Atlantean wrote:
From my understanding there are different waves of feminism, the older waves are composed mostly of the man haters. The newer feminists didn't have it as bad as far as civil rights and really heard some say they can change the world feminism to equalism!
If you want to talk about it as equalism, I have seen it in the sorcery books. I think it was in The Fire from WIthin that I recently read where don Juan describes a younger version of himself. I actually had a few good laughs as he described how sexist he was and then when he went to live in that big house and the Nagual of the house said that the women of the house would be the ones that would decide if he could stay or not so he had to change his behavior around them.
...Also when he was forced to dress like a girl and then got sexually harrassed
My favorite book by far!!! Fire from Within!
All in all I would say there is an equalist tone in most of the books. I dont remember which book exactly but I remember when the party of sorcerers was traveling in the "parrallel world?" dont remember what exactly it was called..some sort of desert land in the astral...but anyway I remember the male and female sorcerers needed each other to make it through because of their different kinds of energy...something like that...
I see it quite a bit differently than that. First off I don't think focusing on whether or not certain people are "hating" anyone is more of a side point. It's hard to prove anyway, and there's a lot of cognitive dissonance out there in society in general regarding their actions towards men and their claims of not being a man-hater. In other words, people have to do an awful lot of man-hating for society to acknowledge that it is indeed man-hating. Usually, the person pointing out another's man-hating behavior is more likely to be labelled the hateful one for doing so.
For example, ever heard of those parties where women exchanged a bunch of man-hating cards because someone got dumped or something? Every woman I know has been to at least a few of them. Well, those cards were first introduced by Hallmark in the early 90s, and within a couple years those cards, (which were printed in their "shoebox division"), outsold all the other cards they sold combined. That's right, more people bought those cards which depicted men as weak, horrible people and having all kinds of jokes the point of which was doing violence towards men or exploiting them somehow than bought birthday cards, get well cards, thank you cards, and holiday cards combined. That's a lot of people buying those cards, and I don't think many of those people were men. Thus, I tend to assume that pretty much all women I meet who were alive at that time have bought, shared, laughed at, and passed around those cards, yet very few of them would call themselves man-haters. Nor would most men label them as such. I guess giving your money to companies to make cards like that and passing them around your friends doesn't count as man-hating. Of course, if the target were any other group our society would call it hate and bigotry and rightly so. The truth is, bigotry against men is very popular, and people don't like to stand up against things that are that very popular and which we're told only bad people would object to.
So, when looking at something like the feminist movement, it's important to consider the society we grew up in and shaped our views. There's a lot of our own identity involved in our beliefs about gender. People generally are unaware of how these things shaped their views about themselves, and how thus attached they are to them. Girls mature faster than boys. Ladies and gentlemen. You shouldn't hit girls. All a bunch of bull that amounts to "women are superior" which kids learn and see adults smile about in a nice, warm-hearted way when they repeat. Would those smiley parents be smiling if they sent their daughters to a school that teaches their students to aspire to grow up to become Lords and gentlewomen? In which the kids were told boys mature faster so they start seeing girls as the less adult ones in the class? Where the rule against violence is, "You shouldn't hit boys" or "It's worse to hit boys than girls"? Those parents would be irate at what kind of sick individual would create a school that taught such things. They could very easily come up with all the reasons why such teachings are unacceptable all by themselves. Yet, when I present the same arguments against schools, (and most everyone else), teaching these things in their usual way, they feign inability to comprehend. When I press it, I detect fear. They're afraid to make those arguments. Which tells me, they worry about social consequences, what these things mean to their identity, and how much they'll need to change their belief structures. If I can't get them to even admit that the arguments they themselves would make are compelling when applied to males as well, how can I possibly get them to take an honest look at arguments that require doing a little research or which they probably wouldn't have come up with on their own which support men or hinder women's even-greater-over-empowerment?
Women didn't have it bad as far as civil rights goes in the past. That's a feminist myth. Yes, feminist leaders lie. Today, thanks to the internet a lot of these lies are pointed out as such and people realize there's at least some disagreement as to what feminists say. In the past, people were far less aware of this. If the NOW said women were only paid 74 cents for every dollar a man was paid, the news repeated this as a simple fact. Movies and TV shows would have their female heroes fighting against the injustice of women being paid less, and we could see evil men cackling and supporting this kind of sexism. Any arguments against this were nowhere to be found. Think people might have questioned that a little more if they knew that the method of generating that figure deliberately ignored how many hours men and women actually worked and that women worked at that time on average 32 hours a week to men's 40? Think if some people on TV had pointed out that the math says that according to their own study, men are making 26% more for working 25% more hours, meaning only 1% than women were paid per hour, which would easily be within the range of the margin of error for the study? Today, at least people with some curiousity or even a little healthy skepticism can look this stuff up online and at least see what the major arguments against these things are.
But decades of feminist propaganda has already shaped society such that even looking at stuff like that will make others uncomfortable with you. It's easier to dismiss someone as a woman hater and "internet researcher" than it is to deal with the discomfort of looking at how you and your friends, family, etc. are actually treating men and women. The last thing anyone who works for the Homeless Shelter for Seattle for Women wants to hear is that "For Women" means the same thing as "No Men Allowed" which is morally equalivalent to hanging a "No Blacks Allowed" sign up on the door. She doesn't want to hear that 9 times as many men suffer from homelessness as women according to Census data. She'd rather stick with the figure that 75% of the homeless are "women and children", interpret that as meaning the same thing as 75% are women, and think that justifies her institution discriminating against men, (probably by mentioning that "homeless women have unique needs" as if that meant that they have needs homeless men don't or somehow need a home more). Nor does she want to hear that the statistic she's clinging to was created by taking the census data and combining it with reports at the number of men and women at WOMEN'S homeless shelters in order to deliberately skew the statistic. Nor does her friend want to hear about that because she wants to believe her friend is doing great things, not promoting institutionalized discrimination. And in my experience, rare is the person who will let any amount of evidence or logic point that kind of stuff out to them.
Consider this. Do you think that if people knew Gloria Steinem, President of all of NOW and darling of the feminist movement throughout the 80s was friends with and continuously defended the actions of a woman who wrote a manifesto calling for the extermination of men and later shot three men herself they might start questioning the integrity of the studies her organization produces? It's true. Her friend's name was Valerie Solanis, and she wrote a manifesto entitled the S.C.U.M. Manifesto, which was an acronym for "Society for Cutting Up Men". The contents of the manifesto include a plan to how to go about killing men, reducing their population to only that needed to maintain the human population. In it, she advises members to wait to kill men who are "playing pals with scum" until last, and by these she lists soldiers and other men who kill men. This she published in the mid 1960s. As much as the news ignored and downplayed this, it was shocking enough to generate some interest and criticism. Steinem stood up for her friend and called the manifesto a cathartic. I'm guessing the point of that was that few people knew what the word carthartic meant and it distracted criticism and sounded like an intelligent reply to it. But, it means to get something out of your system. If that really was the point, to get this out of Valerie's system as claimed, then why were feminists promoting and publishing the book. Furthermore, why did Valerie act on the ideas in her manifesto by shooting 3 men in her attempt to kill Andy Warhol, (the other two men she didn't know but happened to be in Andy's dressing room when she went in there. She stated in court that she shot them because they were men.). For shooting three men our society which highly praises men and was terrible for women, (especially back in those days) gave her the draconian sentence of 3 years in prison. What a horrid patriarchy! Yet even after this Gloria continued to defend her and her work, still claiming it was cathartic, and NOW lobbied to get it taught in women's studies classes in universities throughout the country. It was part of curriculum at over 60 campuses at one point, including the University of Minnesota. Today the story is changed a bit, and now Gloria and the more prominent feminists out there like to compare the SCUM manifesto to Jonathon Swift's "A Modest Proposal" in which by satirically advocating for killing all the Irish to point out the bigotry against the Irish in the US at that time. Of course, Swift's satire was obvious and consistent with his beliefs, while Valerie actually did attempt to murder 3 men. Still for those who grew up in our society it's easier to feign ignorance at the difference between a modest proposal and a grandiose claim than it is to admit my grandmother who worked for the local chapter of NOW might have been helping an evil organization supported by the system and not the freedom fighter courageously standing up to it that I've always thought. If I believed things based on evidence, what would that say about my loyalty to my grandma? Could my family forgive me for such a betrayal?
This is hardly the only instance of powerful feminist leaders supporting violence. In the late 90's, tired of Erin Pizzey, (the woman who invented the very first battered women's shelter), railing against them and what they'd done with her well-intentioned concept, feminists made multiple threats against her over the phone and finally succeeded in chasing her out of her London home when she arrived to find her dog's decapitated head on her front porch. During the highly publicized John and Lorena Bobbit case, (in which Lorena had severed John's penis from his body while he was asleep, originally claiming to police to have done so because he was too "greedy" during sex, and always stopped after he came without finishing her off, but later with a little help from feminist lawyer Gloria Allred, remembered that she was abused and so attacking him during his sleep was really self-defense), feminists rallied hundreds of women to publically declare that if Lorena was found guilty of assault that they would go out and cut off the penises of 5 random men each. Lorena was found not guilty, and the hundreds of women were not charged with anything, (though I can't see how threatening random people to try to force a government to do what you want isn't terrorism).
More recently, feminists had plans to make a motion picture to "educate the public" about how horrible things are for women in prison based on the true story of Donna Hylton, who spoke at Women's Marches for Hillary during the last presidential election. The plan was scrapped however when thanks to the internet, (and no thanks to the news who of course refused to talk about this), people found out that Donna had tortured and murdered an innocent man over twenty days in a serial killer like fashion and shown no remorse when asked about it. 10 years after her arrest, when talking about shoving a 3 foot metal bar up the man's rear, she said that he liked it because he was gay. When asked how she knew he was gay she replied that he "wiggled" when she pushed it in. During her speech at the march, she talked about her horrible childhood and how bad women's prison was. She has been a "women's rights advocate" and spoke out for "at risk, (of being arrested, as if that just happens by itself), women and women of color, women who aren't able to speak for themselves". Yeah, as if we haven't heard the voices of how all women are victims everywhere in the media for the past half-century. Donna is apparently now a close friend to Eve Ensler, author of the Vagina Monologues, a play in which a series of women dressed as vaginas speak as if they actually were vaginas and "honestly and openly" discuss their feelings and experiences. Collectively of course, these experiences paint a picture of women good, men bad, but surprisingly one of them even goes as far as to promote child molestation. The vagina in question describes a scenario where as a 14 year old girl she was fondled by an adult woman and liked it saying, "If it was rape, it was a good kind of rape". This part, and only this part, of the play has become fairly controversial and it's often left out of performances. Getting back to the motion picture planned about our hero Donna Hylton's life, it appears to be on hiatus. This could be because of the negative publicity she recieved from the internet, (once again, ONLY the internet), when people discovered what she'd done and her lack of remorse for it or it could be because they're having trouble getting all the right people in place to make it. Being true feminists they want to make sure they have a female screenwriter and a female director. They do have the actress who wants to play her hero in place though in Rosario Dawson. "Dawson and Hylton are currently looking for a female screenwriter to adapt the book as well as a female director. “We are all looking for the right female screenwriter and director for A Little Piece Of Light. This is a project for women, by women, of women,” said Dan Pearson, who is repping the material and Hylton’s life rights through his D4 Entertainement. “That’s how it’s got to go. Donna says, ‘Your voice is my voice. My voice is your voice. And together our voice is powerful.’ ” For women, by women, of women. Doesn't that sound beautiful? So inclusive. It's all about equality. The book the screenplay is to be based on, (which is in turn based on Donna's life) is available at Amazon and finer bookstores everywhere. After all, why wouldn't they sell it? Just put 'em on an endcap next to some Hallmark cards from the shoebox division.
Of course, not all feminists are violent psychopaths, but a large number of those in the most powerful positions in the largest and most influential feminist organizations as well as those whose books sell well at major stores both online and off have shown sympathy and agreement with those kinds of views. More importantly, MOST feminists I've known, and I believe most of them overall as well as a good chunk of the people out there who don't even label themselves as feminists, feel that a little sexism against men is ok, if not good, because it "balances out" some of all that sexism that women must endure and is progress towards real equality. The idea that men are already facing more sexism than women now and probably always have is totally inadmissable. After all, women must have had it really really bad, and men really really good, or else the news is ridiculously one-sided. Surely they aren't just repeating what organizations led by violent psychopath-sympathizing man-haters say without doing any due dilligance on those claims and making sure they're not just operating as a PR wing for a hate-filled group whose agenda is pretty much the exact opposite of gender equality are they?
Growing up, I heard 4 main reasons why women had it so horribly in the past.
1. They couldn't vote.
2. Beating and raping women was legal.
3. They couldn't own property.
4. They weren't allowed to work, (outside the home).
In addition to these, I occasionally heard a few others.
5. Divorce was difficult, therefore women couldn't escape violent husbands.
6. They had some behavior restrictions due to social expectations based on gender roles.
7. They had fewer birth control options.
Thanks mostly to the internet, as an adult I've been able to at least hear some contrary opinions on each of these things. I'll tackle them backwards, starting from number 7.
7 - Yes, not having birth control must've sucked for women back in the day. It wasn't all that great for men either. As many men as women probably ended up with unexpected children they didn't want or felt they couldn't afford. If a woman got married out of wedlock, that would suck for her as well as the man her daddy kept his shotgun pointed at as they marched down the aisle. Overall this probably was worse for women. It isn't a very good example of oppression though. This is just the bodies we were born with, not some evil patriarchy oppressing women by forcing them to be the ones to undergo unwanted pregnancies should they occur. And most of the research and development that produced all the birth control options women now enjoy were performed by men. Meanwhile, everytime a company comes close to producing a "man's pill", feminist magazines and newspapers start writing articles like "Why do men need a pill", followed by some tripe about how pregnancy doesn't affect him in any way since it doesn't happen in his body, and "Would you trust him to take a pill?", implying that women would somehow lose their own options if men could take birth control pills. Rather than focus on the benefit to women who can't use birth control it seems the writers of these articles are worried about losing something. Of course, only a true misogynist would even think that the something could be the ability for women to lie about being on birth control and thereby get a man to take paternity risks he otherwise wouldn't, perhaps resulting in almost 2 decades of payments for her. Nah, that couldn't be it.
6. Yep. So did men. Feminists have worked hard and had some great success in freeing women from those social obligations. Some take it to the extreme, thinking that women should be free from any obligations, like the obligation to not torture and murder men. Fortunately most of the feminists one might meet on the street don't take it to this level, they just unknowingly follow people who do. Regarding the behavior restrictions of men's traditional social role, aside from showing some support for men acting in a more traditionally feminine manner, feminists tend to try to use these restrictions and increase them to emotionally and socially manipulate and exploit men.
5. Divorce being difficult to achieve was bad for abused women. And abused men. Throughout the 90s and early 2000s I tended to watch the crime rates regarding domestic violence and intimate violence which the Department of Justice posts online and even breaks down by gender and other categories. In the early 90s it appeared that men were more often guilty of this kind of violence than women were. However, for a variety of reasons, men's rights advocates suggested this was misleading, (police were more likely to arrest the man, states were more likely to try to prosecute against men, lawyers were less likely to be provided to poor men, and juries were much more likely to convict men), and that the numbers were much closer, probably roughly equal. In the late 90s feminists succeeded in lobbying the UK to pass a "must arrest" law, forcing officers called to make an arrest everytime they recieved a domestic violence call. The guidelines were they were to arrest the person/s who'd committed the violence if known, and if not to arrest whomever was acting in a more aggressive manner, as determined by threats made in front of the officer or a seeming desire to escalate the situation. The result, which did not come as a surprise to myself or the other MRAs I knew who watched this with interest but just baffled the news and feminists, was that now a lot more women were being arrested for these crimes. Turns out, as we expected, a lot of cops were being chivalrous and not arresting the ladies. At the time these results became known a similar law was in the works in the US, and the feminists quickly rallied to ammend it, adding a section in the guidelines telling the police to arrest the "larger person, or the one who looks capable of inflicting the most harm". Such equality minded people they are. Fortunately, that section was removed before the bill was passed. Once again my friends and I enjoyed the show while feminists watched in horror as the number of women arrested for these kinds of violent crimes quickly rose up to match that of men. Since then, feminists have been continuing to work to skew that figure, at one point introducing a bill to force doctors to privately ask women who appear with unexplained bruises or damage from allegedly crashing into doors or falling down stairs if they are in fact being abused. It skews the statistic a little, since they only ask women, but not a bad idea really. Too bad it didn't also have doctors ask men similar questions if they habitually show up with alleged sports injuries.
Erin Pizzey, (the woman I mentioned above as having invented the first battered woman's shelter), has remained involved in and is an expert on domestic violence. According to her, in 90%+ of violent relationships both people are guilty. She notes that a lot of the women she helped didn't know they were being violent. As she put it "no one ever told them they could be violent" and adds that one woman would take off her shoe and throw it at her kids and think nothing of it. The women didn't see how them hitting, slapping, or throwing things at others was violent. I suspect that these things were as true in olden times as they are today. So again, I don't see that divorce being hard to get was any harder on women than it was on men. Sometimes, being stuck in a marriage is bad no matter who you are. This is just women being oppressed, and it's not a sign of patriarchy, (I'm using the old definition of patriarchy here... the idea that because most of the visible people in power are male they use that power to help other males over females. That simply is not true in my research. Usually they protect and provide for women much more than other, poorer men).
4. Simply false. Laura Ingalls Wilder's diary proves it, (among many other sources). Women were allowed to and have worked outside the home since this country was founded. I've seen the claim that women were unable to work bizarrely argued in one feminist work, (I can't recall the name, but it was a book by a famous feminist in the mid-90s), which sited as an example a sewing factory where women, in protest of their low wages, walked out to live on only their husbands income for a while only to be replaced by starving Irishmen who had no choice but to take the lower wages. How this was supposed to be an example women having it worse, or being unable to work I never could figure out. Later this claim of women's inability to find jobs was changed to say women were relegated to lower wage jobs. This at least has some basis in fact. The jobs women worked at did tend to pay less than the jobs men worked. However, a little examination reveals that the jobs men worked at back then were mostly hard labor. Heavy lifting was often required, and these jobs were often notoriously dangerous. Naturally, men needed to be paid more to go mine coal than they did to be schoolteachers. But I seriously doubt there was a line of women just waiting to get those great coal mining jobs. Although there was certainly sexism at play with regards to anyone trying to get a job too far outside of their own gender role, I suspect there were some people of each sex who managed it.
About the only point feminists really have on this one is for a short time after WWII, women who'd been filling in at factories were let go once the male soldiers came back from the war. Factory work wasn't so bad, especially since now that a lot more women were in the workplace suddenly society showed some real concern about people getting hurt at work, (a factory fire today injured 23 including women 'n children!), and OSHA, (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration), was created and removed much of the hazards from the workplace, particularly in factories. So women, encouraged by Rosie the Rivettor, felt it was their patriotic duty to pitch in and help out. Also, it paid the bills. Preference was shown however towards giving the jobs back to the men who'd left them to go to war, in part because they were seen as having just saved the world, and also because they were considered to need the jobs more as their income needed to support their whole families whereas the working women were assumed to just be taking in some extra income to help out with someone else supporting them. Was this fair? No, but I'm not sure what would have been most fair. Being denied my job back after I'd just gotten back from fighting for my country would suck too. Either way, this is a very small chunk of history and overall it doesn't change the fact that it's misleading at best to claim that women weren't allowed to work prior to about the 1930's or that they were forced to only take worse, (because they were lower paying), jobs.
3. Mostly false. Women did and have owned property since this country was founded. Now, if we limit this claim instead of pretending it applies to all property and say it only applies to land and houses, then feminists have some argument. Women did own land and houses, but they either had to inherit them, or purchase them when they weren't married. Land and houses sold to married couples were registered under the husband's name. If the husband died, the widow would then be the sole owner of the property, although sometimes their were some issues with creditors. In the case of divorce, the husband usually kept the property although there are a few examples where that wasn't the case. Divorce however, was very rare back then so this didn't affect very many women. Was it wrong? Probably. But to claim that women as a whole were being oppressed by being denied the right to own property is enough of an exaggeration of this as to be hard to distinguish from an outright lie.
2. This has never been true. For a while, feminists were claiming that the phrase "rule of thumb" was a judicial term, indicating that it was legal for husbands to beat their wives with a switch provided that switch was not wider than the husband's thumb. This was probably a complete fabrication, as the only evidence they've managed to come up with for such a claim is that in one case in which a husband was being charged with beating his wife, (funny to have a court case for something that's supposedly legal according to those feminists isn't it?), the phrase was spoken once. The actual origin of the phrase is now widely published on the internet and feminists have quietly stopped arguing that it had anything to do with beating women.
Although rape and abusing women has always been illegal and considered highly immoral by nearly everyone in this country, feminists do like to point out that there was no law specifically pointing against raping a woman you were married to until the 1970s. Why a specific law like that needs to exist I'm not sure, since that would already fall under the existing rape laws, although I agree most people probably didn't even really think of raping your wife as a thing prior to that. Just like most people don't think that raping your husband is a thing today. Is there a law specifically pointing out that raping a man you're married to is a crime today? No. Do I feel this lack of a law provides a compelling argument for men's oppression? No.
1. The vote. The holy grail of feminist oppression claims. Surely we know, we have to know, that women were oppressed by our wicked grandfathers because those bastards didn't even give women the vote. Most people have the idea that since women lacked the vote, they lacked any say in government. This is not true and our country has a long history of respecting the petitions of women, who made them often, to the government. Regarding the actual vote however, initially women and most men did not get it when the country was founded. Black men and men who did not own property were denied the vote for some time. This was partially due to discrimination and partly because those with power didn't want to share it, (at least, that's my best guess). With women however it was different. First off, the government was much smaller back then and the areas it was mostly involved with weren't considered women's areas according to gender roles. Also, there was a strong belief back then that with the right to vote for those in government came the responsibility to defend it, and even as late as the early 1900s there was a supreme court ruling which said that the reason men had to register with selective services and be eligible for the draft was because they were able to vote. Back in those days being drafted was a much more common occurrance, and a much greater danger, than it has been since women have had the vote. In other words, not letting women vote was more about trying to protect them than to oppress them. And candidates liked to mention how much they listened to the women and acted on their petitions while running for office because, hmmm.... the men who were voting actually liked women and wanted them protected?
Thanks to the suffragettes however, women got the right to vote without the accompanying responsibility to defend anything. Why just a few years ago, I thought we might finally get someone in charge who'd never had to worry about being drafted, (due to her being a woman), placed there mostly by others who'd never had that worry, (due to them being women), and who might enact the draft causing me to be drafted, (due to me being a man), while the media championed all this as a great victory for equality.
So, to sum up those last few paragraphs, no I don't think women were oppressed and had it bad civil rights wise in the past. So I don't see an excuse for the older generation to be more man-hating although in my experience it's the younger one that's worse. It seems you can't even breathe in the same room as a college girl these days without her thinking you're sexually harassing her. But I might get into that later, else people will think this post is too long.
