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On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote:
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).
"Women are helpless victims who had society and culture forced upon them."
Again and again you come back to this. I call bullshit. You have zero evidence for the claim that men controlled society and culture. Society and culture is composed of both men and women, and they both perpetuate and reinforce it in their own ways.
On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote:
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.
It's an implicit requirement to everything you're saying, because you're portraying women as nothing more than helpless victims who are so weak that they were easily controlled by men throughout all of human history. I don't buy this misogynistic assumption of yours.
On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +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.
Virtually no one in modern society excuses rape or rapists. Rape is considered one of the most horrible crimes that can possibly be committed.
The only reason you think that "victim blaming" is incredibly common is because people cry "victim blaming" in cases where it is not true (e.g. see Thieving Magpie in this thread). Giving safety tips is not "victim blaming", nor is disagreeing that someone was raped on the basis of evidence, yet feminists lump these all together as examples of "victim blaming".
On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote:
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.
This is false. Feminists assert that rape is based on power, but actual psychologists and criminologists will tell you that like most crimes, the reasons for sexual violence are complex and vary between individual criminals and crimes. Studies of rapists have shown that most rapists do not have a preference for rape over consensual sex, and that rapists are more aroused by consensual sex scenarios than nonconsensual sex, even though they are more aroused by nonconsensual sex than non-rapists.
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Why is this even a discussion? A woman's body is HER body. Regardless of her age, or the reason for her pregnancy. Abortion is a choice, it's THEIR CHOICE TO MAKE, and we have absolutely no right to judge, or decide for, them. Get fucking real.
Doctors are allowed to say no, of course, but there will always be those that will do it, no problem.
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Instead of using fallacies, why don't you provide some examples to the contrary? Oh right, you can't.
Oh wait, I can. Numerous feudal societies (early medieval Europe) and tribal civilizations (Mongols, Gothic tribes) alike literally treated women like property and didn't give them even the most basic human rights.
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.
Higher life expectancy: Like I said, life expectancy alone isn't good enough.
Less likely to be victims of violent crime: Only because they weren't allowed to operate in most societal spheres. Women were, historically, the primary victims of any form of violent crime that occurred in social spheres they were allowed to participate in (rape, domestic violence)
Workplace deaths: Only because women weren't allowed to work. Completely irrelevant.
Suicides: Source.
Imprisonment: Again, when you are allowed to do less things, you will be imprisoned for less things. This is indicative of their oppression, not their freedom.
Homelessness: Simply an occupational hazard of having more freedom. When you are a piece of property like women are, you aren't given up by your father until you are actually in a relatively secure living situation, so that the father can get some kind of return for his investment.
Government aid: 1) Source. 2) I guarantee you that all of this was expected to go towards taking care of the kids and, of course, supporting and doting on the man while he was at home. It's not like this money was going towards the woman's education of leisurely activities until contemporary times.
Conscription: Same as workplace deaths. Completely irrelevant as women didn't have any kind of freedom to serve in the armed forces anyway. Conscription is a responsibility you take on in society for the freedom of being able to do things.
So you've got life expectancy, (maybe) suicides, and homelessness. Men have everything else, including legal rights, cultural superiority, and basically everything else imaginable.
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. 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.
"They had it worse, so yours is fine!"
Is a ridiculous argument and makes you look like an ass. Just because blacks had it worse than women in American history doesn't mean that women were well-off in any sense. Furthermore, women didn't have "benefits" to their gender roles. As I have stated, being a man was, in pretty much every way, more beneficial than being a woman. It wasn't a "trade off" in any sense.
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?
You still talk about "no resistance", "tons of support". Really? what about the countless attempts throughout history where women DID try to assert their independence and were shot down?
Oh, sure, let's just ignore that since it pokes a hole in your argument. Let's also just fabricate the resistance to women's suffrage in the early 20th century to make women look like the "bad guys".
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On June 20 2013 05:45 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 05:29 sunprince wrote: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:
[quote]
[Citation again needed]
[quote]
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).
[quote]
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 :
[quote]
If you have no counter-argument, no need to reply. You've already stated your position several times.
[quote]
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.
Not everyone who leaves their car doors unlocked is robbed, but that doesn't mean leaving your car door unlocked is a good idea. You're deliberately ignoring the concept of probability in order to pretend as if <100% safety = 0% safety.
On June 20 2013 05:45 Thieving Magpie wrote:
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.
You're reshaping the contexts to suit your argument. Nowhere is it implied by any of my posts that you should go around telling robbery victims that they should live elsewhere.
However, this doesn't change the fact that it is objectively true that living in a better neighborhood reduces your chances of being robbed. Stating this objective fact is not victim blaming.
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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.
Um, not really. Slavery has been legal for most of human history. Considering that you want to consider all women as being part of some homogeneous group when they're actually not (given that they were oppressed in different fashions depending on the culture they happened to live in and the time period) I don't see why you're demarcating different groups of slaves. Furthermore, how the fuck do you square this premise with the facts of ancient slavery, which had empires spanning thousands of years employing slaves relatively consistently?
Premise: Unlike those oppressed groups, women were unable to achieve "freedom" for nearly all of human history.
Women are not a homogeneous group. Some women had more rights than others, and some women were more successful in achieving legal autonomy than others.
Let's apply your criteria to another oppressed group: homosexuals. They didn't acquire equal standing under the law until, being generous, the latter half of the 20th century. Were they oppressed beforehand? Well, considering homosexuality was illegal in virtually every country, and the punishment for homosexual sex ranged from forced sterilization (shoutout to Turing) to execution (see: the middle ages, Muslim countries, etc.).
Homosexuals were unable to achieve freedom for almost the entirety of human history. In fact, it took them longer than it took women. I wonder what the reason for that is!
Premise: Women are just as capable of revolting and achieving freedom when they want to.
False. Women were not subject to the same kind of oppression that slaves were, ergo they couldn't resist in the same fashion. First of all, slavery was obvious; there was a clear, distinction between free citizens and slaves. Society perpetuated this "us vs. them" mentality, which is why slavery generally resulted in hatred of slavemasters (but, important to note, this was not always the case! Many civilizations actually treated slaves quite well in terms of humane treatment, which meant that those slaves were not at all vengeful and would even be fiercely loyal to their masters i.e. certain cases in Egyptian/Roman history).
The difference with women was that their oppression wasn't really styled as oppression! Everyone knew slaves were being subjugated because they weren't citizens. No slave master was labouring under the delusion that slavery was doing the slave a service (except for, perhaps, some truly insidious slavery apologists) but simply thought that they had the right to own the slave for some particular reason. With women, this reason permeated cultural boundaries and applied universally to all women everywhere, not just some particular category, as in the case of slaves (i.e. men and women could both be slaves, but citizens could not be slaves. The justification for slavery was that people who had been overpowered by a culture were bound to serve it. It's a stupid justification, to be sure, but it's based on something out in the open: you are not a Roman citizen, ergo you do not enjoy the rights of a Roman citizen and hence can be enslaved!) on the simple grounds that they were women.
Strictly speaking, this premise is either false or deliberately loaded, because the phrase "just as capable" is loaded and presupposes a specific type of agency (which, based on your arguments, appears to be something like: women were physically capable of revolting, ergo they had the choice to revolt, despite the fact that women did not posses an objective framework or anything even remotely close to one from which to evaluate society). The phrase "achieving freedom" is also totally ambiguous and I have no idea what you're referring to, given that different groups of women had different levels of freedom in different cultures at different places in history.
Premise: Women as a group have had substantially better treatment than the aforementioned oppressed groups.
Utterly and totally syllogistically irrelevant to your conclusion, and irrelevant to the overall point. Oppression has nothing to do with how well you are treated. Oppression is unjust subjugation. That's what the word means! That aside, one's treatment is not the sole decider of their ability to revolt. Again, using ancient history as an example, some slaves were treated like shit, and some slaves were treated well. Nevertheless, all slavery is and always has been oppressive. The reason that cultures which didn't universally beat the shit out of their slaves were able to maintain slavery is because there was less opportunity for solidarity among slaves and less tendency for them to see slavery as bad per se but rather to see certain slavemasters as bad. That doesn't mean that a slave who was treated well (by slave standards) wasn't oppressed, because slavery by definition is the deprivation of agency. It simply means that the mere fact that a well-treated slave was less likely to murder his master than a poorly treated one does not imply that the former was not oppressed, just that he had little reason to believe that a) he would be able to convince other slaves to join him, given that his objections to oppression would have been high-minded, and b) there was a livable condition available to him whereas revolt generally means violence. I think that's the thing you're really missing. Even if you're given mildly humane treatment (but still far below the freedoms you're entitled to) it's pretty difficult to convince a large number of people to risk their lives and the lives of their families to gain more rights, because there's a lot on the line to lose. When some group is being universally executed, resistance becomes more appealing, because you're going to be killed anyway, so what do you have to lose?
In that sense, yes, slavery, anti-homosexuality, and the oppression of women was perpetuated because the oppressed realized that they could choose either a suboptimal but livable life or play a lottery of resistance in which every losing number is imprisonment, ostracization, execution, torture, or some combination. Doesn't take a genius to pick one, but then, if I offer you a choice between having $5000 per year to support your family versus zero (i.e. if you revolt), you'll probably pick the former. Doesn't mean that I'm not oppressing you, though, because I've taken away every other option.
Premise: When women did eventually revolt, they faced minimal resistance, especially compared to oppressed groups.
Pretty much impossible to evaluate. I'm not sure why it's so difficult for you to grasp that people simply bought into deceptive gender roles perpetuated by a trusted, primarily male, academic and clerical community, at least in the West. Simply saying that "oh, well why didn't every woman stand up and revolt if it was so unfair?" is to completely ignore the strict social conditioning which existed in pre-modern society. It has nothing to do with women being weak, either. Men were just as susceptible to it, hence their failure to ever permit female equality even though they did control the executive levels of their various societies. People in general are incredibly susceptible to such things! Just take a look at the modern world. Over half of Americans think that Creationism is true and evolution false. Now, I'm pretty sure that over half of the American population isn't comprised of complete morons, and that these people are capable of understanding evolution and the evidence for it, but nevertheless they are incredibly and violently opposed to it based on nothing more than familial and religious conditioning.
There's no reason to suppose that something similar didn't happen to women, especially since ontological states don't walk up to you and punch you in the face when you're wrong, as does evolutionary evidence to Creationists.
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.
This literally doesn't follow from your premises at all. This is a completely speculative conclusion that, frankly, does not follow logically from your three premises (even if they were true or concise or clear) without the addition of about five more behavioural premises which you failed to mention.
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.
Your last sentence betrays your bias. Nobody is arguing that. In fact, men were just as much victims to the social conditioning as women were, hence their failure to overturn unjust laws despite holding all the power.
Your view of oppression is not only demonstrably false given the actual definition of the word oppression, but is largely based on a revisionist view of history which completely neglects the psychology of decision making viz. informed consent.
At no point have you ever addressed the fact that oppression is defined (as in this is what the word fucking means) as, essentially, unjust subjugation. Were women subjugated? Yes. Was it unjust to consider women legally lesser than men? Undeniably, much in the same sense it would be unjust to teach Creationism in science class, even if it made everyone feel really happy. Ergo women were oppressed. This is not a matter of opinion. It is a fact because that is what the word freaking means!
Just gonna address the various "quality of life" statistics you've whipped out for a second: you arguing that the deaths of men in the workplace/military indicates women historically had a better quality of life than men is like saying that poor have it good in some sense because they can't afford to be in plane crashes. Literally none of the statistics you've presented that are actually applicable to pre-modern history (i.e. excluding ones like government aid which are basically modern inventions) demonstrate that women had some great, comfortable life anymore than a quadriplegic who lives his entire life in a bubble has it better than an able person on the grounds that he's less likely to acquire a foreign pathogen.
You seem to measure quality of life in terms of physical things which perpetuate your survival...without ever even addressing that two people who live healthily to a hundred might have drastically different opportunities available to them. There's more to the quality of one's life than simply surviving. It's not just about comfort, either. It's about being able to do things that you find interesting, live the way you would prefer to live, and create your own legacy. The ability to do this was limited unilaterally in pre-modern times, but women were undoubtedly less able to do these things than men, in general.
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On June 20 2013 05:48 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote:
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). "Women are helpless victims who had society and culture forced upon them." Again and again you come back to this. I call bullshit. You have zero evidence for the claim that men controlled society and culture. Society and culture is composed of both men and women, and they both perpetuate and reinforce it in their own ways. Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote:
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. It's an implicit requirement to everything you're saying, because you're portraying women as nothing more than helpless victims who are so weak that they were easily controlled by men throughout all of human history. I don't buy this misogynistic assumption of yours. Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote: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. Virtually no one in modern society excuses rape or rapists. Rape is considered one of the most horrible crimes that can possibly be committed. The only reason you think that "victim blaming" is incredibly common is because people cry "victim blaming" in cases where it is not true (e.g. see Thieving Magpie in this thread). Giving safety tips is not "victim blaming", nor is disagreeing that someone was raped on the basis of evidence, yet feminists lump these all together as examples of "victim blaming". Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote:
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. This is false. Feminists assert that rape is based on power, but actual psychologists and criminologists will tell you that like most crimes, the reasons for sexual violence are complex and vary between individual criminals and crimes. Studies of rapists have shown that most rapists do not have a preference for rape over consensual sex, and that rapists are more aroused by consensual sex scenarios than nonconsensual sex, even though they are more aroused by nonconsensual sex than non-rapists.
A.) Societal oppression of women is not Men vs Women but the assertion of the superiority of the masculine. Which is where get terms like "man up" to promote someone to be stronger but describe "like a girl" to reveal someone's weakness. Both men and women perpetuate this patriarchal system--because misogyny is not gender based, it is brain based. Men and women can be misogynist.
B.) How aroused someone is has nothing to do with Rape. Heck, it barely has anything to do with sex. Most people can arouse themselves with nothing but free hand and a crappy imagination. Someone being more or less aroused by different types of sex acts has nothing to do with being a rapist for the same reason that my enjoying my male hands stroking my male cock does not define how gay or straight I am.
Do you really believe that "even though they are more aroused by nonconsensual sex than non-rapists" is a good argument against rape being about power? Really? Are you really that thick headed? When someone says that rape isn't about sex, it's about power--you replying that rapists don't get any more aroused by different types of sex than non-rapists do actually supports that thesis. Why? Because, as you have pointed out, the sex is not the point of it. They don't get any more aroused than anyone else when it comes to normal sex. Which shows that they're not trying to fill some missing fucking gap in their sex lives. Because the sex is not the point of it when your rape someone.
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On June 20 2013 05:52 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 05:45 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 05:29 sunprince wrote: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:
[quote]
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. Not everyone who leaves their car doors unlocked is robbed, but that doesn't mean leaving your car door unlocked is a good idea. You're deliberately ignoring the concept of probability in order to pretend as if <100% safety = 0% safety. Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 05:45 Thieving Magpie wrote:
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. You're reshaping the contexts to suit your argument. Nowhere is it implied by any of my posts that you should go around telling robbery victims that they should live elsewhere. However, this doesn't change the fact that it is objectively true that living in a better neighborhood reduces your chances of being robbed. Stating this objective fact is not victim blaming.
Reshaping the context? Robbery was your fucking example!
When someone has just been robbed/raped asking them about how locked their door is means absolutely shit.
When someone who has not been robbed/raped yet lives in a neighborhood where everyone leaves their door locked/dresses nice for the club--do you walk up to them and tell them to stop doing what they are doing or else someone will rob/rape them?
At no point is it relevant before they are robbed/raped and at no point is it relevant after they are robbed/raped.
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On June 20 2013 05:52 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +
Instead of using fallacies, why don't you provide some examples to the contrary? Oh right, you can't.
Oh wait, I can. Numerous feudal societies (early medieval Europe) and tribal civilizations (Mongols, Gothic tribes) alike literally treated women like property and didn't give them even the most basic human rights.
You're shifting the goalposts. These are not examples of women being treated worse than the underclasses, which is what we're talking about.
On June 20 2013 05:52 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote: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.
Higher life expectancy: Like I said, life expectancy alone isn't good enough.[/quote]
Arbitrarily dismissing key data? Why am I not surprised?
On June 20 2013 05:52 Stratos_speAr wrote:
Less likely to be victims of violent crime: Only because they weren't allowed to operate in most societal spheres. Women were, historically, the primary victims of any form of violent crime that occurred in social spheres they were allowed to participate in (rape, domestic violence)
False. There are many societies in which women did participate in public life, yet in those they were still less likely to be victims of violent crime.
On June 20 2013 05:52 Stratos_speAr wrote:
Workplace deaths: Only because women weren't allowed to work. Completely irrelevant.
As you yourself pointed out, there have been many different societies. Women have worked in some of them, and they have substantially lower workplace deaths in those.
On June 20 2013 05:52 Stratos_speAr wrote:
Suicides: Source.
I explained that you can use Google. There are way too many arguments here for me to provide you with a half dozen (in case you arbitrarily dismiss some of them) sources for each issue.
On June 20 2013 05:52 Stratos_speAr wrote:
Imprisonment: Again, when you are allowed to do less things, you will be imprisoned for less things. This is indicative of their oppression, not their freedom.
Completely backwards reasoning. If more things are illegal for you to do, it would actually make sense for you to be imprisoned more often, not less. Would you argue that the criminalization of drugs decreases the likelihood of imprisonment?
On June 20 2013 05:52 Stratos_speAr wrote:
Homelessness: Simply an occupational hazard of having more freedom. When you are a piece of property like women are, you aren't given up by your father until you are actually in a relatively secure living situation, so that the father can get some kind of return for his investment.
I like how you manage to rationalize every single advantage into a disadvantage.
On June 20 2013 05:52 Stratos_speAr wrote:
Government aid: 1) Source. 2) I guarantee you that all of this was expected to go towards taking care of the kids and, of course, supporting and doting on the man while he was at home. It's not like this money was going towards the woman's education of leisurely activities until contemporary times.
Actually, for historical situations we're talking mostly about feeding the poor. Women were and are simply more likely to be taken care of by governmental and philanthropic institutions because they elicit more sympathy than men.
On June 20 2013 05:52 Stratos_speAr wrote:
Conscription: Same as workplace deaths. Completely irrelevant as women didn't have any kind of freedom to serve in the armed forces anyway. Conscription is a responsibility you take on in society for the freedom of being able to do things.
It's also a responsibility that most men and women didn't want. Most men would rather give up their vote than be conscripted, and that's not even going into the past when the lower classes had few rights and yet would still be expected to fight.
On June 20 2013 05:52 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote: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.
Ties into the next section.
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. "They had it worse, so yours is fine!" Is a ridiculous argument and makes you look like an ass. Just because blacks had it worse than women in American history doesn't mean that women were well-off in any sense. Furthermore, women didn't have "benefits" to their gender roles. As I have stated, being a man was, in pretty much every way, more beneficial than being a woman. It wasn't a "trade off" in any sense.
That's not the argument and you know it. The argument is that oppressed groups all have certain things in common, and women as a group have never shared those things, so they don't qualify.
On June 20 2013 05:52 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +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?
You still talk about "no resistance", "tons of support". Really? what about the countless attempts throughout history where women DID try to assert their independence and were shot down?[/quote]
A few women trying to assert their independence is not an attempt. The second that a majority of women wanted anything, they've gotten it. And unlike actual oppressed groups, women have never been shot down with brutal, oppressive violence.
On June 20 2013 05:52 Stratos_speAr wrote:
Oh, sure, let's just ignore that since it pokes a hole in your argument. Let's also just fabricate the resistance to women's suffrage in the early 20th century to make women look like the "bad guys".
The resistance to women's suffrage was mostly from other women. As I've already noted earlier in this thread, the second that polls showed a majority of women agreed that they wanted the vote, male politicians practically tripped over each other to give it to them.
Compare this to the fire hoses, riot police, lynching, and attack dogs which met African-American civil rights movement, to get an idea of what true oppression is.
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On June 20 2013 06:04 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 05:52 sunprince wrote:On June 20 2013 05:45 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 05:29 sunprince wrote: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:
[quote]
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. Not everyone who leaves their car doors unlocked is robbed, but that doesn't mean leaving your car door unlocked is a good idea. You're deliberately ignoring the concept of probability in order to pretend as if <100% safety = 0% safety. On June 20 2013 05:45 Thieving Magpie wrote:
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. You're reshaping the contexts to suit your argument. Nowhere is it implied by any of my posts that you should go around telling robbery victims that they should live elsewhere. However, this doesn't change the fact that it is objectively true that living in a better neighborhood reduces your chances of being robbed. Stating this objective fact is not victim blaming. Reshaping the context? Robbery was your fucking example! When someone has just been robbed/raped asking them about how locked their door is means absolutely shit. When someone who has not been robbed/raped yet lives in a neighborhood where everyone leaves their door locked/dresses nice for the club--do you walk up to them and tell them to stop doing what they are doing or else someone will rob/rape them?
You're reshaping the context of how the information is stated.
When you take an objective fact and shove it in the face of someone who was just victimized, then of course a reasonable person may get the impression you are blaming them. However, that's not what we're talking about here.
People generally say that you should lock your doors. They sometimes give cautionary advice to others to learn from someone else's mistakes. They don't generally go around rubbing it in the faces of recent robbery victims.
On June 20 2013 06:04 Thieving Magpie wrote:
At no point is it relevant before they are robbed/raped and at no point is it relevant after they are robbed/raped.
TIL that locking your doors does not decrease your chances of being robbed. /sarcasm
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On June 20 2013 06:00 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 05:48 sunprince wrote:On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote:
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). "Women are helpless victims who had society and culture forced upon them." Again and again you come back to this. I call bullshit. You have zero evidence for the claim that men controlled society and culture. Society and culture is composed of both men and women, and they both perpetuate and reinforce it in their own ways. On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote:
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. It's an implicit requirement to everything you're saying, because you're portraying women as nothing more than helpless victims who are so weak that they were easily controlled by men throughout all of human history. I don't buy this misogynistic assumption of yours. On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote: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. Virtually no one in modern society excuses rape or rapists. Rape is considered one of the most horrible crimes that can possibly be committed. The only reason you think that "victim blaming" is incredibly common is because people cry "victim blaming" in cases where it is not true (e.g. see Thieving Magpie in this thread). Giving safety tips is not "victim blaming", nor is disagreeing that someone was raped on the basis of evidence, yet feminists lump these all together as examples of "victim blaming". On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote:
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. This is false. Feminists assert that rape is based on power, but actual psychologists and criminologists will tell you that like most crimes, the reasons for sexual violence are complex and vary between individual criminals and crimes. Studies of rapists have shown that most rapists do not have a preference for rape over consensual sex, and that rapists are more aroused by consensual sex scenarios than nonconsensual sex, even though they are more aroused by nonconsensual sex than non-rapists. A.) Societal oppression of women is not Men vs Women but the assertion of the superiority of the masculine. Which is where get terms like "man up" to promote someone to be stronger but describe "like a girl" to reveal someone's weakness. Both men and women perpetuate this patriarchal system--because misogyny is not gender based, it is brain based. Men and women can be misogynist.
Wrong. A woman is acting too masculine is often shamed for it. Therefore, your entire assumption falls apart.
On June 20 2013 06:00 Thieving Magpie wrote:
B.) How aroused someone is has nothing to do with Rape. Heck, it barely has anything to do with sex. Most people can arouse themselves with nothing but free hand and a crappy imagination. Someone being more or less aroused by different types of sex acts has nothing to do with being a rapist for the same reason that my enjoying my male hands stroking my male cock does not define how gay or straight I am.
Those were merely two examples. The point is that only feminists argue that "rape is about power". Psychologists and criminologists argue that, like most crimes, rape is about a lot of things.
On June 20 2013 06:00 Thieving Magpie wrote:
Do you really believe that "even though they are more aroused by nonconsensual sex than non-rapists" is a good argument against rape being about power? Really? Are you really that thick headed? When someone says that rape isn't about sex, it's about power--you replying that rapists don't get any more aroused by different types of sex than non-rapists do actually supports that thesis. Why? Because, as you have pointed out, the sex is not the point of it. They don't get any more aroused than anyone else when it comes to normal sex. Which shows that they're not trying to fill some missing fucking gap in their sex lives. Because the sex is not the point of it when your rape someone.
You missed the second part that I mentioned about that study: rapists are more aroused by nonconsensual sex than nonrapists are. Clearly, there is a sexual component.
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You missed the second part that I mentioned about that study: rapists are more aroused by nonconsensual sex than nonrapists are. Clearly, there is a sexual component.
Nobody is denying that there is a sexual component to rape. There is obviously a sexual component to rape considering it's fucking sex. If a man wasn't aroused when trying to rape someone he literally wouldn't be able to penetrate them properly.
The point is that rape is primarily a crime of violence rather than sexual attraction. Yes, there are obviously other factors (as with everything) but the constant factor appears to be that rape is about violent subjugation of another person. I'm not sure how you can think that there's "clearly a sexual component" but not accept the pretty obvious and reasonable assertion that control has something to do with raping people. It's literally forcing someone to do something against their will, which is a matter of control by definition. Denying this is absurd.
Compare this to the fire hoses, riot police, lynching, and attack dogs which met African-American civil rights movement, to get an idea of what true oppression is.
Psh, that's nothing. Compare that to the systematic execution, forced labour, and disenfranchisement of Jews during the Holocaust to get an idea of what true oppression is.
Oh shit, the vast majority of Jews never rose up before slaughtered? Guess they weren't being oppressed, yo. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that they didn't know what the fuck was happening and Antisemitism was widespread in Europe anyway so nobody was about to rush to the defense of Jews when they were shipped away to mysterious camps, even if nobody knew what was happening in them.
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On June 20 2013 06:10 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 06:00 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 05:48 sunprince wrote:On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote:
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). "Women are helpless victims who had society and culture forced upon them." Again and again you come back to this. I call bullshit. You have zero evidence for the claim that men controlled society and culture. Society and culture is composed of both men and women, and they both perpetuate and reinforce it in their own ways. On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote:
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. It's an implicit requirement to everything you're saying, because you're portraying women as nothing more than helpless victims who are so weak that they were easily controlled by men throughout all of human history. I don't buy this misogynistic assumption of yours. On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote: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. Virtually no one in modern society excuses rape or rapists. Rape is considered one of the most horrible crimes that can possibly be committed. The only reason you think that "victim blaming" is incredibly common is because people cry "victim blaming" in cases where it is not true (e.g. see Thieving Magpie in this thread). Giving safety tips is not "victim blaming", nor is disagreeing that someone was raped on the basis of evidence, yet feminists lump these all together as examples of "victim blaming". On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote:
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. This is false. Feminists assert that rape is based on power, but actual psychologists and criminologists will tell you that like most crimes, the reasons for sexual violence are complex and vary between individual criminals and crimes. Studies of rapists have shown that most rapists do not have a preference for rape over consensual sex, and that rapists are more aroused by consensual sex scenarios than nonconsensual sex, even though they are more aroused by nonconsensual sex than non-rapists. A.) Societal oppression of women is not Men vs Women but the assertion of the superiority of the masculine. Which is where get terms like "man up" to promote someone to be stronger but describe "like a girl" to reveal someone's weakness. Both men and women perpetuate this patriarchal system--because misogyny is not gender based, it is brain based. Men and women can be misogynist. Wrong. A woman is acting too masculine is often shamed for it. Therefore, your entire assumption falls apart. Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 06:00 Thieving Magpie wrote:
B.) How aroused someone is has nothing to do with Rape. Heck, it barely has anything to do with sex. Most people can arouse themselves with nothing but free hand and a crappy imagination. Someone being more or less aroused by different types of sex acts has nothing to do with being a rapist for the same reason that my enjoying my male hands stroking my male cock does not define how gay or straight I am. Those were merely two examples. The point is that only feminists argue that "rape is about power". Psychologists and criminologists argue that, like most crimes, rape is about a lot of things. Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 06:00 Thieving Magpie wrote:
Do you really believe that "even though they are more aroused by nonconsensual sex than non-rapists" is a good argument against rape being about power? Really? Are you really that thick headed? When someone says that rape isn't about sex, it's about power--you replying that rapists don't get any more aroused by different types of sex than non-rapists do actually supports that thesis. Why? Because, as you have pointed out, the sex is not the point of it. They don't get any more aroused than anyone else when it comes to normal sex. Which shows that they're not trying to fill some missing fucking gap in their sex lives. Because the sex is not the point of it when your rape someone. You missed the second part that I mentioned about that study: rapists are more aroused by nonconsensual sex than nonrapists are. Clearly, there is a sexual component.
A.) When women are called manly it has always been associated with being less fuckable and usually also associated with being too buff/strong/aggressive. Why? Because when woman don't act submissive they are shamed for it. When women resist the gender roles they are attacked because women aren't allowed to be powerful.
B.) If your examples on why you believe that rape is not about power shows you that you're wrong, then show me the other examples that you seem to believe prove your point. I have a feeling those examples won't help you either. In fact, I have a feeling you only look for these studies whenever you pop on a TL thread to bash women in order to make you feel better about yourself.
C.) The reason rapists act the same with consensual sex as non-rapists, but like non-consensual sex more than non-rapist IS BECAUSE OF THE NON-CONSENT. What is non-consent? It is literally doing something without their consent--which is why its a power dynamic, not a dick/pussy dynamic. If it was just the sex they would be just as aroused as consensual sex. They, literally, enjoy it more when the woman doesn't want it. ie--power.
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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.
First of all, blaming rape victims happens to men as well. Have you ever heard of the idea that "erection = consent"? Victim Blaming is an entirely nongendered concept except for the fact that rape victims are usually women (if you don't count prison). Prison rape is often blamed on the fact that the person is in prison to begin with. That's obviously victim blaming. All rape victims are subject to blaming, regardless of gender.
Second of all, Victim Blaming does not just refer to rape. If anything, it refers to the negative side of Just-World Hypothesis. Just-World Hypothesis is the cognitive bias where people generally believe that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. There is a general form of cosmic justice (similar to karma), and you are demonstrating it very well. Even if you are not religious (and it's usually caused by religion), this is a cognitive bias you should shrug off as soon as possible, and seems to be responsible for most of your inaccurate viewpoints.
Victim Blaming happens with lots of crimes, not just rape. In fact, it's the entire case against Usury Laws and other classist clashes. Rape just happens to be a egregious example of victim blaming so it is used often. Hell, victim blaming as been used by anti-semites to justify the Holocaust. But there are tons of examples of victim blaming that have nothing to do with rape. Victim Blaming enables people to convince themselves that bad things won't happen to them (or their family), because the victim of that crime was stupid/bad.
Third of all, what you're saying makes absolutely no sense because of one of the common perpetrators of victim blaming is the victim. People who are prone to Just-World Hypothesis are more prone to blaming themselves for bad things that happen to them. Using rape as an example, rape victims blame themselves all the time, and it's even more common among the religious.
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On June 20 2013 06:08 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 06:04 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 05:52 sunprince wrote:On June 20 2013 05:45 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 05:29 sunprince wrote: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:
[quote]
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. Not everyone who leaves their car doors unlocked is robbed, but that doesn't mean leaving your car door unlocked is a good idea. You're deliberately ignoring the concept of probability in order to pretend as if <100% safety = 0% safety. On June 20 2013 05:45 Thieving Magpie wrote:
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. You're reshaping the contexts to suit your argument. Nowhere is it implied by any of my posts that you should go around telling robbery victims that they should live elsewhere. However, this doesn't change the fact that it is objectively true that living in a better neighborhood reduces your chances of being robbed. Stating this objective fact is not victim blaming. Reshaping the context? Robbery was your fucking example! When someone has just been robbed/raped asking them about how locked their door is means absolutely shit. When someone who has not been robbed/raped yet lives in a neighborhood where everyone leaves their door locked/dresses nice for the club--do you walk up to them and tell them to stop doing what they are doing or else someone will rob/rape them? You're reshaping the context of how the information is stated. When you take an objective fact and shove it in the face of someone who was just victimized, then of course a reasonable person may get the impression you are blaming them. However, that's not what we're talking about here. People generally say that you should lock your doors. They sometimes give cautionary advice to others to learn from someone else's mistakes. They don't generally go around rubbing it in the faces of recent robbery victims. Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 06:04 Thieving Magpie wrote:
At no point is it relevant before they are robbed/raped and at no point is it relevant after they are robbed/raped. TIL that locking your doors does not decrease your chances of being robbed. /sarcasm
There is no reshaping involved.
If a community doesn't lock their doors--it's their business. If a person locks his door--it's his business.
I was sick for two weeks once, never left the apartment. You know how often people tried opening the door? 0. You know why? Because, for the most part, you're not going to get robbed by whether or not you lock the door.
I do tell people what I practice. Such as "I don't like leaving *my* door unlocked because I don't trust *this* neighborhood that *I* am living in and *if* you move into *this* neighborhood I would suggest you do the same as *me*."
Could you imagine telling a girl that?
"I never wear short skirts, every time I do I get raped. Oh right! I don't actually wear short skirts because I'm a man, I simply assume that if someone is wearing a short skirt that they'll be raped without realizing that women have been raped while wearing pants but I'm choosing to ignore that fact because I'm a male and I assume skirt equals fuck me. but don't worry, at least I'm not victim blaming."
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On June 20 2013 06:32 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 06:08 sunprince wrote:On June 20 2013 06:04 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 05:52 sunprince wrote:On June 20 2013 05:45 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 05:29 sunprince wrote: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:
[quote]
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. Not everyone who leaves their car doors unlocked is robbed, but that doesn't mean leaving your car door unlocked is a good idea. You're deliberately ignoring the concept of probability in order to pretend as if <100% safety = 0% safety. On June 20 2013 05:45 Thieving Magpie wrote:
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. You're reshaping the contexts to suit your argument. Nowhere is it implied by any of my posts that you should go around telling robbery victims that they should live elsewhere. However, this doesn't change the fact that it is objectively true that living in a better neighborhood reduces your chances of being robbed. Stating this objective fact is not victim blaming. Reshaping the context? Robbery was your fucking example! When someone has just been robbed/raped asking them about how locked their door is means absolutely shit. When someone who has not been robbed/raped yet lives in a neighborhood where everyone leaves their door locked/dresses nice for the club--do you walk up to them and tell them to stop doing what they are doing or else someone will rob/rape them? You're reshaping the context of how the information is stated. When you take an objective fact and shove it in the face of someone who was just victimized, then of course a reasonable person may get the impression you are blaming them. However, that's not what we're talking about here. People generally say that you should lock your doors. They sometimes give cautionary advice to others to learn from someone else's mistakes. They don't generally go around rubbing it in the faces of recent robbery victims. On June 20 2013 06:04 Thieving Magpie wrote:
At no point is it relevant before they are robbed/raped and at no point is it relevant after they are robbed/raped. TIL that locking your doors does not decrease your chances of being robbed. /sarcasm There is no reshaping involved. If a community doesn't lock their doors--it's their business. If a person locks his door--it's his business. I was sick for two weeks once, never left the apartment. You know how often people tried opening the door? 0. You know why? Because, for the most part, you're not going to get robbed by whether or not you lock the door. I do tell people what I practice. Such as "I don't like leaving *my* door unlocked because I don't trust *this* neighborhood that *I* am living in and *if* you move into *this* neighborhood I would suggest you do the same as *me*." Could you imagine telling a girl that? "I never wear short skirts, every time I do I get raped. Oh right! I don't actually wear short skirts because I'm a man, I simply assume that if someone is wearing a short skirt that they'll be raped without realizing that women have been raped while wearing pants but I'm choosing to ignore that fact because I'm a male and I assume skirt equals fuck me. but don't worry, at least I'm not victim blaming."
Your entire line of reasoning is based on ignoring that increased safety ≠ perfect safety.
Just because locking your car door does not perfect theft 100% of the time, does not mean locking your car door is useless. You are deliberately conflating the two.
Locking your car door decreases the odds of theft. Do you disagree, yes or no?
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On June 20 2013 06:28 DoubleReed 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. First of all, blaming rape victims happens to men as well. Have you ever heard of the idea that "erection = consent"? Victim Blaming is an entirely nongendered concept except for the fact that rape victims are usually women (if you don't count prison). Prison rape is often blamed on the fact that the person is in prison to begin with. That's obviously victim blaming. All rape victims are subject to blaming, regardless of gender.
While all victims are subject to victim blaming, the term is primarily used to refer to any criticism (or any implied criticism) of female behavior. This is because of the misogynistic notion that women are helpless objects, and therefore there is nothing they could do to affect the world around them or to protect themselves. I don't buy it.
On June 20 2013 06:28 DoubleReed wrote:Second of all, Victim Blaming does not just refer to rape. If anything, it refers to the negative side of Just-World Hypothesis. Just-World Hypothesis is the cognitive bias where people generally believe that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. There is a general form of cosmic justice (similar to karma), and you are demonstrating it very well. Even if you are not religious (and it's usually caused by religion), this is a cognitive bias you should shrug off as soon as possible, and seems to be responsible for most of your inaccurate viewpoints. Victim Blaming happens with lots of crimes, not just rape. In fact, it's the entire case against Usury Laws and other classist clashes. Rape just happens to be a egregious example of victim blaming so it is used often. Hell, victim blaming as been used by anti-semites to justify the Holocaust. But there are tons of examples of victim blaming that have nothing to do with rape. Victim Blaming enables people to convince themselves that bad things won't happen to them (or their family), because the victim of that crime was stupid/bad.
Based on its definition, victim blaming does not refer solely to rape. However, in practice, it is use primarily to refer to rape. The reason for this is because certain groups like to use it as a thought terminating cliché to shut down any criticism of female behavior. The only cognitive bias going on here is people treating women as helpless objects without any agency they can use to protect themselves.
On June 20 2013 06:28 DoubleReed wrote:
Third of all, what you're saying makes absolutely no sense because of one of the common perpetrators of victim blaming is the victim. People who are prone to Just-World Hypothesis are more prone to blaming themselves for bad things that happen to them. Using rape as an example, rape victims blame themselves all the time, and it's even more common among the religious.
Acknowledging what you could have done differently to reduce your chances of victimization is not victim blaming yourself. It is focusing on what you could have done differently in order to learn from a bad experience.
If you lose a 5v5 game of Halo, it is quite probable that the loss is not your fault. In fact, the game may have been virtually unwinnable, given that there are 9 other players in the game acting as factors. If someone on your team engages in teamkilling, then it's most likely that the blame lies with them. However, this does not mean that you played perfectly. There are things you could have done to increase your odds of winning. Focusing on how you could improve, or studying to learn general concepts from this to share with others, is not the same thing as blaming yourself. You can easily blame the teamkiller, while working to improve your odds.
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On June 20 2013 06:22 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 06:10 sunprince wrote:On June 20 2013 06:00 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 05:48 sunprince wrote:On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote:
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). "Women are helpless victims who had society and culture forced upon them." Again and again you come back to this. I call bullshit. You have zero evidence for the claim that men controlled society and culture. Society and culture is composed of both men and women, and they both perpetuate and reinforce it in their own ways. On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote:
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. It's an implicit requirement to everything you're saying, because you're portraying women as nothing more than helpless victims who are so weak that they were easily controlled by men throughout all of human history. I don't buy this misogynistic assumption of yours. On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote: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. Virtually no one in modern society excuses rape or rapists. Rape is considered one of the most horrible crimes that can possibly be committed. The only reason you think that "victim blaming" is incredibly common is because people cry "victim blaming" in cases where it is not true (e.g. see Thieving Magpie in this thread). Giving safety tips is not "victim blaming", nor is disagreeing that someone was raped on the basis of evidence, yet feminists lump these all together as examples of "victim blaming". On June 20 2013 05:14 Stratos_speAr wrote:
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. This is false. Feminists assert that rape is based on power, but actual psychologists and criminologists will tell you that like most crimes, the reasons for sexual violence are complex and vary between individual criminals and crimes. Studies of rapists have shown that most rapists do not have a preference for rape over consensual sex, and that rapists are more aroused by consensual sex scenarios than nonconsensual sex, even though they are more aroused by nonconsensual sex than non-rapists. A.) Societal oppression of women is not Men vs Women but the assertion of the superiority of the masculine. Which is where get terms like "man up" to promote someone to be stronger but describe "like a girl" to reveal someone's weakness. Both men and women perpetuate this patriarchal system--because misogyny is not gender based, it is brain based. Men and women can be misogynist. Wrong. A woman is acting too masculine is often shamed for it. Therefore, your entire assumption falls apart. On June 20 2013 06:00 Thieving Magpie wrote:
B.) How aroused someone is has nothing to do with Rape. Heck, it barely has anything to do with sex. Most people can arouse themselves with nothing but free hand and a crappy imagination. Someone being more or less aroused by different types of sex acts has nothing to do with being a rapist for the same reason that my enjoying my male hands stroking my male cock does not define how gay or straight I am. Those were merely two examples. The point is that only feminists argue that "rape is about power". Psychologists and criminologists argue that, like most crimes, rape is about a lot of things. On June 20 2013 06:00 Thieving Magpie wrote:
Do you really believe that "even though they are more aroused by nonconsensual sex than non-rapists" is a good argument against rape being about power? Really? Are you really that thick headed? When someone says that rape isn't about sex, it's about power--you replying that rapists don't get any more aroused by different types of sex than non-rapists do actually supports that thesis. Why? Because, as you have pointed out, the sex is not the point of it. They don't get any more aroused than anyone else when it comes to normal sex. Which shows that they're not trying to fill some missing fucking gap in their sex lives. Because the sex is not the point of it when your rape someone. You missed the second part that I mentioned about that study: rapists are more aroused by nonconsensual sex than nonrapists are. Clearly, there is a sexual component. A.) When women are called manly it has always been associated with being less fuckable and usually also associated with being too buff/strong/aggressive. Why? Because when woman don't act submissive they are shamed for it. When women resist the gender roles they are attacked because women aren't allowed to be powerful.
You've done nothing but reinforce my point that gender role shaming goes both ways. Regardless, women are attacked for acting masculine while men are attacked for acting feminine, which completely destroys your flawed argument that society elevates the masculine above the feminine.
On June 20 2013 06:22 Thieving Magpie wrote:
B.) If your examples on why you believe that rape is not about power shows you that you're wrong, then show me the other examples that you seem to believe prove your point. I have a feeling those examples won't help you either. In fact, I have a feeling you only look for these studies whenever you pop on a TL thread to bash women in order to make you feel better about yourself.
You have not presented any evidence to support the feminist myth that "rape is about power" (which itself stems from the feminist notion that all sex is about power). An empirical test disproved this baseless feminist myth decades ago, and it only persists as a form of "common knowledge" that is perpetuated by feminists for their own political purposes.
In reality, there are many causes for sexual violence.
On June 20 2013 06:22 Thieving Magpie wrote:
C.) The reason rapists act the same with consensual sex as non-rapists, but like non-consensual sex more than non-rapist IS BECAUSE OF THE NON-CONSENT. What is non-consent? It is literally doing something without their consent--which is why its a power dynamic, not a dick/pussy dynamic. If it was just the sex they would be just as aroused as consensual sex. They, literally, enjoy it more when the woman doesn't want it. ie--power.
We have empirical evidence that rapists are more aroused by non-consensual sex than non-rapists. This means that there is a sexual component. No one is arguing that sex is the only component, merely that your myth that rape is solely about power is wrong.
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"This study was directed toward testing a major component of the feminist explanation for rape: that such criminal behavior is most fundamentally the result of traditions of male domination in most sociopolitical and economic affairs. "
That's not what Thieving Magpie is arguing about, as far as I can tell. Rape being about power follows necessarily from what rape is, but that's not the same as it being a result of institutionalized power.
While I think that the victim blaming rhetoric feminists use goes way, way too far, it's worth pointing out that some pretty fucking moronic things are used as mitigating factors for being raped. I mean, yes, it's one thing to say that you shouldn't get wasted out of your mind (or brandish your money in a dangerous neigbourhood) with strangers in a vulnerable place, but things like "you shouldn't dress sluttily" are basically puritanical, considering that "slutty" dressing appears to be anything other than a beekeeper's outfit. It's like telling people to avoid being mugged by not carrying a wallet. Yes, it would work, but it's also pretty silly and offensive. You could also avoid being raped by never going outside, but that would be stupid too.
There's victim blaming and victim blaming, basically. I'm all for promoting letting people know when you're going out, traveling with friends, not walking alone late at night in unlit areas, not taking drinks from strangers, and so on, but there have been many notable instances of people saying that girls who've gotten raped were asking for it due to the way they were dressed. That is definitely victim blaming in a negative sense, because it's absurd to suppose that people dress as conservatively as possible so that some fucking dumbass doesn't rape them, even though it's well-established that dress has relatively little to do with one's chance of being raped.
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On June 20 2013 09:32 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 06:32 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 06:08 sunprince wrote:On June 20 2013 06:04 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 05:52 sunprince wrote:On June 20 2013 05:45 Thieving Magpie wrote:On June 20 2013 05:29 sunprince wrote: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:
[quote]
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. Not everyone who leaves their car doors unlocked is robbed, but that doesn't mean leaving your car door unlocked is a good idea. You're deliberately ignoring the concept of probability in order to pretend as if <100% safety = 0% safety. On June 20 2013 05:45 Thieving Magpie wrote:
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. You're reshaping the contexts to suit your argument. Nowhere is it implied by any of my posts that you should go around telling robbery victims that they should live elsewhere. However, this doesn't change the fact that it is objectively true that living in a better neighborhood reduces your chances of being robbed. Stating this objective fact is not victim blaming. Reshaping the context? Robbery was your fucking example! When someone has just been robbed/raped asking them about how locked their door is means absolutely shit. When someone who has not been robbed/raped yet lives in a neighborhood where everyone leaves their door locked/dresses nice for the club--do you walk up to them and tell them to stop doing what they are doing or else someone will rob/rape them? You're reshaping the context of how the information is stated. When you take an objective fact and shove it in the face of someone who was just victimized, then of course a reasonable person may get the impression you are blaming them. However, that's not what we're talking about here. People generally say that you should lock your doors. They sometimes give cautionary advice to others to learn from someone else's mistakes. They don't generally go around rubbing it in the faces of recent robbery victims. On June 20 2013 06:04 Thieving Magpie wrote:
At no point is it relevant before they are robbed/raped and at no point is it relevant after they are robbed/raped. TIL that locking your doors does not decrease your chances of being robbed. /sarcasm There is no reshaping involved. If a community doesn't lock their doors--it's their business. If a person locks his door--it's his business. I was sick for two weeks once, never left the apartment. You know how often people tried opening the door? 0. You know why? Because, for the most part, you're not going to get robbed by whether or not you lock the door. I do tell people what I practice. Such as "I don't like leaving *my* door unlocked because I don't trust *this* neighborhood that *I* am living in and *if* you move into *this* neighborhood I would suggest you do the same as *me*." Could you imagine telling a girl that? "I never wear short skirts, every time I do I get raped. Oh right! I don't actually wear short skirts because I'm a man, I simply assume that if someone is wearing a short skirt that they'll be raped without realizing that women have been raped while wearing pants but I'm choosing to ignore that fact because I'm a male and I assume skirt equals fuck me. but don't worry, at least I'm not victim blaming." Your entire line of reasoning is based on ignoring that increased safety ≠ perfect safety. Just because locking your car door does not perfect theft 100% of the time, does not mean locking your car door is useless. You are deliberately conflating the two. Locking your car door decreases the odds of theft. Do you disagree, yes or no?
I have no idea how this discussion became so incredibly stupid, but I blame you.
Firstly, if you're arguing that girls shouldn't wear short skirts because it increases the chance of being raped, I will say: [citation needed].
However, even if it is does, I fail to see how it is relevant. Rape is illegal, regardless of what clothes the girl was wearing when she was raped. Just as theft is illegal regardless of whether you locked your door or not. So I don't see how this is in any way relevant to the discussion AT ALL?
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While all victims are subject to victim blaming, the term is primarily used to refer to any criticism (or any implied criticism) of female behavior. This is because of the misogynistic notion that women are helpless objects, and therefore there is nothing they could do to affect the world around them or to protect themselves. I don't buy it.
If the victim is female then yes this refers to criticism of her behavior. What a silly thing to say.
I have no idea where you get that it's misogynistic in the least. You're just making that up. As I said, men are subject to the same victim blaming rhetoric that women are. There's no misogyny. I literally just gave you evidence against that idea but you have completely ignored it.
Based on its definition, victim blaming does not refer solely to rape. However, in practice, it is use primarily to refer to rape. The reason for this is because certain groups like to use it as a thought terminating cliché to shut down any criticism of female behavior. The only cognitive bias going on here is people treating women as helpless objects without any agency they can use to protect themselves.
Other than the fact that this is a non-sequitor, the "thought-terminating cliche" is a Fully General Counterargument. You can use this as a line of reasoning against literally everything. Just because you don't like feminists says nothing about the fact that your reasoning is based entirely on Just-World Hypothesis.
Again, the only reason why victim blaming occurs with rape is that it is a particularly egregious example. Nothing more. Considering you are demonstrating victim-blaming behavior with locking your doors at night as well, I don't understand how you can argue with this. You are blaming the victim, and the only reason why you think this is justified is because of Just-World Hypothesis, which you consistently demonstrate. Seriously, read up on it.
Acknowledging what you could have done differently to reduce your chances of victimization is not victim blaming yourself. It is focusing on what you could have done differently in order to learn from a bad experience.
If you lose a 5v5 game of Halo, it is quite probable that the loss is not your fault. In fact, the game may have been virtually unwinnable, given that there are 9 other players in the game acting as factors. If someone on your team engages in teamkilling, then it's most likely that the blame lies with them. However, this does not mean that you played perfectly. There are things you could have done to increase your odds of winning. Focusing on how you could improve, or studying to learn general concepts from this to share with others, is not the same thing as blaming yourself. You can easily blame the teamkiller, while working to improve your odds.
That is not what happens. Yes, the details of rape are obsessed about over and over by victims in particularly traumatizing ways. "Learning from a bad experience" is pretty fucking sick joke when we're talking about things like this. This also applies when loved ones or fellow soldiers die. But hey, next time a traumatic event happens, I know what to do! Unless there's something slightly different!
Not to mention that this is incorrect. Religious people ask "Why did God let this happen to me? I must be a terrible person." You are doing the same thing. You are taking the fact that something bad happened to someone as evidence that they did something wrong. This does not follow and doesn't make any sense.
This is Just-World Hypothesis. Bad shit happens to good, decent, intelligent people. Bad shit can happen to you. You are not immune. Stop acting like you are superior by the fact that bad things haven't happened to you.
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