As part of my literature studies this year I’m doing a module on modernism(s), an incredibly diverse movement that is generally associated with early to mid 20th century texts.
The critic I’ve been reading today made a gross, superficial statement:
It’s this latter phrase ‘the only possible just outcome’ that grates with me, as though the democratisation of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries were some sort of inevitable process and as though no other policy that the one we actually adopted would have been just.
I label this sort of feminism (I’ve no idea whether the author of this text is a feminist but the argument is and that’s what concerns me) ‘kid in a sweet shop’ feminism, the type that has dominated popular gender discourses for most of the 20th century. Basically it is ‘that kid (male) has something, therefore I want it, and because I want it I have a right to have it’. Complete bullshit, logically speaking, but one that fits in with consumerism and the paranoid jealousy that permeates all aspects of 20th century culture in the west. ‘If men have the vote then the only just outcome is that women should also have the vote’. It’s crap. There are any number of other just outcomes (overlooking for the moment the semantic problem of defining ‘just’), the most obvious being to remove the hierarchy of elective democracy. But no, female (or more specifically, feminist) philosophers and political leaders don’t tend to think like that. They tend to think, as I said, like the jealous kid in the sweet shop who turns to their parent, tugs on their trouser leg and says ‘that kid has some sweets that I like the look of, I have a right to also have those sweets’. The thought that ‘perhaps sweets are bad for everyone and so no-one should have them’ doesn’t occur to the feminists (for the most part). No, they only think ‘what can I get out of this?’ rather than ‘what is the best possible outcome?’. That early 21st century critics merely repeat the dogmatic mistakes of the foremothers is truly laughable and partly explains why feminism is currently so impotent, having to resort to renaming manhole covers ‘personhole covers’ and other such revisionist crap.
This is a big debate, but you’re right. During second-wave feminism, the woman and their male supporters argued for equal opportunity within the work force. Now though that they have equal opportunity within the work force there started to realises the negative implications of that change. Even though traditional gender roles were fought and women got more choice which is a good thing, they saturated the labour market and now families need two working parents to achieve the same level of economic benefit once supplied by the one. It’s also led to many women having trouble with the family/work differential which traditionally only really males faced.
I’m not saying it shouldn’t have been attempted, it should have its given woman more autonomy but on a flip side it’s given them more pressure to deal with. It was short sighted in not seeing how this change would affect economics systems and how that economic system affects both sexes.
I so much want to agree with your post it is almost painful, yet I can’t, as much as it is popular (and it is) to bash the female kid in the sweet shop, or for feminists to bash the male kid in the sweet shop, the only truly reasonable thing to do is to bash the human kid in the sweet shop. Because, when you boil down feminists making the same mistakes as their male predecessors, you still have men and women making mistakes.
I suppose your larger point might be that men make newer mistakes, though any fair history would probably record it as “same old mistake, just worded differently”.
Friday night! Live in the Ramada ballroom!
Snagglepuss and the Suffragettes!!
bring to you their greatest hits of the 50’s and 60’s…
come enjoy “Suffering Succotash” one more time!!
(it’s a cartoon)
and yes, I can see your objection to “just” as if the author’s idea of justice (whatever that may be) is indeed the universal ideal of justice.
I have the same objection whenever I see someone use “ethical” or “moral” as if their narrow conception of either is the only and correct one as a universal.
and manhole covers should still be called panties…
Not to hijack this thread, but I am going to hijack this thread and ask if you can expand upon this, or if you like, we can take it to the Philosophy section.
I have to commend you on that, it is definitively a perspective that never crossed my mind. Logically though, it does seem more correct than the current feministic aire.
Monty brings in a valid point as well, “traditional” gender roles being abolished. Although, there is no certainty that that is the catalyst for the nuclear family decay. I believe the family decay is more of an effect of the westernization aspect, which has seriously delineated social morality, making narcissism superior to social character.
I know I am about to make an impossible query, but, how then do we balance the gender roles, maintain “equality”, (another ficticious definition), and bring the social state back into a semblance of order?
Monty Cantsin: This is a big debate, but you’re right. During second-wave feminism, the woman and their male supporters argued for equal opportunity within the work force. Now though that they have equal opportunity within the work force there started to realises the negative implications of that change. Even though traditional gender roles were fought and women got more choice which is a good thing, they saturated the labour market and now families need two working parents to achieve the same level of economic benefit once supplied by the one. It’s also led to many women having trouble with the family/work differential which traditionally only really males faced".
K: I suggest it is because of economic conditions that forced
women to work, not any burning desire to enter the work force.
In 1963, my parents built a huge four bedroom house in
Illinois, for 35,000. Today that same house is worth a million
plus. My dad was very wealthy making 40,000 a year and was
making serious bucks in those days. Today 40,000 is a hair
above poverty level for a family, at least in the bay area.
I think women responded to the economic conditions rather
then the economic conditions responding to the women.
Colin: As per you lay down some great thoughts…I can’t help but think that one of the main problems you are approaching here is…‘the change in thinking of epochs’ (but why need it be like that!)…i.e. Why did women seek the vote to forcibly rather than question the entire elective political process (I found this idea hilarious)? I see your point…that thinkers of the time merely reflect the thought of the time…they don’t change it…they don’t overcome it…they sit within it…or do they really? Can a person ever escape the confines of their own culture and cultured bias?
I see part of the point, so much of thinking merely reinstates the ‘staus quo thinking’…anything like ‘slapping the kid’ or ‘the kid challeneging’ is left to the side…
siatd, are you not simply the symptom of a ‘deconstructive bent’ in our cultural thinking, which is o so common? (am I making sense?)
I have nothing but respect for intelligent and talented women (or more generally, feminists) who seek to challenge obstructive stereotyping and rid us of unnecessary structures and dynamics that patronise. I have nothing but total contempt for feminists who under the guise of ‘progressive’ politics make stupid generalisations that do nothing but create more problems and conflicts between genders.
Or, more simply, we’re told to be (or that we are) individuals so much and so often that what is the point in family? If a wife/husband/mother/father is, regardless of whether or not they are caring and loyal and loving, merely ‘an individual’ then why bother? When it makes no difference to one’s right to vote, one’s ability to earn money, one’s capacity to get laid then why be pleasant, respectful, smart, informed and interested rather than lazy, stupid, ignorant and selfish?
Equality is a crock of shit, men and women are different and without mass genetic manipulation to rid us of the biochemical and other anatomical differences such notions are merely a distraction. You do indeed ask an impossible question, my only advice to the world is to learn from past mistakes. Instead of reporting that ‘women on average earn 7-15% less than men over a lifetime’ we should actually talk about why that is - namely that because women still undertake the main responsibility for homekeeping and childrearing they spend, on average, 7-15% less time WORKING over a lifetime and so of course they earn less money. Also, while they are childrearing they are generally supported financially by men, so men earn more over a lifetime but also spend more on others over a lifetime.
But of course that’s not how the story is reported, it’s reported in a way that heavily implies that women are being oppressed, that it is a ‘man’s world’ and all the rest of the hackneyed crap trotted out every year or so when we get a new govt. report on work and paying conditions. The articles will state that ‘65% of women work in low paying jobs like cleaning, nursing, carework and so on’ without offering comparable statistics for men. The fact is that most people work in crap jobs for low wages, not just women. Without comparison statistics such news articles and academic papers are little more than pro-female sexist propaganda that serve to marginalise half the population simply on the grounds of gender. A man is paid too little for a nasty job - So what? A woman is paid too little for a nasty job and it is the fault of a misogynistic society and is headline news. This sort of bias is no more than a repetition of the old patriarchal dogma with the genders reversed.
I could go on for hours about this stuff, I could write a whole manifesto for those who seeks to avoid the same mistakes and create solutions. It’s something I’ve never studied at length academically (because all ‘women’s studies’ and ‘gender studies’ courses are dominated by pig ignorant female sexists who refuse to accept anything contrary to the accepted line) but have studied personally for years. As with all political discussions, the terms used dictate the potential solutions (Orwell’s point, 60 years ago) and telling one dimensional stories solves nothing. We need new conversations in order to come up with new solutions, it really is that simple.
Culture is merely human activity. While habit is possibly the strongest feature of human life (see Hume) habits can be broken as easily as ‘just do something else’. So culture is eminently escapable, it’s simply an issue of imagination and willful action. Now, I may be better at the imagination than the action but I retain all the faith in the world that change for the better is possible.
Yes and no. I am not ‘simply’ this but I am, in part, this. If I’d been born a century earlier I’d probably have been a Nietzschean instead of a Derridan, this is true. One can only work with the tools at one’s disposal or invent new tools using existing ones. The same applies to words as to hammers and chisels, though obviously some tools are better than others as means to a given end.
I do feel that we need to use our sense of justice here and keep in mind that many current practices trying to normalize the genders are correctives rather than institutions.
People do get locked into vicious cycles, if there is nothing else to learn from human history that be it. You say that women spend less time working than males because they are consigned to perform more housework/childrearing. Is that just? Or could we not strive to normalize it more? And what about the handicap of pregnancy.
I can only speak from within my own field, but pregnancy is a career-killer. There are now more females entering science grad school programs than males in the US. However, the upper eschelons of science remain very much male-dominated. While you can argue that this is because it takes a long time to become a PI, so the top reflects an older generation . . . but even there the genders don’t reflect the ratios of male:female entering the grad programs. Why? Because of pregnancy. That is pretty much nine months where one’s access to hazardous chemicals, infectious agents, and radiation are severly limited. Those are the bread-and-butter of the biological sciences. If I don’t start my day with a healthy dose of Ethidium Bromide in my coffee, well, I just can’t call it a good day. Then, after they give birth, they have maternity leave.
Now, I am both for maternity leave (helps foster the mother-child relationship), and for not exposing developing children to teratogens. However, in the publish-or-perish world of science these women will have a very hard time getting back into the ring. Journals for publication, let alone Grant procedures, are notoriously ‘what-have-you-done-for-me-lately’ institutions.
I would argue that to prevent the loss of good female scientists (who would otherwise be doomed to perpetual post-docs, or move to evil Industry) a corrective is a useful tool. Start-up grants for returning post-docs, are an example of something which is being tried out right now.
These aren’t hand-outs, they merely level the playing field. Men can’t give birth, so we have a huge advantage in highly involved (which usually, but not always, end up being high-paying) careers. That’s unfair and, what’s more, counter-productive.
Pardon the misstep of letter arrangement in your acronymic name version. My fault, not intentional.
I understand completely, and agree completely as well. During college, I, like a number of others in liberal arts majors, were forced to take certain sociological “sensitivity” classes. For six semesters, the students were pounded by militant feminists who would fail you for anything they considered a “male stereotypic behavior”, or if you did not summarily agree with their assertions. Quite slanted actually.
This was also the primary reason I left the military. Every time a problem occurred, I was sent to “social reconditioning” training, and had no choice but to silently agree with whatever was forced on me, or face the possibility of an Article 15. Females in the military, speaking of non-combatant situations, had complete control of any situation involving a male. In Basic, our first Tech Seargant, was Article 15 and Dishonorably discharged for an accidental contact, ( he was pointing a finger at a female, I was a witness, while verbally reprimanding her for an obvious infringement, and made accidental contact with her chest just below the neck, not the breast). It cost him his military career after 13 years of dedicated service without incident.
The price of industrialization, modernization and westernization. This pendulum will not likely swing back to equilibrium.
Obviously, “equality” in the social or capital sectors will never actually be achieved. The genetic differences will continue to play into the psyche, whether anyone likes to admit it or not … that is unless stem cell research advances to the point where the female’s body is no longer necessary for reproduction.
It appears that the failures of history and typical status quo social consciousness will prevail. Sadly.
Of course we could. My point was more so that the PC feminist press present the problem as though it is one of women simply being paid less than men when in fact there are a series of different structures at play involving time, money, work, childrearing and the varying responsibilities of different peoples and families, none of which are well served by one dimensional news reporting and ‘academic’ ‘studies’ that repeat the same presumptions.
“You say that women spend less time working than males because they are consigned to perform more housework/childrearing. Is that just?”
I don’t think so, no. But we can (in part) blame feminism for producing such a situation - women wanted to go out to work and be capable of being as financially independant as the average man. Fine, no problem with that. If they can do the job (without some pathetic positive discrimination policy covering the asses of the incompetent ones) well and work hard then gender simply isn’t an issue for me. But along with the movement of women into work we should have had a dual movement of men into the home. Feminism (on the whole) has not only failed to grasp the importance of this, it has actually discouraged it (because of the kid in the sweet shop mentality of ‘I want more but I’m not going to give up anything for it’) and portrayed men as crap parents. Feminism has unequivocably characterised men as ignorant, sexist and violent. The legal system (which gives a man an average of several years for a violent sexual assault but gives women who perform involuntary penectomies on men little or no punishment) only perpetuates this.
Artificial wombs - that’s the answer to so many of these problems.
It isn’t just that - there are so many ‘programs’ to encourage women into the sciences (more bullshit positive discrimination, i.e. sexism) and as such you may expect a high number of entrants (because there is more funding for gradschool female scientists) but also expect that quite a few women would, once this support structure of positive discrimination is removed, find life in your field a lot harder than they did before. This, of course, is the fundamental problem with positive discrimination.
Of course, and this can set back a career tremendously. On the other hand pregnancy is something only women can enjoy. Personally I’d quite like to know what it is like to carry and give birth to a child but I’ll never have that pleasure. Feminism tends to characterise pregnancy as a burden, as a block to career development (as though careers were the only important game in town) rather than as a wonderful, life altering experience.
Personally I think that the woman has had 9 months to foster such a relationship and I’m far more concerned about the total lack of encouragement or support for the father-child relationship.
This is a problem for anyone who has to take time out from work for any reason (who works in the academic sciences). Admittedly this is more likely to affect women but characterising is as only a problem affecting women (who are pregnant) is simply repeating the same mistakes as before. Whether or not you are doing this is another matter.
We should offer these to men too, otherwise we are simply slapping on more positive discrimination to try to solve the problems created by the first wave of positive discrimination. If equality is to mean a thing then it means the abolition of such one-sided measures and policies.
There are reason why men have to take long periods off work too, you know. Levelling the playing field is fine, positive discrimination will only come back to bite you in the ass.
I’ve searched but not found a single male professor of women’s studies. I’ve been told by both men and women that males in such departments (or even ‘gender studies’ departments) that men are consitently alienated and insulted and harassed (esp. being accused of being a closet patriarch) if they criticise or disagree with the ‘party’ line. You may like ‘who stole feminism’, a book all about how one wing of the feminist movement had dominated the field and excluded all those who refused to accept the lies that they told (the classic one being ‘95% of all domestic violence is male on female’), including plenty of female academics who were excellent at their job. Hence my adoption of the term ‘feminofascism’.
It’s the ‘crying woman’ syndrome. I noticed it back at highschool - I once got into a lot of trouble for making a female teacher cry. I was messing about in the classroom making jokes about anal sex (it was a class of 17 year olds so such a topic wasn’t exactly taboo) and she never, not once, told me to stop or that my behaviour was out of order or offending her. After the lesson she went to the staffroom and cried. I got a bollocking and was forced (i.e. threatened with suspension if I refused) to apologise. Basically I was apologising for her lack of ‘balls’ and inability to control a classroom. If a woman gets upset because of something a man has done then it is bullying and possibly sexual harassment. It’s a fucking joke…
Like I say, artificial wombs would impress me no end and if introduced in the right way would solve a hell of a lot of gender based problems. But, as with the domestic life issue, I can’t see any feminists being in favour of giving up the area over which women have supreme dominion, even though it would lead to greater equality. Equality for many feminists means ‘hang on to all the biases in favour of women but eliminate those against’.
That depends entirely on how much we’re willing to accept. I don’t accept the dogma and challenge it in a way that I see as productive and creative. I try to come up with other solutions and conceive of a society where such problems are not merely perpetuated but are actually dissolved. I’m optimistic, the veil of political correctness is being burnt like a 16th century witch, in 10 or 20 years I think that things will look very different.
Here again is something within my experiences, although this probably won’t make others look favorably upon me.
My wife was given a job opportunity, that was at that time, a positive step. The problem was that it required her to be gone thirteen to fifteen hours a day, which directly made me the primary caregiver for the children.
I have to be honest and say, with regards to gender roles, I didn’t experience comfort at all for the three years she was the provider and I was the “Stay at home” parent. I felt like a slug quite honestly. Being the male, it gave the sensation of not properly doing my job by staying at home, and having my wife make all the money.
I realize the fallacy of gender roles, but this is a good example of the difficulties involved with stepping beyond them. I couldn’t look people in the eye when they asked what I did, because the second you say “stay at home” father, you can see the assumption race through their mind, “bum”, “unemployed bum”, “I can’t believe you make your wife work”, “you’re not a real man”, etc. I can’t speak for Europe, but in America, that is how it is received, perceived.
The other side was, I really enjoyed my time with my kids, and after the adjustment of having to deal with my authoritarian home model, they found themselves enjoying it as well. I don’t know if it is a positive/negative, but as a father, I was less likely to do “for them”, preferring the cooperative mode; i.e. everyone was responsible for pitching in with the household upkeep requirements.
There are definitely familial advantages to the father having the primary role with the children, but it is inherently difficult, and American society at least, seriously frowns upon a male caregiver.
Yeah, I definately think that there should be correctives in place to have men at home and for that to be OK.
I’ve known a lot of latchkey kids and they usually don’t turn out as well as the Children who had a parent at home when they got out of school. Insofar as my limited test sample goes, it didn’t matter if it was the mother or the father. Heck, in one case it didn’t matter that it was Mother #2, the Butch one.
The stigmas attached to a non-working male are quite problematic.
Correctives do need to be addressed on the other end, that goes without saying. An even playing field is an even playing field. The pendulum is just in a massive state of disequilibrium right now. It’ll swing back with time.
The nice thing about being male is how little these correctives affect me. Heh, in a recent study, the same Grant but with a male vs. female vs. ungendered name recieved very different fundings. Males/ungendered got more money than the females.
If they want a piece of the pie, that’s fine, since I still have about 3/4ths of it. Come on guys, we are the rational gender after all. Tja, women. Their skin is so porous, it lets Dionysus in. Silly women.
I am quite certain that siatd will come and shred me for this, but if those correctives are attempted in any way, from other than inside the feminist camps, it will be perceived, most likely in my opinion, as another attempt of the patriarchy asserting control of the female.
This seems an obstacle built to promote antagonism, continually.
I’m sure that you are generalising to an extent but I believe every word of your personal experience (and sympathise with it) because I’ve seen the exact same situation in this country. I’m not so sure about the rest of Europe - Sweden has the most progressive gender policies in the world and plenty of other European nations would appear to be ‘higher up’ the chart than the UK.
The way it works in Britain, which is essentially a centre-left country but much more central than left, is either the homemaking father is viewed as an idle, idiotic, unemployable layabout (though we’ve got a sincere respect for homemaking mothers, or ‘mothers’ in this country) who is reliant on a woman for financial support, or he is seen as a ‘superdad’ i.e. one that actually talks to his children and does the majority of the housework, shopping and cooking. This is a highly patronising term, completely at odds with the other representation. Now this is, of course, a problem of a world where the vast majority of jobs are full-time. Either you have a full time job, in which case you simply don’t have the 7 hours a day or more necessary to maintain a good home and a reasonably sizes family, or you don’t work. Part time work is invariably low wage, low skill work. Well, almost invariably. Put simply, we haven’t broken out of the model of father-as-breadwinner to anything like the extent that we’ve broken out of the mother-as-homemaker model. In truth we’ve not even left the latter behind to the extent that I’d prefer, but the iconography of males and the institutional dynamics concerning them are, in certain key ways, more obstructive and limiting than those facing females.
The issue of pregnancy is a particularly female one and certainly something we could deal with in a much more effective way, artificial wombs or otherwise. The economic liberals won’t like me saying this but I’m all for state intervention in the economy (which is inescapable when you have national economies in the first place, laissez-faire is a spectre) to produce a situation where there are more part time skilled jobs. I heard on the BBC radio (5) two guys who shared the management of a firm, each working 3 days a week, who found it both a better way of running their business and that it enabled much more time for other activities.
Not sure which part you thought I was generalizing about?
On the social aspect, it is likely to have to accept that criticism.
As far as on the home issue, no, not generalizing there. My wife will admit that with children, (all of them older, no infants/toddlers), I can maintain a more peaceful and productive household. She is definitely superior with children in the formative years. Which I personally believe is a more natural model for the situation, mothers for the nuturing years, fathers more for structure. Not that equalizing elements aren’t present in both genders, it just appears that is how it generally ends up in practice.
Again, I can’t speak for you country, but in America, the only way the “stay at home” father scenario will work out where society accepts it, is only if at the same time the complete emascualtion of the male is accepted as well. For this country, that doesn’t seem a likely scenario … we grow more barbaric all the time, even though it is a PC society.
LOL … I wouldn’t see any issue with a female referee at all, other than her being required to be assertive, dealing with hostile competitors in the heat of the moment. Football always has it’s rogue’s and hotheads. (still the best sport ever)
Tja, women. Their skin is so porous, it lets Dionysus in. Silly women.