Ian Duncan-smith says unmarried men are a problem for society

[QuentinSummers]

m.huffpost.com/uk/entry/uk_59d3b8f9e4b04b9f92054af5
Seems to me there are undertones that women should be controlling men better.

Also quite a lot of blatant sexism such as men who aren't married develop "low value for women" which suggests to me that the value women hold is intrinsicly linked to their chastity/marriageability to ID'S

Interested to hear what others think because I'm being a bit inarticulate on this.

This seems like an article you will like john

mobile.nytimes.com/2017/08/12/opinion/why-women-had-better-sex-under-socialism.html

Thanks Quentin I'd just read it! Very good.

Gentlemanjohn do you seriously believe that society once valued women more than it does now? Or am I reading you wrong?

You're reading me wrong. Sort of.

I'm saying it was possibly better in some ways and worse in others -
and the same now. Women were confined to the home but there was an expectation (which was often not met) that they should be loved and respected. Men went out and worked in unionised factories. It was of course a time not to be romanticised and often grim for both parties. Men were exploited and made to inhale asbestos. Women were trapped in abusive marriages. Not denying any of that. Now the unionised, patriarchal work-forces have gone, and women in increasing numbers have left the home and entered the marketplace. Here the ideal of freedom has arguably been co-opted to some extent by the consumer-capitalism. Female freedom, we are all told, is to found in the pursuit of money - in consumerism, careerism, 'leaning in', 'breaking the glass ceiling' and all that other Thatcherite stuff. As a result a vision of socialist feminism has, I think, been somewhat lost.

Moreover, while women are more economically free they are probably more culturally sexualised than they have ever been before. While pornography used to be confined to a few top shelf magazines, it is now the basis of a ubiquitous internet culture, with the hard-core of yesteryear the soft-core of today. Data suggests young women are more anxious about their appearance than they were forty years ago, as well as feeling compelled to perform sexual acts they would rather not. However, may women who identify as feminists have adopted the pornographic style as a source of empowerment. 'Slut walk' is an example, as is the hyper-sexualised bump-and-grind trend of pop videos. Meanwhile, male unemployment is increasing, and women are encouraged to seek a new domination as high-flying capitalists. It is not equality that is the goal of this right-wing feminism, but power. Power is not a route to equality but the end itself. Power and equality are opposites. You cannot have power without a person or persons over which that power is exercised.

So it's a bit of an out of the frying pan and into the fire situation. Domestic servitude has been swapped by hyper-sexualised identity politics and the adoption of the very aggressive, competitive, patriarchal cult of power seeking that feminists once critiqued. But what else would have happened within a capitalist system? Equality of any kind is impossible within it. At most a few privileged women will rise to the top of elite institutions leaving many more at the bottom.

You don't understand what a slut walk is so I suggest you read up on that. Personally I'd prefer to live now where men's sexual violence is at least in the open and talked about than in a time where I could be legally raped as long as the man who raped me was my husband. Even if he wasn't my husband, the chances of my rapist bring even charged was practically nil. Men are more overtly sexually violent now because they can no longer coerce women into being their sexual prisoners by denying them education and forcing them into marriage.

In my view, gender inequality and capitalism both rest on the the reduction of human beings to commodities. In the past however, value was extracted from labour - both male manual labour and female domestic-child-rearing labour. Now things are not so simple. Capitalism is no longer concerned with production, but consumption and rent extraction. The exploited factory worker with a permanent job is actually a privileged position now. Women are still largely left with the child-rearing, but if they are poor this, again, is a privileged position of exploitation if that makes sense. The middle-class woman is compelled however to prioritise the pursuit of a career, to succeed. To do this she must not just sell her labour, but herself. So too must the man. We are all compelled to sell ourselves, to exploit our own commodification in the pursuit of freedom. No good can can come of this.

Gender equality can only become manifest in an economic system in which no one is a commodity and no one is in competition with another - in which all humans are seen as ends in themselves. In any other system sexual relations between the men and women will be warped.

Of course Sparrowhawk all of those advances are wonderful. But again, you are left with a different form of patriarchal violence.

If the morality of the old patriarchal family was wrong (and as your examples suggest, in many ways it was), then the task is to replace it with a new morality.

This has not happened. Correct me if I am wrong, but most feminism is concerned with increasing the freedom of women to do as they please rather than create a new moral culture. Therefore, it is no surprise that men will think they can do as they please as well. There are no moral values anymore. No moral co-ordinates - just a very confused codification of rights and freedoms and no underpinning moral absolute.

Furthermore, I would say the reason men are more overtly sexually violent now is simply the internet. They can say things they could never say in public life before; hook-up easily with strangers that they will never have to see again; hide behind fake identities; create and consume violent pornography; and run sex trafficking and prostitution rackets on an unprecedented scale.

There was never any moral structure - only a structure in which women were controlled. Men could always do as they pleased, including raping women. The idea that we all once abided by lovely rules that valued everyone is total nonsense.

hook-up easily with strangers that they will never have to see again

You think the internet invented that? And only men do It?

Capitalism isn't perfect but I'll take a liberal, secular, democratic capitalist society over the other options available.

Of course there was never such a perfect moral structure - but there was a moral structure, and there has to be a moral structure. Indeed, there still is a moral structure. We accept in our society that it is immoral to mug old ladies, molest children and commit arson. The fact that we don't live in a perfect world and people nevertheless mug old ladies, molest children and commit arson anyway is beside the point.

All human affairs have to be governed by moral rules. Our exchange now is governed by rules of conduct. It would be wrong for me to call you something nasty.

Sexual relations, like any other area of human affairs, have to be governed by rules. If the old rules were wrong, then there has to be new rules. You're rightly saying it was wrong for men to be able to legally rape their wives. Well, that's a moral statement isn't it?

You think the internet invented that? And only men do It?

No, and this is my very point. It has become acceptable for women to be sexually exploitative too.

Liberal democratic capitalist society is over. We are now entering a violent, authoritarian, neo-feudal form of capitalism. This is the new phase of capitalism whereby postmodern disintegration and the networked society exist in a symbiotic relationship with a tendency to fascistic regression. In the extreme it is represented by Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Modi, Xi Jinping and Rodrigo Duterte – all capitalists and violent fanatics. In place of the bourgeois egalitarianism of old is people trafficking, corrupt mega-corporations, private militias, online surveillance systems, click driven death cults, beheadings on Facebook, pornography, misogynist and ethnic fundamentalist internet subcultures, drug and prostitution cartels, extrajudicial murder.

If you want a vision of the future of capitalism look to India. Fully committed to neoliberalism, Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata party are nevertheless violent Hindu nationalists. Recently, I spoke to a young woman from Mumbai who works in India’s marketing industry. She is a member of the countries’ new middle-class – highly educated and renowned in her field. However, she works on average a seventy-hour week, and is routinely made to work forty-eight hours straight, for very little money. She told me of a terrible suicide epidemic among young people in India. At some point during such a 48-hour shift, it is common for an aspirant young professional to walk to the lofty window of their office building, and jump. And such is the pressure on children to compete for the few opportunities for success that those who fail their exams commonly take their own lives too. Aspirational parents in Delhi and Mumbai keep finding the lifeless bodies of their children spinning from ceiling fans. At the same time, India has a homeless population of 78 million, including 11 million street children, many of whom end up in prostitution or slavery. Rape and violence are endemic.

That is capitalism. Egalitarian, middle-class, democratic capitalism has gone.

A working single person is massively worse off than a working couple, sharing living costs. But we are supposed to subsidise them through the tax system, because they are morally better than we are.

How do single people subsidise couples droogan?

'Egalitarian, middle-class, democratic capitalism has gone.'

I'm genuinely confused here. For it to be gone,bit would have had to exist in the first place. When did it ever exist?

What certainly did exist was a system where if you were a straight white man all you had to do was fulfil a few conditions (largely around background, means and class) and you were golden. Everyone else, however, was fucked.

Eg marriage allowance, single households get only 25% council tax reduction. And I DS wants more tax breaks. Single people are already so much worse off.

Unmarried couples and married couples where both earn a certain amount also don't get the marriage tax allowance.
Council tax is based on house value; I am not sure a 50% reduction for a single person is fair. Families often live in bigger houses and pay more council tax but also have less disposable income than childless singles or couples.

Ian Duncan Smith is our MP. I saw him on Saturday at our local high street. He was at a cash point with a few people gathered wanting to shake his hand.

I came home and kicked myself for being within spitting distance of him and not thinking of a single thing to say to him to express the way I feel about this article. I couldn't trust myself to remain composed so just walked past muttering to myself

Why the fuck would anyone wish to shake his hand?

Because lots of people around here seem to love him!

Sparrowhawk I think the illusion of it existed. There was this sense that capitalism led to the growth of a property-owning democracy and middle-class.

That belief isn't tenable anymore.

Apologists for capitalism would argue that it's the least worse system because the alternative is totalitarianism - that wherever you get capitalism you get democracy. Even if means sticking a tyrant in power in Chile in somewhere eventually open markets will engender political democracy. However, now capitalism is itself slowly becoming another nakedly repressive, authoritarian system.

There wasn't the illusion of it - it was true for certain people and not others. Those certain people aren't too happy that because other people have a shot at prosperity their own guaranteed ticket is no longer valid.

And I entirely reject the idea that women must be better than men in order to be worthy of success (regardless of how that success is framed).