of repeating yours.
[quote]
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. Why are you even replying to me if all you're going to do is repeat your initial statement which I thoroughly debunked? Here, let me copy/paste the entire relevant section of my initial post: 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. Feel free to reply when you have actual counter-arguments to put forward. There is nothing to answer here, because you are once again arguing with the assumption that women were powerless in the first place. I disagree with that fundamental assumption, so there is no point in arguing further down the line of reasoning when it's broken near the beginning. No, see, that's you reducing my argument to a caricature and calling it an "assumption" to avoid having to discuss the actual argument. It's also not even a matter of "arguing further down the line" since I directly replied to your assertion that they had a choice and chose willingly to have an inferior place in society. You, on the other hand, have been shutting your ears and repeating that they had a choice without ever providing any evidence (or even logic) to support that claim. Again, here is my response to you : 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. If you have no counter-argument, no need to reply. You've already stated your position several times. On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
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. Yes, and socially-accepted gender roles can prevent individuals from exercising their choices the way they would want to - for example by voting. Thank you for agreeing with me. Except that this doesn't support your argument that women as a group were oppressed. Except that I already told you that's not what I was discussing with you - I was discussing access to choice and possibility to act upon choice. You just agreed with me that individual women could not act upon their choices, thanks! sunprince, you'd do well to actually directly address his points that he's bringing up, because kwizach is right, you keep skirting around them without directly addressing what he's actually written. Otherwise this (interesting) conversation will keep going round in pointless circles. Edit: for example, you tell kwizach "you're demeaning them by saying they're incapable" - this simply is nowhere near the thrust of his argument, yet you keep repeating it. It's not what he's saying. Alright, let's see if I can clarify my argument: Premise: Every other (read: actually) oppressed groups throughout history successfully revolted within a few centuries. Premise: Unlike those oppressed groups, women were unable to achieve "freedom" for nearly all of human history. Conclusion #1: There must be some reason that, unlike all other marginalized groups, women did not revolt. Premise: Women are just as capable of revolting and achieving freedom when they want to. Premise: Women as a group have had substantially better treatment than the aforementioned oppressed groups. Premise: When women did eventually revolt, they faced minimal resistance, especially compared to oppressed groups. Conclusion #2: Women did not fail to revolt because they were too oppressed, nor because there was too much resistance. In other words, they did not lack resources, as kwizach argues, since other groups demonstrated you need less than what women had. If we put those all together, we can see that women chose not to revolt. kwizach's argument on agency is that women didn't actually have a free choice because they were too oppressed or something (or, in his words, too constrained in their choices), but we know that other marginalized groups, who were treated substantially worse, apparently had a free choice. In light of the fact that women are just as capable as those other marginalized groups, and that they had easier circumstances and eventually faced less resistance when they did revolt, one can only conclude that it is because they made the choice not to. Furthermore, attempts to deny these women their agency by arguing that they didn't have a free choice is perpetuating a misogynistic view of gender issues, in which the poor wittle wimminz are merely helpless objects without choice since they are so oppressed by the big, bad menz. TL;DR: Women either perpetuated gender roles because they were too oppressed to do anything about it, or because they chose not to (most likely because it benefitted them). kwizach is arguing that they had no choice, therefore he is arguing for the former. This is not only incorrect (because groups who were treated worse than women managed), but misogynistic (because he's implicitly considering women helpless objects). You're missing two key points. 1) Women were not uniformly oppressed by one oppressor. Every culture had different ways of treating women, and the degree of oppression changed dramatically from one to another. Yes, but in all of them, actually oppressed groups were treated far worse. Black slaves were treated far worse than white women, Jews were treated far worse than German women, etc. I'm sorry, I didn't know that you had Ph.D's in both history and women's studies so you could uniformly tell us that every culture treated their women better than any other oppressed group throughout all of history.
Instead of using fallacies, why don't you provide some examples to the contrary? Oh right, you can't.
On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 05:03 sunprince wrote:On June 20 2013 04:54 Stratos_speAr wrote:
2) Oppression comes in a variety of ways. Just because one group is oppressed in every way possible (black slavery in America) doesn't mean that another group that is simply not allowed to express their religion is no oppressed. Women currently and have historically outperformed men (and especially oppressed groups like slaves and other underclass groups) by substantial margins in all quality of life indicators used to determine oppression. There is no way to treatment of women from the dominant group in any society is even remotely close to the treatment of oppressed religions, be it Jews in Europe, Christians in Islamic societies, etc. Source. What metric besides life expectancy/general health did women perform better on? It's already well known that men had every conceivable legal and societal advantage, so your argument is pretty slim here.
We obviously have limited data going back historically. But Google for any sort of data on the subject, and you'll find that as far back as we can go, women have higher life expectancies than men, women are much less likely to be victims of violent crime, women comprise a ridiculously tiny percentage of workplace deaths, women commit suicide far less often, women are far less likely to be imprisoned and are imprisoned for significantly shorter periods, women are less likely to be homeless, women receive a larger percentage of government and philanthropic aid, women are virtually never conscripted, etc. And all of this is comparing women to men in general; it's a much, much larger gap when you compare women in the dominant class with the underclasses.
On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 05:03 sunprince wrote:On June 20 2013 04:54 Stratos_speAr wrote:
Furthermore, you are drawing your conclusion as if it's the only logical step, when in fact it is not. It's disingenuous and rather arrogant to do this. You're missing a possibility.
Just like black slaves, the "untouchables" of India, peasants/serfs of Europe, and countless others, women were oppressed through indoctrination. They were conditioned to think that the limited lifestyles they had were the only ones for them and that this was ok. But so were the other marginalized groups which were indoctrinated far worse, and often had their indoctrination reinforced with torture and homicide for those who stepped out of line (see slaves, untouchables, peasants, etc). So this was already considered under my fourth premise: women were treated far better than the actually oppressed groups. Your argument here is essentially that women didn't have a choice because they were too oppressed. However, that's clearly wrong because other groups were oppressed far worse, and yet apparently had a choice. If you're fairly educated, it's more or less common knowledge that if you push humans too far, they push back. This is a perfect example. Women were fed with one hand while they were oppressed with the other. The groups that you are talking about (such as black slaves in America) were simply oppressed with both hands. When you do this, you cause backlash.
Now you're getting it. Oppressed groups have always been oppressed with both hands, while women have always had benefits as well as drawbacks to their gender roles. To put it in social justice terms, all other forms of privilege/discrimination (racial, religious, etc) are unidirectional, while gender privilege/discrimination is bidirectional. Women have always been better off in some ways than men, and worse off in others. By contrast, truly oppressed groups have always been worse off in every way. That's a huge distinction to make in determining oppression.
On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote:
Furthermore, you are acting as if every oppressed group in history freed themselves, which is hardly the case. Blacks would not have become free in America if it wasn't for widespread public support (among the white community), namely in the north. Plenty of history's examples show that it isn't the oppressed group alone that wins their freedom, but they frequently get support (in one way or another) from outside forces.
All of the other oppressed groups still managed to do it, with or without support. Yet women (who have always had immense support) didn't fight for the longest time, and when they eventually did fight they faced more support than resistance (and most of that resistance was from other women). So what does that tell us?
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On June 20 2013 05:17 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 05:12 sunprince wrote:On June 20 2013 05:08 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 05:04 sunprince wrote:On June 20 2013 04:54 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 04:25 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 20:24 marvellosity wrote:On June 19 2013 08:57 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
No, the problem is that you're refusing to address the points I'm making, in this case going as far as completely changing the topic. The analogy was there to respond to your assertion that we were demeaning women. My reply to you was 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". Except that your argument is that women never had the power to achieve structural change, when the reality is that they did. [Citation again needed] On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:
You're demeaning them by calling them incapable, when in fact they were capable, but chose not to. No, I'm not demeaning them, because I just explained to you why remarking a group has limited power to achieve structural change, and is affected by social norms that make it harder to challenge its inferior place in society, is not the same as demeaning that group. Regarding "choice", see below (again). On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
Why are you even replying to me if all you're going to do is repeat your initial statement which I thoroughly debunked? Here, let me copy/paste the entire relevant section of my initial post:
[quote]
Feel free to reply when you have actual counter-arguments to put forward. There is nothing to answer here, because you are once again arguing with the assumption that women were powerless in the first place. I disagree with that fundamental assumption, so there is no point in arguing further down the line of reasoning when it's broken near the beginning. No, see, that's you reducing my argument to a caricature and calling it an "assumption" to avoid having to discuss the actual argument. It's also not even a matter of "arguing further down the line" since I directly replied to your assertion that they had a choice and chose willingly to have an inferior place in society. You, on the other hand, have been shutting your ears and repeating that they had a choice without ever providing any evidence (or even logic) to support that claim. Again, here is my response to you : 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. If you have no counter-argument, no need to reply. You've already stated your position several times. On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
Yes, and socially-accepted gender roles can prevent individuals from exercising their choices the way they would want to - for example by voting. Thank you for agreeing with me. Except that this doesn't support your argument that women as a group were oppressed. Except that I already told you that's not what I was discussing with you - I was discussing access to choice and possibility to act upon choice. You just agreed with me that individual women could not act upon their choices, thanks! sunprince, you'd do well to actually directly address his points that he's bringing up, because kwizach is right, you keep skirting around them without directly addressing what he's actually written. Otherwise this (interesting) conversation will keep going round in pointless circles. Edit: for example, you tell kwizach "you're demeaning them by saying they're incapable" - this simply is nowhere near the thrust of his argument, yet you keep repeating it. It's not what he's saying. Alright, let's see if I can clarify my argument: Premise: Every other (read: actually) oppressed groups throughout history successfully revolted within a few centuries. Premise: Unlike those oppressed groups, women were unable to achieve "freedom" for nearly all of human history. Conclusion #1: There must be some reason that, unlike all other marginalized groups, women did not revolt. Premise: Women are just as capable of revolting and achieving freedom when they want to. Premise: Women as a group have had substantially better treatment than the aforementioned oppressed groups. Premise: When women did eventually revolt, they faced minimal resistance, especially compared to oppressed groups. Conclusion #2: Women did not fail to revolt because they were too oppressed, nor because there was too much resistance. In other words, they did not lack resources, as kwizach argues, since other groups demonstrated you need less than what women had. If we put those all together, we can see that women chose not to revolt. kwizach's argument on agency is that women didn't actually have a free choice because they were too oppressed or something (or, in his words, too constrained in their choices), but we know that other marginalized groups, who were treated substantially worse, apparently had a free choice. In light of the fact that women are just as capable as those other marginalized groups, and that they had easier circumstances and eventually faced less resistance when they did revolt, one can only conclude that it is because they made the choice not to. Furthermore, attempts to deny these women their agency by arguing that they didn't have a free choice is perpetuating a misogynistic view of gender issues, in which the poor wittle wimminz are merely helpless objects without choice since they are so oppressed by the big, bad menz. TL;DR: Women either perpetuated gender roles because they were too oppressed to do anything about it, or because they chose not to (most likely because it benefitted them). kwizach is arguing that they had no choice, therefore he is arguing for the former. This is not only incorrect (because groups who were treated worse than women managed), but misogynistic (because he's implicitly considering women helpless objects). I just watched someone go from victim blaming to gender blaming in one single post. I never realized people would actually argue that "since women didn't complain as a gender, they obviously must like what we're doing to them." I'd be impressed if I wasn't horrified. The entire notion of "victim blaming" is based on misogynistic notions of women as helpless objects who aren't responsible for any of their circumstances, while men are agents responsible for everything that happens. Just look at how you describe society as something that men do to women (once again, women as objects and men as agents), instead of something that both men and women perpetuate. You're not telling them how to dress, you're just telling them they'll get raped if they practice free will. I'm sure that makes sense to you dude. Strawman more bro. Still, I'll entertain your bullshit argument: "You're not telling them to lock their doors, you're just telling them they'll get robbed if they practice free will". Can you spot the logic error with the above? Should someone not lock their door and be robbed, most people would say "well, you're an idiot for not locking your door". What they don't usually say is "you deserved to be robbed for not locking your door". Continuing to argue that offering advice to limit one's risk of being victim is something to be discouraged because it's sometimes unpleasant, and labeling it something as negatively-charged as victim-blaming, will discourage people from not managing their risks properly, and actually does a disservice to people, putting them more at risk of being a victim out of ignorance. It's illegal to rob someone whether their door is locked or not... them leaving it unlocked =/= mean they're asking to be robbed. Many neighborhoods don't lock their doors. Many people have accidentally left their doors unlocked. Many lock their doors, but not their windows. None of them ask to be robbed/raped. But it's funny that you think they are.
Nowhere did I say they were asked to be robbed, and nowhere did I say that it was okay to rob them. Saying that they could improve their chances of staying safe is not the same thing as excusing the criminal or blaming the victim.
Apparently, all you can do is falsely accuse others of saying things they didn't, instead of actually owning up to the fact that you have no argument.
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On June 20 2013 05:15 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 05:04 sunprince wrote:On June 20 2013 04:54 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 04:25 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 20:24 marvellosity wrote:On June 19 2013 08:57 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
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? No, the problem is that you're refusing to address the points I'm making, in this case going as far as completely changing the topic. The analogy was there to respond to your assertion that we were demeaning women. My reply to you was 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". Except that your argument is that women never had the power to achieve structural change, when the reality is that they did. [Citation again needed] On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:
You're demeaning them by calling them incapable, when in fact they were capable, but chose not to. No, I'm not demeaning them, because I just explained to you why remarking a group has limited power to achieve structural change, and is affected by social norms that make it harder to challenge its inferior place in society, is not the same as demeaning that group. Regarding "choice", see below (again). On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
I pointed out why that was a strawman and I responded to it. Try answering my argument instead of repeating yours.
[quote]
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. Why are you even replying to me if all you're going to do is repeat your initial statement which I thoroughly debunked? Here, let me copy/paste the entire relevant section of my initial post: 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. Feel free to reply when you have actual counter-arguments to put forward. There is nothing to answer here, because you are once again arguing with the assumption that women were powerless in the first place. I disagree with that fundamental assumption, so there is no point in arguing further down the line of reasoning when it's broken near the beginning. No, see, that's you reducing my argument to a caricature and calling it an "assumption" to avoid having to discuss the actual argument. It's also not even a matter of "arguing further down the line" since I directly replied to your assertion that they had a choice and chose willingly to have an inferior place in society. You, on the other hand, have been shutting your ears and repeating that they had a choice without ever providing any evidence (or even logic) to support that claim. Again, here is my response to you : 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. If you have no counter-argument, no need to reply. You've already stated your position several times. On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 05:42 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
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. Yes, and socially-accepted gender roles can prevent individuals from exercising their choices the way they would want to - for example by voting. Thank you for agreeing with me. Except that this doesn't support your argument that women as a group were oppressed. Except that I already told you that's not what I was discussing with you - I was discussing access to choice and possibility to act upon choice. You just agreed with me that individual women could not act upon their choices, thanks! sunprince, you'd do well to actually directly address his points that he's bringing up, because kwizach is right, you keep skirting around them without directly addressing what he's actually written. Otherwise this (interesting) conversation will keep going round in pointless circles. Edit: for example, you tell kwizach "you're demeaning them by saying they're incapable" - this simply is nowhere near the thrust of his argument, yet you keep repeating it. It's not what he's saying. Alright, let's see if I can clarify my argument: Premise: Every other (read: actually) oppressed groups throughout history successfully revolted within a few centuries. Premise: Unlike those oppressed groups, women were unable to achieve "freedom" for nearly all of human history. Conclusion #1: There must be some reason that, unlike all other marginalized groups, women did not revolt. Premise: Women are just as capable of revolting and achieving freedom when they want to. Premise: Women as a group have had substantially better treatment than the aforementioned oppressed groups. Premise: When women did eventually revolt, they faced minimal resistance, especially compared to oppressed groups. Conclusion #2: Women did not fail to revolt because they were too oppressed, nor because there was too much resistance. In other words, they did not lack resources, as kwizach argues, since other groups demonstrated you need less than what women had. If we put those all together, we can see that women chose not to revolt. kwizach's argument on agency is that women didn't actually have a free choice because they were too oppressed or something (or, in his words, too constrained in their choices), but we know that other marginalized groups, who were treated substantially worse, apparently had a free choice. In light of the fact that women are just as capable as those other marginalized groups, and that they had easier circumstances and eventually faced less resistance when they did revolt, one can only conclude that it is because they made the choice not to. Furthermore, attempts to deny these women their agency by arguing that they didn't have a free choice is perpetuating a misogynistic view of gender issues, in which the poor wittle wimminz are merely helpless objects without choice since they are so oppressed by the big, bad menz. TL;DR: Women either perpetuated gender roles because they were too oppressed to do anything about it, or because they chose not to (most likely because it benefitted them). kwizach is arguing that they had no choice, therefore he is arguing for the former. This is not only incorrect (because groups who were treated worse than women managed), but misogynistic (because he's implicitly considering women helpless objects). I just watched someone go from victim blaming to gender blaming in one single post. I never realized people would actually argue that "since women didn't complain as a gender, they obviously must like what we're doing to them." I'd be impressed if I wasn't horrified. The entire notion of "victim blaming" is based on misogynistic notions of women as helpless objects who aren't responsible for any of their circumstances, while men are agents responsible for everything that happens. Just look at how you describe society as something that men do to women (once again, women as objects and men as agents), instead of something that both men and women perpetuate. It's also ironic that you talk about gender blaming when you're blaming the male gender for the historical organization of society. Lovely edit--has a presumption that Patriarchy is only perpetuated by men. (It's not) Patriarchy puts the masculine above the feminine because it is assumed that the masculine is superior. Being male is a not a requirement to perpetuate patriarchy.
What you're calling "patriarchy" is merely gender roles. There is also no evidence for your claim that masculine is considered superior. Masculine is considered superior for men, and feminine is considered superior for women.
On June 20 2013 05:15 Thieving Magpie wrote:
But its interesting that you constantly try to frame this image that feminists are against men when feminists don't really care what gender the other side is.
Nowhere did I talk about feminists in this discussion. But if you want to get into it, the reason why feminists are against men is because their actions speak louder than their words.
On June 20 2013 05:15 Thieving Magpie wrote:
Here's an example of patriarchy.
Woman dresses in a suite--no one laughs and she's called professional.
Man dresses in a gown--people laugh and he's defined as weird. Why? Because to dress like a man is superior to dressing as a woman, so a man dressing as woman is funny while a woman dressing as a man is "normal."
Notice how the person attacked in that patriarchal structure is the man? Because patriarchy isn't Men vs Women, patriarchy is ranking the masculine over the feminine.
Absolutely false. Women are attacked for being too manly as much as men are attacked for being too feminine. Everyone is shamed for deviating from their gender roles; there is no ranking of masculine over feminine here.
A woman dressing as a man has only very, very recently become normal, and it's an example of how we've allowed more freedom for women to expand outside their gender roles. It's hilarious that you've reversed this into an example of masculine being valued over feminine, when in fact it's another advantage that women have over men.
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On June 20 2013 05:34 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 05:15 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 05:04 sunprince wrote:On June 20 2013 04:54 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 04:25 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 20:24 marvellosity wrote:On June 19 2013 08:57 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:
[quote]
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? No, the problem is that you're refusing to address the points I'm making, in this case going as far as completely changing the topic. The analogy was there to respond to your assertion that we were demeaning women. My reply to you was 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". Except that your argument is that women never had the power to achieve structural change, when the reality is that they did. [Citation again needed] On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:
You're demeaning them by calling them incapable, when in fact they were capable, but chose not to. No, I'm not demeaning them, because I just explained to you why remarking a group has limited power to achieve structural change, and is affected by social norms that make it harder to challenge its inferior place in society, is not the same as demeaning that group. Regarding "choice", see below (again). On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:
[quote]
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. Why are you even replying to me if all you're going to do is repeat your initial statement which I thoroughly debunked? Here, let me copy/paste the entire relevant section of my initial post: 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. Feel free to reply when you have actual counter-arguments to put forward. There is nothing to answer here, because you are once again arguing with the assumption that women were powerless in the first place. I disagree with that fundamental assumption, so there is no point in arguing further down the line of reasoning when it's broken near the beginning. No, see, that's you reducing my argument to a caricature and calling it an "assumption" to avoid having to discuss the actual argument. It's also not even a matter of "arguing further down the line" since I directly replied to your assertion that they had a choice and chose willingly to have an inferior place in society. You, on the other hand, have been shutting your ears and repeating that they had a choice without ever providing any evidence (or even logic) to support that claim. Again, here is my response to you : 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. If you have no counter-argument, no need to reply. You've already stated your position several times. On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 06:54 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 06:19 sunprince wrote:
[quote]
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. Yes, and socially-accepted gender roles can prevent individuals from exercising their choices the way they would want to - for example by voting. Thank you for agreeing with me. Except that this doesn't support your argument that women as a group were oppressed. Except that I already told you that's not what I was discussing with you - I was discussing access to choice and possibility to act upon choice. You just agreed with me that individual women could not act upon their choices, thanks! sunprince, you'd do well to actually directly address his points that he's bringing up, because kwizach is right, you keep skirting around them without directly addressing what he's actually written. Otherwise this (interesting) conversation will keep going round in pointless circles. Edit: for example, you tell kwizach "you're demeaning them by saying they're incapable" - this simply is nowhere near the thrust of his argument, yet you keep repeating it. It's not what he's saying. Alright, let's see if I can clarify my argument: Premise: Every other (read: actually) oppressed groups throughout history successfully revolted within a few centuries. Premise: Unlike those oppressed groups, women were unable to achieve "freedom" for nearly all of human history. Conclusion #1: There must be some reason that, unlike all other marginalized groups, women did not revolt. Premise: Women are just as capable of revolting and achieving freedom when they want to. Premise: Women as a group have had substantially better treatment than the aforementioned oppressed groups. Premise: When women did eventually revolt, they faced minimal resistance, especially compared to oppressed groups. Conclusion #2: Women did not fail to revolt because they were too oppressed, nor because there was too much resistance. In other words, they did not lack resources, as kwizach argues, since other groups demonstrated you need less than what women had. If we put those all together, we can see that women chose not to revolt. kwizach's argument on agency is that women didn't actually have a free choice because they were too oppressed or something (or, in his words, too constrained in their choices), but we know that other marginalized groups, who were treated substantially worse, apparently had a free choice. In light of the fact that women are just as capable as those other marginalized groups, and that they had easier circumstances and eventually faced less resistance when they did revolt, one can only conclude that it is because they made the choice not to. Furthermore, attempts to deny these women their agency by arguing that they didn't have a free choice is perpetuating a misogynistic view of gender issues, in which the poor wittle wimminz are merely helpless objects without choice since they are so oppressed by the big, bad menz. TL;DR: Women either perpetuated gender roles because they were too oppressed to do anything about it, or because they chose not to (most likely because it benefitted them). kwizach is arguing that they had no choice, therefore he is arguing for the former. This is not only incorrect (because groups who were treated worse than women managed), but misogynistic (because he's implicitly considering women helpless objects). I just watched someone go from victim blaming to gender blaming in one single post. I never realized people would actually argue that "since women didn't complain as a gender, they obviously must like what we're doing to them." I'd be impressed if I wasn't horrified. The entire notion of "victim blaming" is based on misogynistic notions of women as helpless objects who aren't responsible for any of their circumstances, while men are agents responsible for everything that happens. Just look at how you describe society as something that men do to women (once again, women as objects and men as agents), instead of something that both men and women perpetuate. It's also ironic that you talk about gender blaming when you're blaming the male gender for the historical organization of society. Lovely edit--has a presumption that Patriarchy is only perpetuated by men. (It's not) Patriarchy puts the masculine above the feminine because it is assumed that the masculine is superior. Being male is a not a requirement to perpetuate patriarchy. But its interesting that you constantly try to frame this image that feminists are against men when feminists don't really care what gender the other side is. Here's an example of patriarchy. Woman dresses in a suite--no one laughs and she's called professional. Man dresses in a gown--people laugh and he's defined as weird. Why? Because to dress like a man is superior to dressing as a woman, so a man dressing as woman is funny while a woman dressing as a man is "normal." Notice how the person attacked in that patriarchal structure is the man? Because patriarchy isn't Men vs Women, patriarchy is ranking the masculine over the feminine. Absolutely false. Women are attacked for being too manly as much as men are attacked for being too feminine. Everyone is shamed for deviating from their gender roles; there is no ranking of masculine over feminine here. A woman dressing as a man has only very, very recently become normal, and it's an example of how we've allowed more freedom for women to expand outside their gender roles. It's hilarious that you've reversed this into an example of masculine being valued over feminine, when in fact it's another advantage that women have over men.
"Another advantage"?
What a joke.
In contemporary culture, women have had more freedom in dress for decades. This isn't new. The mere fact that women have been allowed to dress in shorts/pants as well as dresses (when men have not) for decades shows this. However, if you think that women have anything past this incredibly superficial "advantage" over men (and maybe the "advantage" of being the pursued in romantic interactions, if that is even an advantage), you have the intellectual integrity of a Holocaust denier at this point.
Oh, and women are hardly shamed for dressing "manly" have as much as men are shamed for dressing like women. That's utterly ridiculous and you're just making stuff up to hold onto your incredibly untenable position.
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On June 20 2013 05:29 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 05:17 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 05:12 sunprince wrote:On June 20 2013 05:08 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 05:04 sunprince wrote:On June 20 2013 04:54 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 04:25 sunprince wrote:On June 19 2013 20:24 marvellosity wrote:On June 19 2013 08:57 kwizach wrote:On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:
[quote]
Except that your argument is that women never had the power to achieve structural change, when the reality is that they did. [Citation again needed] On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:
You're demeaning them by calling them incapable, when in fact they were capable, but chose not to. No, I'm not demeaning them, because I just explained to you why remarking a group has limited power to achieve structural change, and is affected by social norms that make it harder to challenge its inferior place in society, is not the same as demeaning that group. Regarding "choice", see below (again). On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:
[quote]
There is nothing to answer here, because you are once again arguing with the assumption that women were powerless in the first place. I disagree with that fundamental assumption, so there is no point in arguing further down the line of reasoning when it's broken near the beginning. No, see, that's you reducing my argument to a caricature and calling it an "assumption" to avoid having to discuss the actual argument. It's also not even a matter of "arguing further down the line" since I directly replied to your assertion that they had a choice and chose willingly to have an inferior place in society. You, on the other hand, have been shutting your ears and repeating that they had a choice without ever providing any evidence (or even logic) to support that claim. Again, here is my response to you : 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. If you have no counter-argument, no need to reply. You've already stated your position several times. On June 19 2013 07:05 sunprince wrote:
[quote]
Except that this doesn't support your argument that women as a group were oppressed. Except that I already told you that's not what I was discussing with you - I was discussing access to choice and possibility to act upon choice. You just agreed with me that individual women could not act upon their choices, thanks! sunprince, you'd do well to actually directly address his points that he's bringing up, because kwizach is right, you keep skirting around them without directly addressing what he's actually written. Otherwise this (interesting) conversation will keep going round in pointless circles. Edit: for example, you tell kwizach "you're demeaning them by saying they're incapable" - this simply is nowhere near the thrust of his argument, yet you keep repeating it. It's not what he's saying. Alright, let's see if I can clarify my argument: Premise: Every other (read: actually) oppressed groups throughout history successfully revolted within a few centuries. Premise: Unlike those oppressed groups, women were unable to achieve "freedom" for nearly all of human history. Conclusion #1: There must be some reason that, unlike all other marginalized groups, women did not revolt. Premise: Women are just as capable of revolting and achieving freedom when they want to. Premise: Women as a group have had substantially better treatment than the aforementioned oppressed groups. Premise: When women did eventually revolt, they faced minimal resistance, especially compared to oppressed groups. Conclusion #2: Women did not fail to revolt because they were too oppressed, nor because there was too much resistance. In other words, they did not lack resources, as kwizach argues, since other groups demonstrated you need less than what women had. If we put those all together, we can see that women chose not to revolt. kwizach's argument on agency is that women didn't actually have a free choice because they were too oppressed or something (or, in his words, too constrained in their choices), but we know that other marginalized groups, who were treated substantially worse, apparently had a free choice. In light of the fact that women are just as capable as those other marginalized groups, and that they had easier circumstances and eventually faced less resistance when they did revolt, one can only conclude that it is because they made the choice not to. Furthermore, attempts to deny these women their agency by arguing that they didn't have a free choice is perpetuating a misogynistic view of gender issues, in which the poor wittle wimminz are merely helpless objects without choice since they are so oppressed by the big, bad menz. TL;DR: Women either perpetuated gender roles because they were too oppressed to do anything about it, or because they chose not to (most likely because it benefitted them). kwizach is arguing that they had no choice, therefore he is arguing for the former. This is not only incorrect (because groups who were treated worse than women managed), but misogynistic (because he's implicitly considering women helpless objects). I just watched someone go from victim blaming to gender blaming in one single post. I never realized people would actually argue that "since women didn't complain as a gender, they obviously must like what we're doing to them." I'd be impressed if I wasn't horrified. The entire notion of "victim blaming" is based on misogynistic notions of women as helpless objects who aren't responsible for any of their circumstances, while men are agents responsible for everything that happens. Just look at how you describe society as something that men do to women (once again, women as objects and men as agents), instead of something that both men and women perpetuate. You're not telling them how to dress, you're just telling them they'll get raped if they practice free will. I'm sure that makes sense to you dude. Strawman more bro. Still, I'll entertain your bullshit argument: "You're not telling them to lock their doors, you're just telling them they'll get robbed if they practice free will". Can you spot the logic error with the above? Should someone not lock their door and be robbed, most people would say "well, you're an idiot for not locking your door". What they don't usually say is "you deserved to be robbed for not locking your door". Continuing to argue that offering advice to limit one's risk of being victim is something to be discouraged because it's sometimes unpleasant, and labeling it something as negatively-charged as victim-blaming, will discourage people from not managing their risks properly, and actually does a disservice to people, putting them more at risk of being a victim out of ignorance. It's illegal to rob someone whether their door is locked or not... them leaving it unlocked =/= mean they're asking to be robbed. Many neighborhoods don't lock their doors. Many people have accidentally left their doors unlocked. Many lock their doors, but not their windows. None of them ask to be robbed/raped. But it's funny that you think they are. Nowhere did I say they were asked to be robbed, and nowhere did I say that it was okay to rob them. Saying that they could improve their chances of staying safe is not the same thing as excusing the criminal or blaming the victim. Apparently, all you can do is falsely accuse others of saying things they didn't, instead of actually owning up to the fact that you have no argument.
When you are robbed/rape the state of the how locked/dressed you are has no bearing on whether or not you were robbed/raped.
It is irrelevant to the person you are talking to whether what state their outfit/locks were during the time of the attack. You asking them that is placing burden on the event on that one aspect of the circumstance instead of the totality of the circumstance.
People don't rob *because* doors are unlocked much like people don't rape *because* the dress was short. Women dress in short skirts all the time--not everyone is raped. Telling the victim that she shouldn't do what she likes doing does not address the issue in any way shape or form.
For example, if you got robbed and I asked you "do you live in east side oakland CA?" (an area of higher crime rate than the rest of oakland CA) You would respond that it doesn't fucking matter where you live--you shouldn't have been robbed and asking you that question is completely nonsense.
Telling someone to stop being themselves or else something bad happens to them is not, as you call it, "giving helpful advice." It is showing that in the subject of Rape/Robbery, you'd rather talk about what the victim should fix instead of what society should fix. Hence why it is called Victim Blaming.
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