Feminism?

[Imari]

I would have called the police and waited for them to deal with the kid.
No good deed goes unpunished.

And unfortunately this is the society we live in, where people are too afraid of the potential consequences of helping another person.

 

[UKMikey]

And unfortunately this is the society we live in, where people are too afraid of the potential consequences of helping another person.

 

[Danoff]

7% of inmates in federal prison are women.
Spot checking a few states, it looks like a comparable ratio for states.

Compare these two plots:

State prisons, 676k men in for violent offenses. 37k for women. So women make up 5% of violent offenders in state prisons. For every women put in state prison for violence, there are 19 men.

Men are also 3.5x more likely to commit suicide than women.

So what gives? Are men statistically flawed human beings? Are we failing them socially? Or is this some kind of institutional sexism?

Looking at these charts definitely makes inclined to adopt a feminist mentality.

 

[Dotini]

7% of inmates in federal prison are women.
Spot checking a few states, it looks like a comparable ratio for states.

Compare these two plots:

State prisons, 676k men in for violent offenses. 37k for women. So women make up 5% of violent offenders in state prisons. For every women put in state prison for violence, there are 19 men.

Men are also 3.5x more likely to commit suicide than women.

So what gives? Are men statistically flawed human beings? Are we failing them socially? Or is this some kind of institutional sexism?

Looking at these charts definitely makes inclined to adopt a feminist mentality.

It may be that men are best suited by evolution for doing hard work, fighting and procreating. If there is no work and no demand for procreation, there is no purpose or meaning in being male. Men at a dead end will behave self-destructively.

 

[Danoff]

It may be that men are best suited by evolution for doing hard work, fighting and procreating. If there is no work and no demand for procreation, there is no purpose or meaning in being male. Men at a dead end will behave self-destructively.

It's almost hard to know where to begin with this:

• "Hard work"
• Why would there be no work? You mean manual labor?
• How exactly does one have "purpose or meaning in being male"?
• There is no purpose outside of working and procreating?
• Are you trying to contrast "men at a dead end" from women at a "dead end"?

As much as I dislike everything about your post, I think there is some common ground in there somewhere. I do think that men may be predisposed to violence and a lack of empathy through evolution. There are real natural selection feedback mechanisms in both of those areas, and testosterone does have real effects on the brain.

So I guess my questions is that if it is at all scientifically valid that men are more aggressive and prone to violence, and that prison statistics bear this out bigtime... why do we pretend this is not an issue? Why do I hear basically nothing about this problematic area?

In the gun thread, @Biggles has been going on about how bad guns are. But we don't hear much of anything about how to address the men-violence epidemic. Yet men are FAR AND AWAY the reason violent crime is an issue. Biggles posted a photo that included a family of both men and women holding serious firepower, and yet we know that it's way more likely that the men in that photo would be the ones to use that firepower to commit a crime.

Feminism had always had this context of female equality to me. And then in some cases it went toxic and became about female superiority. But how do we not view men (as a whole, and possibly even as individuals), at least partly, as being somehow fundamentally compromised based on the statistics? I have a hard time believing that this enormous statistical disparity between problematic male behavior and problematic female behavior is entirely down to institutional sexism or some kind of indoctrination.

 

[Danoff]

Regarding gender and ethnic pay gaps:

It does seem to be a budding area of data science to correlate pay, promotion, award, etc. anomalies (such as an unexplained gap) across an institution with a combination of variables. It looks like institutions are starting to look at their "parity" statistics, and there are even some off the shelf products that help do this, to find differences that shouldn't exist and try to explain and address them.

Data science can identify potentially unexpected drivers for differences. What's the correlation between sick leave and a gender pay or promotion gap? That's something that can be determined, at least for an institution large enough to have lots of data to feed - and especially when looking at data accumulated from lots of organizations. I would imagine that such an analysis could even point out discrepancies between individual managers. Imagine corporate management have a plot that shows that bob under pays, under promotes, or under hires women, or certain ethnicities. The hard data can lead to much more standardized results within an institution.

In the meantime, one thing that seems to help (and I've seen it help firsthand), is people just being willing to talk about how much money they make. This is super taboo in the US, but keeping your pay secret from your colleagues in similar positions is exactly how companies maintain discrepancies with pay. Promotions are less likely to remain a secret, but when employees talk to each other openly, it really helps. I've seen people get big raises from this.

 

[Danoff]

Follow up:

Dad Gets On One Knee To Propose To His 20-Year-Old Daughter With A Purity Ring

He claimed he was "proud" his daughter was pure and would remain so until she was married.

www.yourtango.com

A 2017 review in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that abstinence education policies and teen girls who pledged to abstain from sex until marriage, or "purity pledges," are associated with higher rates of teen births, nonmarital pregnancies, and contracting sexually transmitted diseases compared to those who didn't.

It's no secret that purity culture doesn't serve anyone involved, and presenting your adult daughter with a purity ring in the form of a marriage proposal is a bit of a questionable act. Just because a woman isn't "pure" before marriage doesn't mean that she's unworthy of respect, and that narrative shouldn't be pushed onto young girls either.

There are so many ways that men attempt to control the sexual behavior and experience of women, and this is one example. The idea that women should not have sex prior to wedding themselves to someone (presumably a man in this guy's mind), and that this same rationale does not in any way apply to men, is just so creepy. The push for "purity" is a push for control over women's bodies, their sexuality, their experience, and their fundamental ability to control themselves.

Why do men constantly look for ways to control women in this regard?

It's gross enough when a man thinks this way about a potential partner - that she's somehow less of a person (impure) if she has certain experiences. But it's even grosser when it's displayed by a father, who presumably (we hope, though it's not clear from this example) has no sexual interest in his daughter. He still has not managed to overcome the basic idea that his daughter's identity is based heavily on her ability to be sexually controlled by (presumably) a man. He's desperate for his daughter to remain "pure" not (presumably) for himself but because he thinks that her future partner will be as insecure as he is and want her to be completely controlled and owned sexually by him. So her identity, in her father's mind, is determined by a "male" perspective. Not just any male perspective, but a toxic, insecure, sexist, controlling, dehumanizing male perspective.

It of course brings to mind the idea that women are punished with pregnancy for having sex outside of marriage, and that abortion (and even birth control) must be illegal because they must not escape punishment for these actions. This is the same desire to control women, seeing them as objects whose value is intertwined with their perceived suitability for sexual conquest by an insecure narcissist who cannot tolerate a woman who knows other men.

I could rant about this for days.

 

[Exorcet]

The push for "purity" is a push for control over women's bodies, their sexuality, their experience, and their fundamental ability to control themselves.

Why do men constantly look for ways to control women in this regard?

As accurate as that is, I don't think the people pushing are always aware of what they're doing. Sexual purity is far from the only stupid idea that has managed to survive across generations. People simply have a tendency to stick with things because it's what they were told. It's also not strictly a problem of male perspective as women can push for it too. Many people have been conditioned with the idea of saving sex for marriage through tradition alone. The tradition has also picked up some supporting reasoning over time, like the promise of a wife loyal to the family for the man, and the reduced risk of unwanted pregnancy or financial burden of child raising for the woman (homosexual couples typically left out since they were historically excluded from the idea of marriage or family entirely). It seems like that's enough to make the ideal appealing at least on the surface even if going a little deeper makes it all unwind. Love and devotion isn't measured by sexual exclusivity and having sex doesn't have to lead to pregnancy. When those supporting the tradition don't realize that, for whatever reason, it contributes to helping the people who are willingly trying to exercise control over others because those manipulators have an easier time hiding their true intentions.

There are other factors I'm sure, but flawed human reasoning is a big one.

 

[Danoff]

I don't think the people pushing are always aware of what they're doing.

But... they kindof are.

I have some in-law relatives that live in Kansas that I recently visited. They're nice people, but they subscribe to a lot of these "traditional" notions that we're talking about. Abortion is presumably off the table for their family, even if some of them might vote to protect it for others. Having children outside of wedlock is also not ok, and sex outside of marriage is definitely a taboo with this group. What happens, when looking at 4 generations of this family, is that the girls tend to get married around 18-20 years of age, while pregnant. It's a pattern that clearly persists across 3 generations (as evidenced by the 4th). Early marriage, early pregnancy. It's such an expected part of their lives that, while I was visiting, they were discussing expectations of a marriage about an 18 year old girl simply because she had a boyfriend. The whole group seemed to expect it, partly because I think they expected her to be pregnant in short order, and then would pressure her boyfriend to marry her and have successfully shipped her off to a married life with kids.

The idea of sexual purity, prohibited abortion, disregard for contraception, and disregard for life experience all nicely and neatly feed into the idea of an unwitting 18 year old girl being highly pressured into a marriage with a boy she barely knows. If you add to this a desire to remove no-fault divorce, you have a perfect setup for trapped, controlled, servile women.

I understand that this might not be entirely a conscious effort, but it certainly has highly predictable and anticipated outcomes. They know the the drive for purity leads to early and uninformed marriage, and they're fine with it. At some level, they WANT this level of control over their girls. They WANT them married off, they WANT them having kids, and they WANT to restrict their options. Why exactly they want this is less clear, but at some level they just aren't comfortable with the idea that their girls are empowered.

 

[Duke]

Why do men constantly look for ways to control women in this regard?

I could rant about this for days.

I glanced off of this topic in the other thread. You hit a lot of the reasons here, I believe.

There are a few tangential ideas, or maybe just imperfectly-formed hypotheses I have, that seem to go in tandem with the Conservative orthodoxy in all its forms:

• The desire to avoid uncertainty at any cost. Conservatives prioritize having confidence in their answer at the expense of caring whether it is the most correct available answer. So the drive to control women is part of the desire to control their environment, which itself is driven by their desire to be absolutely sure that their concept of the world is unshakable. Abrahamic literature is rife with "upon this rock" and "solid foundation" analogies. Human women, with their own intelligence, free will, and all the various emotional freight they may bring to a man's life, are probably the most complex thing that your average bronze age adult male would have to figure out. So rather than trying to relate directly to women, with all their own human variables, it's easier to institutionally stack the deck against them and teach the followers that this is the "natural order" or "God's Way".
  
  
• The desire to outsource dealing with internal negative emotions. This is also built in to the major Abrahamic religions. Hence why an orthodox Muslim woman must cover herself completely - because an orthodox Muslim man apparently shouldn't have to keep his own sexual desires in control. Or why homosexuals are an Abomination and should be stoned to death. Conservative people encounter things that make them uncomfortable all the time, because they don't fully understand them (see first bullet point above). This is not tolerable, and because their own world view cannot be questioned, that means it is the discomforting thing that must change or disappear, rather than be accommodated. This is also strongly driven by the neolithic in-grouping / out-grouping instinct, carefully nurtured among Conservatives for millennia. So men that cannot deal with the strong emotional impact of women, either as family members or potential partners, again feel the need to control the interaction to the greatest degree possible.

I remember when Men Are From Mars; Women Are From Venus was a popular book. While it made a valiant attempt to explain some of the mental and emotional differences, I also solidly remember thinking to myself, "Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Just deal with it."

I don't know how directly this relates to your post above, but it seems to be intertwined with the issues, at least.

 

[Danoff]

I glanced off of this topic in the other thread. You touched on a lot of the reasons here, I believe.

There are a few tangential items, or maybe just imperfectly-formed hypotheses I have, that seem to go in tandem with the Conservative orthodoxy in all its forms:

• The desire to avoid uncertainty at any cost. Conservatives prioritize having confidence in their answer at the expense of caring whether it is the most correct available answer. So the drive to control women is part of the desire to control their environment which itself is driven by their desire to be absolutely sure that their concept of the world is unshakable. Abrahamic literature is rife with "upon this rock" and "solid foundation" analogies. Human women, with their own intelligence, free will, and all the various emotional freight they may bring to a man's life, are probably the the most complex thing that your average bronze age adult male would have to figure out. So rather than trying to relate directly to women, with all their own human variables, it's easier to institutionally stack the deck against them and teach the followers that this is the "natural order" or "God's Way"
  
  
• The desire to outsource dealing with internal negative emotions. Conservative people encounter things that make them uncomfortable all the time, because they don't fully understand them (see first bullet point above). This is not tolerable, and because their own world view cannot be questioned, that means it is the discomforting thing that much change or disappear, rather than be accommodated. This is also strongly driven by the neolithic in-grouping / out-grouping instinct, carefully nurtured among Conservatives for millennia. So men that cannot deal with the strong emotional impact of women, either as family members or potential partners, again feel the need to control the interaction to the greatest degree possible.

I remember when Men Are From Mars; Women Are From Venus was a popular book. While it made a valiant attempt to explain some of the mental and emotional differences, I also solidly remember thinking to myself, "Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Just deal with it."

I don't know how directly this relates to your post above, but it seems to be intertwined with the issues, at least.

It's interesting. You went in a very different direction than I did. Having seen the way deep insecurity drives people to find and form obligate, controlled relationships, that's where I tended to focus - if deep down you think you don't measure up, make sure people are forced to be with you anyway.

I'll have to ponder this idea that the desire to be confident in your worldview results in a natural tendency toward controlling behavior. Maybe these two are related.

 

[Duke]

I'll have to ponder this idea that the desire to be confident in your worldview results in a natural tendency toward controlling behavior. Maybe these two are related.

Oh, I absolutely think they are strongly related. I think the fear of uncertainty is behind the fear of inadequacy.

[edit] Or, maybe vice versa.

 

[Danoff]

Having seen the way deep insecurity drives people to find and form obligate, controlled relationships, that's where I tended to focus.

[*]The desire to avoid uncertainty at any cost.
[*]The desire to outsource dealing with internal negative emotions.

Feels like all of this describes children. It all seems to come from a lack of education and experience in socialization.

 

[Famine]

But it's even grosser when it's displayed by a father, who presumably (we hope, though it's not clear from this example) has no sexual interest in his daughter.

I tend to make the opposite assumption. I've always been very, very, very wary of men who are obsessed with their daughters' virginities, and I am never surprised when they turn out to be their abusers. It's far from an exclusive overlap for both circles on that particular Venn diagram, but I'm also sure it's not such a small one* either.

*On the virgin-obsessed-father side; sadly women and girls face so much abuse from so many possible abusers that their circle overlaps with dozens of others. Virtually every woman (if not all), and a horrifyingly large proportion of girls, will have a story to tell about rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse, or coercion from someone in a position of power over them

 

[Duke]

Feels like all of this describes children. It all seems to come from a lack of education and experience in socialization.

And a child's lack of self-awareness or introspection.

 

[Exorcet]

But... they kindof are.

In every case?

The idea of sexual purity, prohibited abortion, disregard for contraception, and disregard for life experience all nicely and neatly feed into the idea of an unwitting 18 year old girl being highly pressured into a marriage with a boy she barely knows. If you add to this a desire to remove no-fault divorce, you have a perfect setup for trapped, controlled, servile women.

People with the desire to control will absolutely go for this, but again I don't think that covers everyone promoting ideas of purity or abstinence. Sexual experience outside of marriage, abortion, and contraception were all labeled as wrongs when I was growing up but the people promoting it genuinely seemed to believe this was the right thing to do.

I think you're absolutely right in your conclusion, where I'm less sure is the motivation that perpetuates these bad ideas. Control is a part of it when considering some people but I don't think it's the only factor.

I understand that this might not be entirely a conscious effort, but it certainly has highly predictable and anticipated outcomes. They know the the drive for purity leads to early and uninformed marriage, and they're fine with it. At some level, they WANT this level of control over their girls. They WANT them married off, they WANT them having kids, and they WANT to restrict their options. Why exactly they want this is less clear, but at some level they just aren't comfortable with the idea that their girls are empowered.

I agree with a lot of that. I think even the people who aren't overtly aiming to control others lives do want to see early (though how early may vary) and common marriage that results in children. In my case marriage was sold as a life goal and the only place to engage in sexual activity. It was more or less expected to be my priority out of school. Uninformed marriage no, and the push for an early marriage was at least balanced by the push to find a good spouse. Maybe I was just lucky to face a less potent version of the mentality you're describing, but it's still full of wrong ideas of what's good or best for a person.

 

[HenrySwanson]

Indian medics step up strike in protest at doctor’s rape and murder

All hospital services except for emergency care to be shut down on Saturday amid outrage over Kolkata attack

www.theguardian.com

 

[Danoff]

In every case?

It's always a bad idea to say "every case".

People with the desire to control will absolutely go for this, but again I don't think that covers everyone promoting ideas of purity or abstinence. Sexual experience outside of marriage, abortion, and contraception were all labeled as wrongs when I was growing up but the people promoting it genuinely seemed to believe this was the right thing to do.

I wonder what this was based on. If not based on control, perhaps Christianity - which is also control.

I think you're absolutely right in your conclusion, where I'm less sure is the motivation that perpetuates these bad ideas. Control is a part of it when considering some people but I don't think it's the only factor.

Perhaps you'd speculate on what other factors might be involved. You say that the people promoting this kind of control believed it was the right thing to do, but I wonder what motivated that belief. Because I think ultimately it does come back to a desire for control - even if it takes a round-about way to get there. My point with my examples were that the people involved weren't necessarily consciously thinking about running someone's life, but they did have a desire to see these girls married with children early in life - and they achieved that desire. Even if you think this might just be because they believed it was the right thing to do, or in the person's best interest, or whatever, it still comes back to their opinion of what a good outcome for raising a child looks like, and they have their methods of achieving (controlling) for that outcome.

To really not be trying to control your children's adulthoods, you have to free yourself from a picture of what their lives ought to look like.

 

[Exorcet]

It's always a bad idea to say "every case".

Fair point.

I wonder what this was based on. If not based on control, perhaps Christianity - which is also control.

Religion was a major component yes.

Perhaps you'd speculate on what other factors might be involved. You say that the people promoting this kind of control believed it was the right thing to do, but I wonder what motivated that belief. Because I think ultimately it does come back to a desire for control - even if it takes a round-about way to get there.

Then I think we're on the same page, I was making a distinction that you weren't by excluding those round-about paths. While religion is often used as a means of control I also tend to separate when that control is the primary end goal as opposed to not.

To really not be trying to control your children's adulthoods, you have to free yourself from a picture of what their lives ought to look like.

Well said.

 

[HenrySwanson]

Little ray of sunshine: