Yes, Patriarchy Is Dead; the Feminists Prove It

[thucythucy]

31. You're assuming that equality has

already been achieved in all areas, or if it has been achieved, it can be maintained without an infrastructure put into place to balance out roughly 8,000 years of recorded oppression. I don't think that's so. In fact, looking at events of the past two or three years, I think women's rights in some areas are slipping backwards, and without a hell of a lot of work we could see some real retrenchment, beyond "rape insurance" and vaginal scans and all that nonsense.

Anyway, to say women have triumphed and so there's no further need for compensatory structures is analogous, as I've said in other posts on this thread, to saying that since equality is the goal of the civil rights movement, we should ditch the Voting Rights Act, affirmative action, or any other program that seeks to work at institutional racism. Coz after all, these all discriminate against white folk, or "southern culture," or what have you. That's certainly the agenda of the Roberts Court, and the GOP in general, so I expect now that the Voting Rights Act has been gutted, Title IX and the ADA can't be too far behind. Surely though, as a member of DU, you can't be in support of such an agenda?

And are colleges made up "mostly of women?" Did I miss something? Smith and Mt. Holyoke maybe, but though women may now constitute a majority of college students, but I doubt anyone wants colleges to be "mostly of women." Interesting though, that the uptick in female enrollment happened just at the time when there are fewer scholarships, and when a college education has come to mean lifelong crushing debt and far less guarantee of employment after graduation. It's like as soon as women gain something of value, what's gained pretty much somehow loses that value, almost instantly. Like when manufacturing jobs finally get opened to women, after the big post-war layoffs of the late '40s, all of a sudden all those jobs disappear to Mexico and China. Go figure.

But I don't think very many colleges "are mostly women." Of course, most colleges didn't even accept women until maybe sixty or seventy years ago, so I admit it has been a dramatic change, all in one lifetime. Just goes to show, I think, that a lot of smart people were being kept out of schools, for entirely fallacious reasons.

I could go on about the rest, point by point, but it soon gets tedious. I mean, for instance, the VAWA also includes provisions for male survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence--so even laws that by title are meant to benefit women perforce must also benefit men. And personally I think women should have to register for the draft as well--and if we do reinstitute a draft I think women should be as eligible for service as men. And a White House Office for Men and Boys may well be a good idea--if it focuses on issues such as male on male violence, male health issues, etc., and not as some "we get some too" knee jerk response to feminism. Otherwise, as I said, it gets too close to demanding "civil rights for white people"--as if white people as a class have a history of discrimination--all else being equal--in this culture.

You do know that "chivalry" as a historical phenomenon has been rather over rated, right? I mean, inasmuch as it applied at all, classical European chivalry of the Middle Ages only applied to the elites, and not at all to the vast majority of men or women. Knights might have fought for the honor of some damsel in a castle somewhere, but this didn't preclude them from raping any lone woman or girl they might happen to encounter while out in the countryside, whether a "citizen" of their fiefdom or not. So it's ironic, a system that was supposedly meant "to protect" women actually worked to threaten probably ninety-nine point nine percent of all the girls and women alive at the time.

Interesting though that you take this tack. Any thoughts on my previous post?

And I wonder, why this preoccupation with feminists and feminism? It seems very much a zero sum game of politics. That is, any gains for women must, evidently for you, mean a loss for men. An act that targets violence against women must inevitably be bad for men?

I suppose to some extent that's true, if we're talking the end of male entitlement. If, for instance, colleges are now open to women as well as men, and assuming the number of college students as a whole doesn't increase, it's now more difficult for your average guy to compete for the same spot. Two random observations on that: a) I don't know that openings for college have remained static in the last fifty years and b) there was a hell of a lot of dead wood in higher education seventy-five and even fifty years ago, hell even more recently. I mean, G.W. Bush gets into Harvard? Really?? You don't think there was a lot of "legacy" and "entitlement" involved in who got into college back then, much of it along lines of gender (not to mention race)?

Wage discrimination is a complicated issue. Some traditionally feminine careers--such as nursing and teaching--turn out to be much more dangerous than they might appear at first blush. All it takes is one prick of an infected needle and you get Hep-C or HIV, or one student with a semi-automatic and your life expectancy is significantly shortened. And some of the more dangerous occupations--roofing for instance--have in large parts of the country been traditionally closed to women, period, though this is changing. But yeah, I think the way this society apportions wages and benefits sucks. Personal care assistants--folks who work with spinal cord injured quadriplegics, helping them out of bed, onto the toilet, folks who work as aides in nursing homes with medically compromised frail elders--get next to nothing, and no benefits, while some Wall Street shark like Mitt Romney gets mega-millions for ripping companies apart and sending jobs to slave labor factories in China.

Not sure though how railing against feminists helps in any of that. Not sure what the point is of all this beefing about how "good" women and girls have it now--while the elites of both genders steal us blind. (Though let's face it, Mittens, the Koch brothers, Trump, most of the top CEOs and most of the country's billionaires are--well, men, the occasional Ariana Huffington notwithstanding).

As I said in a previous post on this thread, there's lots of good work to do, and feminists are doing, I think, their fair share. Fighting sexual violence, for instance, against both women AND men. Hell, it was Susan Brownmiller back in 1971 who devoted a significant hunk of Against Our Will to the issue of rape in prison. There were few if any men talking about the topic then as anything other than a joke about dropping soap in the shower--But now I'm getting back on my "soap box"--and I've been told there's no need for it here, in the Men's Forum.

Anyway, I wouldn't call feminism "chivalry 2.0" in this or any other political system with which I'm familiar. But obviously we have a difference of opinion here.