Still confused about patriarchy

[PixelZing]

What's the feminist take on the fact that, even if we live in such patriarchy, the attention given to issues affecting men/boys is insignificant compared to the same attention given to issues of women/girls?

The list of such issues seems pretty long to me (paternity leave, family court bias, domestic abuse shelters, unequal sentencing, workplace fatalities, due process for false accusations, under-representation in HEAL, men's health funding, suicide rates, homelessness, ...) so I'd say there is plenty to advocate about.

(and BTW I don't even understand why we clump men and boys in the same category, wouldn't be more humane to put boys in the same category of women/girls, since they are affected by similar problems that affect girls?)

Let's make it a default 50:50 and both parents cover costs equally?

Full-time carers cannot cover any costs. Dependent spouses (male or female) have to keep the breadwinner happy or risk destitution. This gives the breadwinner control.

Are you advocating for mothers to be able to work if they want to, and to keep their earnings through state childcare, and so to turn family life into an equal arrangement? If so, then welcome on board the equality-train. It’s a wild ride.

I'm advocating either we live as couples and it's up to each to work out what works best for them.

Or on divorce care is and costs are 50:50, mum and dad both have an equal opportunity to work / earn.

And why might it be, do you suppose, that most families through history have not lived like that?

Because until yesterday, women didn’t have any education (take a bow, feminism)?

Because until the day before yesterday, married women couldn’t own property (take another bow, feminism)?

Because today, childcare is prohibitively expensive (feminists are working on that one)?

Because for many, divorce is also prohibitively expensive (see above)?

It’s almost as though feminism exists for a reason.

A lot of what you've stated doesn't really match historical fact.

In the 1700's the working class account for about 90% of the population, by the late 1800's this had dropped to about 80%. Before the The Elementary Education Act of 1870 most of these people had little or no formal education. It wasn't for another 10 years when it became mandatory that education become widespread. So a more honest description is until yesterday no one had education.

Property is a similar story, in the 1700's around 5% of working class people owned land or property growing to about 10% by the 1900's. It wasn't until the Housing Act of 1918 that things began to change. So again, a more accurate description is that no one owned property until very recently.

I get that feminists like to pit women against men but in truth we were all equally screwed until very recently in historical terms.

Men were educated into trades and guilds, which women were not allowed to join. If they did work, they were limited to very low pay. Those who had to support themselves often resorted to selling their bodies.

And any working-class man could, if he happened to rise up socially, own property. Google 'Marquis of Granby' pubs, it's an interesting story. Meanwhile no married woman, of any class, could own anything.

Motherhood imposed, and often still does impose, a state of complete dependency. This is the crux of male control of women.

What feminists often get wrong, and what I suspect angers you, is the idea that men designed all of this out of deliberate hostility to women.

They didn't. It's simply the outcome of an economy that doesn't reward caregiving relative to other forms of work.

Wouldn't it be better if we all got together and fixed this, rather than attacking one another?

Having done a faire bit of reading my view is men and women scraped through an awful lot of very tough times by working as a team. For some reason there has been a lot of effort put in to divide and conquer of the sexes.

Yes men could buy property theoretically, but they didn't.......

A team on which one player had no vote, could not assume political leadership, was instructed by the church to obey her husband (read Paul's letter to the Ephesians), and was liable to be infected with syphilis by her husband: endemic in the nineteenth century. Some team.

That’s a cherry-picked half of the story. Yes, historically, wives were expected to obey their husbands, but if we're cherry-picking, we should also note that husbands were expected to go to war if needed. Meanwhile, women could shame men, sometimes even 14-year-old boys, by handing them white feathers to label them as cowards if they didn’t enlist to fight in WW1 and die in the trenches. Some of those boys caved to the pressure, enlisted, and never returned.
See: https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/the-haunting-story-of-the-fourteen-year-old-boy-who-went-to-war-and-never-returned/

We're talking about adult women publicly shaming teenage boys for not being willing to die in a war. It was a different social equilibrium, one that is often reframed today as purely one-sided oppression. The same oversimplification can be seen in how domestic violence is discussed today, where it's conveniently hidden that studies show around 70% of inter-partner violence is initiated by women.

The law of coverture meant that men owned women. Women lost their rights as an individual once married and needed their husband' s permission to study or work.

They couldn't inherit and their children belonged to their husband.It's only relatively recently that rape in marriage was made illegal. You're saying that handing out white feathers is the equivalent?

Crime statistics on domestic abuse don't back up your claim about women being the primary instigator. Men are almost 100% responsible for the majority of sexual abuse and violent crime including homicide.

Childbirth was pretty dangerous too. No medals for that.

The position you want to challenge is that idea that all men have easier lives than all women. Disproving that, as you have shown, is easy.

What feminism seeks to remedy is male control of women. As you say: 50:50 is the best way. Can’t we all work toward that, rather than pinging the cut & paste gotchas?

How does that work in a society where the woman/wife/mother both starts and ends at an economic disadvantage? It needs a wholesale restructuring of society.

It does, and it’s already approaching. Think of all the things we take for granted that were once unimaginable: clean water, anaesthesia & mass literacy to name just three of them.

Then as now, people said it could never be done, would cost too much, wasn’t needed - and yet no society that took on those innovations has ever returned to life without them.

Then as now likewise, some countries got there first, and showed it could be done. The Scandies have fixed the childcare issue: good luck telling Sven or Oskar at the school gates that they aren’t real men.

Hectoring women about the dangers of feminism just doesn’t look very convincing any more. Man up xxx

Why do you feel women are at an economic disadvantage?

@aylis didn't say that women are at an economic disadvantage. They said that the woman/wife/mother, in a relationship, has a disadvantage: the issue is the economics of care.

The fantastic performance of girls at school and of child-free women in the workplace is often used to counter the feminist case, when in fact it strengthens it. Without feminism, girls wouldn't be competing with boys in school to begin with, and women wouldn't be competing with men in the workplace.

Pretty soon, women will be able to hold their own financially, if they want to, even with children on board. Why would you want to deny them that?

I'm not sure I'd whole heartedly celebrate women catching men in earning's. There are a lot of factors in this:

1. Almost every large employer has gone away from ableism to setting quotas based on characteristics like sex and race. If you insist 50% of engineers are female you're recruiting from a very small pool and you artificially inflate wages for that group and end up with less competent people - see note before angry replies.
2. We've dismantled much of what was once typically well paid work for men. The steel industry, chemical plants, manufactinger etc.
3. We've bashed men so much they've stopped going to university and aiming for higher paid roles.
4. Men are taking on more of an active role as parents and choosing to work less. In 1998 they did on average 38.6hrs/wk in 2022 they did 35.3hrs/wk.

So women are catching up with men in a big part because male earnings are collapsing. I hope we could agree that as these men are your fathers, brothers, husbands and friend's it's good if they are economically successful. Even if you look at it purely from a selfish point of view this is bad news for the country.

Note on less competent: If we assume men and women are equally competent at doing X, but only 10% of the workforce are women, if you then try and make 50% of all managers in this field women you're picking from a much smaller talent pool so will on average competence will be lower. This would be the same if we tried to employ 50% male nurses.

I didn't say that women's earnings will equal those of men, nor that they will hold fifty per cent of all jobs. I said that women, once childcare is in place, will be able to hold their own financially: they will be free to support themselves if they wish to, with or without children, and so will not not be under financial control by men.

When the going is bad, proper adults don't whine about how it's all someone else's fault. This is what the worst kind of feminists do, and you're exactly mirroring their behaviour. Adults take practical steps to make things better. What could you do, today, to make your own life better?

A patriarchy is where men are in charge, hence woman's rights to equality are limited, by definition men have all the rights already, so protests are going to be made by women. Men in situations of domestic abuse usually have more ability to get out of the situation, they are usually paid more, don't have responsibility for children in the same way, they can just get up and leave. I know some don't leave and put up with terrible abuse for years, but they do have more options (and it's not as common). I wouldn't consider the UK a true patriarchy although the balance of power is definitely with men.

You are right that in a true absolute patriarchy women's rights would be completely non-existent, everything would be for the benefit of men.

Stating facts isn't winging.

Can you please clarify what rights men have that women don't in the UK?

It’s almost as though “Laid back Luke” and friends get a kick out of being squelched by feminists. They can’t get enough of it, can they? As though Mumsnet were some kind of suburban dungeon, kitted out with net curtains and jasmine air freshener. Destroy me some more! And again! Go on, properly smash me!

What a squalid hobby. Yuk.

Crime statistics on domestic abuse don't back up your claim about women being the primary instigator. Men are almost 100% responsible for the majority of sexual abuse and violent crime including homicide.

To be fair to the previous poster, the statistics do seem to show that women perpetrate more IPV. The biggest domestic violence study to date was a metastudy of 1700 previous peer reviewed studies and it found that 'Rates of female-perpetrated violence were higher than male-perpetrated (28.3% vs. 21.6%)'.

I was a bit hmm when I first read it but I think a key factor is that crime statistics don't show the full picture. Men don't tend to report DV, kind of similar to how a lot of women don't report rape.

Part of this is likely social stigma and the fact that men don't like to be seen as 'weak' or they feel nobody will take them seriously. I remember the charity Mankind did some research around this and I think the figure was that men were 2.5x less likely to report DV than women. Most of the men that called the helpline apparently said they wouldn't have done so had it not been anonymous.

I also read another couple of large studies which found that the number of women who admit to perpetrating DV is higher than the number of men that admit to having being abused. This does also suggest that men don't like to admit it, but historically most of the discussions have used crime data which we know is flawed. If we went by reported incidents we'd be concluding that rape was vanishing rare which we know isn't true.

I think it's maybe a bit like the situation around male suicide where women attempt it more but men die more frequently due to being more violent in their execution (pardon the pun!). Similarly, more women assault their partners than men but again the men are more violent/powerful in doing so, which causes more deaths. Well that's what the data suggests to me.

Here is a link to that DV study I referenced, by far the biggest one to date, in case anyone is interested to read it.

domesticviolenceresearch.org/domestic-violence-facts-and-statistics-at-a-glance/

@YehRight

Can you show the crime statistics you're referencing please? All the stats I've seen show that men are far more violent than women.

On average two women a week are murdered by a partner or former partner and women are also reluctant to report due to the repercussions.

Always read a study before quoting it. This one is pathetic -

”Who should be considered a batterer depends to some extent on how the concept is defined and measured, and which aspects of PV are considered most important. If one considers the impact of physical violence to be the most important factor, then PV is asymmetrical and men would comprise the majority of batterers. However, when defined by the other relevant factors, PV is primarily symmetrical and there are a comparable number of batterers across gender.”

Other “relevant factors” are left undefined in the study, with one example given as insisting on moving house if the other partner doesn’t need to. Or reducing the number of times the other partner can see their friends.

Can’t go to the boozer every night now you’ve got kids? That’s abuse! No wonder you slapped her one.

Hi, I wasn't talking about crime statistics, I was talking about the world's largest DV resource which I linked in my post.

It was previous posters that were saying crime statistics didn't back up the claims made by another poster so I mentioned that there is other data that does seem to back up this claim and that crime statistics don't always tell the full story because people may mention instances of DV in an anonymised study which they didn't report to the police, hence these assaults not being part of the gov crime figures. For example, instances where the number of women admitting they've assaulted partners not tying up with the number of men who claim to have been assaulted (likely these men didn't report it).