Do you think that men are oppressed?

I'm going to have to read some Millet aren't I

that's so interesting, Sakura.

That's true - no-one was supposed to enjoy sex, were they. And women used to have to come and be purified at the church after giving birth, to atone for their filthiness in having sex/giving birth presumably.

HB, Kate Millet in Sexual politics (sorry for going on about it, but there is an ounce of genius in every single line) explains that all patriarchies have always gone out of their way to make sure that heterosexual love has never been the basis of coupledom/marriage. They've striven to make men and women procreate on any other basis, anything but love.
" Medieval opinion was firm in its conviction that love was sinful if sexual, and sex sinful if loving"
And yet... as you say, women (and men) reinvent the wheel with each generation, and the cracks in patriarchy are revealed.

God Jeremy Kyle, Jerry Springer - got a lot to answer for. They are just the patriarchy's latest weapon to make us all hate each other.

I was thinking this earier on. The history of the patriarchy has in a sense been a history of the denial of love between the two halves of humanity - the business of humanity they said, is commerce, war, and controlling as many other people as possible; romantic love was an unimportant diversion. And yet with the exception of a few great war epics like the Iliad, the great literature of most human societies, has dealt with heterosexual romantic love between men and women, the impossibility of their love within whichever rigid patriarchal society they were in, adn their desperate determination to risk total destruction in their defiance to pursue that love against the rules of their society.

It's a really interesting psychological phenomenon that. Why weren't the great dramas about commerce, setting up empires, the "important" stuff? It's like people recognised the lack of balance in society and tried to express it somehow in their literature. Women were effectively wiped out of public life, but the need for them to be there in art and literature, re-asserted itself again and again and the greatest expressions of human culture, haven't been teh story of how a new adminstration for administering taxes was set up by a conquerig army, it's been the story of how couples defied the gods, their families, their destinies, for love. Patriarchy just can't seem to stamp it out.

Monty Python! What did the feminists ever do for us?!
well, apart from the education, the sanitation throughout childbirth, the pill and other means of family planning, the abililty to own your own bank account, doctor confidentiality, owning your own property etc.
What Have The Feminists Ever Done For Us?!
Funny how the MRA movement doesn't have any kind of comparable triumphs to compare.

ok I'll try again cos if he's not gonna get ignored then neither am I....
bill how does men holding 90% of the worlds wealth and power square with the arguments about men being oppressed?
cos that is what this thread is about.

it's a depressing world view. If you are thinking like that when you are 23, you are on a downward slope.

Life is good, cheer up, follow the advice of Monty Python "always look on the bright side of life". Not everyone is cheating, scheming and trying to grab money for babies. The world is what you make it, you see what you want to. Change your outlook, be positive, snap out of it, and spot the goodness, love and kindness all around.

Turn Jerry Springer off and watch something good. Change your outlook, do a sport, set goals. You've only got one life, don't go through it hating half of humanity. Open your eyes, your mind and your heart, and the world will look a different place.

Doing the right thing doesn't mean creating dysfunctional families either. It simply means taking responsibility for your own actions. If you fuck a fertile woman, you are taking the chance that you can create a child. No-one thinks that means you have to have a shotgun wedding as you appear to think it means Bill. But it does mean taking responsibility - financial and emotional, and that means supporting the mother of your child in the decision she makes as to whethr to have an abortion or whether to go ahead and ahve the child. She is the only one who can make that choice, because she is the one with the child in her body. And if she cannot abort, then you ahve to accept taht the child you co-created, will exist and live and to decide that you are not going to function as its father - well it's simply contemptible and it's an attack on a child. No decent man would do such a thing.

Having said that I do bristle at MRA language;

"kids getting churned out"

"are scum"

"are also scum"

"I'd leave her and find someone else like a normal human being? "

"do you want it with an ex-boyfriend who bailed the second he heard the word "baby" or would ya rather have it with the turkey baster?"

"find out later you were cuckolded"

"If a woman wants to keep an accident, she can."

"I'd just have to import a nice vietnamese girl bypassing any effect feminism might have my reproductive choices."

Bill - your posts, language, analysis and world view are vile. But hey, thanks for demonstrating what an MRA is in all its glory.

Ach well, I know it's all doom and gloom and hard done by and life is shit and love is a trap and brats and men and women pitted against each other in MRAland.

(And they say feminists are humorous and dogmatic!)

But here, in the real world, well, it's quite nice really. Yunno, all of us bow to the pressure of the patriarchy to some extent, but most of us are pretty decent, and just want a happy life. We love our children and our partners and our friends and do what we can to survive with integrity in the patriarchy.

Watch yourself Bill, I'll be quoting Dworkin at ya next to spread the love!

But you're a deadbeat dad if you get a woman pregnant because of a contraceptive failure (there is a 1% chance of the pill failing for example and is it 1.5% for condoms? And that's not with misuse - that's purely becuase no contraceptive method is completely 100% effective) and then refuse to take moral, emotional and financial responsibility for the child who carries 50% of your genes. And where is the child's right to have a loving, decent father in all this?

Most unplanned pregnancies aren't because of anyone trapping anyone else - they are because of mistakes and contraception failures. If you don't accept that mistakes and contraception failure can happen and be prepared to face the consequences of that mistake or contraception failure, then you should not be fucking anyone who is capable of becoming pregnant. Stick to post-menopausal women or men, or get your sperm stored and get a vasectomy.

"I cut off about half of a post on one of these threads, I remember pasting the other half into another post a few minutes later. What is your point? Look at the thread title."

My point question is - why did you resurrect an old thread instead of starting a new one?

DuelingFanjo Mon 06-Dec-10 18:58:12

but you bumped it, you didn't start it or contribute to it until you bumped it. So why did you decide to bump an old thread when you had no previous posts to edit?

or have you name changed?

Do you understand my question?

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I cut off about half of a post on one of these threads, I remember pasting the other half into another post a few minutes later. What is your point? Look at the thread title.

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Beachcomber Mon 06-Dec-10 18:57:37

Oookaaay, I now understand this MRA obsession with being forced to father 'it' (that's their child).

They either haven't figured out that they can avoid fatherhood by keeping their dicks in their pants ooooorrrr, as Seth said, they are just mighty pissed off that they don't get to fuck free of all consequence whenever they want.

(I thought that's what condoms were invented for...)

I suppose the women who had unprotected sex or forgot the pill are any less guilty or stupid than the men who thought wearing a condom was too uncomfortable?

I also think men who go "Yeah, sure. I'll be the dad" and fuck off a couple years later are scum. That doesn't change the fact that I think women who lie about taking the pill are also scum.

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HerBeatitude Mon 06-Dec-10 19:00:18

One of the very first rows Victoria had with Lord M, was over the constitutional necessity of her remembering that she didn't have the same powers as Charles I.

Do you know that there is no such thing as 100% effective contraception? So therefore any adult who has sex, is responsible for a pregnancy if contraception fails, not jsut one half of the couple?

Or do you think that men shouldn't ahve the right to have access to tehir children when they divorce Bill, seeing as how it's not their bodies that have to bear the child?

What about the child's rights in all of this Bill? D'you give a shit about them?

That is entirely beside the point, if women doesn't WANT to carry a baby to term, it's cool. If women WANTS a baby, it's cool even if the father was a one-night stand or simply isn't interested in fatherhood.

How many people have gotten married simply because a baby has come into the picture? How many of those couples do you think are really happy?

Often "doing the right thing" ends up creating a dysfunctional family where the parents are too young, too immature and too irresponsible to give that child the life they deserve.

I am thinking about the child's rights, who do you think suffers the most because of situations like this? These kids getting churned out by teenager mothers with deadbeat fathers are really copping it hard.

What is actually genuinely sad about BH's view of the world, is the lack of love in it.

But seth everyone knows that men and women are only together because women trap men into having babies and men trick women into everything else being housewives who are stuck at home with a mop and a baby bottle.

Actually, no, sorry got a bit mixed up - that's the sexist knobber MRA point of view.

Regular folk get together cos they like each other and decide that they are having enough of a good time together to have a shot at bringing up some happy children to add to the love and fun. Well, that's the feminist version anyway.

You know girls, we really must stop this tricking men into fathering children, now Bill has kindly explained to us why it's wrong.
We're all at it aren't we - I have already forced dh to have 3 by getting him drunk and making holes in the condoms with very sharp pins, and now he has to pay for them all. It's just not fair.

One of the very first rows Victoria had with Lord M, was over the constitutional necessity of her remembering that she didn't have the same powers as Charles I.

Do you know that there is no such thing as 100% effective contraception? So therefore any adult who has sex, is responsible for a pregnancy if contraception fails, not jsut one half of the couple?

Or do you think that men shouldn't ahve the right to have access to tehir children when they divorce Bill, seeing as how it's not their bodies that have to bear the child?

What about the child's rights in all of this Bill? D'you give a shit about them?

but you bumped it, you didn't start it or contribute to it until you bumped it. So why did you decide to bump an old thread when you had no previous posts to edit?

or have you name changed?

Do you understand my question?

Oookaaay, I now understand this MRA obsession with being forced to father 'it' (that's their child).

They either haven't figured out that they can avoid fatherhood by keeping their dicks in their pants ooooorrrr, as Seth said, they are just mighty pissed off that they don't get to fuck free of all consequence whenever they want.

Poor lambs, there they are with their male entitlement and privilege and all, and yet some unfair fact of life is getting in the way of their pronging.

Cos everyone knows that men explode if they don't get to do some worry free pronging once in a while.

Good 'ole MRAs - someone's go to activate for a man's right to a consequence free prong.

(I thought that's what condoms were invented for...)

The best women can do is use protection too - if there's a fragment of decency in you you must be able to get that a huge number of unwanted pregnancies come about by accident. Either by neither partner making sufficient effort to prevent it, or by contraceptive failure. In either case, IMO it is the parent's joint responsibility if the baby is born. Having an abortion is not the same as un-getting-pregnant. It's not a simple choice for many, whether for personal reasons, religious ones (and related things like being ostracised from family/church for having an abortion), or practical ones. If you're in the US you must know how hard it is to access abortion in many areas.

So yes it is the woman's choice, within these constraints, to have an abortion if she is in a country that allows it. But not wanting to have an abortion is not the same as forcing some guy to impregnate you against his will. Men don't have to think about whether they would be able to access and go through with an abortion. Don't criticise women for being the ones forced to face this decision. The only sure way to prevent pregnancy is to abstain from penetrative sex, and basically keep it in your pants at all times. don't you think a lot of women would like to abdicate the responsibility of being the childbearing sex, especially when you're too young or poor to want kids?

and how does men holding 90% of the worlds wealth and power square with the arguments about men being oppressed?

DuelingFanjo Mon 06-Dec-10 18:44:57

BillHicks...

why did you bump this old thread?

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No edit function as far as I'm aware, I'm used to VBB.

She was also the last of the real monarchs, I don't think the royals have actually had to give assent since her reign ended.

BillHicks...

why did you bump this old thread?

HerBeatitude Mon 06-Dec-10 18:30:53

Not got a very good grasp of constitutional monarchy either.

I suspect Lord Melbourne had more control over all that wealth and certainly over all the policies to do with it, than Queen Victoria did.

She didn't have the right to vote because she was the queen. But if she hadn't been the queen she wouldn't have had the right to vote because she was ... oh why am I bothering.

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She had to give Royal assent to everything from passing laws to declaring war. She had veto power over every single thing the British Empire. What's a vote when you can deny passage of a law by not signing a piece of paper?