Politics On gender politics

The idea that the patriarchy benefits men isn't fucking ridiculous it's literally the entire point, the sum total and entirety of the claim we live in a patriarchy is that men are privileged. Second off the idea that "men don't cry" is because of "patriarchy" is ridiculous when you consider that in actual patriarchies like ancient greece, japan, or even England (as visible in beowulf) male tears were considered the ultimate sign of honesty, integrity, and a man's character. Likewise your feeling of obligation to protect your mother wasn't because of "patriarchy", it was because society teaches us that men are disposable.Once again patently absurd to try and pin that on a theory which claims society privileges men above women, and just as absurd to try and claim feminism is the answer when feminist ideology singlehandedly takes that to a new extreme with it's systematic and institutional erasure of male rape victims and the almost totally male Glass Cellar.

Oh and just to bring a little irony to the fact you've stooped to personal attacks after one post, feminism's mocking very idea of men showing emotion and employing it as a weapon against men is so widespread and well documented they literally have merchandising.

As you say, garbage in garbage out. And so far you're throwing out a lot of garbage and not much of anything else.

You just committed the Apex and Frontman Fallacies. Just because there are some male individuals at the top does not mean that those individuals are acting as representatives of class-men trying to act to benefit class-men, and it's patently absurd on its face to try and compare the apex of society to all men as a class. Remember the Glass Cellar?

You also just took your personal attacks to a new low with the "hurt feelings" jab. One of a number of routine shaming tactics that's so old and overused that it's literally be charted and color coded as the Charge of Hypersensitivity.

You mean like the two leading feminist academics I JUST fucking linked you to? One of whom is so influential and established in her field that she's been directly involved with the Center for Disease Control in producing the single largest and most definition quantitative survey of sexual violence in the entire United States of America? And the other who argued that even pedophile rapists aren't rapists if they're women and their victims are men, or that it's not rape if it's a male prisoner and a female guard, and so on and so on and so on?

That "real fucking world"? Or is there another "real fucking world" I'm not aware of where none of this happened?

Did I even mention her? No. But since you brought her up I may as well respond even though you're basically committing a No True Scotsman fallacy.

You say they play an important role and ask "who cares"... Well, I'm sure Andy Warhol cared after a "troll" by the name of Valerie Solanas shot him three times to try and murder him in the name of feminism. I'm pretty sure Erin Pizzey, the woman who started the very first modern abuse shelter and almost singlehandedly turned domestic violence into a socially ostracised crime cared when her dog was shot by feminists who'd been flooding her with death threats for daring to help male victims as well. I'm also quite certain that the more than a million rape victims completely erased from the books by Dr. Koss care that they're not even recognized as rape victims because that would contradict feminist dogma about sexual assault. I'm sure Earl Silverman cared, he cared so much he started a shelter which was the victim of a multi-tiered political and social attack by local feminists culminating in his total political stonewalling, bankruptcy, and eventually being abused and ridiculed so much he was driven to take his own life.

I think a lot of people care about these "trolls" as you call them.

That's exactly right, people often seek things that appeal to them or make them feel good. In some cases they do so to such a degree that they actively refuse to accept facts and evidence contradicting those beliefs, prioritizing ideological purity and strict adherence to dogma above all else. We generally call those "religions" but not always.

 

I never said that patriarchy doesn't benefit men. I said that it doesn't benefit men absolutely. Which means that I think that men suffer as a result of patriarchy. Your historical examples are cool, but not interesting because we don't currently live in ancient greece, japan, or england. I'm convinced that you have a different definition of feminism than me.

And our society treats everyone as though they are disposable. That's fucking capitalism, homey.

You seem to be mistakenly under the impression that apparel design is a fundamental component of feminist theory. I see a t-shirt with an insensitive phrase on it. I don't know of any feminist (that I've had more than a 30-minute conversation with) who would wear that shirt.

To be fair to me, I was super loaded when I wrote that post. Still, I think it flows well. And I stand by it, though it seems clear to me that I hit a nerve or two with it.

I suppose if tfp had a debate moderator, they might know what those particular fallacies are and might dock me points for committing them? Apex, shmapex. I do stand by the notion that men have more power in the US than women do. And that when women do have power, they are faulted for displaying the types of aggressive behaviors that are valued in men with power. I don't know what 'class-men' are. What I do know is that people with power tend to favor people like themselves, and this can exacerbate existing power imbalances.

I like your characterization though. "Just because there are some male individuals at the top." Like, you know, there gender imbalances in the halls of power are the result nothing more than an incidental and sparse smattering of men who (whoops!) happen to find themselves running the country.

Glass cellar? I had to look it up. It makes perfect sense being the result of patriarchy if you recognize that patriarchy trades on the notion that men are more powerful than women. And if you look into how women were treated when they originally tried to get jobs in these industries (those damn feminists, amiright?), you might recognize that patriarchy is one of the reasons that women aren't as well represented in these types of jobs as men are. Because women were treated as being unable to do the job (you know, because men are more powerful). They were harassed. They were assaulted. I don't know how you can think of the glass cellar and not blame patriarchy.

I will have you know that my personal attacks have been known to go a lot fucking lower than vaguely alluding to hurt feelings. I recognize that I may have hurt your feelings by implying that your feelings were hurt, and for that I apologize.

Right. The real fucking world. Where people live their lives and don't give two shits about what some academic says. I suppose you think that all Catholics agree with the Pope too? I'm not sure of what to call the particular logical fallacy you're committing here (some combination of an appeal to authority and of guilt by association) but it's pretty clear you aren't aware of the diversity of thought that feminists have. You should follow some feminists on Twitter. I doubt you will, so I will tell you what you'd learn: feminists don't all think the same thing. They argue. There are different schools of thought. There are many feminists who hate each other. It is a field constantly experiencing ongoing debate where many things aren't settled.

I can tell you this, though, that I know of no feminist in real life (ie who I interact with on a direct, personal level) who would claim that women can't sexually abuse men. Not one.

Are there feminists who believe otherwise? Seems like it. But their beliefs aren't canon feminism; they are just feminists who believe something that other feminists don't. Feminism is a big tent.

Either you don't understand the No True Scotsman fallacy. Or you misunderstood what I was saying. Let me rephrase: Andrea Dworkin was an extremist. She said some outrageous things, and a lot of people within her intellectual community disagreed with her (though I imagine some people agreed with everything she said, because she wasn't wrong about everything, there were a lot of people who didn't). I brought her up as an example of how social movements can have leaders whose ideas aren't actually embraced uniformly by other members (or other leaders) of the movement. These people still serve a purpose, which is to push conversations in directions they might not otherwise go. I was hoping to use this example to support the idea that you were ill-aimed in your attempts to paint all feminists as agreeing with whomever it is you quoted.

Social upheaval is messy. It sucks. But unless these people were acting under direct orders from Andrea Dworkin, your passionately rendered examples of 'people who might have cared' are irrelevant. Andrea Dworkin didn't kill Andy Warhol. Andrea Dworkin didn't shoot anyone's dog (I'm assuming).

Social sciences are never as clear cut as you seem to think. You seem stuck on the idea that feminism is a monolith. It is not. Feminism is the idea that men and women are people who deserve to be treated as such. That's it. Everyone else is allowed to fill in the blanks as they see fit. Certainly there are asshole feminists, but the fact that those people are assholes doesn't invalidate feminism.

 

...Umm... That is more like "egalitarianism" or "humanism..." Feminism is interested specifically in the advancement of the feminine side of the human race, hence its name. I mean sure - the better and more noble feminists are interested in true equality (whatever that means), but an awful lot of them are either angry at men and wish to overpower them (the stereotype), or simply dismissive of men in favor of advancing women as far as possible - even if this creates further imbalance.

 

I will cop to providing a wishy-washy definition. This is more in line with what I actually think, though possibly not what you think (and still wishy-washy):

"Feminism is the idea that men and women are equal and deserve to be treated as such."

I can also suggest the perhaps radical notion that because men are generally running shit (though the situation seems to be getting better in some ways), that there can be no movement towards equality without serious challenges to existing power structures and that the very nature of these challenges and what they aim to accomplish means that they will appear to be the result of angry people looking to overpower men. I mean, discrimination, inequality, that is some infuriating shit. People have every right to be angry. And if you accept the notion that current power imbalances generally favor men, then in a very real sense, any move towards equality will involve overpowering men. On top of that, if a fundamental component of balancing power is to try to make sure women are equally represented in positions of power in society, then that goal requires one to be in favor of advancing women as far as possible.

In other words, one can be angry at men, wish to deprive them of power (because they have more in the aggregate) and in favor of advancing women and be in the process be actively working towards equality. How else will equality come about? When in history have groups with more power ever just handed that power over without a struggle? How else do you envision this struggle playing out if it is to not involve anger, power realignment or the displacement of people in the favored group?

I think that there are differences in how people approach the problem of correcting society's structural inequalities, and that some approaches may seem like they favor women in the short term. Structural inequality causes suffering in all groups, and this is an issue that I imagine a lot of feminists are acutely aware of. So I don't see how feminism's endgame could be anything but "treating men and women as equals."

 

Seriously, if Valerie Solanas is the person you are going to use as the large brush to paint feminism as evil, you had better also point to deranged men that kill women as people who support men's rights.

Valerie Solanas, regardless of her politics, was certifiable.

 

Well no, not ideally... Although I worry that an awful lot of feminists might not truly harbor these benign Utopian sentiments deep down inside...

 

You can't have it both ways Bodkin, either people getting treated badly is "fucking capitalism" or its "patriarchy".

You seem to be under the impression that you can simply ignore all of the links and evidence I give you in favor of making pithy remarks and finding ways to halfass handwaving away anything inconvenient to you. That shirt exists as an example of how widespread the sentiment on it is. Your No True Scotsman doesn't magically make all of that stop existing.

You keep saying that as though somehow by insisting you "hit a nerve" or "hurt my feelings" somehow you'll magically make any of my evidence-backed statements somehow go away or become invalid.

I already addressed this several posts back, you're just repeating yourself and ignoring what I'm saying and linking you in favor of going by what you want to be true. The one original idea here is that women are faulted for displaying behaviors valued in men, which comes from the latest criticism-silencing dishonest tactic of branding any criticism of women who treat people abusively as misogyny.

Again you're contradicting yourself and trying to have things both ways. First you say patriarchy isn't about privileging men, now you're saying it is. What's even more ridiculous is you're now trying to claim that men's lives not being valued as much as womens' is somehow evidence of a system where men are universally considered more valuable, important, and privileged above women.

Can you possibly get more asinine and less logical? You're literally claiming everything is Patriarchy, even things that are 100% the exact opposite of its definition.

I can look at the glass cellar and not blame patriarchy because I recognize the basic logical fact that its mere existence completely disproves patriarchy theory. You can not claim that we live in a society where men are more important, more valuable, and more privileged than women and then have men be 70-90% of the homeless, over 90% of suicides, over 90% of workplace deaths, and as little as under 1/3rd of college graduates.

Claiming that is patriarchy is literally claiming that everything, no matter what it is, no matter what happens, is always patriarchy. It makes your theory completely unfalsifiable, and that makes it inherently invalid.

Once again you're back to dishonestly ignoring evidence to try and pretend things contradicting you don't exist. I don't know what fantasy world you live in but in the real fucking "real fucking world" governments commission studies and decide how to act based on the results. Funding is assigned and actions are based off those results. Entire laws have been created based off of studies and the work of academics. Remember VAWA? Domestic violence is split 50/50 between the genders but because of feminist academics dishonestly pushing dogma over facts we got a gender-based law that ignores male victims entirely. And then there's the real world violence I mentioned. Entire shelters for abused men being bankrupted, people who try to help abused men being targeted for violence. That's the real world. But of course that's all completely ignored or handwaved away because it contradicts your practically religious worship of feminist dogma.

And I gave you an example of two of the leading feminists out there, one of whom is so influential and in such a position of power she was able to singlehandedly write all men who were raped by women out of existence in order to preserve feminist lies about "rape culture" and sexual violence being male on female.

What part of hard, empirical, proof do you not fucking understand? I don't give a damn what your friends say, I give a damn about what feminists actually do. I give a damn about over a million rape victims being shoved under a rug by one of the most powerful feminists in the nation without a single peep from the entire rest of feminism about it, and in fact people like you attacking people like me rather than helping fix the problem.

I'll make this simple for you: If someone does something abhorrent and you stay silent you're condoning them with silence. If you then attack the people who respond to that abhorrent action you're actively defending it.

Feminism does not get to do nothing and then get pissed off at other people for holding them responsible for actions committed by feminists, for feminists, in the name of feminism, from which feminists benefit.

Either you don't understand that I was responding to your question of "who cares" by listing a number of real world acts of violence perpetrated by people who followed the ideology of those you no-true-scotsmanned out of the definition of "feminist" by calling them "trolls", or you're being deliberately dishonest. Again.

Actually yes, yes it can, and it SHOULD, not only because people should be responsible for controlling their own extremists but because feminism in particular claims a monopoly on morality and social justice. Feminism doesn't just try to claim it has the answer, it demands to be the ONLY answer, and accuses anyone who even tries to criticise it or dissent of being a woman-hating bigot. Hell merely not joining up with feminism is enough to be attacked as demonstrated when people tried to independantly hold a conference on suicide prevention and feminists showed up, committed felonies to disrupt the event, and then proceeded to harass and abuse the victims and survivors present, going so far as to sing "Cry Me A River" at them.

As for your dishonest attempt to write-out feminism's actions in the real world with the NAFALT argument (itself soundly disproven by Karen)... you're once again ignoring that real life isn't a vacuum. Let me quote you something I wrote elsewhere solidly disproving your "assholes don't invalidate feminism" argument:

--- merged: May 18, 2014 10:30 AM ---

As I've said twice now I already addressed this. You're now actively arguing against the validity of your own point. Since when has ANY oppressed group ever received power without a struggle?

Do you see women in the streets getting firehosed and attacked by dogs? Firebombed? Lynched? No, instead they actively get more and more favorable and preferential treatment just by demanding it. As you yourself say: since when has that ever happened? Like I already quoted earlier: The mere fact that people fall over themselves rushing to defend feminism and answer any call it puts out is proof positive that feminism's core dogma about the "patriarchy" is false. Feminism exists and succeeds because we don't live in a patriarchy.

Maybe you don't see it because you're deliberately refusing to see anything you don't want to see, like the overwhelming evidence I've provided you of feminism being literally violently opposed to actual equality, to the point of bankrupting shelters, mocking suicide victims, completely writing rape victims out of existence, and shooting people's pets as a death threat just for daring to shelter male abuse victims.

Here's another well written and very well sourced post detailing why feminism is not remotely about equality, and giving a great deal of evidence to back that up. And while we're at it here's another onewith yet more evidence and documentation, spurred on by a post on one of the most highly trafficked feminist sites on the internet which literally claimed that merely recognizing the existence of bigotry justified that same bigotry.

The fact that you're resorting to such copouts as "some approaches may seem like they favor women in the short term" says pretty much everything anyone needs to know. Since when has any abuser ever failed to claim they're the real victim? Since when has any group of violent bigots ever failed to say they're oppressed, they're the victims, they're the good guys?

More than that... when will be enough? Women are already 30% or less of the homeless, single digit percents of workplace deaths and suicides, massively outperforming men at all academic levels to the point of being up to 71% of college graduates, and even earning more than apples-to-apples men.

If you reversed the gender on any of those statistics people would be waving pitchforks and torches, but this way around and you not only don't give a damn you're actively fighting me over this.

Privilege is when you're a member of a class that's almost never homeless, almost never dies just trying to put food on the table, almost always graduates college, earns more, is unemployed less, and receives staggeringly preferential treatment in every other aspect of life down to literally getting away with rape and murder.

It doesn't stop being privilege just because you're a woman instead of a man.

 

Perfectly stated. We penis-bearers have privileges and drawbacks - but they are very different, and being either gender comes with its perks and pitfalls. Trying to claim either gender is problem-free (or free of any problems that matter) is unjust minimization.

 

The GOP these days plays on fears of an malevolent and corrupting Other. Whether that's terrorism, drugs, immigrants, or just plain brown people doesn't really matter as long as they can spin that it's a threat to "american values". It doesn't matter what those actually are, just as long as everyone listening is convinced you're talking about what they think it means.

Feminism is actually more oldschool than that. Feminism plays on fears of victimization, and peoples' anger at not getting what they feel entitled to. It's the positively ancient tactic of pointing and saying "The huns are coming" and "See them? They're why you didn't get what you deserve". The production of false statistics or use of rhetoric to spin away inconvenient facts are just routine maintenance necessary to protect and preserve that fear and anger.

I mean think about it. If the fact that the last time we checked there were as many men were raped by women as there were women raped by men got out would feminism be able to keep claiming that we live in a "rape culture" that men use to oppress women? Would they be able to keep up the fearmongering about how men are rapists and women are victims? If the fact that domestic violence is an almost perfect 50/50 split between genders were widely known would VAWA have ever passed? Would we have laws that force the police to arrest male victims of spousal abuse just because they're male?

But like you've seen right here on these forums the moment someone even hints at dissenting from the party line they're accused of being a misogynist, a rape apologist, a woman-hater... they're buried in accusations and personal attacks that brand them like the scarlet letter.

That's the beauty of claiming at absolute monopoly on morality itself. You can paint anyone who ever disagrees with you as being a monster. When you control the very language itself you control what people think. Remember 1984 and NewSpeak?

 

That's understandable, but such is an indictment of humanity, and not feminism.

 

As someone who sees this from the ground level and finds the shrill voices on both sides to be really frelling annoying let me weigh in a bit.

I consider myself to be a feminist and I define it the way it is defined, as the effort to put men and woman on equal footing.
Any other semantics or efforts to run away from the term are just part of fear, anger, and bad publicity.

My mother was a 60's feminist who raised three sons on her own.
She was a poet, a firefighter, an EMT, a farmer, a political activist and a single mother.
She could hold a fire house by herself, chop a cord of wood, recite Byron, stand her ground against police and raise her sons to be feminists.

I raised two daughters to be third generation feminists.
Their politics are based more on gender and sexual identity as well jobs and relationships.
My youngest worked in a shelter and will happily admit that men and boys are sexually assaulted (often by men and boys)

So many of these battles have developed in academic and political BS when what they should be about how we treat each other and how we raise out kids.

 

What?! No. That's bullshit. I can have it both ways here and I could add ways and still have room for so many more 'ways' here. The world is a rainbow when it comes to the colors of systems that serve to fuck over certain groups of humans over other groups of humans.

Oh, there was 'evidence' somewhere in your select reportage of facts, links to youtube videos and references to t-shirts? Man. I'm going to say this so its more obvious: I believe that some (most?) of your evidence is bullshit. And have said as much. For example: the t-shirt. You're using the existence of a t-shirt to prove, what? I don't know, that feminists are all shitheads? That they would all prefer swap power with men rather than coexist equally? It doesn't matter. It's a fucking t-shirt. It's evidence of capitalism, not feminism. It is only evidence of *something* if one chokes down the super ridiculous idea that the one particular specific action by unknown people could invalidate *all of feminism*. One would have to chase this rotten fucking intellectual meal with a hot cup of the fact that your world view is so black and white on this that you can't even acknowledge that feminists disagree amongst themselves about fundamental things. So yeah. fuck your 'evidence'.

I know I hit a nerve. Unless you're this sanctimonious when you order a cup of coffee.

I don't need to invalidate your evidence. As far as I can tell, much of it is fairly invalid as you're using it (see t-shirt example).

Oh, did I call you a misogynist? No? Okay, so dismissing my reference to historical facts as examples of patriarchy as a means of calling someone a misogynist is silly. You seem to be having a pissing match with ghosts here. You're using echo chamber logic to dismiss arguments *no one* has made.

History is full of examples of women being treated poorly for trying to do traditionally male things. Pointing out this fact is what it is. That fact that you think that me pointing out this fact is a backhanded way of calling you a misogynist is ridiculous and super illogical.

There's no contradiction. Your inability to understand doesn't imply contradiction.

If can recall when I said that patriarchy doesn't provide absolute benefit...

Your definition and expectations for patriarchy are ridiculous. Patriarchy isn't a mens-only free milkshake club. It's a lot of things, including attitudes about how different genders should behave and what roles they play in society. Here's something: imagine a patriarchal society where everyone believes that only men are strong and capable enough to go to war. Assuming this society only invades and never gets invaded, the number of men with war-attributable PTSD will vastly outnumber the number of women with war-attributable PTSD. You would look at the fact that men suffer more from war-attributed PTSD and say "LOOOOOOOK MOM, NO PATRIARCHY!" Whereas I would say, "LOOOOOOOOOOOOOK MOM, MEN SUFFER IN PATRIARCHY TOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

My choice to ignore your evidence is completely honest (notice how I'm not trying to play the victim here, even though you just called me a liar. You should try conversating from off the cross sometime. It's chill). I don't directly address your bullet points because I instead choose to throw out the whole list. Feminism isn't a monolith, remember?

I think you raise good points about the how government research and programs can be flawed if the people running them are flawed. Other than that? Don't care.

What, so you heard a feminist or two say something mean once and now all feminists are jerks? Explain that, because that's a fundamental error of attribution.

You should stop trying to lecture me on how to use empirical evidence. You have absolutely zero authority over me in this regard, especially because you are so clearly horrible at it. You're the poster boy for the perils of confirmation bias. You use empirical evidence like other people use toilet paper. You think the fact that you saw three trees with lemons in them means that all trees have lemons in them.

I never said she wasn't a feminist. In fact, I called her a fucking leader of feminists. Choke on that little nugget of info and make it make sense in the context of everything else I said (because it does).

I'm not on a first name basis with Karen, so I don't know what her deal is. I'm not sure where Karen's ideas end and yours begin because of how you quoted everything. I'm not going to respond to each point. But I will address them generally by saying this: The logic that you are using to dismiss all feminists is nearly identical to the logic required to call all Catholics pedophilia apologists. Switch some nouns around, and I bet the structure of the bullet points would still work.

I don't follow your logic here at all.

Because people of color had worse things happen to them, patriarchy doesn't exist? Nope. Sorry. I'm trying to find something refutable in that statement, but there's nothing there because it's just how you feel. Feelings are nice.

You've provided evidence of people who self identify as feminists, not evidence of feminism. These aren't the same things.

I literally do not fucking care. If these people are as sloppy with their ideas as you, I'd rather go take a shit on a slide than click the links and plinko my way through a bunch of half-truths and confirmation bias.

This ^^^ is a choice statement, and one that I would ask myself if I were you. For the record, I never called anyone a violent bigot though.

I don't know when it will end. Probably never. Your stats don't mean what you think they mean, though. How does feminism control the rate at which people go homeless? Why wouldn't men commit suicide more in a society where they aren't supposed to get help with their emotional problems (because patriarchy)? Why wouldn't more women end up in school in a society where many of the better-compensated blue collar jobs can be hostile places for women to work (because patriarchy)? Women earn more? Yeah, I know how to slice data to make it say whatever I want too.

I'm not fighting you about the tragedy of these facts. I'm disagreeing with your explanation for these facts.

Privilege is when you're a member of a group who can't attain power as a public figure without having to explain her outfit to the press. Clearly it's not an absolute thing.

 

No, you can't, because your "ways" are nothing more than either twisting everything to claim it supports "patriarchy" or handwaving it away to say it doesn't count if you can't do that.

I love how you keep trying to isolate that one thing from its very reasonable and sound context because you can't actually do anything about the rest of the evidence I fucking buried you with earlier. I'm going to assume that your continued obsession with that to the exclusion of everything else, and your continued intellectual dishonesty with playing the NAFALT/Monolith argument to handwave away any and all evidence against your point as conceeding that you can't actually rebut anything I've said.

Do you have anything else other than saying "That's not a beach, see it's just one grain of sand!" or are you going to continue picking up single grains of sand from the beach to insist the beach doesn't exist?

The fact that you're continuing to obsess over one single thing that you STILL need to completely remove from context and dishonestly misrepresent when I've given you mountains of other evidence and documentation suggests you're projecting here. Why else would you spend more time making personal attacks against me and my emotional state than actually dealing with the evidence I've given that soundly disproves your arguments?

Now you're not even taking things out of context anymore, you're just making things up entirely. I never said YOU were calling me a misogynist, I was plainly talking about feminism's tactics in general. Ironic that you bring up "echo chamber logic" considering you've literally spent this entire thread doing nothing but explicitly refusing to even look at anything that contradicts your worldview and commenting on how hurt my feelings must be.

History is also full of examples of men being treated worse for failing to do traditionally male things, or for trying to do traditionally female things. The fact you're trying to invent victimhood by claiming I said you called me a misogynist when I was plainly referring to the latest silencing tactic of accusing anyone who criticises a woman's abusive behavior as misogyny. In what world does saying "Feminists are claiming that anyone who criticises a woman for behaving abusively is a misogynist" remotely translate as "you called me a misogynist"?

Also I like how AGAIN you try to have something both ways by claiming it's perfectly valid for you to reference historical facts but when I did the same you dismissed them because historical facts weren't valid.

Your inability to recognize that an unfalsifiable and circular argument is inherently invalid does not mean that the rules of basic logical validity cease to apply, and this is a perfect example of it.

Lets go through this again.

Patriarchy affects two genders: Male and Female
Patriarchy has two possible effects: Privilege, or Oppression.
Mathematically there are only four possible outcomes: Male Privilege, Female Oppression, Male Oppression, Female Privilege.

You are trying to claim that all four prove Patriarchy exists, which means that absolutely everything in the universe supports Patriarchy and nothing ever disproves or falsifies it.
Do you get why that is logically invalid? Yes. Or. No. Because if the answer is ANYTHING other than "yes" we're done here, because it means you're literally trying to claim that it's impossible for you to ever be wrong.

You're not trying to play the victim but so far you've already twisted me talking about other people entirely into you claiming I'm attacking you (while attacking me in the same breath), and now you're accusing me of attacking you again while literally admitting to flat out ignoring evidence against your position. Right.

Also I love how you're back to playing "Feminism isn't monolith", which is literally nothing more than a weaponized version of the No True Scotsman fallacy. No matter how much evidence I give you, no matter what proof I give you, all you have to do is say "Nope, that magically doesn't count because Feminism Isn't Monolith". It's an infinitely extensible way to simply pretend evidence against your position doesn't count. Once again: Anything that makes your position unfalsifiable is inherently an invalid argument. In order to be a valid argument it MUST be falsifiable.

I've got to hand it to you though on the mental gymnastics necessary to say I raise good points about something and then completely ignoring the fact that it was done by a feminist, in the name of feminist, according to feminist dogma, and for the express purpose of producing false statistics from which all of feminism has benefited and which all of feminist continues to use for political gain.

If I say "we're standing on a beach" how many times can you pick up one grain of sand and say "No we're not, it's just one grain of sand" in a row before you're forced to admit we're standing on a beach? That's what you're doing. Every time I provide evidence counteracting your position you either ignore it completely just because it contradicts your position, you pretend it magically doesn't count because "feminism isn't monolith" and exclude them from your definition of a True Scotsman, or you resort to saying "that's just ONE example" no matter how significant the context or implications of the example are.

Hilarious that you can presume to say I'm horrible at empirical evidence when you literally have none, and have literally done nothing but go "Nuh-uh DON'T WANNA BELIEVE YOU" this entire time. Or rather that's what you're doing when you aren't trying to attack me personally by insisting I'm unstable, emotional, my feelings are hurt, and so on.

So suddenly "X was a troll" translates as "X was a fucking leader of feminists"? That's a new and inventive way of using "troll" to mean completely the opposite of what it means every other time it's ever been used. And you have no room to talk about context.

Once again using underhanded tricks and dishonest rhetoric to handwave away evidence and arguments just because they disagree with you, and hey since I pre-emptively disarmed any attempts to call me a misogynist now you're trying to paint me as a monster by using pedophilia and discrimination against catholics. Your argument's ridiculous by the way, not only because the "structure of the bullet points" is complete nonsense, not only because I'm relying on fact and evidence based argument and attacking that is absurd on its face, but because the entire point of the section you're attacking doesn't apply because catholics took massive public action against the corrupt institutions of the church.

In other words they did exactly the opposite of feminists who not only condoned the violence and prejudice in their movement, but actively attack anyone else that has a problem with it. Exactly like you're doing right. now.

And did you seriously just take a potshot at me just for referring to someone by name?

Maybe if you actually read the sources I gave you instead of just inventing dishonest reasons why they're magically invalid just for disagreeing with you then you'd understand the point I've made several times by now.

That feminism gets virtually everything it wants with a minimum of struggle and has literally whipped up society into mass hysteria and public panic to such a degree that even RAINN has had to step in and publically rebuke one of feminism's boogeymen is not a feeling, it's a fact. And it's a fact which solidly disproves the very idea of a Patriarchy because the very fact that feminism gets what it wants so easily, that feminism has so much power it can do that, that a majority of the country will bend over backwards to appease feminism, proves we don't live in the world feminism claims we do. If we did they wouldn't have it nearly so easy.

Ah the classic dictionary fallacy, usually phrased "The dictionary definition of feminism is X! Your real world examples of feminism's actions are irrelevant!"

Let's rephrase your argument here: I've provided tangible evidence of the real world actions of feminists taken in the name of feminism because of what they learned from feminism and feminist leaders, and according to you none of that matters.

According to your logic the real world actions of something are completely irrelevant as long as somewhere someone says something else. So going by your own logic the Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea is a free and democratic republic that's a wonderful place to live, and the real world evidence that it's a murderous totalitarian hell on earth doesn't matter because the dictionary says those words all mean something else, and their leaders and defenders say it means something else.

I rest my case Y'Honor, opposing council openly admits his sole criteria for judging the validity of anything is whether or not it agrees with him.

Did you really just say "I know you are but what am I"? Did you REALLY just do that?

Again you contradict your own arguments more than mine. I don't claim feminism controls these things, I claim that feminism is disproven by them. YOU are the one who claims "Patriarchy" controls everything, and everything no matter how contradictory it is somehow supports the "patriarchy".

And your explanation is literally "everything is patriarchy no matter what it is". Your explanation is completely circular, nothing is ever not patriarchy. Everything, no matter what it is or how contradictory it is gets twisted to support your claims of patriarchy.

It's almost as if the class of people that make up a majority of voters, spenders, and control a majority of household income all actively sought out that information and so created a demand for it. The problem for your argument is that class of people is women, not men.

Oh and by the way thanks for proving that feminism is so morally abhorrent that you honestly believe it's reasonable to compare fashion coverage women themselves demand to an absolutely catastrophic death toll.

 

I don't think I can roll my eyes any higher in my head.

I have never read such a pile of dingo's kidneys. The absolutism and orthodoxy that are displayed in the post above only convinces me that someone has a particular ax to grind and can accept that no other possibility is acceptable (or possible).

I have no desire to engage in a conversation with this kind of complete and utter close-mindedness. The social and political world is messy, inexact and imprecise. There is no need to develop such closed loop way of thinking of things. Not only does it not allow anything beyond your blinders to exist, it also bears no resemblance to the world in which the rest of us live.

 

That's rich coming from the guy who ran face first into godwin's law using the Ku Klux Klan the last time I disagreed with him. You don't get much more absolutist than comparing someone to murderous white supremacists for daring to not-agree with you.

You want to talk about closed-mindedness? We've got two people here literally refuse to even acknowledge anything that disagrees with them, calling it wrong purely because it disagrees with them, and one is so abusive, bigoted, and hostile that he literally scared people out of posting the last time the subject came up. I had people PMing me to say they were afraid to say anything because they were afraid they'd be next in line after me.

You have absolutely no room to talk about closed-mindedness. You bullied people off of the damn forum for disagreeing with you and even abused your staff position to keep harassing me while I was trying to talk to the other admins about how astoundingly inappropriate that was. If anyone else had come to the admins saying "people are afraid to post because of the harassment and attacks from this member" that person would've been gone.

You don't get more closed-loop than refusing to even acknowledge things that disagree with you, branding people with comparisons to mass murderers, and then cranking it up even further to such a degree you scare anyone else out of even posting.

 

You really do know how to miss the point.

Thanks for making mine.

 

If I wanted my own comeback I'd eat the tissue when I was done, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised that you've cut out the "you're a horrible person if you disagree with me" middleman and gone straight to "If you disagree with me it proves I'm right". Why even bother pretending with circular logic when you can just go straight to the endgame?

 

Shadowex, you are more than welcome to have an opinion. I will even say, for the record, that you have made some good points and shaped my opinion on this subject.

I will be honest though, you absolutely rub me the wrong way.

At first, I though it was just your obstinate orthodoxy, but that isn't enough. There are many here that hold opinions in opposition to me and they don't leave me with the emotional response you bring out in me. I have given it some thought and here is what I finally realized...

There are many people on this board who have identified themselves as feminists. People, who, despite the brush you choose to paint them with, are not as you would have us believe they are. These are people who have, in some cases, many years and many personal experiences that stand in diametric opposition to your point of view on what it means to be a feminist. Consistently, and without apology, you have gone out of your way to discount their personal experiences.

I have read many of their posts (if not all of them) and at some point or another, they have in various ways conceded points to you. They have not done this because you have convinced them wholly of your opinion but rather; they have managed to understand that all things are not black and white.

You, on the other hand, have consistently claimed victimhood and persecution where most simply see heated debate. You need to understand, as I have pointed out above, that the world is not as black and white as you would have us believe. That despite people not agreeing with your “facts”, they are not trying to squash or belittle you. They simply disagree. It happens.

Perhaps if you took even a moment to understand any of this, you might see that most of us do agree with you on a number of things and arguing, as you seem bent on doing, about how many angels can fit on the head of pin is not only counter-productive, but also rendering you guilty of throwing the very brick bats you so fervently feel are being thrown in your direction.

I wouldn’t waste my time writing this if didn’t think you were an asset to the board and worry that your particular axe to grind will be your undoing.


(and no… that isn’t a threat, it’s an concerned observation)