To lol at the feminism threads....

[Hannah4banana]

Seriously are people constantly looking out for a way to be offended first world problems!

"Take a leaf from Asia Ramazan Antar's book. Died at 22 wielding a heavy MG fighting her oppressors. Better role model than a sheltered middle class feminist whining about the colour pink"

Now I may be wrong, but this looks very much to me like you are encouraging British women to shoot men with machine guns? [confusing]

Sorry meant 'ended up on the streets'

No user the difference is that you had some support, a safety net.

People who end up homeless don't have this, for a myriad of reasons.

My point exactly Boundaries. My point exactly.

larrygrylls
"Why is gender a social construct? One day old babies exhibit gendered behaviour based on their sex. It is a real stretch to say it is conditioning."
That sounds quite interesting, and I don't remember hearing anything about that when I studied child development (although, that was a fair few years ago ). Could you provide a linky please, or even just point me in the rough direction of where to look? Ta.

user: not capable of empathy. We default to empathy. Most of us. No, there is not a 'human tendency to abuse power'. Some individuals have a tendency to abuse power. Most people find it difficult to empathise in the abstract. The conjunction of these last two sentences in addition to certain economic and political crises points is a fairly good explanation for mass atrocities.
Are you actually going to present any peer reviewed studies on your human nature to abuse power, or just keep repeating your opinion?

Beyond you are wrong. My point is they are better role models. While Dworkin or Greer were by the cosy fireplace writing their books, Malala and Asia were lucky to even see a book or writing equipment. I know who the better role models are

Well amisparticus, may I challenge you're actually very Daily Mail/Norman Tebbit 'they're just too bloody lazy to work' argument with my own personal experience

Are you telling me that that would have been my fault because I didn't apply for enough jobs as a cleaner

You said that male homelessness could be related due to a lack of 'male' jobs. I replied and told you about a survey which showed men were reluctant to apply for jobs such as cleaning and supermarket work as they were perceived as 'female jobs'.

You applied - and got rejected. Discrimination exists. I am sure that discriminaton does exist - age and yes - sex as well.

Which is why we need feminism - it is not about women 'being equal' as such. It's about the whole system. So boys don't see things as being 'male; to ensure that boys and men see themselves as able to do things women do etc.

I know about discrimination. I know how hard it can be and how vulnerable you can feel.

A lot needs to be done to break down the stereotypes. To make boys and men escape the 'this is what a man does'.

Women are doing it. Are men doing it?

So women that kill their abusive partners are better role models than those that campaign foe womens rights.
OK. got that, thanks for teaching us.

Oo, I got a direct reply rather than more chatbot gobbledegook!! 😮

We live in a patriarchy, a society in which men are the default human. Under patriarchy men, as a class have greater power and privilege over women as a class. This does not mean that all men have greater power than all women. The idea that if some men are more disadvantaged than some women we can ignore systematic inequality is absurd. I have never heard any feminist claim that all individual women are worse off than all individual men. No. It's a class analysis.

A useful comparison is race. The highest position in the USA is the President. The current President is black. There are literally hundreds of millions of white Americans with less power and influence than their black President. There are also plenty of wealthy, high status African Americans. None of this means that racism isn't a huge problem in the USA. It is, but, just as with feminism, you clarify and can examine the situation through class analysis.

The fact that there are plenty of homeless men doesn't mean that our patriarchal system doesn't treat women worse than it does men. If you analyze earnings, the relative numbers of men and women in positions of power (judges, for example) and various other metrics it's very obvious that women are still not equal here, and that the situation is very dramatically unjust in other parts of the world.

Well that conjunction constitutes the tendency then. That is the origin of the tendency.

I think we're arguing over what a tendency is. I mean it as just that - as one of the things that people tend to do when exercising power is abuse it and lose empathy. Just like there is a tendency for it to rain more in January. It doesn't necessarily mean they will, just as rainfall may not be very high every January.

I don't know what you want me to produce as evidence. You can't evidence observations about human nature with a data subset.

DJ? What you on about?

My role models are the women who speak out about issues.
Malala put herself on the line. I am astonished at her bravery.

In the UK, feminists aren't killed for speaking out about issues. They are threatened with rape, attacked online, harassed, stalked etc but not killed. (I think Jo Cox was a political murder - was her being female just making her more likely to be attacked).

Any feminist who speaks out is a role model. I wish I had their guts.

Missswatch

Maybe you'd care to explain your point better.
What is, in your opinion, a good feminist model?
What are we, as feminists, do to show we are feminists and fight the good battle?

I'm not so sure that feminists don't get killed for standing up for themselves.
So many women are killed by their partners because they didn't submit to them. Surely that's on a par with Malala being shot for going to school.

Women in the west often risk their lives when leaving partners and there's very little protection.

Brave women who refuse to be nothing but equals.

Ĺweji. By promoting ME fighting women as take no shit kinda people. That this is what they must resort to

bardolino I think larrygrylls is referring to this study: www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/godis/sex.pdf

You can't evidence observations about human nature with a data subset.

I agree. Therefore, one cannot use assertions about human nature as evidence. And they are assertions, even though you present them as 'observations'. Data is not the plural of anecdote.

Anyway I'm signing off now. User I suspect our politics are not massively opposed (I would never call a Thatcherite a feminist, whatever she calls herself) but I do not understand your blindness to the structural oppression of women. Men can be oppressed. But they are not oppressed for being men.

Ĺweji. By promoting ME fighting women as take no shit kinda people. That this is what they must resort to

What do you mean by promoting?
What about service women? Aren't they take no shit kind of people?

We need all kinds of role models. Intelectual, take a gun and fight, fight the everyday small battles. All are valid and necessary role models.

I consider myself a worthy feminist role model to my son, in my daily life. Why shouldn't I be as valid as a woman who had to take up guns to defend her life and her family?

Feminism is not about guns or violence. It can be, but feminism is for ordinary life most and foremost.

ah, this has been fun, but I think missswatch has given me a full house on my Troll Bingo Card by now so I'm off.

Usually trolls' intentions are to derail threads with clearly inflammatory or disingenuous statements, to move discussion points away from the original goals (this was what trolling originally meant) so it warms my heart slightly that this has been a massive failure on those fronts - many brilliant arguments showing that feminism is alive and well and reinforcing my beliefs.

Prawn there is much I agree with there, but I never suggested that systemic gender equality be ignored, only that gendered power relations have to be looked at in an economic context and an intersectional one. Otherwise the whole thing makes no sense at all.

Of course the higher echelons of politics and business are male dominated, and that is wrong. Clinton should have won over that baboon. But most of us do not exist in that world; and in some areas of life it is actually an economic and social advantage to be a woman rather than man.

Women are sexually subjugated; young men face in the West face more poverty; black men face more poverty still; women are more likely to be raped; men are more likely to be murdered. Women find it easier to get bottom end jobs; men get all the top jobs.

It's a dynamic, shifting complex of power with stratifications within stratifications - not a binary oppressor/oppressed dialectic. And therefore it is possible to be a man and have no power or privilege at all.

That day-old baby experiment is discussed in Fine's Delusions of Gender, the conclusions to be drawn from it aren't as quite as simple as "day old babies demonstrate sex-differentiated social behaviour".

iloveeverycat Ok so no assertions about human nature can be made by anyone then. That's the whole history of philosophy and psychology written off then. Thanks. If only you were around to tell the Greeks not to bother starting the whole thing off eh?