thestalkinghead
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Posts posted by thestalkinghead
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I don't want anyone to do dangerous work at all, but I'm not going to stop them.
You, on the other hand, want to make other people do dangerous work even if they don't want to.
no, it's just reality that people have to do dangerous work, and the patriarchy has made it so that only men do this dangerous work, i want equality, and that means both men and women have to have equal share of both the good and the bad parts of society
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Why do you expect other people to do dangerous work. If it's so important, do it yourself.
i really have no idea what you are saying, are you saying I personally should do every dangerous job on the planet or that just men should do them, or are you saying that if nobody did dangerous work the world would just be fine, because people just do them because they want to?
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I'm a radical. I don't want anyone to do the dangerous jobs. I won't stop them from doing dangerous jobs, but I would prefer they stop.
No, I won't fight to give men more secretarial jobs. I am willing to accept that imbalance.
i am optimistic of the future and think there will be a time where robots do all the dangerous jobs and humans are free to pursue happiness, but that isn't the reality we live in now, someone has to do the dangerous jobs and if women wont do them, men will have to, and that acceptance of imbalance if it concerns men is why i don't fully agree with feminism
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As a feminist, I do not expect men to do the more dangerous jobs. So, I hope that helps.
but would you fight for more women to do the dangerous jobs? because it's fine protesting that women are less likely to be managers or other high level positions (very cozy) , but unless women are pushed/encouraged to do the more dangerous (and higher paid) jobs it will still be men who have to do them, and would you fight for men to get more secretarial/administration jobs? because otherwise women will still dominate those areas
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Aren't pensions a form of payment for labor? Maybe it's different in England, but typically in the U.S., pensions are offered as a way to pay people less salary while maintaining the appearance of an attractive compensation.
there are quite a few different types of pension, ones you pay into yourself (you could call a private pension) there are pensions your job pays into (different rates and pensions for different companies) but there is also a state pension that everybody gets (different amounts for date born and how many years worked) from the government, and you are entitled to claim them all once you reach retirement age (which is increasing all the time and the gap between men and women is decreasing) but is just seems insane that women can retire earlier even though they live longer, and at the same time men are expected to do the dangerous backbreaking jobs (which probably reduced their lifespan), and women to do the safer more civilised jobs (which they could more easily do at an older age)
edit: yeah i know (not 100% guaranteed though) but not entirely getting rid of it, and they are increasing it all the time, I'm not sure if i could ever retire
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I'm glad you are tackling that problem while we feminists focus on what we consider to be higher priorities. Teamwork!
I hope you manage to get those pension-requirements equal for both genders, but I'd prefer less conscription rather than more.
But. What if the shorter requirement for women is an attempt to encourage more women to enter the workplace? I'd prefer a more equal quantity of women in the workplace if I have to choose. You know, being a feminist and all.
If men want equal requirements for years served to get pensions, I recommend they boycott working until they are back in demand, then we can try to bring their numbers back to an equilibrium by offering them better pension deals.
This page seems somewhat relevant, though I didn't read it all.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/mar/08/international-womens-day-pay-gap
I think some would say that the thing to take away from that first graph is that male secretaries and male social-workers should be making more money. While I think that would be a good idea, I'm more interested in the larger scope inequalities.
well it's not totally relevant because it is about pay gaps not pensions, but i can't tell how the gaps are worked out, it seems to be worked out in a way that just shows that because there are more male workers in a field they get overall paid more and vice versa, because it is pretty obvious that if a field is dominated by one gender that gender will be paid more on average (because there would be more higher paid roles for that gender), it doesn't actually show that two workers male/female working the exact same job have different pay, I'm not saying that doesn't happen, but statistics can be showed in many different ways that give misleading information
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I guess I don't really want to get in on this argument, but... this is why he said "ceding". If you're not supporting women you are ceding to those who want to silence them. I just thought I would point this out because it looked like you missed that word and therefore the point
i have made it clear that i support women but i support men also, and that i don't want to silence women, so that argument was not about anything i had said or anything i believe, and is actually a nonsense argument meant to silence me.
anyway, here is another part of equality that feminism wouldn't tackle, because women have the privilege in this case
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Unbe-fucking-lievable. This is like the fourth or fifth time someone has tried to reason with you, at length, and you have quoted one line of their post out of context and retorted as though it were representative of the whole. More often than not, you seem to even misinterpret that line, whether willfully or not. You're not listening. At all.
Fuck it. You are obviously, obviously more interested in defending your position than in actually hearing what people are saying and parsing it into your worldview. This is garbage. I'm done. Maybe I can communicate with you again at some point in the future, when you've demonstrated some capacity for actually hearing and interpreting the stances of others, developed a little bit of goddamn empathy, developed beyond this shallow guise of open-mindedness concealing a circle of self-justifying rhetoric.
I tried.
i read the whole thing i just responded to that one piece, just like the many times people have done that to me, and you want to defend you position more than listen to what i have to say, you didn't try at all.
you just can't imagine how somebody could think that achieving equality is something that would take solving the issues of both men and women, not just solving the issues of women, or how someone can support specific parts of a movement but not be behind the thing as a whole, you need to learn some empathy and understanding instead of assuming that if someone doesn't totally agree with you they are totally against you
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all it means is that we don't want to join these social movements and throw our weight behind them. Nothing wrong with that. That's how life works.
well, we seem to agree on something
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Being a feminist doesn't exclude other causes.
if that is the case then how many feminist are also part of the men's rights movement?
thinking of that, i could actually get behind the feminist and men's rights collaborative movement (or whatever such a thing would be called)
It is not unfair to focus on one problem instead of another problem. If focusing on a problem was unfair, then all social movements would be unfair because all social movements necessarily focus on some social ills and not other social ills. E.g. it would be unfair for a movement to fight cancer and not fight AIDS; it would be unfair to fight poverty and not fight illness; it would be unfair to campaign for blood donation but not kidney donation; etc.
that isn't the same, it would be the same for a movement to fight cancer in women not men, to fight AIDS in women not men, to fight poverty for women not men etc. equality among the sexes are not two separate things they are part of each other
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There's lots of reasons you might choose to focus efforts on British people and not people everywhere. For example, you might feel more strongly identified with British people. You might feel that British people are suffering in a particularly intense way. You might feel that helping British people is more effective than trying to fight poverty abroad. You might feel that helping one's local community is more important than helping people you do not know. There are all sorts of good reasons to pick one cause (and not some other causes), and that's fine.
The same is true of feminism. You might feel more strongly identified with women than with men. You might feel that women suffer more than men do. You might feel that the problems faced by women are more important than the problems faced by men. You might feel that helping women is more like to improve matters than helping men. You might simply personally get more out of helping women than helping men.
I feel like the essence of your argument is that it is somehow wrong to help one group and not another. But I don't see why that should be. No one has unlimited time or effort to put into a cause. It's OK to put that time and effort into one cause and not another.
well i may support many of the goals of that movement, but i wouldn't call myself a Britishpovertyist (or whatever it was called) on the principle that it was unfair to focus a worldwide movement on just british people
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So if I started a movement that was aimed at helping poor British people, you would disagree with the movement because the movement didn't expressly aim to help poor people everywhere?
if it were a worldwide movement and not a charity, i and i assume many other people would be asking, why not all poor people?
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I like that that's what you got from what I said.
The actual point is, there's a conflict right now between those who want to support women and those who want to silence them. But declining to be one of the former, you are ceding to the latter by default.
You aren't trying to make an informed decision. You're just running away from something that makes you uncomfortable. Your views of feminism have been repeatedly shown to be misguided and unfounded, and yet you persist in cherry picking edge cases to make it seem like your reservations are justified. Your reservations are not justified. You are willing to let real people suffer because you are afraid of having a semantic label applied to you that might also be applied to people whom you find a little strident or a movement that you think is too narrow in its aims. You are not willing to work with those who seek to end sexism because they're concerned first and foremost with those who have lost the most and who have the most yet to lose from sexism. You would rather save no one than save only those most in need. It is a terrifying and gross viewpoint, and I can only hope that someday you grow enough to see why.
The thing is, I even agree with some of what you're saying. I identify as humanist before feminist but, feminism being that branch of humanism which is concerned with the systemic depredation of women, that makes me a feminist as well by default. I agree that everyone needs help, that this needs to be a more egalitarian world over all, that there are serious problems of, not only sexism, but racial tensions and transphobia and homosexual persecution that need to be addressed. The problem is bigger than feminism -- but feminism is one of the movements, albeit one of many, that needs to exist to fight that problem.
Do you see how fucking insane it is that, when the world is on fire, you cast aspersions on those who fight the fires, just and only because they first fight the fires at home, the fires they know best, the fires which will haunt their nightmares and render them incapable of fighting the greater conflagration?
"The actual point is, there's a conflict right now between those who want to support women and those who want to silence them. But declining to be one of the former, you are ceding to the latter by default."
no you don't have to be one or the other
let me put it this way, if i were to start a movement to end world poverty, but only help blonde haired blue eyed people, you may agree with my goal of ending world poverty, but not support that i am only doing it for certain people, this doesn't mean that you would rather have poverty, it just means you disagree with the way the movement is only helping some people
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so even though i have made my position clear, the automatic assumption from saying i'm not part of the feminist movement means i'm a "mysoginerd" yeah i really want to be a feminist now, you are all clearly not ignorant bigots
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All right, I give up. I had hope you would come around but I just don't see it happening at this point. Just please know that there are some very intelligent people in here giving you incredibly good reasons for supporting feminism and you are responding with very unintelligent answers and ignorant stances.
No hard feelings man but I'm out.
well, i think you are overconfident of your own intelligence, and ignorant of your ignorance.
but yeah, no hard feelings
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I am merely making the point that the civil rights movement only improved things for a subset of people and not all people. You said you do not identify with any movement that doesn't improve things for all people.
Edit: And saying that I am comparing modern feminism to the civil rights movement is a straw man. You are completely misrepresenting my argument.
well, maybe i misunderstood, but if i was around when MLK was i would have asked him what he thought about POC being racist towards white people, and if he said it was of no concern of his or the movement i would have had issues with that, I'm not trying to put words in his mouth though, I don't know what his stance on that was
edit: i wouldn't say that ignoring mens issues was a half baked reason
edit2: thinking about it, didn't MLK want equal justice for all American citizens? so i assume he would be against discriminating against white people, so if there were disadvantages to being white he would want to help those disadvantaged white people
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I'm going to say it again but this has to mean you would be against the civil rights movement. It was biased towards one group of people and didn't help everyone equally. And so what if the results are biased? If one group has more privileges than another, shouldn't we strive to achieve results that help those that are less privileged?
if the civil right movement was only for black people, and asian people weren't any concern of it because they have the privilege of being assumed that they are good at mathematics then it would be like the modern/third wave feminism movement, are you seriously comparing modern feminism to the civil rights movement because they aren't alike, maybe you could compare the suffragettes to the civil rights movement but not modern/third wave feminism
also the results and impact of feminism will be different for each country, i am talking about england, i get the impression that in america feminism hasn't had as much impact in certain areas as it has in england
@I Saw Dasein 271,000 more women in university isn't marginal (out of a total of 1,697,000 984,000 women and 713,000 equals 16% more women or 58% women 42% men) and i agree there are many factors for this but they come under the umbrella of education
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I would like to directly respond to this point. I'm not sure how the feminist movement is to blame for women getting higher grades than men. Are you suggesting that women are being given undue academic favors because they are women? If so, please talk to any woman who has ever studied in the hard sciences field, they'll tell you otherwise.
There are numerous reasons why women tend to score higher than men in an academic setting. A lot of it has to do with psychology and how the two genders are socialized, but there's no nefarious feminist plot to keep men down by rewarding all the A+ to the ladies.
I'm not saying there is an conspiracy to make men less educated or that women don't work hard for their education, however it used to be the case that men outperformed women academically so feminists campaigned to changed the education system to make it more "equal" but that has clearly resulted in a biased towards women, which i think is probably unintentional, but i don't see any feminist campaigns to make the academic setting better for men and i don't think there ever would be.
as you said there are numerous reasons for this gap, but i don't think the feminist movement would be willing to put in the time or the effort to make men perform better academically and have better career prospects because they concentrate on the needs of women, I'm not saying that i would want some mens group to go about changing it so that in 20 years time the education system is better suited to men, i would want a group that is dedicated to helping men and women equally to make it so that men and women both perform equally, you might say that that is feminisms goal, but i think a biased movement (towards either gender) no matter what the intentions, will always have biased results.
Edit: i really didn't anticipate your response, and didn't feel like i was saying that women don't work hard or there was some nefarious plot, and that is the sort of thing i mean when i say i don't think i can communicate that well with text, if that were part of a conversation i may have read you were taking it that way or you may have inserted that question into the conversation.
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Now that thestalkinghead has provided some reasons to consider not being a feminist, I can say that I have thought it through, weighed the pros and cons and decided (whole-heartedly) that I am a feminist; I want to be a feminist, and I am proud to be one.
Thestalkinghead, have you ever read a comic-book called "Cerebus"? I loved it and I think you may also enjoy it if you ever have a hankering to read 300 comic-books that someone on the internet recommended. And "yes", it does have a small amount of relevance to this discussion, especially the portion after Church&State.
i will find out about reading it
I'm happy your talking about actual stances on specific issues, rather than generalizing, stalkinghead. I disagree with all of what you said, but it did a much better job of explaining why you won't label yourself a feminist than the last 10 pages of this thread..
i am happy to debate about it and i think i have learned a lot so hopefully there will be more understanding on both sides
There's a lot of more significant stuff in your post that I'll leave for cleverer people to handle (is there any evidence that women in the army are under-performing?), but this one is easy: sports prizes are not salaries. They are, as someone already said, prestige-based awards. After all, these are competitions. Competitors aren't producing a commodity. By your logic the prize size should vary depending on the quality of play. That's not how competitions work.
Whether the number of games played in either tournament is appropriate is another issue. I'd say that the right amount is a tournament long enough to push the competitors to their limit, but not so long that they're all utterly exhausted by the final. But I don't know much about sport, so that might be completely wrong.
i have no issues with women in the military and i don't assume they underperform i just don't think the requirements for women should be made easier.
sure sports prizes aren't salaries, but the funds come from sponsorship and tv/news coverage, so if there are less games in womens tennis it contributes less towards the funding.
anyway, for specific issues in feminism that i agree with i would be behind it, I'm not anti-feminist and i don't think they/you should shut up and go away or anything, and i'm not trying to derail or troll, i like to debate and discuss things so i can better understand peoples perspective, but i think i will try and leave that out for now and lurk and learn
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Yeah, half this stuff is unexamined privilege and the other half is the lingering effects of the patriarchy.
Easy one first: the chief way feminism benefits men is that both men and women are required to buy into the patriarchal idea of how men and women are. Women get the raw deal here because their role is much more limited, but while men get more freedom in what they're allowed to be, they're still in a gilded cage. When it comes to things like custody and relationships with children, men frequently get the raw end of the stick because what kind of man could possibly want to mother children? And the patriarchal notion of men as distant breadwinner and women as homemakers and protectors of children is reinforced. Feminism is opposed to the patriarchy, and demands both that men be both allowed and expected to take a greater share in the raising of children.
Harder one last: you are coming at things from a perspective that has no real conception of what it's like for women (and maybe minorities? I don't know), and you are never challenged on your ignorance because your perspective is seen as the 'default'. On many issues, you don't get to be right, and you will have to learn to live with this. Specifically, you have no conception of the thousand little ways women are undermined and marginalised, things like rape culture, mansplaining, disenfranchisement. Things are not 'equal', and gender-blindness is an impossible goal. The important thing is to recognise and disentangle our perceptions of gender, which are cultural, from sex, which is physiological. Sports prizes are not based on physical fitness, but on prestige. This does not need to be based on physiological characteristics. Defence force fitness requirements are designed to ensure their troops are in peak physical fitness - they're arbitrary. The unequal requirements are there to compensate for women starting further back - a man meeting the women requirements is far less likely to be physically fit because of the natural advantages he has thanks to his physiology. Of course, the defence forces need people in peak physical condition, but they also need many other things, like discipline, leadership and accuracy, and it turns out that they're not gendered. The defence force is acknowledging that men and women are different in specific ways in order to ensure that they take best advantage of the assets they have.
The reason why privilege is important is because until you realise you have it, and how it blinds you, feminism looks a lot like it's trying to disenfranchise you as a man. No-one is coming for your balls.
that last part is something feminism doesn't apply to women, women don't realise the privileges they have, as i said i don't want this to be a privilege or suffering competition because the just goes nowhere, but there are so many advantages to being the protected part of the patriarchy, but they just don't have names because there aren't such things as male studies or masculinity intellectual books, but basically men are expected to do all the dirty back breaking jobs while women get all the clean more civilised jobs, i do recognise that the jobs at the top being predominantly male is a problem and i am not saying it isn't (even though that is only really an middle/upper class problem), it's that equality is now in a position that unequal requirements are not just helping women but hurting men.
@Brannigan the university link is about women getting better grades but obviously that is a problem that should be fixed, and it shows that feminist policies aren't equal, they are actually damaging male education and career prospects, and that the balance has now (at least in england) swung past equal and is now unfair for men.
the army link isn't just about the biological difference, the military isn't a sport among peers, the requirements are there because it is about life or death, if anybody can't carry a wounded soldier to safety because they aren't strong enough they shouldn't be allowed in the army, if they can't aim their gun straight because their arms are tired after carrying it for miles with no rest they shouldn't be allowed in the army, if they can't carry jerry cans full of fuel or full ammo boxes they shouldn't be allowed in the army, nobody should get a free pass based in their biology, should there be a new category for scrawny men?
and obviously i have a problem with different branches or schools of thought, but that wasn't the point of the links, i was trying to provide links just so people can't just claim i am making it up
the tennis link is about equal pay for equal work, and how playing less tennis is not equal work.
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Instead of arguing about whether or not you can identify yourself as a feminist, maybe you should talk about what you believe, what exactly your issues are and what specifically you think are issues that aren't being fairly represented within feminism? What exactly is it that you feel, in the feminism umbrella, is unfairly biased against men, where more compromise on women's privilege would help the cause?
What do you think are men's rights issues that feminism doesn't help with?
I'm actually asking, not being snarky or childish or anything. If you don't want to label yourself as a feminist, that's fine, but after all these pages of discussion I don't remember once actually clearly reading about any specific issues you had or what your stance was on it.. You mentioned something about biology and you asked us what we thought about child custody cases and paternity leave. What do you think about those things, for example? Are they examples of what you talk about, where women should compromise on their privileges?
well the problem is that when there is something good it will be claimed that it is all of feminism but when there is something bad it will be claimed that it is just a part of the umbrella of feminism not all of feminism.
but a few examples of campaining that has resulted in an unfair bised for women are:
campaingnes to get more women in the military, but not that they should have to have have the exact same tests to qualify for it (a link that doesn't show everything but what a quick search showed up) http://www.army.mod.uk/join/20153.aspx
and with child custody, the system may claim equality, but men only get primary custody of the child if the woman has drug or mental issues, the defualt if for women to get custody https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fathers%27_rights_movement#Family_court_system http://www.fathers-4-justice.org/about-f4j/fact-sheet/
or that in tennis women now get equal prize money but they still don't have to play as many matches or use the same heavier equipment http://www.scotsman.com/sport/tennis/andy-murray-let-women-play-five-sets-for-equal-pay-1-3074466
or just basically things that campaign for better treatment of women but just leave men of the campaign ( https://www.gov.uk/government/policies/creating-a-fairer-and-more-equal-society no nention of supporting and protecting the rights of men here and notice the advisory group: Advisory groups:Women's Business Council )
feminists would want a minimum percentage of women in male dominated workplaces but wouldn't campaign for a minimum percentage of men as well
obviously i haven't gone into detail with this, but if you are going to fight for equality it shouldn't only be a fight for equal treatment of women, it needs to be about men also
edit: it's things like this that show that the campaign for more equality for women is working, but it also shows that men have been left out http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/9484597/White-males-now-classed-as-a-minority-group-at-university.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3179265/The-future-is-female-job-figures-show.html
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thestalkinghead, your logic is deeply flawed and you repeatedly contradict yourself as others have pointed out. If you are an all or nothing type of guy then that must mean you don't believe in anything and have a nihilistic perspective. There cannot possibly be any movement or belief that is pure enough in its messaging for you so I have to assume you believe in nothing and disagree with every possible movement or belief out there. And even if a movement or belief was pure enough you can only get behind it if it benefits every single person on earth? So fuck the civil rights movement, fuck feminism, fuck feeding the hungry, fuck curing cancer, fuck things that benefit the rich, and fuck things that benefit the poor. Or do you only believe in things that benefit you?
Long story short, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU SMOKING AND CAN I HAVE SOME?
yeah sure some things may sound like they contradict each other, but they wouldn't if i were able to properly express my beliefs, i think it is a problem associated with individual ethics, because i can't rely on many people over time writing about a set belief system and say read/watch/listen to this, this person has done a good job of explaining what <insert belief> is, but i think stopping racism of all kinds would benefit all the people on earth, i think stopping all sexism would benefit everybody on earth, i think stopping all kinds of poverty would help everybody on earth, i believe curing cancer, AIDS, malaria etc would benefit everybody on earth and when i say everybody on earth i do also include myself (some ways more directly than others)
maybe it isn't clear perhaps because i just can't communicate through texts as well as i want to (i think an actual face to face conversation would be easier to explain it) but i do think a lot of what feminism does is good, but i don't think you can achieve equality by focusing on just women, a simplified view of the patriarchy is that is was there to protect women and children in a harsh living environment, obviously over protectiveness is oppressive, especially now that in the western world we don't live in a harsh environment, so we no longer need a patriarchy.
however i think it is naive to think that men have only benefited from the patriarchal system and that women have only suffered in it, i don't want this to start a conversation about who has suffered most or who has the most privilege, but i think the best approach would be to simultaneously focus on the problems of both men and women and also focus on how they can both compromise on their privileges, sure there are feminists under the umbrella of feminism that would take that approach, but unless that is the majority view i couldn't totally get behind the movement.
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Says the "individualist" who believes that ideologies should be one hundred percent consistent and labels should be one hundred percent accurate.
You seem as though your greatest concern here is someone thinking that you believe something that you do not believe. Therefore, you refuse to call yourself a feminist (or anything else, I imagine). I didn't want to say it, but since the words have already been bandied about, that does sound like someone who lacks principles to me. "I don't consider myself a supporter of civil rights because someone might then mistake me for a Black Panther. Better than segregation continue than someone misunderstand who I am and what I think."
well you hear wrong.
principles plural of prin·ci·ple (Noun)Noun- A fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning.
- A rule or belief governing one's personal behavior.
i have my own principles, obviously a lot of what i believe is similar to other people and that doesn't make me any less of an individual.
feminism is only around to help women, i wouldn't call myself something that is only around to benefit one subset of people, i support everybodys rights equally
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The description you're looking for is "lacks principles," I think.
you shouldn't describe yourself as a feminist you really give them a bad name
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i just watched the stream (not live) and the bit where sean went to the toilet and we hear reloading was intense, i can't believe he didn't just kill him straight away, but good job with the extinguisher and axe