I mean I’ve seen videos where they talk to little kids and it’s like hey Sally what do you think about the wage gap? and Billy you should really stop contributing to rape culture, don’t you think? and hey they’re eight years old, sure it helps to teach about communication and consent etc. but these kids are going to be convinced that gender is a warzone before they hit puberty, let alone college.
unsurprising that an increasing number say fuck this I’m out, nb4life y’all
just look at the incentives
you say that like “nonbinary” or “agender” is truly neutral
i would guess enbies are, on average, more supportive of intersectional feminism than either men or women
Speaking as a supporter of intersectional feminism, this makes perfect sense as a central point of intersectional feminism is to stop the war and establish a fair peace treaty. Of course there are those career guerrillas who are incentivized to see the war going on because they can’t imagine anything else, but the rest of us are actually trying to solve the problems.
There’s promethean-steel-feminism!intersectional feminism, and then there’s, uh, “intersectional” “feminism”. I feel that nonbinarity is correlated somewhat with the latter, unfortunately. Which is definitely a faction.
That’s why I’m taking over. I didn’t specify how big a faction “the rest of us” are, but it needs to get bigger, and seems to be getting bigger indeed. One country is already basically conquered because the steel faction has seized control of the edge of the Overton Window, and I have Secret Plans to make it scale across the entire world as well.
Okay so gender nonconformity may be boosted by endocrine disruptors leading to physical dysphoria (plastic in the water? some medications during pregnancy? chem trails? who knows). But what about cultural shifts leading to a rise in social dysphoria, where people wish to opt out of their assigned gender?
Gender roles were more restrictive in the past, but they were also taken for granted and less intensively examined, and when they were studied it was typically to attribute them to God or natural law or some other relatively remote and unchangeable source that doesn’t demand any personal response.
Today, everyone in the developed world will be bombarded from an early age not just with gender roles, but also deconstructions of gender roles and a worldview where they are constructed from human actions, tradition, patriarchy, capitalism, warring forces that you, yes YOU, can help or hinder in your personal life.
This is exhausting! Everything you do becomes weighted with symbolism in the struggle to define what gender means, and to be a man or a woman is to join an army locked in ideological struggle.
Combine this with the obsessive focus on internal identity, “born this way”, and the idea that men and women have some completely different gender qualia at a fundamental level and it’s unsurprising that many people would decide they just don’t feel strongly enough to justify claiming any gender at all.
we shall give people the means motive and opportunity to opt out of the cistem until it collapses under the weight of its own impossibility and this creative destruction shall achieve the redistribution of the means of social construction so that the abolition of gender as all previous generations have known it shall be reality and one day our children will not know that once people were very concerned about what their genitals looked like and adults wrapped them in pieces of cloth superficially hiding their genitals but also signaling very strongly to everyone what they looked like despite such things making very little sense and our descendants will not even be horrified when we tell them the reason old buildings have an even number of bathrooms because the idea itself will be just as absurd as purple hippos with six legs
I mean I’ve seen videos where they talk to little kids and it’s like hey Sally what do you think about the wage gap? and Billy you should really stop contributing to rape culture, don’t you think? and hey they’re eight years old, sure it helps to teach about communication and consent etc. but these kids are going to be convinced that gender is a warzone before they hit puberty, let alone college.
unsurprising that an increasing number say fuck this I’m out, nb4life y’all
just look at the incentives
you say that like “nonbinary” or “agender” is truly neutral
i would guess enbies are, on average, more supportive of intersectional feminism than either men or women
Speaking as a supporter of intersectional feminism, this makes perfect sense as a central point of intersectional feminism is to stop the war and establish a fair peace treaty. Of course there are those career guerrillas who are incentivized to see the war going on because they can’t imagine anything else, but the rest of us are actually trying to solve the problems.
official opinion on “Chariot for Women”, the new Uber competitor that only hires women drivers and only picks up women:
women in Ubers are not at an elevated risk of sexual assault. most people who are sexually assaulted know their attackers. our societal obsession with the scary stranger as the prototypical case of sexual assault to protect ourselves from is deeply unhelpful.
women also commit sexual assault. saying “we’ll only hire female drivers, to keep our women safe” is buying into a narrative about female harmlessness and male predatoriness that helps female abusers and rapists get away with it.
In general, the fact that women are scared to be out at night and scared to call a cab is a problem. That fear is not remotely warranted by the evidence, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect and limit peoples’ lives. it is part of the same patriarchal “women can’t go out alone; they need protection” mindset that motivates some countries to require women have male chaperones. It is not feminist and feeding the unwarranted flames of this fear in the name of feminism is disgusting.
There’s this thing that keeps happening where people say “let’s unquestioningly accept the patriarchal narrative that women are pure, virtuous, and need protection. Let’s also unquestioningly accept the narrative that women are safe around other women, and that danger comes from men. Then, let’s come up with a plan for ‘empowering women’ that buys into both of those assumptions completely and in fact reinforces them! Why aren’t women empowered yet?”
On the bright side good on them for having an unequivocal “duh we take trans women, they’re women” policy. I guess if we’re going to all be subject to stupid empowerment-flavored pedestalization it may as well serve a population with a legit non-negligible risk of random strangers assaulting them.
Also, regular Uber is already able to be a lot safer for women than traditional cabs because both the driver and the passenger are identifiable from the app databases, while traditional cabs can easily be like “good luck trying to remember the license plate when you were totally wasted”.
Sexual assaults happen in ubers, and their numbers seem large because Uber carries so many people, and there has been some possibly-valid criticism about Uber not responding to them as well as they could/should (although taking it to the cops isn’t always that useful either, and if an abusive driver “only” loses their job it might be quite a bit more serious of a consequence than most assaulters get), but this is a relatively insignificant problem as far as the actual per capita numbers are concerned; and IMO only shows that Uber is evil, not dangerous.
"I wanted to … make [Rorschach] as like, ‘this is what Batman would be in the real world’. But I have forgotten that actually to a lot of comic fans, ‘smelling’, ‘not having a girlfriend’, these are actually kind of heroic! So Rorschach became the most popular character in Watchmen. I made him to be a bad example. But I have people come up to me in the street and saying: ‘I AM Rorschach. That is MY story’. And I’d be thinking: ‘Yeah, great. Could you just, like, keep away from me, never come anywhere near me again as long as I live?’"
“I wanted to use the typical cliches to signal that this character is disgusting, but people sharing some characteristics saw a reflection of themselves, no matter how twisted (it’s not like trans women never recognized themselves in “evil” characters), and I just want to make it absolutely clear that I consider smelly people without girlfriends disgusting and worthless.”
I was pretty skeptical about the figures, since they contradict what I usually hear on the media, so I did a little research. Here’s what I found: (Sorry this is so US centric) (I’ll also try to stay close to primary sources as possible)
- the 12 months before taking the survey, an estimated 4.0% of women experienced some form of physical violence by an intimate partner -an estimated 14.2% of women experienced some form of psychological aggression in the 12 months preceding the survey. -*4,774,000 women have been victims of physical violence by intimate partner in the 12 months preceding the survey -*17,091,000 women have been victims of psychological aggression by intimate partner in the 12 months preceding the survey
- the 12 months before taking the survey, an estimated 4.8% of men experienced some form of physical violence by an intimate partner -an estimated 18.0% of men experienced some form of psychological aggression in the 12 months preceding the survey. -*5,452,000 men have been victims of physical violence by intimate partner in the 12 months preceding the survey -*20,471,000 men have been victims of psychological aggression by intimate partner in the 12 months preceding the survey
*Table 6
By the data presented by the Center for Disease Control, out of the estimate of 10,226,000 yearly victims of intimate partner violence, 53.3% of victims where male and 46.6% were female. As for psychological aggression, out of the estimate of 37,562,000 yearly victims, 54.4% were male and 45.5% were female. These statistics would support the claim made in the bottom left.
Now I couldn’t find a primary source for the 70% of DV is initiated by women, but here’s the facts that I found, which may have been interpreted by the people who made this poster:
This can be interpreted as “67% of violent couples with IPV is mutual”. But then again, primary sources and full data would be helpful to back up this claim.
-23.9% of relationships are violent -50.3% of IPV is non-reciprocal and 49.7% is reciprocal (Reciprocal IPV= Mutual violence) -70.7% of non-reciprocal IPV is initiated by women.
So summing up the numbers, it’s not that 70% of all DV is initiated by women, its that 70% of non-reciprocal DV is initiated by women. To go further would say that 49.7% of DV is mutual, 36.2% of DV is initiated by women, and 14.5% of DV is initiated by men
Male victims of domestic violence are real. They are hurting. And they often don’t get the attention and compassion they so urgently deserve and need.
Have a heart. Open your mind, and give a care.
Hm. These numbers are all so different to anything I’ve seen before. I’m reblogging and liking this both for my own reference and to spread these numbers to others. I’m definitely gonna look into this and see if I can find more sources and more information.
Mother fuckers can we all just say let’s not be dicks to our fucking love ones already?
Tagging this for my speech project that I need the sources for
That list is good, but outdated. I e-mailed the researcher who compiled that list a couple weeks ago and he gave me three different documents. I uploaded them to this dropbox folder. You can go there and download them.
The list of studies is now up to 343 scholarly investigations (270 empirical studies and 73 reviews). Not only did he send me that list, but he also sent me two meta-studies (also in the dropbox folder). One is on male/female perpetration rates and the other is on male/female victimization rates.
I really need to write up a solo reference post for domestic violence data…
You are also a life saver.
This is so important
Reblogging since this is a huge list of scholarly sources. Am poking through some of these and it’s a fucking huge list.
- Mod Kuzco
this is very important, so i’m abstaining from fallout for a bit to bring this to everyone’s attention.
Coincidentally, I was reading earlier today that most men who are repeated victims of abuse learn NOT to call the police because THEY’Re usually the ones who end up being arrested.
The men in the survey who called the police found them to be “very helpful” in only 19% of cases, and “not at all helpful” in 50% of cases. More importantly, when an abused man called the police, the police were more likely to arrest him than to arrest his abusive female partner. The men who called the police were arrested in 26% of cases, whereas their abusive partners were arrested in only 17%. Half the time the police arrested nobody, despite the abuse, and in 8% of the cases they arrested both the abuser and the victim. In those cases where the police did identify the abused man’s female partner as the aggressor, in 29% of cases, they refused to arrest the abusive woman. In 39% of these cases they said that there was nothing they could do and left.
This is relevant for my interests. It might also be relevant for some others’ interests to know that Influential Feminists™ consider these relevant for their interests.
I’m against criticising fanfic for being problematic because I’ve so rarely seen it done well, and so often seen it be destructive to young writers and to communities and to healthy conversation, that it’s probably better to just say “don’t like it, don’t read it”.
But I’m amazed that no one who is enthusiastic about criticising problematic fanfic says anything about what is objectively the most problematic fanfic, which is “character A is a sex worker and character B saves him and then he quits sex work and they fall in love” fics. Like, that’s perpetuating an actually really harmful message to an audience that actually mostly doesn’t know better, the people writing it often pretty much believe in the message as presented and basically never problematize it (also, none of them use the phrase ‘sex worker’), the characters are mostly morose caricatures who lament how they “fell so far” as to be “selling their body”, and there are disappointingly few subversions in which the sex worker is not, in fact, miserable and abused or brainwashed or enslaved (or in which they want to stay in sex work after Falling in Love.)
ending state violence against people involved in sex work (by legalizing it) is really important. stopping the hot fanfic in which the narratives that serve that state violence are used to fuel plot is less so. but I still find it unpleasant to run across, and it’d be cool if writers would throw in a scene that reflects the actual biggest source of violence and risk in the industry: the police.
(This observation is corroborated both by the linked article and by Professor Bridgette Carr, who runs the human trafficking clinic at the University of Michigan).
And while both she and the article would agree with you that legalizing the selling of sex work is important (and would certainly agree that that fanfic trope is Bad), imo it’s important to make the distinction.
Nah, I support full legalization. First of all, “trafficking” laws are written so broadly that “I helped my sex worker roommate make rent” or “I drove my sex worker partner to a hotel for their work” can make you a sex trafficker; “rate of sex trafficking” is not a useful or meaningful statistic if you’re interested in the safety and rights of the people involved. People think “trafficking” means “being forced into sex work against your will”, but a vanishingly small share of trafficking arrests have anything to do with that.
Sweden’s model doesn’t make sex workers safer. It still means that there’s no way to screen clients or spread the word about dangerous or manipulative ones, it still means that sex workers can be subject to police raids, and sex workers mostly oppose it. Also, as @2centjubilee observed, it hasn’t lowered rates of violence or abuse against sex workers, and your link itself doesn’t say it does.
Likewise the study you linked doesn’t say anything about abuses or the rate of “human trafficking” (which, remember, doesn’t mean forced sex as often as it means ‘assisting sex workers in finding clients’ ) in Amsterdam.
Also, saying that “the rate of sex work has gone down” is the metric by which the success of an intervention is measured is bullshit. Why should sex work go down? Sex work is fine. I don’t oppose state violence against sex workers because I think then it’ll be easier to rescue them from their tragic and/or sinful careers. I don’t want to “end demand”. I just want people to be able to have consensual sex with others for money without any state violence on either end.
Also, in Finland it’s even “trafficking” for two sex workers to work together. The laws are trying to ostracize sex workers out of the legal economy, isolate them from any support and security, and basically do everything to destroy them that isn’t outright banning them. Full decriminalization and deregulation, as regulation itself segregates the work into the law-abiding and legitimate, and the marginalized.
I always get frustrated when I see stuff like “men benefit from sexism”. Because, like… absolutely, most men are better off than they would be if they were women under sexism. But men are not in general better off than they would be if there were no sexism at all, except possibly under some narrow metrics like income. The “benefit from” framing implicitly reinforces the zero-sum eternal conflict model that makes oppression seem superficially attractive to begin with, and sets the privileged up with the unsustainable dichotomy of choosing what is right vs choosing what is good for them.
And, since I suspect this will come up: A world in which it would actually be in my interests to maintain some or all of the structure of oppression that currently exists is so different from our own that I’m wary of making any claims about what would be right, but as a first guess I expect I would happily and guiltlessly reinforce those structures and it would be right to do so. That world isn’t ours, though. (Except possibly with respect to speciesism, if that’s actually a thing).
Not sure I agree with you on that last part, but I find it weird that people choose to frame social justice as a zero sum game. If it’s zero sum, why shouldn’t I just do whatever’s in my best interests? I (theoretically) only care about taking actions that increase the amount of good in the world as a whole.
This is probably my biggest SJ “heresy”.
No, the world isn’t zero-sum, and recognizing this fact isn’t the same thing as always centering able-bodied neurotypical straight white cis men. Why are you so insistent on signaling “no we don’t care about them” so hard that you make it look like it is zero-sum. Why are you ‘splaining what the privileged groups "””actually””” want. How about instead of telling that no, they really should rationally desire to oppress you because ~group interests~ or whatever, you be like “okay good now start removing the things that hurt you as well as us”. You don’t need to give them cookies, just stop trying to turn this into a bullshit zero-sum game for ~purity signaling~. Okay fine I’ve got a plan. Let’s call it “promethea is deviously tricking the privileged people into acting against their gender interests”. Yes, that’s what it is. Definitely. They’ll soooo mistakenly believe they are so ~liberated~ in the postgender transhumanist morphological freedom utopia that they won’t even notice that they ”””really””” would prefer going back to the oppressive bullshit system because being a bit higher on the hill of flowing bullshit is so better than not having any hills or bullshit at all. And they’ll support us in constructing our utopia in which they will be terribly ~oppressed~ by ~not being able to oppress others~. No, I’m not sarcastic or questioning anyone’s life choices or anything what makes you think that.
Not sure why but the “having sex, no matter what precautions you take or agreements you make with your partner in advance, obligates you to two decades of at-least-financial-and-possibly-more support” position is consistently a hot-button issue more than any other.
Maybe it’s related to the fact that people haven’t properly internalized that we have easy access to contraception and abortion nowadays (okay, we should have them and authoritarians should get their grubby paws the cuck off from other people’s bodies and that includes socio-cultural coercion as well as state power although just getting the state to cuck off would be a damn fine start) so having sex doesn’t obligate one to rent their body to a non-consensual occupier and thus the Worst Outcome for one party has fallen a lot lower than it used to be when the system has established, and zero-sum biases of identity politics have prevented them from realizing that symmetrically reducing the other party’s Worst Outcome would be the Only Morally Justifiable Decision.
Also, everyone loves making someone else pay for stuff they want to see done, therefore they go hunting for people who have interacted with the problem and upon whom the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics lets them assign the costs so they don’t have to bear the responsibility of taking care of innocent otherwise possibly insufficiently ofcaretaken children from their own tax dollars.
There’s lots of stories about women succeeding at traditionally male things (e.g. Mulan, Legally Blonde) but almost none about men succeeding at traditionally female things. When a woman does male things, it’s “she’s a woman but she’s awesome enough to live up to male standards”, but when a man does female things, it’s treated as a joke at his expense.
We need more stories about “he’s a man but he’s awesome enough to live up to female standards”.
I imagine you don’t count, like, Mrs. Doubtfire?
While I can see how Mrs. Doubtfire is sort of about a man learning to succeed at femininity, I find it deeply unsatisfying for two reasons. First, Daniel Hillard (Robin Williams’s character) only attempts to learn feminine skills in order to pass as a woman. This reinforces the idea that femininity is a female thing. Second, at the end of the movie, I feel that he’s presenting as a more-well-rounded masculine, rather than simply feminine. The message seems to be “it’s okay to cook and clean and spend time with your kids, because it doesn’t compromise your masculinity”. I want a message of “it’s okay to not be masculine”. I’m vaguely reminded of countersignaling; I get the feeling that Daniel Hillard is allowed to have feminine traits because he manages to not let them overshadow his masculinity.
By contrast, consider Kanahe Tomohisa, from Puella Magi Madoka Magica. He’s a stay-at-home husband who wears an apron and takes care of the housework, his build is slim and his demeanor submissive, and this is (at least in the episodes I’ve seen so far) not remarked upon at all or treated as a source of either drama or humor. It’s treated as perfectly normal, natural, ordinary, healthy, unremarkable that he should tend the home and the children while his wife earns the family income as a career businesswoman. The show isn’t really about him, he’s only a supporting character; but he’s the sort of character that would be a natural consequence of the shows I want to see.
I feel like the fact that Elle didn’t compromise her femininity was a big part of Legally Blonde, though. Do the two movies do this differently or am I just completely misunderstanding what you’re saying? (I haven’t actually seen Mrs. Doubtfire. I’m just going off what you say)
I’ve actually only seen a couple of scenes from Legally Blonde, but I got the impression that, while she’s femme in a shoes-and-lipstick kind of way, she’s also characterized as having qualities that are necessary to success specifically in classically male endeavors: proactive, academically gifted, a take-no-shit attitude, etc. She’s undeniably girly, but I don’t think she could be characterized as soft and vulnerable. What I know of Legally Blonde gives me a “women can be strong too” vibe, as opposed to the “it’s okay not to be strong” that I’m looking for.
popular culture cannot bear the sight of a weak man.
I’ve been thinking about this post for a while.
And it occurs to me that, just as stories about a woman breaking into the male role center partially around the secondary characters being forced to confront their own sexism and disrespect for her abilities, reversing this trope would require the story to center partially around the secondary characters around the male protagonist being forced to confront their contempt for weakness.
At least one example of this exists. There is a famous movie about an emotionally broken man who acts out in pain, until the the people around him are forced to confront and repent for the contempt and disgust they displayed towards his brokenness.
Rambo: First Blood.
Sure, in the sequels, Rambo was a straightforward action hero. But not in the first movie.
although it sort of reinforces the idea that men can only admit weakness once they have managed to singlehandedly fight off the entire national guard?
Men’s weakness only gets recognized and acknowledged once they have managed to singlehandedly fight off the entire national guard, and that’s very very bad and we as a civilization need to do way better so men don’t feel like they need to be able to singlehandedly fight off the entire national guard to be allowed to display a bit of weakness without having instant crosshairs of thermonuclear contempt painted on their backs.
