Was Greer Right When She Said Men Hate Women?

Of course it doesn’t but it’s changing and I’d say it’s changing quite fast.

There are lots of privileges both men and women have. I am not about to list them here. Google it.

One i experience my job quite often is the assumption that because I’m Male then I’m automatically viewed as a threat to the degree that if I’m walking down a street at night and there is a lone female in front of me, I will cross over so she doesn’t feel threatened. So your privilege in this respect is not to be seen as a threat.

Then you of course realise your personal situation does not reflect society at large? What privilege do you speak of?

Ifnot interesting and yes, a very depressing read.

Lettuce do you recognise your privilege at all?

Personally I am the one in the family who is the primary Carer, I left my job to support my wife firstly through berievment and then dropped down to part time to be the mostly stay at home parent whilst my wife continues her career.

I agree that assumptions are made of women just as assumptions are made of men. I could give you examples but I doubt you want to know.
Personally I don’t really take notice of assumptions and just try to do what’s right for my family.

I see it more as men being scared of being treated like women are being treated ie glass ceiling, lower pay etc. Or that they are being called up on their treatment of women. Even otherwise completely nice men can still have very suppressive views for example that their job or career is more important than that of their wife. I do think it is getting better nowadays though but still so much to do.

IfNot - I completely agree. And it is depressing.

Ray is providing a decent demonstration right here of how men just don't notice that women are "lesser" in society. Ray is trying to insist that there is a parity between women and most men who don't have power - and misses the point spectacularly.

The Labour Party is doing the same with it's brocialists - lefty men with no clue of the systemic disadvantage women face in society because they have never experienced it.

Simply not true Ray, the patriarchy is a system where all men, regardless of class have power over women and children ...because you are male it will automatically be your right to shag as many women as you want, women don't get to do that without scorn or judgement. It will be assumed that you won't have to take time off your career if you become a parent, it will most likely be women who take on caring responsibilites generally. You most likely won't be accused of being hormonal or ditsy, so no Ray I don't accept you have no power because you absolutely do!

Going back to caring and nurturing.

I think the issue is Men as a class don't "care about caring". I dont think we ever will to same extent as women. I think men are generally more selfish.

When it comes to elderly relatives etc, women do take on a lot of those roles as they genuinely care.

They could stop, but men as a class wouldn't pick up the load.

I think men and women are groomed to hate women from day 1. You only have to look at newspapers like the Mail, and the way they both fetishise women's bodies, and despise everything women do(complain about sexual assault, fail to be good enough wives or mothers, get older..)
Our whole media is seeped in disdain for women and girls.

And the myths are very pervasive. I have had men tell me that women don't want child support because it means they get less tax credits. That it's common for women to block men from having contact with their kids. That women cheat and lie, that they secretly hate each other (see! They cant even agree on a feminist forum!). Popular TV hosts like Matthew Wright are forever sneering and crowing about "the sisterhood" when women disagree.
Women are barely portrayed in most films, unless specifically "Women's films".
Films that we think of as neutral (not action movies)may actually have a cast of 8 men and 1 or 2 women. Men are over and over portrayed as the default humans.
Women are Lesser is woven into the fabric of our entire culture.
Men don't notice it, because it doesn't affect them adversely.
Women don't want to believe it, and look for exceptions to prove they are really valued. (Which they sometimes are by their own men).
It's easy to hate a class of people you have been subtly trained to despise by everything around you since childhood.

I agree that the Internet is showing just how deep this goes, and is probably perpetuating it.
God I have just depressed myself!

Re caring responsibilities, it would help enormously if ministers who think that society has got "too selfish" and should care more for the elderly within families would recognise that this responsibility overwhelmingly falls to women [DM link warning]

Because lettuce all men don’t have the power (which has been my point all along) a tiny minority of men have the power. The rest of us, men and women are just fighting for the scraps.

Ray, I tend to agree with you that we would all be better to get our heads together and tackle the issues. It does seem to me that those in power have more to gain while we little cogs are busy squabbling amongst ourselves.

Ray, how is it demonising each other when it is men who have the most power? When it is men who overwhelmingly abuse, rape and assault? Until you accept you have privilege and power nothing will change. Do you understand your privilege?

“How do we tackle it though? Where do we even start?”

By working together maybe. Loved your last post.

I started following these boards as I have an interest in society and wanted to understand feminism and get my head around it. I’m learning a lot (good and bad).

It does seem that the powerful prefer to keep us at each other’s throats.

I guess when I started reading this thread it just seemed like an attack on men as a group and tbh from some of the posters, it clearly was.

Only when we all start working together can we force change. If we keep demonising each other we will continue to go around in circles.

Not really, no.

None so blind as those who won't see!

In my full matriarchy, the tax and cash transfer system would have non-gendered allowances for caring responsibilities - children, older relatives, disabled relatives. Remunerated caring careers would be given better wages and higher status (Labour's National Care Service is a great idea, I think). And each individual would make a free choice between pursuing a high paid career that used high quality care services employing decently paid and qualified people, and doing it themselves without being consigned to penury.

The problem is that economists and policy makers cannot conceptualise value outside of GDP. I suppose, in many ways, what radical feminism actually is, is anti-capitalist. Because it gives equal value to the monetised and non-monetised aspects of the care economy.

Apologies for autocorrect.

Recently I have read Mary Beard's Women and Power which details the silencing of women who want to enter the power sphere of society since classical times. I have also read Mary Shelloyds and her mother Mary Wollstencraft's biography about creative women wanting to be valued equally. I've also read Rose McGowan's Brave about cult exploitation of children and women, and men to some extent.

It all points to our culture of exploitation.

I also read something about a quaker guy who experienced exploitation of women and back then slaves aswell as animals so became an abolitionist, feminist and vegetarian.

What I'm trying to day is I think it's a massive problem and the route of it is exploiting others by the few to maintain the few. I think we're on the brink of deciding which way we go. All of us. Do we carry on our do we change it to make everyone, men women and children across all countries equal in value and stop all the exploitation whether it be justified by sex, gender or age.

If we tackle all of it add unacceptable then the ones who benefit from it can't split us off and say it's about women and we should basically know our place out gaslight us.

How do we tackle it though? Where do we even start?

Not really, no.

Lol. Another satisfied customer...

They should not have to say no- care should be valued higher to the extent that people should be rewarded for providing it and if they do not provide it themselves I still would have said no even if I'd been offered a large financial reward.

Hopefully now though you are able to see that radfem is not incompatible with being a SAHM Not really, no.

Why I came on this thread in the first place I don't known. I very rarely post on this part of the forum, only if a general thread title pops up that may interest me. They drain me. So I'm off. Sorry if I didn't respond to anyone quoting me.
You all have strength within. Best wishes.

Yes the focus is on property and assets because our society is based on making assets for the top. Therefore we are stuck believing assets = value or worth. That's why sahp aren't valued by others and themselves. Because they aren't accruing wealth their value is in what they save. Or it's linked to their partner's assets via marriage. Or if they're a lone sahp they are supported by the state.
We need to change that way of thinking. The value of a sahp is in their care of their child and the household and that's not measurable in financial terms and that's OK.

Money is an imaginary concept of I owe yous and is not the be all and end all of life. We're just conditioned to think it is.

The idea that radical feminism is somehow against stay at home mothers because radical feminists say they want to dismantle gender (an oppressive set of sex stereotypes) is, frankly, a complete crock of shit and utter (and wilful) misrepresentation of radical feminism.

Exactly.

Actually, that point about marriage versus mothering as the focus of the state is very much to the point, I think.

Historically (and even now in terms of what it offers over simply cohabiting), marriage is ultimately about property rights and ownership (no longer the literal owning of women, but it's a financial contract about who owes what to whom, who gets what in the event of a split or death, what inheritance rights the children get by default). Mothering is about looking after a new, vulnerable human being.

At the moment, law and public policy and politics tend to focus more on property than on people. Particularly female people (low convictions for rape and sexual assault being a prime example). A radical feminist analysis would say the public sphere has got the emphasis wrong.

Women are fearful of saying 'no' because of immense social pressure. But we should of course feel able to have the choice without anxiety. We're so deeply conditioned we don't even realise it's going on all over the place in every aspect of our lives. And when we meet it and realise we're being exploited it makes us feel both angry and powerless. We have to find a way to sort out societies exploitation of all peoples so that none of it is acceptable anymore.

Not easy no but not impossible. So you're saying that saying no means a women would have a heart of stone, thanks for that.

No, and I apologise if that's what you think. The point is that you may feel able to say no, but others do not. They should not have to say no- care should be valued higher to the extent that people should be rewarded for providing it and if they do not provide it themselves, there should be an appropriate and reliable state funded alternative. The onus should be on the state to provide this- it should not be on the women themselves to say no, because often they can't.

Hopefully now though you are able to see that radfem is not inherently incompatible with being a SAHM and that radfems are not out to 'get' women who care for children at home. Many radfems argue that mothering and other caring relationships should be the focus of state policy. Instead, our society focuses heavily on sexual relationships, e.g. marriage and the gender roles involved in that. Those gender roles serve an important purpose because they ensure that care remains undervalued and unpaid and performed nearly exclusively by women. That's why feminists want to break them down.

"Nowdays, when you read MN you have plenty of women saying it’s a bad idea, what about pensions, your financial independence etc... being a WHOM is seeing as normal when it wasn’t 15 years ago."

It's important to distinguish "is" from "ought" in this sort of discussion, I think.

In society as it is currently constituted, where there is bugger all social security safety net for women, and no such thing as alimony, and the stats show overwhelmingly that women come out of divorce worse off than men, then it is a bad idea to be financially dependent on a man.

Of course it ought to be possible to restructure society so that it isn't.

How about, for instance, when a couple decide to have a child, both parents are required to put a certain portion of their income/savings into a fund to be held in case they split up (kind of like escrow), and to be used to support the parent (mother 90% of the time) doing the bulk of the child care until the child is of school age? Then leaning heavily on employers to consider making a proportion of their jobs "school hours only" (because a major thing that stops women going back into work when their children start school is a structural issue of not enough part-time jobs being available 9.30 to 3.00pm).

I'm not saying this is a "good" solution (it's the first example that popped into my head), simply that it's a different solution to the options currently on the table, and an example of the sort of thinking that might allow one to say "look, society as it is currently set up isn't working for women - so let's move the goal posts instead of constantly telling women it's their fault".

I’m not sure if you realise how selfish you come across. What, for saying I have strength and say no.

you, as an individual, isn’t important here Yes I am important and so are the other women on this thread and the wider world. Stop trying to belittle an individual from feeling strength. A group can't feel strength if the individuals within that group feel weak.