The Left Vs Right's treatment of women

[MidLangClegs]

I heard this statement recently and was wondering if women here could help explain it to me with historic examples:

"The Right treat women as their private property, and the Left treat women as public property".

Is it that the Right, purportedly perusing 'c'onservative family values may be more inclined to be anti-abortion? But why is this a 'private property' concern?
And the Left, I am thinking of Rosie Duffield and the very public ostracisation of her by Starmer.

But I know that's not correct. Just mulling this over and wanted some more information.

There is no no right or left, just men beings shots to women.

Private property as in a chattel over whom they decide what happens.

To be grim, I think there are men who would like abortion to be available, but for them to be the one who decides whether the pregnancy is aborted or not. Luckily enough, even they can realise how problematic it is in giving others autonomy over your body: anyone need a kidney when others have two?

IIRC, this is a loose quote of Andrea Dworkin, and the point she was trying to make was that American women should not trust the Democrat Party to look after women's rights any more than they trust Republicans. Democrats might make the right noises, but they still treat women as the property of men.

Right and left were always very blunt descriptors and I think they're now virtually meaningless. When feminists standing up for women only spaces are described as 'far right' then you at least know to treat any similar descriptor with a pinch of salt. I don't think the quote is remotely helpful at explaining anything but it does alert one to the fact that misogyny permeates society across the political spectrum and manifests itself in many different ways.

I keep prefacing my posts with "l'm "only" 20", but I feel I need to as I'm told (irl) that I haven't experienced all I complain about.

But I have experienced deep misogyny from men of all political persuasions, so this is really a long way round of saying imo, right and left make NO difference at all, a person with a 🍆will always treat me as a 3rd class citizen!

Sorry but my experiences when I was younger have embedded themselves in me. (Don't worry - I have received therapy!)

The Right treat women as their private property,

"Oy! That's my wife/girlfriend/mother/sister/daughter!" Women's status derives from their protector. Women who have no protector have no status. Women should service their protector.

and the Left treat women as public property.

Women are assets. They should take their place in the fair distribution of assets. Women should service everybody.

Hard agree. Even "far right" and "far left" are non sequiturs.

I think I can see this. If a woman on the left doesn't toe the Party line she is abandoned. If a woman on the right is alone she is an old crone.

i think it's helpful to stop thinking as left and right as a horizontal line, but more like a circle. Once you do that you realise that far left and far right eventually meet and, although they may describe their views about women in different ways, the end effect is the same i.e. they both have archaic views about women that involve them having power over them. Both views suck.

I recommend doing the Political Compass test as a way of looking at how your views fit on the left/right (largely economic) axis and on the authoritarian/liberal (largely social attitudes) axis.

www.politicalcompass.org/test

I posted about this on another thread, but for example the Dutch right wing media and Dutch right wing politicians were quiet as church mice on the Volleyball player/child rapist scandal (I know someone who wrote to their equivalent of an MP and got a shitty response back). If, say, a Morrocan had travelled to the Netherlands with the express purpose of raping a girl and had then been released from prison by the Moroccans and allowed to compete in the Olympics I can guarantee there would be outrage (rightly so). But it would have been taken as yet more proof that there is something wrong with Islam/Morocco's attitudes towards women. But a blonde blue eyed Dutch man rapes a foreign child and it is not worth talking about and definately requires no soul searching. In the same way that Nigel Farage/Elon Musk think that Tate is "an important voice for young men" but are also outraged about other men being sex traffickers.
Lots of people are outraged about white child rapists and Asian grooming gangs and mixed race Muslim converts on trial for sex trafficking who boast about grooming women into sex work. Its not either/or. But for a certain type of "right wing man" its OK if the man doing it is from their "in group" especially if the victim is from an outgroup. Its an outrage if its done by an "out group" against one of their girls/women. Ironically, that was also the attitude of the Asian grooming gangs themselves (because Islamism is also a far right ideology).
In Musk/Farage's case I don't its even genuine racism. Its more performative outrage.

So I think thats what is meant by the "women as public property" comment. There is history for this since originally rape was seen as a crime against the father or husband (the word rapine means the violent plunder of property). Constantine changed the law to make it a crime against the state. That also meant however that if a woman didn't do enough to stop the rapist/was responsible in some way for allowing it to happen (being alone) she was also liable for punishment as having helped harm the state.

Hard agree. Even "far right" and "far left" are non sequiturs.

Far right and far left meet on the opposite side of the circle.

Does anyone know the source of this Dworkin quote? I've seen it attributed to her book Right-wing Women, which is a powerful read and has exploration of related ideas but, it's not in there.

I think the idea with this is actually quite simple. It's that men on the right feel they "own" women as individuals, they are head of the household, and their women, be they wives, sisters, or daughters, shouldn't stray.

On the left, it's the opposite, men may not claim ownership of individual women, but they think that women should be sexually accessible to men in general, this is why they push for social norms that say that recreational sex is great and consequence free, and push reproductive control. They don't want women to have an excuse to say no to sex without any commitment or duty to support them.

As far as it goes, I think the description of men like this is accurate. And it's a warning that the sex positivity of the left is really very male centered, even though it paints itself as empowerment.

However - I don't think either of these descriptions describe the attitude of all or even most men. Lots of conservative and leftist men do not have these attitudes and respect and like women.

What I think is most true is that you can find men who are users across the political spectrum, and they will justify it with whatever ideology is close to hand.

When the left are putting in place policies hellbent on taking all women's rights away, and even the language to describe women's rights (because 'women' now includes 'men' too) then it's not surprising that women who have lovely husbands and / or fathers are going to vote right.

When the left are letting boys / men into girls sports, letting rapists into womens prisons, letting Canadian dodgy fake breasts man force kids to refer to him as female (could the fetish imposed on children be more obvious?) etc.

It is a circle, so when the many, many misogynists on the right are saying (essentially) 'women are private property' vs the left misogynists saying 'women are public property' (and we're going to offer up unconsenting women to men with a fetish) then anyone with a half decent husband or father is going to choose shitty option A over shitty option B. For supposedly intelligent people, many left wing politicians have not seemed to grasp this and how unappealing their offer to women now is.

Interesting test. I hadn't heard of it. Thanks!

Left wing men: prostitution, surrogacy, men in women’s sports = women as public property therefore all grand. Wouldn’t actually vote for one as leader of the Labour Party however.

When it comes to womens rights, the far left and the far right are both authoritarian and misogynistic. They are in firm agreement that a boot is to be placed across female necks and differ only in the exact placement of that boot.

If that quote was by an American, about the USA, it may well be valid where it was observed, but it’s not universal. I can see the basic point, but it doesn’t really work here, now.

I despair when I keep reading about the supposedly powerful ‘religious right’ in Britain. That’s a US phenomenon that has no equivalent over here. Yet another example of the ignorance spread via the internet.

The problem women have is not left wing men or right wing men, it's men. I mostly see that quote used in a "Not my Nigel" way.

Feminists know better.

That's a version of the Horseshoe Theory:

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_Theory

I am familiar with the horseshoe theory but I'm claiming copywrite on the circular theory as I've held it for decades 😁I think my theory demonstrates that they are identical in the actual results (which is what matters) - they both shit on women to the nth degree, whereas the horseshoe theory leaves a little room for manoeuvre. Left shits less than right or vice versa.

Sorry, this is spam - it's a personality test for which you have to pay to view the results.
Reporting.

Eh? I did this test when I saw Dean had linked it. It asks you about your values and where you stand on certain topics, and I got my results for free.

I repeated the process a couple of times as an experiment and it still gave me a result with no payment needed.

There's no payment required, never has been.