It’s Question Time again. I’ve been reading through Susan Faludi’s Backlash and her more recent book on men, Stiffed, as well as some of the discussion surrounding Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men and Kay Hymowitz’ Manning Up. Faludi, writing in 1991, obviously saw the 80s as a time of antifeminist backlash.
My question is how you would characterize the years since she wrote her book. A continuation of that backlash? A time of feminist resurgence, from the Riot Grrls up to Rosin’s predicted End of Men? A mixed period of progress and regression?
I’m wondering both what your general assessment of the situation is, and also what specific evidence you have — either hard data or personal experience — that underlies your overall view. This could be anything from data on employment segregation or the prevalence of rape to your sense of how media representations of women and men have or haven’t changed, or even how people you know have changed the ways they talk about gender. What do you think are the significant data points to look at?
The question isn’t just what has changed for women but what has changed for men as well — with my underlying question being: what if anything in the real world has changed that might be making the angry men we talk about here so angry? I think we can agree that most of their own explanations are bullshit, but could there be a grain of truth to any of them? Or something that they don’t see that’s far more compelling?
In the interest of spurring discussion and providing some data to work with, here are a bunch of articles responding to (or at least vaguely related to the issues raised in) Rosin’s End of Men, including a link to her original Atlantic article. In addition, here are some posts by sociologist Philip Cohen challenging many of Rosin’s claims, as well as more general posts of his on gender inequality. (Feel free to completely ignore any or all of these; I just found them useful resources.)
@Howard Bannister
Yes, of course, sex is the most important issue. For example, the hate for Freud’s theory I’ve seen here, it’s more important than your incessant babbling about the supposed visceral misogyny of the rest of the world : someone who don’t want to acknowledge that a part of his sexual impulses are inherently perverse and destructive will always try frenetically to destroy the perversion, the corruption out in the world, i.e. putting his noise in other people perversions.
Freud was the creepiest one, isn’t it? The one who said to you that it’s all your head, that you’re not completely pure, that you’ll never be completely pure, that you can just try to understand yourself a little bit.
Oh, what a nightmare of “silencing” and “victim-blaming” where systemic gigantic forces are not challenged and threaten to attack with all their corruption the real victims who are so pure and innocent!
Well it’s official Brz, I think you’re an idiot. You said math, and particularly statistics, is boring. That just might be the,out offensive thing you’ve said.
(Yes, I am joking, about that last sentence anyways)
And the problem, or one of them, with Freud is shit like the Oedipus Complex and anal retentive and explusive and kids “stingily withholding feces”. Like, w00t for kinks, but dude, we don’t all want to fuck our parents and hate the parent of the same sex because we have to share attention.
Do go google Freud before assuming we all just want to feel “pure” >.<
And now I’m going to bed, try not to insult the building blocks of the universe too much ok?
Cuz math, you’re made of it. (And chemistry, but that’s applied math, sorta)
!!!
Maths are just a tool created by humans to describe approximately the reality, I’m not made of maths, people try to use maths to describe me approximately.
In a certain way, scientists are the dumbest kind of people when they talk about anything else than their work : all the evo biology stuff the pua-sphere love so much for example is just crap invented by scientists who thought that they will be able to make an objective description of human behaviors if they use scientific methods and the result is the most puerile vision of the human relations ever produced which isn’t even objective because thinking that we can describe human relations by using patterns we had found by observing wolfs or chimps or that people follow natural pattern wired in their genes when they interact with other people are beliefs in themselves and when we scratch the surface we found the “life is perpetual competition”, “survival of the fittest” crap.
Beliefs always precede science, the belief in the absolute power of science is just that, a belief.
That’s the reason why fighting with stats is boring, it’s not the numbers who fight which each other, it’s almost always the beliefs.
Brzzzzz: the only thing you “deserve” is a banning. Fuck off.
…no, that’s not what you said.
There’s, um, a very big difference between those two questions. And a fuck-ton of misogyny.
Wow, Brz. That is NOT the most transparent attempt at brushing off a fact that I’ve seen this week.
Up your game, son!!
Also, none of those reasons you’ve provided explain why some countries do much better at getting to an equitable gender split in the halls of power but yours doesn’t. Huh. It’s almost like you just don’t care. So all your “I actually do care about women, but only in real equity” is just a load of bullshit.
Gee, whoda thunk?
According to Brz: Sex = incredibly important
The vicious dehumanization that is misogyny = not important
Also, Argenti, have I ever mentioned that I admire your math skillz? Math is hard for me (though I still want to learn it for usefulness factor XP) so it kind of seems like magic.
Howdy, Auggie! Can I call you that? How are you?
As for Joe, DAMN! I missed my chance to tell him what for!
@Kittehserf (about my colonic comment) Thank you! I’m happy I made you laugh. =)
I’m going to read this whole thread with Joe-Blow’s sulfurous wind-breaking and our responses, then lend my two-cents.
Brz: I don’t fear ridicule. Looking ridiculous yes, but ridicule no.
Let’s look at some ridiculous:
Spot that fallacy: You had an opportunity to prove one of your accusation and you failed, the rest of your accusations is like this one : gratuitous unfounded accusation.
1: I don’t think I failed. I think you misrepresented his argument (which I said in the parent thread you are trying to use to show me up).
2: Fallacy of division. Even if I were wrong in my understanding of the article as a whole (and thus your misuse of it; in an attempt to show what… that “feminists will ignore misogyny and pedophelia if it comes from a French Intellectual who happens to be communist and a homosexual; and dead for 25 years?) that doesn’t mean I am wrong in the rest of what I write about you.
I have a question for you, what are you doing up until almost 6 in the morning in Cambridge? Why did you wait until 4 a.m. to make this comment? Why do you ignore the other people who call you out?
Is it perhaps that my critique of your personification is more trenchant then theirs? That I’m actually cutting closer to the bone?
Food for others thoughts. At a guess, something I am saying is cutting close to home.
Why don’t I believe you? Because I have worked with French ex-pats. I have spent some time in Paris. I have known French soldiers. You don’t feel French to me. Your English is quite good, but your “bad” English is inconsistent. You don’t have “tells”, no specific sorts of error which you make consistently (such as my weakness in using the feminine past tense of the second person familiar form in Russian).
You have an encyclopedic use of MRM talking points, and an obsession with American feminism and don’t understand French Feminism of the period of this article; as it related to motherhood.
French feminism, in the ’80s, was arguing for rearing children as an act of rebellion against the system. Of rearing those children in way which differred from the more social norm. French culture was much more of what has come to be called, “it takes a villiage” with any adult expected to correct the faux pas of a child. Feminists were saying this was bad. It encouraged the inculcation of patriarchal norms.
You might have tried to show how his objection to “the mothers and grannies” was going to undermine that, and wondered how French feminism reacted to it. You didn’t. You pretended his opinions (which you admitted were almost unknown in France, which might explain a lot of the lack of traction this piece has) had relevance to American Feminism.
In the present.
Who has no fear of ridicule? Looks like it’s you, because that’s an inane proposition.
P.S: I’ve never lied about anything here, you can say that I’m creepy, that I’m an asshole or whatever, that’s your call, but I’m not a liar : I’ve always been frank.
You on the opposite… You have a little tendency for showing off, like exaggerating a little bit your French reading skills, isn’t it?(You understand French like a understand Spanish, i.e approximately).
Ah…. did we touch a nerve?
You have lied. You lied about your skills with English. You’ve lied about some aspect of why you are in the US. You’ve admitted to being a troll.
You don’t engage with the facts people present; instead harping on how awful it is we mock you for your claims of being French. Pro-tip. If you want it to stop, stop rising to the bait. You don’t want it to stop. You want to be able to use it to duck the harder issues (like why you think Freud is hot shit. It’s because he hates on women isn’t it? What with them thinking they are imperfect because they don’t have a penis, instead of pitying the poor dudes who have all that junk flopping around… or the idea that men don’t need to “grow into mature/adult orgasms” but women do, or the entire fantasy of the primordial murder of the father by the sons as a sort of permanent memory. No it’s that we don’t want to look into ourselves, even though we do a lot of navel gazing about motivations. Oh! I see, you don’t like the motives we’ve found. They undermine your justifications for misogyny).
Which means I (and the rest of manboobzers) have every reason to doubt you. You chose to present an argument you know most people here can’t challenge you on directly. That’s dishonest. It’s palming cards.
Is my french perfect? No. It means that I will miss some structures, I will slip a precedent but it doesn’t mean it’s, “approximate” (not in the way you are using it, which is to imply that I am completely out of my depth in reading it). I’ve spent time in purely francophone environments. I’m not great at speaking, but I’m pretty good at understanding; even in rural Quebec, where the French is far from Paris. I didn’t suffer in Paris either.
But you, you are in the States. You claim to hate it; and to loathe the sound of English, and to be hyper-french, but you are also hyper concerned with US feminism.
Why? That’s what makes you ridiculous. It’s a gaping flaw in the logic of the story. Better that you should claim to be a person of some skill and talent; good at english, sent her for years by a company with interests in the US/France; forced to deal with US feminism on a daily basis in your work; and suffering from the perils of romance and rape accusations which come of your skills as a Frenchman, because you are so naturally good at seduction (being french and all), which leads you to trouble because feminism has ruined the ways in which normal male and female interaction work.
But that would be harder than making a vague claim to being “not american”, and “other” and isolated, forced to suffer in this hell of hamburgers and feminists, where you can’t even get a decent cheese before you surrender to something.
You are affected. You chose stupid tropes in your affectation. You have obsessions; and they are with American things.
That’s why we don’t believe you. That’s why we (because it’s more than just me) think you are a liar.
Argenti: All alpacas are llamas, not all llamas are alpacas.
It’s not almost like I just don’t care, I actually totally don’t care about the gender split in the national assembly, like I don’t care about the gender split among lawyers, among judges, among university students (but funnily, “gender equality” advocates are not interested about the “equitable gender split” anymore when it’s women who are the majority) because that’s irrelevant, that doesn’t say anything about the laws which are adopted, the ideas which dominate the debate in the assembly, that doesn’t say if the power will treat all people equally.
I didn’t provide any reason yet to explain why my country is so bad at getting an “equitable gender split” in the halls of power but I have one : unlike you we have a long history with egalitarianism, there’s a strong presence of Marxist culture in the French society, so it’s more difficult to bullshit people and that exactly what people tend to think when a politician brags about a “gender equality” policy, that he’s trying to bullshit us. They never talk about the bourgeois/proletarian split in the assembly, they never talk about the number of former blue-collar workers in the assembly and no fucking international organization will never accuse France of having a bad representation of the different social classes in the assembly or for having a general unfair distribution of value added between capital and labour. It’s hard to bullshit French with the “parity”, the socialists are not even able to bullshit their own supporters, everyone know that they use this kind of language only to hide something else : our president brags about the perfect ratio male/female of our government but everyone knows that it’s gaslighting to hide the fact that he conducts a totally non-socialist policy, that they’re dismantling savagely Labour Code, that they will submit to every diktat of the “market”, destroy slowly every piece of institution which helps the ones in need.
We’re “backwards”, we’re still too much communists to embrace fully the Social Justice movement.
Shut up, Brzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Y’know, I think all you Manboobz members shut Joe down just fine! I have nothing more to say.
You guys think I should change my name here to my FSTDTs name (‘SpukiKitty’)?
@Julie
I was lurking on the forums here once, and I did see a SpukiKitty with an avatar similar to your FSTDT one. Why didn’t you mention that here before? Are the forum and comment members different or something?
The program for this site is screwy. I’m still trying to get the hang of this WordPress thing. Also, the thing with SpukiKitty was with my alternate Outlook account but I want to use exclusively my Gmail. Perhaps I can merge the two on here. I should rename myself SpukiKitty. I’ll do that now. I’ll simply replace the name “Julie” with “SpukiKitty” in the reply form thingy, bellow.
You heard it here first folks, the workings of the universe are not dictated by the laws of physics because they’re just approximations!
Pecunium — so llamas are like parallelograms and alpacas are rectangles? Cool
Re: alpacas
Oops. I was trying to embed this link.
http://youtu.be/1gZ0x8AVaBI
You know, at the beginning I was thinking that this thing of accusing me of not being French was a joke, you kept doing it aggressively and I started to think that it was just one of your rhetorical tools to dismiss what I say but now I realize that your problem is that you have absolutely not a slightest idea of what I am, that you can’t put me in a box and that, therefore, you don’t know what my buttons are, you don’t no what will hurt me and you really don’t like that.
This is what this is all about, finding a way to “cut close to the bone”, “to touch a nerve”, doing with me what you try to forbid everyone to do on you, “boundaries-crossing”.
I didn’t confuse you on purpose, but I realize now that it’s a good thing to be hard to identify with people like you. Foucault said that it was strange that what was pulled out by the use of torture in the Medieval age, the confession, suddenly became something liberatory, something that someone must absolutely do in order to affirm himself, became an injunction to everyone to tell his truth, to come out. There’s nothing less empowering than the confession, everything you confess will be used against you as some point, the empowerment is to keep things for yourself and mystify those who asks too much questions.
Brz, you’re not mystifying, you’re sexist, bloviating asshole. Learn the difference.
we know exactly what you are, and don’t much like it
Brz This is what this is all about, finding a way to “cut close to the bone”, “to touch a nerve”, doing with me what you try to forbid everyone to do on you, “boundaries-crossing”.
Nope. It’s that I think you are liar. One of the things I think you are lying about is who you are. Maybe you are french. If you are, you managed to convince everyone here that you aren’t. It’s not me. It’s you.
I don’t care about hurting you. I don’t care about you, qua you. I care that the person who presents himself here as Brz is a disingenuous ass. You pretend to engage. You pose questions,and then; when challenged on them, you bob and weave about how you are/aren’t french. It’s been the schtick you pulled from the get go.
You don’t have any basis to say, “oh, my english is so poor”. Because it isn’t. You lied. You have an in depth grasp of some pretty esoteric ideas about male/female relations; from an obscure corner of the internet. Their jargon gives you no pause; though it’s confusing to many an english speaker,and trips of the inhabitants of MRA/PUA fora.
You adopted over the top stereotypical expressions, in the vein of what farcial representations of the French are supposed to be like (straight out of Monty Python).
I insult your frenchness because if you are French the ways in which you pretend to be stupid, and the vacuity of your attempts to be clever are an insult to the french.
If Brz is french, or has even spent time in France, then I am the queen of England.
AHAHA, you all keep accusing me of being not French all the time with ridiculous pretexts (the most funny one is the “cheese and surrending” : no French has ever seen an episode of the Simpsons, no French has ever seen American making jokes about French, in fact, no one in France knows what are the American stereotypes about French people) , almost each time I say something and it’s all my fault, I’m so disingenuous and sneaky that I managed to convince you that I wasn’t French… while trying to prove (providing evidences that should have been seen as reasonable by a non-paranoid mind) that I was French…
I love this one : reasonable, coherent, non-hysterical, just like you.
Anyway, I start feeling tired by this little game, you refused to acknowledge in total bad faith that you’ve accused me wrongly of having ill-interpreted the quote of the interview, as for me, It’s just clear that every accusation coming from you is unfounded and that you do it on purpose, it’s apparently your way of arguing with people: accusing them of being disingenuous, invent things they’re supposed to have said and when your accusations are challenged, accusing them of something and again and again,…
Keep amusing yourself doing that if it please you.
Buzz, nothing about you is amusing, or interesting, or worthwhile, no matter what country you’re from. Congratulations?
It’ll be amusing if we can work him around to arguing that the fact that he sounds like a French stereotype rather than an actual French person is actually proof that he is French.
Dude, we don’t care if you’re a boring French person or a boring American, the key issue is “boring”. Now get lost.
You are lying again. I did admit I was in error when I used the word elide, I should have said you misrepresented the article (which you didn’t actually try to refute: all you said (of substance) was, “he said mothers”, when the context was plainly the role of mothers, i.e. motherhood, [BTW, your affections of poor english are back… this is the sort of shit which causes people to disbelieve you. It’s not that we don’t believe a non-native speaker can be fluent, it’s that you pretend, sometimes, to a lack of fluency which other occasions betrays to be false).
It’s not that you were so sneaky, or disingenuous (per se) it’s that you are either not french, or too stupid to avoid looking not french.
My way of arguing people is to address the things they said; and how they said them. Your way seems to be making bullshit statements, and then attacking the comments people make about your method of argument; ignoring the substantive replies as if they never were.
Brz, I don’t care if you’re a sentient fungus from Planet Blorzok-5 you’re still a loser.
WordPress does have a fondness for messing nyms. It does that to me and I’m using the site direct, ie. from a pc and not via mail.
And there’s a BIG BLUE BUTTON that says “REPLY”. How can I be so stupid? Oh, I’m SpukiKitty again. Now, Kittehself, how do I change the icon on my posts? I want to put my own Spuki-tastic icons up.
“Brz, I don’t care if you’re a sentient fungus from Planet Blorzok-5 you’re still a loser.”
Okay that made me squawk!
If only he were, we might be able to send him back.
My usual catchphrase for reactionary weirdos is “Ship them to Pluto”. But since Brz is from a planet of my own conjuring, I’ll have to arrange something else.
ah, a new insult. I’m also, among other things, a loser now, how cute.
Howdy, Space-fungus! You’re back!
Well Brz, calling you a loser is simpler. Though you remind me of what fish shit looks like after being broken down by a biological filter — slimy, gooey, stinky, brown shit.
Alien fungus is also good.
You’d think he could find a domme and pay her to insult him rather than begging for insults here. Cheapness impresses no one!
Spukikitty, if you click on the avatar it’ll take you to the Gravatar site and you can make an account (it links to Google and stuff) and put your own pic in. 🙂
Also,
” rel=”nofollow”>improved pic from Fawkner this a.m. (Do actual work? Nah, it’s Friday.)
No, I’m not begging for it and I’ll never be until you ensure my enthusiastic consent!
0/10 for attempted wit.
Trying to mock consent politics by equating conversation with sex isn’t doing you any favours on the “creepy rape apologist” front, Brz.
Are negative points a possibility here? Because I think that someone who finds the very idea of consent laughable deserves -100/10.
And also no sex, but I get the feeling that the women around Brz are already taking care of that.
Negative points are definitely a thing.
At first I thought you meant points in the sense of “You have a point” or “What’s the point?” and the whiny mosquito being in the negatives that way.
Both senses apply, I think.
Brz: Trying to co-opt the concepts of feminism/social justice only works if you understand it.
Since you don’t, it just makes you look ridiculous (as I said earlier, you don’t seem to be averse to ridicule). If you check the banner, it it says “Misogyny [we] mock it”.
You are a misogynist. You chose to post here. You continue to choose to post here, even when your presence has been declared unwelcome by pretty much everyone (I can’t think of anyone who has said they would be grieved by your departure, and I’d be amazed to see anyone who said they wanted you to stay. It’s sort of like the large number of people who doubt your frankish origin).
So you have consented (enthusiastically) to being mocked.
Logic fail 100/100. Understanding of the social habits of the local community fail 100/100.
Fail at subversion of the language of social justice/feminism to attack same 1,000/100.
Indeed. The fail is so epic that it deserves it’s own Cecil B. DeMille movie!
Somehow I doubt “loser” is a new insult, Brz.
“Nobody in France knows what the American stereotypes about French people are”
Just like nobody in America knows the French stereotypes about American people, right?
“no French has ever seen an episode of the Simpsons”
That statement is *blatantly* untrue, and so much so that it’s laughable.
All signs point to the fact that many French people love Les Simpson (especially because it pokes fun at those American stereotypes, I’d say).
In fact, if you search “Les Simpson” on Facebook (not “Les Simpsons” – that’s the Quebec version), you’ll find an unofficial like page that has over 1 million likes. That’s a pretty large proportion of the French population if you take into account that it’s an unofficial like page and not everybody in France has a Facebook or advertises their TV preferences on Facebook.
“No French” my butt. T’oh!
*SHA-ZING*!
Pure win, minor in French!
Brz is about as French as Ghengis Khan!