Feminism, whats the goal?

No, male violence is framed as the problem. Women have to live their lives around managing a risk they have no control over.

....as 'white culture' is framed as the main stumbling block for the liberation of black people.

So I'm interested in why you see 'male violence' as an ideological statement rather than a factual description

Because it is an ideological framing and naming of what is considered to be the main issue; the thing to be overcome. Ideological frameworks tend to rely on an essential opposition. Males, in feminism, are framed as 'the problem' per se.

How is 'male violence' nebulous? It's pretty well documented as a real, material phenomenon, isn't it? Two women a week die at the hands of males - is there a better description than 'male violence' for this? What ideological work do you think the term 'male violence' is doing? I am genuinely struggling to understand your point of view.

Male violence is one of the barriers to true equality.

It’s a very different term to white privilege which is a rather nebulous concept

I wonder if someone will be along fairly soon to tell you that whilst you may think that white privilege is " just a nebulous concept" is because you benefit from it. That's because what you preach is just " White Feminism"

'Male violence' is no more or less nebulous than 'White privilege' or 'White feminism' - as each term seeks to define and encapsulate what they think the main issue is; the issue that prevents realisation of 'true equality'.

In recent times I've been shaken free of various fixed positions.
Thats an illusion, you have moved to a new fixed position, which is 'I am anti ideology', and you frequently dismiss discussions because you view them as based on ideology, not fact.

You accept 'men are more violent than women' as a fact but object to the descriptive term 'male violence' as you see it as an ideology, not a descriptor.
What term would you use instead? How should women talk about male pattern violence?

'Male violence' is factual, isn't it? I don't see it as ideological. It reflects the statistical data. Females can be violent but generally speaking are not the problem. I don't see anything wrong or ideological about using a factual, descriptive term.

I think I probably agree with you, Just, that there are ideological frameworks within feminism that we may unthinkingly default to and which are not useful or reflective of reality. 'Male privilege' I think is one that I would question, for example. So I'm interested in why you see 'male violence' as an ideological statement rather than a factual description.

Long post, Just that does nothing to explain why the term ‘male violence’ is in any way similar to ‘white privilege’.

Don’t be daft. You admit that there is an issue that the vast majority of violent crimes are committed by men (and not just crimes but violence in general). This is a real problem that needs to be named so that it can be tackled

Is it really necessary that you resort to calling people 'daft' because they don't view things in the exact way you think they should?

You cannot see a framework when you are thinking and operating and based on its precepts. In recent times I've been shaken free of various fixed positions. Partly as a result of all of the identity wars surrounding Brexit; partly because of what has been happening with Momentum/ the Labour party; partly because of the rise of identity politics, and in particular gender ideology; but also because iIve been posting and reading on here for a couple of years and can recognise that feminism also channels its conceptions of the world through a very particular framework, along with adherence to its very own articles of faith.

Like any other political movement feminism is seeking a better world, one that never quite arrives. Human relations are complex, and there is no no one right solution or one right way of understanding human relations.

And the thing with ‘violence against women’ is that it ignores that men are frequently violent against other men too.

The common factor is the sex of the perpetrator.

I had a man ask me once if I could talk about ‘violent people’ instead of ‘violent men’ as talking about male violence stigmatised men. Because that’s the real problem?!

I think that rhetorically it is useful to specify the 'male' in male violence, because otherwise you have 'violence against women', a term in which the perpetrator's role is invisibilised. I don't think it suggests all males are violent but it does shift the focus from 'women' to 'males' - which I think is a useful rhetorical strategy to support campaigns against such violence.

I wouldn't lump it in with terms like white or male privilege. I think the intersectional/privilege model of looking at the world is the most damaging thing to ever happen to civil rights movements, especially to feminism.

Don’t be daft. You admit that there is an issue that the vast majority of violent crimes are committed by men (and not just crimes but violence in general). This is a real problem that needs to be named so that it can be tackled.

White privilege or cis privilege or able privilege or whatever is a way of trying to get people to think about disadvantages and barriers faced by other groups of people instead of calling it, say, ‘black disadvantage’ and making it a problem for the other group that the first group can simply ignore. OR it can be seen as a way for woke people to self-flagellate and make something about them and do nothing to address disadvantage but make sad YouTube videos where they tearfully acknowledge their privilege and claim to be terrible people for having it.

Entirely different concepts.

The adoption and rigid application of structural ideologies results in terms such as 'Cis privilege' 'Male Violence, 'White Privilege'. When you cease to frame the world in a particular way, your view of it changes.

You agree that male violence is an issue but you don’t want it called male violence? What then? It’s a very different term to white privilege which is a rather nebulous concept

I think they are two sides of a similar coin.

You agree that male violence is an issue but you don’t want it called male violence? What then?

It’s a very different term to white privilege which is a rather nebulous concept.

The use of such blanket terminology just shores up division and polarisation and is not particularly helpful.

Why are you so determined to minimise the issue of male violence (with no evidence except your own opinion it seems) and pretend there are no structural inequalities to overcome

I have come to have an issue with blanket terms as 'Male Violence' or 'White Privilege' . I don't deny violence exists at all, or that males carry out most/much of it.

So when you say creche care, what do you mean?
I mean, children playing and spending more time together in multi family groups, supervised by one of their parents or by an older sibling.
As opposed to this quite intense at home in one family construct in place today.
I know the busy roads don't help, but I don't think children have enough freedom to grow and develop social relations today

[quote WinterAndRoughWeather]@Justhadathought

You’re completely ignoring what I’m arguing about violence.

I’m not talking about aggression, or anger. I’m not arguing that male violence is a product of the patriarchy.

I’m talking about anthropological studies in great ape populations that have observed gratuitous violence, serving no imperative or purpose. Violence that is dangerous to the females of the group.

There is evidence - not just in humans - that destructive, pointless male violence is a real thing. Collective action by females in humans and bonobos has controlled it to an extent.[/quote]
I don't know that anyone has missed what you are saying, but it's not clear what your point really is.

No one has suggested saying that it is just ok for men (or anyone else) to be violent. No one things it should be made legal, or socially acceptable.

I would wager too that everyone thinks that social structures and beliefs that minimise that behaviour are a good idea.

I don't know what it is you are saying people are supposed to be ok with.

Only to a point. Mother-father-child is not a construct, it's the foundational triad of human existence. Even in the few examples where children depended more on uncles than fathers, it still bound men and women together to care for children. Historically that's been far more embedded, most of the time, in larger structures of extended family and community. That it isn't now is in part down to increased wealth, and largely down to the requirements of the movable labour force, it's quite interesting to see how that is reflected within different types of communities and social classes in the west.

But this idea that you can just mandate men to take on half of the childcare and, presumably, women to take up the paid work? Even if many women didn't want to care for their babies, or weren;t tied down by feeding, it has so many limits. Some jobs are dangerous, some jobs are physically demanding, some jobs require weird hours or travel. Women who are heavily pregnant are not working on a fishing boat, women who are pregnant at all, are not going overseas as soldiers to fight in wars, many mums with small kids are not usually going to want to be away half the year in their job, many women find the after-effects of pregnancy impact them physically in ways that make a difference in their work if it is physically demanding.

If a family is a fishing family, and we are having several children, are we really expecting the pregnant mother is the one going to be on the boats while the father watches the toddler at home? Probably not.

These kinds of physical differences will always result in imbalances in the workforce, and different choices about who will have the main career, and who won't, in some families.

It would be interesting to hear other women's perspectives, especially mothers, as I've read posts here before from some about how much they preferred to be at home with their baby rather than rush back to work (which seems like a perfectly unsurprising and natural response to me). But maybe that's best left for a different thread rather than derailing the conversations in this one. Anyway just felt like I had to comment on that point as I thought the cultural differences in the role of motherhood were interesting.

FWIW, I have four kids, from 3 to 15, and I agree with you. I don't think trying to socially engineer mothers and fathers into identical roles, in search of some abstract ideal of equality, is particularly desirable or even possible. As soon as you consider breastfeeding as being an ideal from a health and resource perspective it becomes patently crazy - even if the mother pumps that is a lot of work that can't be turned over to the father. Recommendations to breastfeed are typically about two years though it becomes much less intense a job over time.

The idea of requiring shared parental leave kind of gives me the rage, to me what it says ultimately is that infant-care isn't considered real work that's worthy of respect, because it often has something to do with women.

A lot of this comes out of a way of thinking that sees widespread employment for wages of the able-bodies as the assumed norm, and doesn't consider a more holistic view of economy might be a better answer. Nor that trapping women into the proletariat just like men might have more to do with benefiting capital than benefiting either women or workers more generally.

Also, this idea that men "should" do more domestic work. Sure. But who's going to make them?

There are actually two things here --- how do you get your individual chap to do more (assuming you're heterosexual), versus how do we get males in society as a whole to do more? Well, laws aren't going to do the whole job, although altering the parental leave situation might. It needs changes in society, as well as possibly a change and a different structure of society, perhaps. But you can't get started unless you realise that it is an enormous advantage for men individually and men as a whole that women do this stuff. It's not just your individual nuclear family, or your extended family, it's your work situation that expects women to be there so chaps can do as required at work. A 'solution' that means working women pay for the labour of poorer women isn't a solution. it's just shifting things around between women. Just as surrogacy does. I'm rich, do you can do my female labour for me.

Which akes perhaps lesbian couples an interesting case study (or at least lesbian couples that were around when I was a few years younger). How to you arrange things when potentially both of you can bear children?

In fact I don't think the idea that we should change it through drugs, or making sure society doesn't require strong people, or somehow making infant care for men easier through artificial baby formula, should be integral to it.

I see all that as an aside. A really radical women's movement would be valid in every time and place, under any technological conditions. Because it would be about a society that treated men and women with equal dignity, and acknowledged their fundamental personhood. And that would also mean understanding that men and women, and also children, have different calls on their bodies, and time and attention, and that needs to be accommodated.

What that will look like concretely would be different depending on where you live - there isn't going to be one right answer. If you are in London working in an office it might not be the same as rural Mongolia, or even the same as something like the fishing industry in a modern industrialised country.

The most important element to me is probably political representation. So voting, and also potentially going pretty far to make politics something women can enter - though I think part of that in our society might be acknowledging that some, or many, may do so a bit later in life after having kids. (In fact I think something we would do well to think about is to make it more acceptable for women to have kids on the earlier side and start a career afterward, rather than having kids after establishing a career. Which would require some changes possibly to education and funding of it, and some changes in attitudes.)

This creche care though. When I've seen it in other countries it only works because there's this massive class of poor women who work as domestic staff on low salaries. Their lives aren't great, and it's common for them to leave their own children somewhere else so they can take care of richer women's children. Or, the other women are relatives of the family who don't have work to go to who come and live in to care for children.

None of that is a demonstration of women's liberation. It's the opposite. It only works because women are poor or without opportunities. So when you say creche care, what do you mean?

Also, this idea that men "should" do more domestic work. Sure. But who's going to make them? That idea about picking a man who will before you procreate requires women to have supernatural powers of seeing into the future, and anyway its no help at all to women whose baby daddies don't help out. They can't go back in time and change them.