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Still a bit light on the details. Are you too afraid of my mean-girl power to explain which men's rights women are taking away, or would you be willing to elaborate?
As for "casting women in an unflattering light," well, your premise that women are too mean and irrational to be allowed to participate in politics certainly does that! And I suppose you will claim that any counterargument that I make is merely an appeal to "women are wonderful." But I think my conduct speaks for itself, to any reasonable observer. Your accusation of habitual bad-faith argumentation on my part is unfounded.
This is a topic I really, really don't want to talk about or even think about, because it's one of the abysses that gazes back and keeps me up at night and also it's radioactive. But I'm already thinking about it and I just went through the entire thread of this top-level post hoping in vain that someone had already said it, so I guess it falls to me to explain the HBD-MRA model of patriarchy and its downfall.
Assumed: HBD, or at least the points of which that men are physically stronger than women, and that women are better at social - in particular covert manipulation - than men. For the latter part, also that women care more about safety than men.
The outcome of this in prehistory and most of history is explicit patriarchy that is somewhat more equal than it looks. Explicit female domination or excessive implicit female domination doesn't work because in extremis men would defeat women physically and rape and/or murder them (and in prehistory, of course, mass abduction and rape of other tribes' women was reasonably-commonplace), but women do better than it looks like they do because of course they do, that's what happens when you're better at covert manipulation and the primary drivers of culture. This was stable.
It went from stable to metastable at some point. Obvious potential contributors include the development of firearms, the immense increase in state power relative to personal power, and democracy + women's suffrage giving women an equal explicit share in that state power. I say metastable, rather than unstable, because there was still the social pressure toward not-being-a-feminist encoded within society and enforced by women at least as much as by men. This maintained the explicit patriarchy for some time, but only against relatively-small disruptions. When a large disruption came along, in the form of the 60s/70s counterculture, the social chaos allowed the "women are better at manipulation" effect to take over society entire. Thus, we get the current system, where there is some explicit pretence of equality but implicitly and even to some degree explicitly the deck is massively stacked in women's favour. This is also stable; rapist revolution on small or large scale is impossible because of state power, and now with both women's material incentives and individual social incentives pointing toward feminism, they aren't likely to steer the culture away from it.
The place where this model gets horrible and abyss-gazey is if you consider a patriarchal society better than a matriarchal one - most obviously to me, if you think that safetyism and its accompanying administrative bloat is strangling our ability to achieve anything, but also if you think that the matriarchal mode's oppression of men is worse than the patriarchal mode's oppression of women, or indeed if you think that matriarchy is incompatible with maintaining replacement fertility and thus with a society that isn't necessarily parasitic on others (I'm not convinced of the latter two, but obviously a bunch of people in this thread are convinced). Because then, according to the model, the only way to fix it is to undo some of the factors that made the matriarchy mode a stronger attractor than the patriarchy mode. And, well, I enumerated the options there, or at least the ones I can see, and the possible ones suck (particularly since - as even Dave Sim noted in his infamous essay - the sex differences in these things are statistical trends and not 100%-accurate stereotypes; revoking women's suffrage would very definitely be unfair).
Like I said, I try not to think about this; I would basically rather stick my head in the sand and hope for a miracle (space colonisation and genetic enhancement both seem vaguely like they might organically lead to solutions, although the latter has its own terrors). But you asked, and I ended up reading your post because of the mod-queue thing (this one wasn't there, but I always look at context), and I'd hate myself more for self-censorship than I would and do for spitting it out. So here you go.
Strongly patriarchal societies tend to lack innovation. They are too conservative for it. Think about much of the Muslim world, for example.
It seems to me that the world's most innovative societies are not strongly patriarchal or strongly matriarchal, they are somewhere in between or somewhere outside of that dimension entirely.
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Thank you, thank you, thank you! I am so grateful for your straightforward explanation.
In arguing against the idea that women’s ability to garner sympathy is dangerous in itself, I find that I am in a similar situation to the one that Yair Rosenberg outlines here:
Similarly, if I point out the cruelty that might result from denying women a voice in the political process, someone who subscribes to the HBD-MRA viewpoint that you outline can simply respond that any traction I can get from such an argument is proof that people sympathise with women. Accordingly, women constitute a danger and need to be treated with less sympathy in order to neutralise this threat.
We need to prevent the possibility of a downward spiral in which any sign of sympathy for your opponents is proof of the danger that they pose. Basic human sympathy ought to apply to everyone. When the state has as much power as modern states almost always do, this means that the state needs to be able to have sympathy for everyone in it. This means that everyone needs to have some voice in the political process.
When women protest that they ought to have a voice in our debates over how society should be run, this is not in itself evidence that women are unreasonable and power-seeking. Nor does the fact that people sympathise with this argument constitute evidence of some kind of overwhelming persuasive power that women have. To claim either of these things is to participate, clearly, in a spiral of nonsympathy.
Thank you so much for your explanation. If your understanding of what I am trying to argue against illuminates any flaws in my response, then I welcome your insight. You can’t argue against what you don’t understand. I appreciate the opportunity you’ve given me.
But it doesn't. When was the last time you saw an argument gain traction in popular discourse that a policy should be enacted because it benefits men qua men?
Or, alternatively, the total power of the state over every facet of our lives might be trimmed a little bit around the edges. There is an argument to be made that more state control in our gynocentric society does primarily result in the preferences of women being taken care of first and foremost. This is what the somewhat cringey "longhouse" discourse on the right alludes to.
Well, I certainly support sympathy for men and policy measures designed to help men in areas where they are disproportionately struggling, and I am open to the idea of trimming back the power of the state over some facets of our lives. So although I don't believe we actually live in a "gynocentric society," we might well be able to come to an agreement on some individual changes!
I've avoided wading into this because I tend to be more sympathetic to your view (at least, your resistance against posters who think you should have few to zero rights). That said, I cannot help sympathizing with your critics on some points. I am sure that you, personally, are sincere about believing that the all-encompassing model of The Patriarchy does not mean individual men can't suffer. But -
Can you give any concrete examples of measures specifically to help men that you would not oppose? Especially if those measures might in some tiny way inconvenience or disadvantage a woman?
Saying "I support sympathy for men" is like saying "I think racism is bad." Okay, good for you. Do you want a cookie? Glad to know you don't think an entire class of people literally deserves no sympathy (and there are regular posters here who do believe that). But in what way would you be willing to "help men in areas where they are disproportionately suffering"? The answers I have almost always gotten from feminists are generally along the lines of "Yes, men can suffer, but women suffer more, so until we have corrected thousands of years of historical injustice and oppression against women, focusing specifically on men is putting our energy in the wrong place." It's very similar to the narrative of "anti-racists," that even if white people (for example) can sometimes be persecuted or disadvantaged, the overwhelming historical trend has been in the opposite direction, so until we have "ended racism," the white people who are now getting the short end of the stick just need to suck it up.
While I do not think the men, or white people, who respond with "Well, fuck you then" and turn hardcore MRA or white nationalist, are choosing the most productive way to engage with the problem, I do feel some sympathy for them and understand why there are more of them.
Hm, let me make a list of measures that I would either directly recommend or seriously consider. Not all of these will inconvenience or disadvantage women particularly, but a few of them should satisfy that also.
Repealing the "Dear Colleague" letter requiring "preponderance of evidence" standards for campus rape cases. I think there is sufficient evidence to show that this has led to unjust outcomes, and that in general allowing campuses to set their own standards based on the way they see things playing out in their local community makes more sense.
Opening up some/most domestic violence shelters to men. I know many radical feminists would prefer them to be all-female spaces, and of course J. K. Rowling famously made one that excludes trans women, just to make it feel extra safe to women who fear men particularly. Keeping a few single-sex spaces does make sense, in areas where the population density can support more than one. But men sometimes need a place to go when they have been abused, too, and when they're dealt with separately this can make it harder to build infrastructure.
Local community measures to give men places to meet and socialise with other men, such as the "Men's Shed" initiatives in Australia.
More physical activity in schools, to make the learning environment easier for high-energy children (who are often disproportionately boys).
Anti-suicide measures aimed at men.
Housing measures that pay particular care to the needs of homeless men.
There are probably more, but hopefully this provides a decent spectrum.
Just wanted to say, awesome engagement here and elsewhere in the thread. It is very much appreciated, and I think this particular post is strong evidence for good faith discussion that was sometimes disputed elsewhere.
I tend to fall into the "the average woman doesn't realize how massively privileged she is" camp (or perhaps more "the average woman doesn't realize how comparatively unprivilegeg the average man is"), but I'd like (1) I'd like us to figure out how make things better, rather than just yell at each other and (2) somehow I still think i wouldn't like to switch (although when I was younger, maybe), which is an indication of something....
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Well, I hear women say that a lot when pressed. But the issue is that men are often struggling in areas characterised by zero-sum conflict in which women have gained unfair advantages. Would you be in favour of abolishing implicit and explicit gender quotas; female-only scholarships, mentorship and career advancement programs as well as professorships; and DEI offices? Make family court fairer (which would mean women would get custody much less often and would be awarded less alimony)? Equalise public spending on health and social programs (which would mean that programs for women's health would receive less funding)? Make schools and universities more friendly for men (which would mean less coddling and abolishing Title IX shenanigans)? Change work place norms so that an accusation of sexual misconduct doesn't automatically result in social ostracism (which would mean that women who claim to be victims would face more scrutiny)? Etc. etc.
It all sounds great in abstract, but is usually met with fierce opposition when concrete policies are proposed.
I can agree with some of the things you ask for, here and there. For example, I agree that the top-down command to use a "preponderance of evidence" standard when evaluating campus rape cases has been shown to be a mistake, leading to unjust outcomes in some cases, perhaps particularly for men with social disadvantages of race and/or class.
There are also some places where I don't agree with your proposed remedy, but might agree with alternate ways to help men. For example, I don't agree with abolishing all female-only scholarships, but nor do I object to male-only scholarships, particularly in fields where men are underrepresented such as nursing or teaching.
Most importantly, though, I think there are some important consequences to the idea that everyone, including men, is deserving of a baseline level of sympathy. One of these is that we need to retire the idea that women don't have to work hard to understand what men are going through, because "society forces less powerful people (like women) to consider the point of view of more powerful people (like men)." That sort of statement is far too confident. Sympathy with someone who is different to you is actually quite hard. Moreover, not all men have power.
So, while I might not always agree with you on all of the issues you raise, I do agree that it's important for me to listen to your perspective as sympathetically as I can.
I can appreciate that.
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Created an account after lurking for a while just to add on to this comment. Another major consequence that @magic9mushroom missed in his current model is that at the end of the day society is built on men's strength. Pretty much every piece of critical infrastructure is created, installed and maintained by men. Their strength is the foundation on which society is built. The house you live in, the roads you travel on with your car, the internet cables, etc. As more and more check out of society for various reasons the more the foundation cracks and we revert back to the first model. Humanity has already exploited all the easy to reach minerals and energy in our current rise, a fall will be one that we most likely never a rise from again.
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I mean, for a quick but non-exhaustive list from the top of my head:
Equal opportunity in the work place (through explicit and implicit quotas)
The right to a fair trial (family court)
The right to face one's accuser (Title IX kangaroo courts)
Equal enjoyment of society's resources men disproportionally provide through taxes (health care spending, or the aforementioned differences in effort to adress male and female homelessness)
I will not list a whole host of outcome disparities (suicides, homelessness, sentencing disparities, work place deaths etc.) because they are more complicated and frequently an outcome of men's choices. Not that outcome disparities disfavouring women aren't frequently used by feminists to demand more freebies.
EDIT: But of course the most important right that is denied to men because of how women abuse their social power to steer political discourse is what Rainer Forst calls the right to justification: to be subjected only to those binding rules that have been adequately justified. This is what Dasein's comments are mainly getting at.
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Well, as luck would have it, you provide details. E.g. this idea that you don't have to justify or spell out your own object-level ideas, instead moving from a sneer to another clever sneer, humorously nitpicking, questioning me and expecting some mealy-mouthed excuses to mock – this is, in itself, an attitude of a person used to wielding social power, to meting out rewards and threats. In fact you have started with accusatory questions and assumptions:
This is and remains sufficient, a catty snipe men do not receive well from each other, and in many other places a heavy, dangerous accusation.
As for men's rights, MRAs have their lists of complaints available on the web. If you are curious, you can find them. My point, however, is not men's rights, but the mode of engagement you presume permissible for yourself, because it is – for a woman, as I've been saying.
If I were to name one right I personally think is missing, that'd be general legal recognition of men-only spaces, i.e. not spaces which women aren't interested in entering because of their perceived low status, but ones they are not allowed into – precisely to avoid this kind of petty bullshit, and also to not ruin some nice hobbies and traditions. Boy Scouts, MTG, Compagnons, old clubs.
For some reason feminists are very hostile to the notion.
But yeah, let's go with me being too afraid. Rather, let's say I am exhausted. Women tend to think this such words make a good argument, so I assume you wouldn't think this an unfair move.
I do, in fact, generally respect exhaustion in my argumentative partners, you're not wrong about that. Unfortunately, in this case, you've made any number of statements that require answers. You accuse me of sneering, but you've been sneering at me this whole time, and suggesting taking away rights far more fundamental than a right to single-sex spaces. As for catty sniping, you're full of catty sniping! "I love the indignation here," you write. "And thanks for another illustration," you continue. It's true that I'm not spelling out my own object level ideas; I'm asking you to spell yours out because you keep leveling accusations at women that honestly seem far more true of you. Perhaps if you were better at engaging with women in good faith, you'd get more good faith in return.
Going to come in handy for the 2 women on the Motte, thanks for the insight.
Sarcasm aside, do you not realize that you making statements like that is exactly his point? That you can harness social shaming as a tool even in a place like a motte without raising too many eyebrows, and such statements are toxic to honest discourse to the nth degree. Be honest, you know you being a woman has nothing to do with how he is engaging in this conversation, if anything if you read @DaseindustriesLtd's other comments on other topics, he is holding back his punches. So why add in that little snide at all if not for shaming purposes? Do you seriously think "has women franchisement gone too far" is too spicy relative to the other things the motte discusses?
I hate to say it, but a lot of women are so used to using harnessing shame to win arguments that they don't even know when they are doing it (or that you can win arguments any other way) [1]. Your statement can roughly be translated to;
" Oh sweetie, no wonder you are having girl troubles, You don't even know how to talk to girls! just say your please and thank yous and you will get a girlfriend in no time" exact same thing as "Perhaps if you were better at engaging with women in good faith, you'd get more good faith in return." in the context of this conversation.
And there you did it. You poisoned the well, now unless one has the eye of Horus he will slightly doubt everything he (Daes) says because maybe you know what, he kinda might just suck with girls and is taking it all out on the internet. Maybe everything he is saying is just incel jibber jabber.
You are non-stop trying to shame him ala "can you guys believe this, he is being mean to girls!" over and over again. And if you can't realize that after being told explicitly, I don't know what to say. But do be careful of wielding weapons, lest they be wielded against you.
Here's some unsolicited advice. You can <argue for/against the point> instead of < arguing for the point as a woman>, the latter will automatically guarantee you hostility. Why? Because the latter is often a failsafe warning sign that shaming will be used if the discussion turns sideways and everyone who has their senses tuned after years of internet usage will pattern match regardless of the ground truth and get in a preemptive strike.
[1] FYI, even the most vilest of online incels or whatsoever woman-hating group you can conjure up not are really hostile to women when interacting with them. But they are hostile to "bitches", i.e women who are so used to arguing "as a woman" that they are gobsmacked by the notion that they might get hostility for reasons other than being a woman, i.e for being annoying/histrionic/naggy/whatever. Men get hostility all the fucking time from other men, but I suppose when you are used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
I do agree with Dasein on the substance and I do agree with your assessment above, but to be entirely fair, one's identity is a valid thing to mention when registering offense at something that is insulting to said identity. The reason it feels alien to many men is probably because they are used to the demonisation.
"As a man, I feel unsafe when you cast us in the role of perpetual oppressors" said no man ever.
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Dase has made his opinion of women very clear, on multiple occasions. He thinks we are liars. He thinks we are mean. He thinks we habitually act in bad faith.
The style of sneering at female commenters personally that he is employing in this thread is very obviously coloured by his broader opinions.
I'm not arguing that it shouldn't be allowed. I decided not to let it -- and the sneering alongside it -- go unchallenged.
I meant it, sincerely. Good faith works best as a two way street. That's just a fact of human interaction.
I've been on the Motte since it was the Culture War Thread. I'm one of the left-most people here. I've never flamed out. I've garnered two mod notes over six years; never a ban. I stay for the charity, when I can get it; I stay to be challenged and to see views I wouldn't otherwise see. Sometimes, I admit, I stay for the fight. But I always argue in good faith, even when it leaves me vulnerable. If you can't access that side of me, you're not trying very hard.
So you are committing the same NAXALT/AXALT fallacy that he claimed women are more prone to making. I.e not understanding distributions.
Yes, he could have avoided this by prepending "most" to his "women are X" clause or "more X than Y", but only a bad faith interpretation (or abject misunderstanding) facilitates that confusion.
I think one of the issues here is that criticizing women as a group is so verboten that any and all of it is taken with utmost offense. Consider "men are more aggressive than women", that is true. Consider "men are more boneheaded than women", also true. Not all men and all women, but those statements can be said without invoking the wrath of the male gender or anyone batting an eyelid at all. However when you levy an equal accusation at women, let's say being susceptible to NAXALT/AXALT fallacies, all hell breaks lose? How is that any worse than being aggresive or boneheaded?
As for sneering female commentators, The one female commentator brought it on herself coming in guns blazing with sneers out of the gate. You just entered the mud bath.
I wasn't the one to insinuate that you are operating in bad faith but you are refusing to face head-on the meat of his criticisms and instead hiding behind the fact that they were said in an unsavory tone.
Why don't you actually challenge the criticisms instead of bringing weak sarcastic platitudes or diverting the discussion to the tone of the conversation?
As I understand it, the claim is that women are so powerful that they have turned into little dictators who go around making unreasonable demands. This requires substantiation. What kind of unreasonable demands? So far I've been given "shut down any political project they don't like." That's a strong claim. There are, in fact, many existing political projects that women are more against than in favour of that have not been shut down.
You've given me a second claim, that "criticizing women as a group is so verboten that any and all of it is taken with utmost offense." It is true that claims about women are policed more strongly than claims about men. However, women are not unique in this regard. Claims about black people are policed more strongly than claims about white people, for example. So it does not make sense to attribute this to women's overwhelming manipulative dictatorial power. It has more to do with the fact that there is a historical pattern of unfair mischaracterisation of women that was bad enough that it gave rise to a movement dedicated to correcting it.
None of what I have been given substantiates the claim that I was initially criticizing -- namely, that women are "queens by political fiat" in any real sense of social or political power. We are not. It is obvious that we are not.
You are, indeed, either speaking in bad faith and thus escalate the demand for evidence as if none were provided yet and I'm just waxing lyrical about generalities (ironically validating me further), or so triggered by the sarcastic line about queens (don't you know it's a meme?) as to become unable to recognize the context of those claims.
The context of my claims about power imbalance is that the onus is consistently on men to change in all related topics where it is clear that something must be changed. E.g. when the topic is sexlessness, men must suck it up and adapt to «increased standards» in dating. When the topic is TFR, men must learn to contribute to housework, reduce their sexism (as documented by gorge) and so on.
Out of context, many of those suggestions are not terrible. In context, though, it is bad on a number of levels. Most importanly it is
a) unfair to consistently demand only one side in a democratic society to compromise, especially while presenting the other as devoid of agency and control;
b) plainly tyrannical to suppress explanations which are relatively less demeaning to men and less flattering to women, namely hypergamy with regard to dating and revealed disinterest in having a family or children; and
c) irrational to expect policies and recommendations based on models which are little more than self-serving gaslighting to actually work.
These deficiencies are exactly in line with the petty tyrant framework.
Female preference is taken as the implicit ground truth which must be acknowledged and adapted to; male preference, sometimes completely made-up (in cases where it is impossible to tie the object-level complaint to things men actually, systematically do), is presented as the root problem to be solved. The reason that such a discrepancy in discourse is possible is: shaming of pro-male voices that women collectively engage in, using rhetorics that amount to sneering, and feeling justified due to the aforementioned wishful thinking tendency where their wants and excuses are objective truths.
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That rhetoric might be a little overwrought, but this reminds me of the infrastructure bill in the early Obama years. It was right in the ruin of the housing crisis, and the people losing their jobs where mostly men. Obama had the genuine insight that you weren't going to easily convince all these construction workers to retrain as nurses, and hit on infrastructure as the big topic to get them back to work while preserving their dignity.
And by the time the plan got through Obama's mostly female and gynocentric advisors, most of the "infrastructure" money had been looted for teachers and nurses (mostly-female professions almost totally unaffected by the crisis) and the rest went to environmental impact surveys and such and basically none of it went to any man who had ever touched a shovel.
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Women have a lower threshold for offense, so the excessive policing of language can be more readily layed at their feet than black people's.
Clearly, what is obvious to a feminist is not obvious to the MRA-ish perspective that you find in a place like this. Originally, the discussion was about reproduction, and the unprecedented and total power women currently enjoy over it. 50% gametes, 100% power. This is an example of women getting their way, unimpaired by fairness. My "fundamental right" to decide if and when I become a father is not 'under attack', it is nonexistent .
Anyway, more generally about 'queens by political fiat', I remember this old irascible MRA, you might have known him if you've been in the game long enough (david byron I think), and one of his shticks was to ask feminists: what legal advantage do men enjoy over women? Because there are plenty of laws advantaging women.
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I'll give you one such example, which is more or less what this entire discussion is based on. The [dm]ating market.
Women just about exercise dictatorial demand. This is patently obvious to most men, but this visualization might give a somewhat illustrative example. Notice how most of the space is pink, indicating female advantage. The advantage shifts genders only when the man is 95th percentile. When @FarNearEverywhere speaks of the infamous choosy male she is falling for the apex fallacy given a majority of the male population is at a severe disadvantage, but they are also invisible to women.
More generally, women wield the power to destroy careers with mere accusations of sexual misconduct, men don't have this privilege. This trend more or less applies to any social shaming, men just about cannot wield the weapon of shaming at all, it's almost an exclusively female activity. Men can intimidate and hurt and wield a lot of other weapons but shaming not so much.
Do you think Davis Sabatini would have been fired for sleeping with a coworker if he was a woman?
That is only part of the reason. Women have an ingroup bias and men have an outgroup bias. Humans are biologically hardwired to be more protective towards eggs than sperm because of obvious evolutionary logistical reasons.
Regardless of the reason, is it rational?
Yes, women are not queens. I am not claiming that is a rational statement but I will try to explain where its coming from to bridge some of the inferential distance.
As a young frustrated guy, it certainly feels like they are. When you see all kinds of scholarships for them, programs to get them STEM degrees and jobs, when there are trends such as "Believe all women" and questioning them is tabooed, when an average run-of-the-mill girl can demand her partners to be 6 foot tall, earn 6 figures and have a minimum 6-inch dick when men making even 1/10th of that demand despite them being worthy or not are chastised to hell. When you are told repeatedly that all of society's social ills are because you keep on playing video games or won't take showers and women are not criticized one bit. When NGOs say "Women are the greatest victims of war" despite men being the overwhelming number of casualties, and doesn't get chastised for it. It certainly sometimes feels like the game is rigged against you.
That is a statement out of frustration, you are not the audience for it, the audience is other men who can relate to the frustration. And the worst part of it all (rhetorically)? You take a massive social hit for pointing any of those things out. Even in a post about how 60% of young men are single and how that is a sign of severe social decay, you clutch your pearls about guys being frustrated at women and lashing out a bit sardonically at the grimness of the situation, it's the lack of empathy.
I probably am sea lioning a bit, it's true. But, on the other hand, it's not actually good for the Motte when it becomes a place for men to lash out in frustration at women with exaggerated claims. You joke that there are about 2 women here, but really, if you want viewpoint diversity, this can't become a space where people are perceived as having the right to complain about a particular subgroup without getting pushback.
For what it's worth, you have my agreement of some of your complaints. "Women are the greatest victims of war" is pretty indefensible. There have been instances in which the social movement against rape and sexual assault has led to deeply unfair outcomes for some of those accused. And, in this context, it is silly to blame men for not being in relationships. If women are "rational" for dating each other or choosing their careers instead, then men are just as "rational" for looking at the hell that is dating apps and deciding to watch porn instead.
The liberal position is that people can "demand" whatever they want out of a partner, provided that they are willing to accept not having a partner if they cannot actually convince such a person to date them. And I think that's a pretty important principle, actually -- that individuals can always opt out of the dating market, if they've decided that it sucks. That women fear coercion in this space is not actually a sign that we are manipulative; our fear is based on a not-too-distant history in which social norms used to make it harder for women to say no to relationships even when they wanted to. If you want to throw away liberalism in this context, because you think it simply isn't sustainable, then it's not illegitimate for people to respond by pointing out that this will create harms of its own.
If we're keeping liberalism, then I think the finger-pointing in both directions has to stop. I think sometimes people point the finger at men because they want to forestall any sort of conversation that might lead to social coercion of women, but I don't think this is actually helpful. Men are also within their rights to opt out if they want to.
Honestly, if you ask me, one reason this problem is hard is that child-rearing just doesn't fit easily into an atomised, market-based society. The strongest incentives are not economic nor directly related to happiness; they happen on the wishy-washy level of fulfillment and even sometimes self-sacrifice. The best ways to support it naturally take place not on the individual level nor the national level but rather on the intermediate, community level.
It's possible that some of the solutions to the problem of finding relationships need to happen on that local level, too. Dating apps suck particularly badly for men, but women don't really seem to love them all that much, either. Rather than berating people for not engaging with the system as it exists, it surely makes more sense to try to reform the system so that better ways of finding partners and starting families start to seem possible for people. That's easier said than done, but better than sitting around arguing about who is to blame.
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I feel compelled to point out that @DaseindustriesLtd was probably trying to make a Heideggerian joke with his chosen name.
Thank you for explaining the joke :)
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This is a lie, as you know. I have not advocated disenfranchisement of women, yet you have already started gossiping to this effect; I believe that the change, as implemented, was a bad idea, but now this is a moot point (in the footnote, I add that there may be no workable political regime anyway). I have not proposed granting me control over pregnancies either, yet you feel free to insinuate this. Inasmuch as I have spoken of conscionable (but still unworkable) solutions, those were a) the artificial womb project, b) social engineering in the manner of Israelis. Perhaps some watered-down incentive structure along 2rafa's lines is also worth discussing, but my overall point is that it effectively entails big reductions in freedom of women, in the name of a natalist, clearly «patriarchal» objective, so it is politically unfeasible; its gender-neutrality is not that relevant. I concede that a substantial proportion of men will also oppose it out of self-interest.
Yes. In response to what? But perhaps the gravity of your accusation is lost on you; as well as the cause for my sarcasm.
Sure, I'm not being exceedingly courteous to you here. But I think I'm being courteous enough.
EDIT @f3zinker has helpfully reminded me that in another conversation I have indeed written down some concrete proposals, though they, too, are not politically realistic (premised on having authoritarian power to begin with). You can debate them if you wish.
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Eh, the freemasons are a society that women aren't allowed to enter, and they're doing just fine (well, apart from membership dwindling but that's not because of the power structures that be).
Your information is out of date, I'm afraid; the masons are accepting women nowadays.
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Not ilforte and not a direct example, but even if no rights are directly being taken away you can still have a subset of the population being reduced to second class status, see Jim Crow laws in the US and "separate but equal" wherein black people were normally given access to inferior versions of the things white people got, even though on paper they both got access to the same things (e.g. the black waiting room at a train station was worse than the white one, even though on paper both blacks and whites got a waiting room at the train station). And while on its own having a worse train station waiting room is a very minor inconvenience, multiply this by 100x with variants of this happening all over society and you suddenly have a very real issue on your hands.
Same thing with men/women in modern society, it is currently structured in such a way that even though on paper everyone is equal, men by and large get the short end of the stick even for things that hurt them more (e.g. more targeted help for female homeless, even though there are far more male homeless than female homeless) where if the genders were inverted would be considered a huge issue needing national attention (see how at the moment in the US the college enrolment gender imbalance is more lopsided in female favour than it was in male favour when Title IX was introduced as a remedy to the issue). Now you can (and people do) always make arguments about why we shouldn't interfere in the current situation, but those arguments also mostly applied when women were getting the short end of the stick, and they weren't considered good enough excuses then, but by and large are considered so now (well, except in those STEM subjects which still have more men than women).
Well, I would certainly be in favour of also having homeless programs that target men. I agree that there is a fair bit of momentum behind addressing inequities faced by women, and less momentum behind addressing inequities faced by men, and I am definitely open to arguments about which such inequities are particularly important (successful suicide attempts would be another obvious urgent one).
So I agree that there are issues that need addressing, here, but I don't think denying women the vote is likely to be an important step towards that. And although some feminists are threatened by the notion that men might also face inequities, I think the broader public, including women, is generally not inclined to view such things with outrage or bad faith argumentation, so much as an unwarranted level of neglect which we can work to overcome.
I don't think your local interlocutors have advocated for stripping women of the right to vote (though maybe someone has elsewhere in the thread). I've read them more as hoping for a shift in power at the level of culture and norms, but basically disparaging that this is possible.
Personally, I'm somewhat optimistic that we will find a better balance in the long term, but believe the short term will be bumpy. We've only had gender equality in the west for maybe half a century, and that equality is not perfect because some aspects of patriarchy have inertia and most feminine privilege remains unexamined due to the nature of the feminist movement. I think feminism is mostly downstream of the industrial revolution, but cultural evolution can take awhile and I think we still have a ways to go before we have adjusted to the economic substraight of the information economy.
I have, indeed, been strictly informed that it is not that women ought to be stripped of the right to vote but that it should not have been given to them in the first place in the way that it was. Reluctant pragmatic acceptance of my rights is obviously not as reassuring as actual support for them would be, but that is where that conversation stands.
Yeah, I saw that after I posted that response.
I think the impulse to say that the female franchise was a bad idea comes from the observation that women tend to be more prone to certain behaviors which lead to a toxic politics (women are generally the front-line enforcers of orthodoxy), which I think is actually true, but conveniently ignores the fact that men have their own set of such behaviors that are arguably worse (our violence at the personal level extends to supporting more state violence and jingoism). I think that mixed gender friend groups are generally healthier than single gender, and I tend to think that the same is true for the political realm as well as each gender provides some balance for the other.
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