Can we talk about female violence? I need to get my response straight

I do wonder why so many feminists seem to be middle class (and white, but thats less relevant)- they are one of the most privileged groups in the world and in general don't experience many of the issues poorer women and women from 2nd and 3rd world countries face. Infact you could say they also live a much better, more privileged existence than many of the males in the world.

For example they don't tend to be forced to take up prostitution, they are less likely to be a victim of domestic violence, rape and abuse among other things (not to say these things dont happen to middle class women but it happens more often to worse off women).

Is it because they truly want to help other women? And how do they feel, acknowledging their privileged status (for some reason to me feminists often come across like they think they personally are hard done by, just for being a woman? correct me if I'm wrong)?

I think poverty and class has got a lot more to do with it than just pure sexism, 'patriarchy' or whatever.

Forgive me if I come across as a bit Buddhist, but I'd also question the idea that we all have urges (to violence) which we learn to control to a differing degree. As far as I can tell, inter personal, loss of control violence is usually related to faulty reasoning, it's a problem in the belief system of the aggressor. They aren't able to get the other person to comply with their own view of what should happen, who should say or.do what in relation to whom, etc. They become enraged because of their own beliefs, not because of another's actions or words. If they changed those beliefs, that rage would not arise. The urges related to those rages would not arise. The urges to violence are therefore a product of thinking and not an innate or natural state.

Moreover, I'd say violent urges are an incapacity on the part of.the aggressor to contain the urgency of their feelings. They then make a choice to try and end what they perceive as the source of those feelings. But some people, even when a state of complete apoplexy and rage would manage that lack of containment by crying or throwing up, for example, I know I've done both. Violence is a strategy, and not a feeling or a state.

'Men who are attacked by a woman are more physically able to hold their attacker at bay without needing to hit back.'

'I always assume that people who pretend there's no difference between a man hitting a woman and a woman hitting a man, are domestic violence advocates tbh.'

What if the woman is a huge 6 foot man beast/butch as hell and the man is a 5'4 weakling?

I have come across plenty of women in my time that would easily wipe the floor with many blokes.

Oh, just as a p.s. to the identical twins anecdata, jeebus your example is oddly chosen, given that if such things were innate, identical twins would surely both be, well, identical rather than "chalk and cheese" in temperament. I actually think identical twins brought up together who seem very "innately" different are an excellent example of the extent to which subtle differences in environment produce really very different individual psychologies. Noone gets the same experiences, even when they are brought up together, but identical twins do get the same genes. If things like temperament were innate, those very subtlety different upbringings would have had no effect on those innate qualities, surely? Yet they had an apparently massive effect on those developing psychologies... makes you wonder at the power of environment, really.

I remembering seeing a documentary on psychopathy, which claimed that 100% of known serial killers were beaten as children. That's an extraordinary correlation.

I'm not sure I'm clear about how we're defining violence when discussing whether it's innate or not? There seems to be an assumption that violence is necessarily associate with a loss.of control but I'd really question that; Patrick Stewart in that speech really nailed.it when he separated violent acts from emotions. Strong emotions do not necessarily.produce violence, violence is a choice we make. Well, not all of us, obviously.

As an aside, serial killers.are very nearly all white, too, aren't they? I've often wondered whether this particular psychopathy is a pathological expression of entitlement/ privilege...

Dervel, you stated that violence is not innate because some people don't resort to it. You said that the root cause is environment. You really think it is that simple?

You can take examples of siblings - same parents, home environment, upbringing - and find that they have completely different temperaments. My anecdata - I have friends who are non-identical male twins. Absolute chalk and cheese in terms of temperament. Some people, due to their chemical make-up, are simply more even-tempered than others. I think we can learn a degree of control over these urges, but the fact that they are there at all tells me that nature plays a part.

There are many academic studies into the nature of violence. I don't think there is real agreement as to root cause. It is too complex an area.

Oh well I'm glad you confirmed my growing suspicion that there's no need to bother to engage with you Montmorency.

"Are you Borg?"

Or are you on glue?

The horrible truth is that it doesn't, or at least not more so than anything else in life. I'm just keeping myself active so my wits don't wholly atrophy. I'm here for quite selfish reasons, in other words. It's not so important that any of you learn something from me, as it is for your philosophical and worldly distinctiveness to be assimilated into my own.

Are you Borg?

Link to the devil's advocate thread.

Montmorency1 In that case might I recommend the inclusion of empathy and emotional intelligence into your larger philosophy and worldview?

Jeebus My assertion that violence is not innate stems from the simple observation that not all people are violent. It really is that simple. The question then becomes why are some people violent and others not?

The answer again is pretty simple: environment. As with a great deal of human behavior change the environment, change the behavior. Now of course you can point to the spectra of psychological and psychiatric disorders, which can of course lead to violent behavior and in those limited cases you could indeed view the violence as innate.

However going back the nominally healthy larger population you need to teach alternate strategies to conflict resolution and how to deal with negative emotions. The causes of violence are innate, but violence itself is merely one of many expressions of those causes. Taking the view that violence is the unavoidable nature of man robs us of the will and the insight to evolve past it.

Is this your preferred bedtime reading, Mont?

www.derailingfordummies.com

Yeah, not so much.

Don't worry, I get excited sometimes. It's normal.

"I still don't get whether or why any of this matters to you. "

The horrible truth is that it doesn't, or at least not more so than anything else in life. I'm just keeping myself active so my wits don't wholly atrophy. I'm here for quite selfish reasons, in other words. It's not so important that any of you learn something from me, as it is for your philosophical and worldly distinctiveness to be assimilated into my own.

My posts in the Libertarianism thread should give insight.

But we can still be friends, I hope.

Montmorency, I'm afraid I don't always understand you. I feel you're trying to impress and provoke as much as you are to engage. I accept that this is only my personal (mis)reading, but from your language and tone I still don't get whether or why any of this matters to you. Men's violence, and the argument that women's attitudes are in some way to blame for it, are not a game to me.

I have a totally different reading of my post that you reacted to. If the social order is "contested", if gender relations are "dynamic and conflictual", as I wrote, doesn't that imply there is space for resistance within patriarchy? I mean, dervel put it better, but I don't understand how you could translate what I wrote into your 1-6 post.

BillnTed:

Avoiding overlap with related schools of thought in the social justice sphere*:

1. Women are valued differently than men, and the ways in which they are valued are often underappreciated or minimized relative to the ways in which men are valued. Furthermore, these "feminine" valuations emphasize and compound the vulnerabilities of women.
2. a. Women must combine competence and privilege (along other axes) to a higher extent than men when it comes to obtaining authority or respect.

1. Sexual crimes against women are frequent even above the order of 'basic' harassment, yet are not well-investigated or adjudicated by our respected institutions. Further, lack of awareness combined with aforementioned cultural standards for women compound the severity of the victimization and help to prolong it far beyond the immediate trauma of the initial episode or episodes.

1. Women are encouraged to enter matronhood or "nurturing" professions from early childhood, thus perpetuating both stereotype and result and ensuring that women maintain less, even if slightly less, economic and legal clout

4. HETERO-SEX IS RAPE MAY SAPPHIC ARDOR SPRING ETERNAL

You get the idea, I hope. I don't disagree with most of the core feminist propositions. I just like to take what is best, and leave the dead-weight behind. To be uncharitable, I cherry-pick. To be fulsomely pompous, I formulate perspicacious nuance. shrug

*Post-colonialism, LGBT theory, various forms of economic populism, etc. are not inherently feminist, and present many distinct perspectives and desires that deserve separate classifications. While in contemporary times these areas of "social justice" tend to align and cooperate, this is not tautologically so, and in the past there was often sharp divergence between their activisms, memberships, and goals.

Dervel:

Violence is of course innate. Is not mobility innate? Is not the "Fight-or-Flight" response innate? Emotion does not lead to violence; rather, violence leads to emotion.

"however you can accept those as natural, but ensure that everybody is conditioned to accept them and work through them and express those feelings in non-violent ways. "

So you tacitly acknowledge that, as I said, socialization merely shapes [violence's] degree and manner of expression.

"Without picking apart your bullet points bit by bit you make the assumption that male dominance and control has 100% efficacy!"

That is the assumption I am in fact disassembling, as I can not imagine another rationalization or origin for the content of ezinma's post there.

"Feminists I think can be safe is saying that the patriarchy controls and dominates sufficiently that it adversely effects the well being and freedoms of women that we should consider dismantling it and reaching a more fair and equitable way of organising our society that it de-emphasises the wants and needs of men over women and brings the wants and needs of women into as close a parity as can be achieved within our complex system"

Hoo-boy. This is precisely what I've been urging since I entered the thread.

"You seem intelligent (or at the very least eloquent)"

Well, Hitler was eloquent, as you know.

"but I worry you have just created a simple straw man of feminist theory."

At worst, a strawman of ezinma's personal feminism. That post was entirely a reaction to ezinma's post.

Dervel, I am interested in your assertion that violence is not innate. What makes you say that?

Montmorency1 I'm sorry but the whole of that last post is flawed beyond belief.

First of all violence is NOT innate, the emotions that lead to violence are. Anger and fear being the prime candidates, violence is but one of the socialised expressions of those emotions. I fear you are trying to lump expression and cause and just because anger and fear are inevitable so to therefore would be violence. Yes we can all experience anger or fear (and such is inevitable), however you can accept those as natural, but ensure that everybody is conditioned to accept them and work through them and express those feelings in non-violent ways. As a side note repression is not a good strategy as that leads to depression.

Without picking apart your bullet points bit by bit you make the assumption that male dominance and control has 100% efficacy! I think it is a truth self evident that man does not not have either total comprehension of his environment nor control of it, so therefore his control over said environment (and by extensions the spheres in which women must occupy to be controlled) cannot therefore be 100% effective.

Feminists I think can be safe is saying that the patriarchy controls and dominates sufficiently that it adversely effects the well being and freedoms of women that we should consider dismantling it and reaching a more fair and equitable way of organising our society that it de-emphasises the wants and needs of men over women and brings the wants and needs of women into as close a parity as can be achieved within our complex system (or in laymans terms we may not be able to achieve perfect utopia, but making the attempt at one leaves us better off than had we not made the attempt).

You seem intelligent (or at the very least eloquent) but I worry you have just created a simple straw man of feminist theory. Reading between the lines I am guessing you do not like the feminist view of patriarchy if that is the case what in your estimation is the causation of women's oppression and what can be done to correct it?

Mont

Out of idle curiosity, which parts of feminism do you think feminists are getting right?

Men's privilege is not absolute, and neither is women's oppression, I guess.

I don't like the term patriarchy for various reasons, but whatever you want to call our social system, I think of it as a sliding scale - oppression on one end, total privilege at the other. We all sit somewhere on the scale, depending on a multitude of factors, not just gender. I think this is why class analysis, which is so fundamental to feminism, is also a bit of a head-scratcher.

By the way, Mont, I think you may have an accusation of 'don't tell us how to do feminism' zinging its way towards you - time for the tin hat

I reject that. As I said earlier, less power is not equivalent to no power. To suggest that women do not shape the patriarchy, that women exist in a vacuum separate from men into which 'male oppression and socialization' simply emerge deus ex machina is simply beneath entertaining.

At any rate, violence in itself is innate, just as musical perception and production emerges directly from the functional organization of the human central nervous system, in particular the auditory pathways. Socialization merely shapes its degree and manner of expression. To maintain otherwise quickly returns one to the problem of First Cause...

The cherry however is the unwitting hypocrisy. Behold:

1. Women are utterly held in thrall by men, and so all socialization of women must be predicated on male values and power.
2. Changing women's values or behavior is pointless at best, impossible at worst, since men enforce it all.
3. Women must implement action of some sort aimed at changing men.

1. Once women have succeeded and broken the patriarchy, men and women should have equal autonomy and equal socializing effect upon one another.
2. Wait a darned second, if all female attitudes used to be determined by the patriarchy and yet causally-inert with respect to the patriarchy, now that women are equal and have causal efficacy towards the attitudes of men, wouldn't women's attitudes have remained unchanged up to the point of liberation?
3. a. Patriarchal women contaminate the 'neutered' men with the patriarchal value-system.
4. Never-ending revolution...

This logically-incoherent maximalism is not something the feminist movement should not tolerate or encourage.

"Male violence" sounds an awful lot like "black crime".

No it doesn't.

Your functionalism is blinding you to the impact of power on class relations. The social order is contested at every level. Yes, classes exist in relation to one another, but the relationship is dynamic and conflictual.

Women's "attitudes", eg to violence, are drawn up within the framework of patriarchy — a system which privileges men and oppresses women. You say women are "closely integrated with the function of men". A feminist view would be that women's autonomy is subjugated to the functions that men put them to. Violence — which is coded as a male activity, which men are socialised to enact, deploy and withstand among themselves — is one of the principal facilitators of this subjugation.