DH believes women have equality and feminism is no longer needed

[Kirk1]

He also doesn't believe in "The Patriarchy" or that we have a problem with a rape culture.

We have recurring discussions, which always end up going round in the same stupid circles. I need new information and arguements to break the circle if(when) the conversation is resumed... So, who can help me?

Can we start with the Patriarchy question, because I always get bogged down with that one because he flat out refuses to acknowledge it unless I can give better examples than I can bring to mind at stupid-o-clock when we always appear to resume the discussion.

violent male partners/expartners kill 2 women every week. that's more than soldiers killed in Afghanistan
The pay gap - currently 16%

just for starters

My riposte to this kind of remark (which is coming up a lot at work lately, they've realised they have a diversity problem) is as follows...
Observable fact: men are massively over-represented at senior levels of, oh, just about everything
Option 1 to explain this: women are a bit crap at being in charge, and also don't deserve to get paid as much as men. Or they're just a bit lazy and don't want it.
Option 2: there continues to be real discrimination against women.

Anyone who really believes option 1 doesn't get to talk to me any more.

I like this and this re: devils advocacy.

Two tactics:

1. Get him to read everyday sexism

1. Ask him how often he has discussed amongst his male friends incidents of harassment and discrimination they have suffered; how they would react if he became upset and cried whist discussing it. Also ask him how his colleagues at work would react if he came into work wearing makeup and high heels and moaned about having a fat day and bad hair; what they would say if he admitted to liking to watch 'chick flicks' and taking up knitting; how his friends and family would react if he confessed that his real ambition was to give up work and stay at home with the children, and that he thought you were being unfair by not working hard enough to allow him to do this, as babies need their fathers at home.

Patriarchy is not some grand conspiracy, but a neat term for describing how society is ordered. It controls the way men behave in just as many ways as it controls women. It's just that the outcomes for men tend to be better than for women.

Thank you so much for the devil's advocate links.

My otherwise lovely DH has tried this on a couple of occasions and I've not been all that articulate in countering it, although I have left him in no doubt that it's a bloody insensitive thing to do.

Kirk, lots of men seem to 'get' the lowest difficulty setting analogy.

Also, could you get him to look at the everyday sexism project maybe it will begin to dawn on him the sheer volume of small (and not so small) shit women have to put up with on a daily basis.

x-post with Thistledew

I'm curious. What does HE think the patriarchy is ? He must have an idea in order to be able to deny it's existence.

Same with rape culture.

I often find that in these types of arguments you're often not starting with the same definition.

And yy to the game setting analogy as being one that many men seem to get.

Show him statistics on rape and convictions for rape and ask him to explain why so many women are raped yet convictions are so low.
Explain that society is run by men. You can show him the percentage of males to females in government and big business and ask him to explain that and examples of how much harder it is for women to rise to the top. Get him to do some reading!

*Observable fact: men are massively over-represented at senior levels of, oh, just about everything
Option 1 to explain this: women are a bit crap at being in charge, and also don't deserve to get paid as much as men. Or they're just a bit lazy and don't want it.
Option 2: there continues to be real discrimination against women.

Anyone who really believes option 1 doesn't get to talk to me any more.*

whereisshe I encounter this all the time as well. For some reason the issue of men having made all the major scientific advances in history keeps coming up at work. The options are:

Option 1: women have been oppressed for millenia, denied an education, property rights, the ability to work, the ability to control their own fertility and if they didn't die in childbirth they were birthing and raising ten children so not in a position to dedicate their lives to science
Option 2: women don't have it in the DNA to be creative geniuses

Sometimes I start on about option 1 and it's actually quite shocking how angry I am that some people haven't already understood it.

Sexism is at the very heart of our constitution. Despite the sex Discrimination legislation we are ruled by a parliament in which access to the unelected house of lords is barred to women as either a bishop or a hereditary peer.

The CoE, part of the establishment, can and does legally refuse equality for women in it's employment structure.

Ask him how, in that context, women have equal rights?

Love that devil's advocate link

[http://www.buzzfeed.com/floperry/12-infographics-that-will-convince-you-we-still-ne-ic9t?s=mobile Here's something interesting ]

gah www.buzzfeed.com/floperry/12-infographics-that-will-convince-you-we-still-ne-ic9t?s=mobile

Yes he's not really playing devils advocate is he? He is invalidating your experiences (and other women's) from a position of privilege and denying there is an issue. That's just simply opposing you.

Here are a few links I like about more low-level stuff before even tackling male violence:

Male privilege. I think someone has linked to this already but worth posting twice.

Workplace sexism
Silent Technical Privilege

Cultural Femicide
Literary women, literary prizes. Not often to be found in the same room
Do they ever make movies about women?
Gender Inequality in Film

Unwanted attention and low-level harassment
But if I can't buy you coffee...
Guide to approaching strange women without being maced

Hollaback! and Everyday Sexism also good on this

Online misogyny
Mary Beard
Caroline Criado-Perez

Rape Culture
So you're tired of hearing about rape culture

Ending Victimisation and Blame is also good on this.

If you want anything on rape/femicide/other sexual violence/DV/prostitution etc I also have loads on that too!

Lucky girl.
He sounds like a keeper

Scallopsrgreat, thanks for all those links, total gold!
Quangle, the suggestion that all great scientific discoveries were made by men is a dreadful example of historical airbrushing. A lot of discoveries made by a man had been made by a woman doing most of the work - only under the "supervision" of a male scientist and of course he got the credit :(
That "lowest difficulty setting" link is great, here is a side question - Why are so many MMO characters female? The majority of the players are male, so why do so many of them choose female characters? DH uses this to play with the wankers by leading them on before informing them he's a big beardy chap, not the petite female he is playing...

Arg, it's getting very late so I need to go to bed. I WILL read all the posts and follow links and I apologise if I've missed commenting and thanking you for your post.

While I'm aware that the topic title invites you to judge DH, I'm really not looking for opinions on his position. Debating subjects is one of our forms of entertainment and I find that if someone is being truly vile on a subject we have debated, I can shred them with no effort whatever.

This particular subject is one I have never properly educated myself on thanks to various reasons I don't want to go into right now. As a result my arguments are rather weak and we go in circles. He's still using the "stupid" arguments, because I haven't (yet) learned to counter them.

Subjects like feminism, racism, education, economy, rape, are all subjects of importance and we like to discuss subjects of importance. I tend to take the stronger position because I'm less practiced. He has 10 years more debating practice than me, at my girls grammar school, we weren't encouraged to do anything as confrontational as debating...

Kirk1, that actually might be a good place to start. Why was he taught to debate and you were taught to be non confrontational? There are different expectations right there.

There were a couple of links I forgot :

Bullying in School

And one just for you :

Feminists are not responsible for educating men

There has been a recennt survey done about sexual harassment/assaulted in schools so you may want to dig that out. It is quite significant at showing how early it starts and is ignores/accepted/glossed over.

I'll stop now!

Kirk, none of my business, but why don't you use your time to read about feminism and discuss it with women who care about it, rather than spending it on circular debates with a man? I mean this as sisterly suggestion because I suspect you would get much more out of it

Feminism is not a debate; it is a political movement. A movement which aims to liberate women from male supremacist society.

If the politics of women's rights interest you (and it seems they do) there are many brilliant books on the subject and a lot of excellent writing on the internet.

If your DH struggles to grasp what patriarchy is, I wonder how much you can get out of discussions about feminism with him! I find the notion of playing devils advocate really inappropriate and disrespectful - feminism is actually about real women's real lives. Real abuse, real suffering, real exploitation, real rape, real violence, real inequality, real sexism, real harassment, real pay gaps, real disproportionate representation, real inequality of opportunity, real male entitlement, dominance, violence and real lower status for women.

(Tell your DH that patriarchy is a system of social organisation in which humans are awarded status within a binary gender hierarchy according to biological sex. Girls and women have lower status and boys and men higher status. This system is the gender equivalent of white supremacy in which status is awarded according to skin colour via the mechanism of race. If your DH can understand what white supremacist society is (and I imagine he can), he should have no trouble understanding what male supremacist society is as they are very similar. Patriarchy is just another word for male dominated/ supremacist society).

Good luck!

Suggest he should change his surname to yours because if there really is equality the it shouldn't matter whose surname is used should it? Then insist on him being addressed as Mr Your firstname yoursurname. Let him experience how his identity is erased by the act of marriage.

I'm just place marking here - very useful links I'd like to bookmark

And if he doesn't think we have a problem with rape culture get him to read something like this and follow all the links.

finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/rape-culture-101/

He is a man, he has the privilege of not seeing rape culture. It is extraordinarily entitled of him if he dismisses what women have to say on the subject.

Then again, maybe don't bother showing him the link if he is only going to engage at the bargain basement level of devil's advocate. Which actually suggests to me that he just doesn't understand feminism even on a fairly basic level - because men who do get it tread carefully and respectfully around the issues and accept that there is much they struggle to understand about women's lived experience because they are shielded from most of it, just as white people are oblivious to many of the manifestations of racism.

scallops I am so glad you posted that blog post "feminists are not responsible for educating men"

on a different thread a while ago I was challenged as to why I wasn't "nicer" and that I should consider teaching people about feminist principles in a "better" way ie. by moderating my frustration and using less "difficult" concepts that "upset" folk

I simply replied "I am not responsible for the ignorance of others" but that piece articulates it much better than I could