They must have a Facebook group or a Google+ group or a mailing list or similar. They must be coordinating their moves. Now it’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali echoing Dawkins echoing Sommers echoing #GamerGate and on and on until they disappear into an infinite regress.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a harsh critic of Islam’s treatment of women, said Wednesday that modern American feminism is focused on “trivial bullshit” and needs to be reclaimed.
Speaking at the Independent Women’s Forum Women of Valor dinner, where she received an award for courage, Hirsi Ali reminded her audience of how far feminism has strayed from its original purpose.
“I want you to remember that once upon a time, feminists fought for the access — basic right — access of girls to education,” she said.
Yes, that’s right, and we’re still doing that. “Access” isn’t just a matter of having a law on the books saying “girls shall be permitted.” Access is a lot of things. It depends on the place and time and background and many things. In some places – many places – “access” is an empty word for children who can’t afford to buy a required uniform, or children whose parents make them take care of their younger siblings, or children who are malnourished and fall asleep in school.
She talked about her parents.
Her mother wanted to take her and her sister out of school because education would lead them to rebel against their family and “bring shame upon us.” Her father responded by saying, “If you take my girls out of school, I am going to curse you and you are going to burn in hell.”
Taken out of context, Hirsi Ali said, one might side with her mother, but in reality, she said it was her father that allowed her to be educated and helped make her what she is today.
Yes. Men can be feminists, and women can be anti-feminists. We already know that.
We’ve won, she says. It’s done.
“Feminists in this country and in the West fought against that and won the battle,” she added.
But now, Hirsi Ali said, feminism has taken that victory and squandered it.
“What we are now doing with the victory, and I agree with you if you condemn that and I condemn whole-heartedly the trivial bullshit it is to go after a man who makes a scientific breakthrough and all that we as women — organized women — do is to fret about his shirt?” Hirsi Ali said, referring to the controversy generated by the shirt featuring cartoons of scantily-clad women worn by the scientist who helped land a robot on a comet. “We must reclaim and retake feminism from our fellow idiotic women.”
Hey! There it is – you can see she and Dawkins have been Skyping like mad, feeding each other lines. “We must reclaim and retake feminism from our fellow idiotic women.” That’s Dawkins. “Pompous idiots,” he called us.
So, what about her claim. It’s a crock of shit, that’s what about it. Part of access is feeling as if you belong. Part of access to places like school and university and STEM fields is feeling as if you belong there as part of the enterprise – learning or teaching or practicing. Part of access is not being made to feel that you “belong” there only insofar as you are sexually interesting to men.
But, Hirsi Ali said, we should not throw away feminism, because that would be like throwing away the civil rights movement. Instead, feminism needs to fight the real war on women: Radical Islam and other parts of the world where women don’t even have the right to an education or to leave their home without a male guardian.
Don’t. Don’t, don’t, don’t. Don’t do that. It’s right-wing bullshit and you have no business engaging in it. Nobody has any business doing that. By all means urge US feminists to pay more attention to women in Somalia, or in majority-Muslim countries, or wherever, but don’t do it by saying “pay less attention to your own stuff” first. It’s hateful, it’s wrong, it’s a ploy, it’s bullshit.
But I shouldn’t even bother, should I. She’s at the American Enterprise Institute, along with Sommers. What trying to destroy feminism has to do with “enterprise” I’ll never know, unless “enterprise” is just code for “right wing on all subjects.”
Whatever it is, it’s a crock. Whether from Hirsi Ali, or Dawkins, or Sommers, or Shermer, or Blackford, or Rush Limbaugh, it’s all a crock.
“Feminists in this country and in the West fought against that and won the battle.”
WRONG! The people working in STEM today will decide the world we live in tomorrow. They will construct our future society. The underrepresentation of women in STEM means an underrepresentation of women in the most important choices we’ll make.
The battle’s not over, Ayann. Why are you retreating?
As ever Ayaan Hirsi Ali is correct, except I would say chuck out feminism out as well, because it’s illogical bullshit and nothing short of a political hate movement, most people now reject it anyway and are far broader minded.
And it continues. I guess the “women are better at multitasking!” stereotype is being beaten out by the “the ladies’ tiny heads can only hold one thought at a time” stereotype.
No doubt the civility brigade will be all over Dawkins and Ali for calling their opponents idiots.
Nothing underscores a run-on sentence about logic like ending it with a non sequitur/appeal to popularity.
Next time Ali and Hoff-Sommers complain that the US isn’t “free market enough” or the like, I’ll make sure to tell them, “What, you’re complaining about a few little old laws here when it’s Full Tyranny in North Korea? Why aren’t you fighting the Real Enemy?”
Christ, I really hate that type of argument. It’s so obviously defensive and in bad faith, a poor effort to deflect efforts that make you uncomfortable at home.
@2 Distance Left, so you feel that it is acceptable for half of society to be second-class citizens, to be legally paid less than the other half, and to have fewer opportunities in work than the other half? Unless you’re feminist, that’s what and who you are.
I notice you didn’t make mention of how ALL the Republican senators voted AGAINST the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would address pay inequity for women. And they voted against it FOUR TIMES. Just kinda slipped your mind, I’m guessing?
Is it a “political hate movement” to declare that it is wrong to pay women less than men for the same jobs, doing the same work, when they have the same education and experience? What’s “hateful” about that?
Just because your neighbor’s house might be falling down is no reason not to work on eliminating the termites in your own.
I’m fascinated by how whole-heartedly people who ostensibly care about science are jumping on the Great Man Great Discovery bandwagon.
As I posed to a friend about this,
Do you know what it’s like to land a probe on a comet all by yourself? No? Don’t worry.
Dr Matt Taylor doesn’t either.
I said it in that other thread, and I’ll say it again here. The existence of atrocities does not negate the existence of “lesser” problems. The existence of atrocities does not necessitate neglecting “lesser” problems. There are millions of women in the Western world. Having some of them focusing on pervasive casual sexism at home is not, in any way, going to hinder or slow the process of liberating women in the Middle-East from the savage oppression of radical Islam.
What exactly can the average Western woman do in the fight against radical Islam, anyway? Most of them can’t exactly pack up their bags, fly to the Middle-East, and start shooting at ISIS members. They can donate to organizations that fight for rights in those countries, they can spread the word and encourage others to donate as well, then can do a lot of little things to help the cause along, but none of those things takes a particularly large amount of time. They have plenty of time to devote to causes closer to home. And so what if those causes closer to home aren’t as severe? What the hell does it matter that workplace sexism and pay disparities aren’t as severe as being sold into sex slavery or stoned for loving the wrong person?
The fight is not won. The fight is never won, not as long as there are bigots and especially as long as there are bigots in positions of power and influence. The fight is never won because the other side is always looking for a way to roll back your progress. Do they think that the gains made in Loving vs Virginia and Brown vs Board of Education would still be here if not for continued vigilance by the civil rights movement? Do they not see how much progress has been lost on reproductive rights since Roe vs Wade? The bigots that we’ve won battles against, they don’t go away just because they lost a court case, or two, or ten, or even a thousand. Because a lot of times all they have to do is win one to roll back decades of progress.
It’s not even just limited to gender or race or sexuality or creed. Human rights in general must be fought for long after they’ve been “won”. Despite all the progress made in health and safety rights for workers and consumers here in the West, there are still people fighting to roll that all back for their own personal gain. It goes beyond even human rights to the very condition of our planet itself. Despite all the progress made to better our environment, there are still people fighting to roll that all back for their own personal gain. The fight is NEVER over. Not so long as their are bigots, not so long as there are those who stand to gain from the misery and suffering of others, not so long as there are those who stand to gain from devastation and destruction and death. Not so long as there are humans. The fight NEVER ends.
It probably comes as no surprise to everyone that Andrew Sullivan has, in the past, defended Ayaan Hirsi Ali against the “PC culture war.” That certain names regularly reappear together to decry the evils of feminism is not a surprise, of course, but given my own recent interaction with Sullivan, I wanted to make sure to put a spotlight on that association.
Andrew “Free Speech for All But Leftists Like Alec Baldwin” Sullivan? Say it ain’t so! So what did he tweet?
I’m so sorry to hear of Ms. Hirsi Ali’s passing. I’ll bet Richard Dawkins is too.
Kidding aside, she’s absolutely right. Why, as recently as 1992 the feminist agenda was still about “a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”
How have we strayed so far from our roots?
There you have it – the popular modern feminist trope that women who disagree with them are just echoing the men.. It can’t possibly be that they’re thinking for themselves. No. No. Only feminists – wait, the right kind – of feminists can think for themselves. Everyone else is a tool of the patriarchy.
Anthony K@12:
Sullivan made an entire blog post about how Baldwin is a “homophobic bigot.” That may be true, I don’t know; I know that Baldwin said some crappy things to papparazzi along those lines–but it’s amusing because this whole year, Sullivan’s been moaning endlessly about “the radical hard left” and “feminists,” writing strawman portrayals of everyone he hates and then sneering at them, and then when he’s called out on it he makes himself out to be a martyr who is being unfairly abused. What’s even more amusing is that by posting edited snippets of dissents on his blog, he actually thinks that he’s being fair and presenting all sides of the issues.
“Hey! There it is – you can see she and Dawkins have been Skyping like mad, feeding each other lines. “We must reclaim and retake feminism from our fellow idiotic women.” That’s Dawkins. “Pompous idiots,” he called us.”
Or you could just be being, quite clearly, idiotic? Observation is often a reason for two people to make the same criticism.
I find Sullivan is best read through Driftglass’ eyes.
I had to google it to make sure I got it right, and whaddayaknow – been there, done that:
From the pfft.
Because she works for the American Enterprise Institute and is married to conservative historian and pseudo-economist Niall Ferguson, I doubt that Hirsi Ali can be described as a liberal, let alone a progressive (although she does support same-sex marriage).
Doesn’t CHS also work for that climate-change denying ideological ‘think tank’? Oh well, I’m sure their research is solid on non-climate-related issues.*
*For the skeptics playing at home, that’s what an ad hominem looks like.
So many negative commenters on this thread need to overcome their cultural barriers against free thinking Black women.
You’re the only one who brought up race, Decker@21. Every other comment about her has been with respect to her ideology and publicly stated positions. Given this, and given your previous non sequiturs and ramblings about islam, PZ Myers, and other off-topic issues in another thread, I think the one who needs to do some introspection is you, not the commentariat here.
Yes. I just said the same thing on a different thread. Knock it off, Decker.
PS I deleted that remark about PZ.
Oh Decker, your slip is showing.
Does Hirsi Ali/Somers/Dawkins et al., ever explain their magical formula for how they decide which Feminist causes are worthy and which aren’t? And why everyone should play by their rules?
On the upside I’m happy to hear that sexism is no longer a problem in the US. That’s the best news I’ve heard since Scalia assured me that racism is also a thing of the past.
Uncle, no, but guess what!! There is a brand new tool for doing just that – the DURP unit – the Dawkins Unit of Relative Perniciousness.
http://www.secularwoman.org/majmike_durp_unit
Ophelia@27:
HAH! I knew that I got a membership to Secular Woman for a good reason.
At the risk of sounding spammy, a quick plug: Highly recommended, folks, that membership. They do a lot of good things to promote understanding, sponsorships, etc. Follow Kim Rippere on twitter, she often tweets what they are up to. I’m not affiliated with them other than just being a member. You won’t see them talking about “taking back feminism from idiotic women,” you’ll instead find them doing productive work to raise awareness and actually solve problems.
That’s quite all right. It’s not spammy to recommend good organizations.
Remember noted anti-feminist gobshite Camille Paglia proclaiming that if women were in charge of civilization,
we’d still be living in grass huts?
That is only true of women like Paglia, Hoff-Summers and, as it turns out, Hirsi-Ali.
AHA is also on record opposing aid to Africa. I wonder what her stance is on assistance with the Ebola epidemic? Is she going to try to blame the crisis on leftists or feminists? Best to leave it to the market?
For that to be true, what is being observed has to match what they claim they’re observing.
Except it doesn’t.
Oh, well. All this makes it easy to justify skipping the American Atheists convention next spring.
Or they could be part of a hive mind. Remember that there are several (if not a horde of) people on the other side coming up with the same criticism – how do you decide then which side is right? You would have to look at (*gasp*) a couple of facts. And the facts do not speak for AHA’s point of view.
So when one side does it it’s groupthink and parroting and blindly following a leader, but when the other it’s “observation” that’s “a reason for two people to make the same criticism”. Can’t have it both ways.
MrFancyPants @28:
Seconded! They’re the only skeptic/atheist organization I’ll promote, and (to no-one’s amazement) their Abort Theocracy campaign had a lot to do with it.
So Ayaan Hirsi Ali is now Dawkinsing the rest of us? I’ll give them credit. It’s the next logical move on a group-conflict level. Who better to hide a Dear Muslima than a former Muslim?
I feel for Ms. Ali and would never try to stand in front of her attempts to get attention for her issues of priority. But standing in front of someone else who is trying to work on their issues and deliberately trying to handicap them is another matter entirely. I won’t take a Dawkinsing from Dawkins himself, and I won’t take it from someone closer to the issues of interest either.
And again, she’s as much a feminist as I am right fielder for the Yankees.
She’s a Phyllis Schlafly feminist. An Anita Bryant feminist. A Michelle Duggar feminist. Meaning “not a feminist at all.”
Oh, this is a lovely principle, absolutely.
Atheists in the west, too. Guess we can ignore their issues entirely. Long as they’re not actually being arrested/beaten/tortured for failing to attend a mosque/church/temple, let’s focus on the places they actually are…
It’ll be so effective, too! Let’s write books and wag our fingers at theocratic states, encourage warfare on them, so on! That’ll get the job done! Working to change attitudes right where we live? Why bother. Such trivial problems, these are, that we face, after all.
Improve our society? Push ourselves further? No need, so long as others are worse. And seeing as I have not today participated in a street mob raping a woman who refused to wear a burka, hey, I’m all right, Jack!
This is awesome! I’m off to catcall some women! Anyone complains, I’m just gonna say hey, at least I can’t actually jail you for wearing that skirt! Thanks, Ms. A! And thank you, mediaeval theocracies, everywhere, for keeping standards so wonderfully low!
(Yeah. Been done. But I’ll apologise for the increasingly repetitive nature of this increasingly shopworn satire–and happily retire it–the day its that much more tired target is justly laughed out of the solar system.)
Good for her. I could not agree more that much of American feminism is focused on things that are not important to the end goal of helping WOMEN. The constant centering of MEN in every single conversation about feminism is an example of the focus being on something not central to feminism. I also see her point, as she has lived horrors we cannot imagine, and seen strict patriarchy up close and personal, so there is an urgency that many simply do not have due to our life experiences. I get this.
Still, I do think that the existence of “lesser” issues, effecting females, can be a frustration when we are seeing horrible things like a war on abortion, child marriage, religious abuse of girls, massive amounts of rape and sexual exploitation, etc. But all the things considered “lesser”, like drawing attention to media and such, are still worth working on because they enable and build the actual system that keeps women oppressed.
Both opinions are valid. Just my 2 cents.
I do want to add….
Feminism is a movement for the liberation of WOMEN from oppression. I should not have to say this so often, as this is the basis of the movement. And no, IMO men cannot be feminists. They can be allies, and I am happy to have them. But the focus should not on them; it quits being feminism and starts being something other than feminism when it focuses on inclusion to the point where women’s needs are on the back burner, or not prioritized.
If WE women do not work for ourselves, who will? I am serious. I have no idea when feminist became so male centers and it is a real issue. I don’t even want to talk more about it because it will, once again, turn the focus away from women. Women for women, this is the way we succeed in solving the oppression we face.
Flame away! I realize this is unpopular, which is honestly mind boggling to me.
Sorry for the messy grammar, I ought to have hit preview!
The longer intra-societal conflicts go on, the more it always seems to come down to a basic split between one end of the authoritarian mindset spectrum and the other. No matter the social performance issue, it’s always ‘we don’t need this, you’re being hysterical and we know better about the real problems while you’re wasting *our* capital and effort’
Is it a good sign in atheoskeptic activism that conservatives are trying to co-opt and appropriate the message/demands of social improvement? Does that mean there’s political value being built that they need to get control over?
As soon as an organization in the tank for Neocons like the AEI allows its members to start going after this ground publically, it looks like there are moves to suck up the growing non-religious demographic that lack interest in ‘socialist attitudes’ and can be persuaded to use their non-religiousity to keep up the Fear assault on -a- religion being used as the bugaboo in American conservative circles. Successfully Up-talking domestic social inequity issues into general consciousness seems to undermine the focus on the external Threat that is lubricatingly Not-Us. Might that be a cognitive dissonance too far for most people, with a sense of hypocrisy not far behind?
I’m not sure what else underpins a statement like taking back feminism from fellow idiot women. (aside from the fact the way it’s phrased it comes out sounding like she’s an idiot woman too) Aside from the fact ‘feminism’ is not a football that can be intercepted and run off with, completely foiling the dastard plans of uh…someone, the declaration gave me echoes of the Moral Majority years and the ERA effort that spawned Phyllis Schlafly and REAL Women of America (which, sadly has its counterpart in Canada).
Those conservative groups and their fellow ‘we are the real feminists’ travellers ramped up in public when it looked like progressive efforts were getting somewhere federally and very publically with gender rights. That model’s been very popular with the rightwing think tanks in the US since.
Hm. I guess what interests me is less the anti-feminism and more how poorly reasoned and presented it all is. I’m a nobody, but I flatter myself that I could deliver a better anti-feminist diatribe than this ridiculous fallacious garbage.
I don’t understand why so many people seem to lose their critical thinking skills when it comes to this particular topic.
and
So, you’re saying men can’t be part of the movement for the liberation of WOMEN from oppression?
Citation really fucking needed. This seems particularly stupid since men are a significant part of the problem in the first place. Those of us who happen to have penises and also consider ourselves feminists often have better luck changing minds precisely because of what should be an irrelevant fact.
So, this is what the Leader-thinky thing of global atheist is for? Coordinating talking point?
Staceyjw @ #40
Yeaaah… from that post? The messy grammar should be the least of your worries.
I’m going to try to do this to everyone I encounter that tries to point to religion as a reason to take attention from other social issues (let alone local issues).
What is Religion?
Proper noun intended. While the narratives of religion are not consistent with reality, Religion objectively exists. It’s has a reality that exists independently of those narratives. So what is it?
It’s an expression of human social behavior. While we don’t know everything about human social behavior yet, it has form and structure. We can manipulate it as individuals. So why should we ignore one expression of human social behavior for another when it’s likely the same underlying bullshit that drives the problems caused by religion in both cases? That is like arguing that we only treat that big tumor over there and ignore the little metastases over here cause “reasons”.
Fuck that.
@Crimson Clupeidae:
The internet has ruined me. I’m glad you’re responding to #40 in good faith, but I’m distrustful of anyone whose ‘nym has the initials “SJW”.
Anthony K @48:
It looked like another attempt at black propaganda to me, this time using sexism instead of racism, but it’s tough to tell from a single sample.
Right, and I should clarify that I’m not suggesting that it’s the case, and/or that people shouldn’t respond in good faith. A few things just tweaked me.
Hj Hornbeck @49 & Anthony K @50
Yeah her post def had some red flags, but a quick search shows xe’s posted on FTB before. Mostly about Isreal/Hamas. Just as mind-numbingly backwards, so I’m thinking it’s legit.
Respond in good faith? Where to even start…
Donnie @ 45 – I hadn’t thought of that. You may have been joking but I think that’s quite possible – that they’re talking together as a group more now because of the “Global” Secular whatsit.
@51 BeyondUnderstanding,
Thanks. I honestly wish I hadn’t brought it up, because I find it annoying when people immediately jump to “This must be a Poe” or “They’re a sockpuppet” and here I am doing something similar on not nearly enough evidence.
No surprise that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, not only being a right wing racist, is leaning towards sexism.
This lunatic actually said that the Breivik mass murders in Norway were a product of “theory of multiculturalism”. To which Sam Harris replied that it bugged him that now that mass murder of nearly 100 children will be used to diminish the stance of racists such as themselves.
These lunatics just shrug off the product of their own vile racism.
Ali is an islamophobe, not pro women. She wants to ignore and silence domestic women and use women to attack Islam.
“If I can point to worse instances of something, you have no right to complain” is a bullshit silencing tactic.
It caught my attention too, not least because my real-life initials are JW and there aren’t many of us. I agree with Anthony’s suspicion but am willing to see what StaceyJW posts next before ruling definitively.
False
“We must reclaim and retake feminism from our fellow idiotic women.”
It seems quite clear what a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute means by this: feminism must be
privatizedcorporatized. Sign up for a suitable plan from FemCorp™ and let the Free Market® fulfill your every desire!First of all, the notion that Ali and Dawkins are collaborating behind the scenes seems like a paranoid conspiracy theory. Secondly, Benson’s closing refrain of “right-wing, right-wing” seems like an attempt to poison the well. Neither of those editorial remarks have any bearing on the content of Ali’s talk. Personally, I don’t know exactly why “pay less attention to your own stuff” first is considered a ploy, although it obviously makes a lot of people uncomfortable. If I were leading a feminist cooperative with the goal of improving the well-being of women everywhere, I would make the culture of majority-Muslim countries a top priority for political and social reform. It would be impossible and even unethical to disregard instances of domestic sexism, but the gap in the severity of sexism between here and abroad is so vast that the Middle East, I think, deserves special attention. My takeaway from what Ali and, yes, Dawkins have said is that effective feminist activism needs to have well-defined priorities in order to have a major impact on women’s rights globally.
Anyone look at the comments to the Washington Examiner article linked to above? I hope a bunch of those commenters keep their strawmen(strawwomen?). Given how big they are they’ll make great fuel if they have a fireplace, or wish to build a bonfire.
@52 Ophelia:
It was a joke with a raised eyebrow observation. The moment that I read what you wrote the first thing I thought of was the “global atheist thinky tank” that is made up of all western think types who slap each other on their backs – and provide cover.
I do not know the current makeup, but…… (looks at conspiracies)
@Ryan Cunningham #1:
She’s not retreating. She’s declaring victory and committing troops to another front in the war. It’s the neocon way, after all. The only surprising thing is that she didn’t do it on an aircraft carrier with a big banner behind her.
Test.
@Blanche Quizno,
My position on this is simple, I’m an egalitarian secular humanist, who is for social democracy in the European sense, as I’m from the UK, and it doesn’t work too badly.
I agree with Ali’s statement that Islam is the new fascism as well, islamism is a totalitarian ideology as dangerous as any other, from communism to nazism, they all operate in the same way, and are as deleterious to humanity.
Also it’s good to hear Dawkins has his faculties intact enough to notice feminism in the west has descended into the trivial.
I reject as unrealistic the feminist conception of history, it’s just marxism with sex replacing class and is easily shown to be bogus, when one reads any serious book, or even wikipedia, the power struggles of the Merovingian Kings is a simple example, history is a complex set of power plays, by many groups, classes etc with no simple ‘one size fits all’ narrative, it’s prone to too many random events. The threat narrative, special pleading and professional victimhood annoy me immensenly.
I also cannot sustain the MRA narrative, that men were ‘doing all the hard work throughout time with no reward and were held in no regard’, it’s equally as wrong, and ignores the subtly of history. The threat narrative, special pleading and professional victimhood annoy me immensenly.
Most people in history weren’t even citizens, let alone second class ones, serfdom happened and was crap for everyone but the aristocrats.
The notion of traditional families (where there were parents and many kids all of whom worked) was functional, up until the age of the nuclear family when technology enabled that to become the new norm, this is once again changing due to numerous factors.
To answer your points directly.
In ‘the west’ women are not second class citizens legally, or financially, this is just nonsense, you use an absolutist claim as ridiculous as ‘if you’re not a feminist, then you’re a bigot’ to attempt I don’t know what, but it doesn’t advance your position.
Of course I don’t support that, no reasonable person does, please use a non-standard derailment set-up that hasn’t been refuted like a million other PRATTs. This is a character attack/ad hom/threat/shaming bunch of BS and isn’t an argument, try harder, I didn’t think FTB had become this much of a hugbox.
I don’t mention GOP types as I’m from the UK and the only time their stupid affects my life is their funding of crazy far right christian groups here, so please stop assuming everyone is an American, it’s arrogantly NorthAmerico centric.
That is your political fight not mine, and if the GOP are attempting to undo things like the equal pay act, then they should obviously not be allowed to do so, as it would harm society as a whole.
However, the pay gap myth, has been dismantled many times, by feminists, non-feminists, anti-feminists, left wingers, right wingers et al and when looked at by a person who can use statistics and when controlled for factors such as education, lifespan, class et al, it’s at about 1.5%, depending on profession, sometimes women earn more than men, sometimes the other way around, the governments of all major nations have these figures readily available for the numerate person, they’re damned handy.
Other myths like ‘rape culture’ etc, are equally batty, for the same reasons, and have been debunked many times over, they are getting like the PRATTs spouted by creationists, it’s quite worrying considering how much modern feminism (if not all feminism) resembles or is coming to resemble creationism, it terms of function, rhetoric and blind adherence to ideology over counter argument and facts.
Yes, feminism could be regarded as ‘a political hate movement’, as could the MRM, or Islamism.
They all advocate a given ‘other’ as the ‘enemy’/’problem’/’root of all our problems’, feminisms is men, the MRM’s is feminism, Islamism’s are Jews and the west.
Whilst many feminists have fought for these things (although they never seem to bother with blackwomen much as far as I can see) it quickly took over and warped IPV/DV blaming men for generational violence in families, which is simply untrue.
This is pretty much ‘read the definition’ well, judged by it’s actions also, feminism has damaged the legal system to the point of removal of the presumption of innocence for many crimes, especially around rape (where it has also stretched the definition to breaking point, and or not included the rape of men by women as a legal statute in many places where it holds sway politically, also many outright falsehoods about the likelihood or rape, and how much it occurs)
I could go on, but I will address your point, which I covered earlier, this is the case when these factors are controlled for, if we’re using the same data sets (US or UK) you’re either unable to perform simple multi-variate analysis on your own (there are websites built to do this with any data set) you’re taking all your information from feminist sources and are thus biasing yourself, or you are willfully mis-representing things to suit your position.
Both the MRM and Feminism abuse statistics in this way and it pisses me off, as I quite like knowing the truth of such matters, with the best available data.
I hope this makes my position clear and answers, clarifies or rebukes any of your points.
I’m always happy to discuss points, and provide, dull referenced articles like essays instead of personal missives like comment replies.
Distance@63: citations fucking needed for your MRA talkingpoints.
So, telling people to put their issues aside to focus on more prevalent ones is hateful? You mean like how feminists shame activists for advocating and raising awareness for men’s rights and issues? The sheer level of hostility to these people is clearly more prevalent than the supposed “war” on women in the west. Seeking to lower male suicide rates, illegalizing female on male rape, working towards non-biased prison sentencing, and so on are things western men severely need to focus on, and women should be supporting them, instead of shaming them and shutting down any dialogue with body shaming and attacks on their masculinity. Meanwhile, these idiotic (yes, idiotic) women expect even more empathy from men, despite the fact that men are the reason that feminism has gotten where it is. Yeah, no thanks for that. Not even a “you work on your issues, and we’ll work on ours” attitude.