A Crash Course in Feminism Mk. II (or, why everyone should be a feminist)

[Nabterayl]

Well ... it is censorship :P Censorship is censorship whether the thing you're censoring is good or bad.

[Gotthammer]

Sanchez was attacked, allegedly by Plaskon, around 7:15 a.m. Friday, when the boy shoved the girl down a set of stairs and started to choke her, witnesses told the Daily News.

The teen pulled out a kitchen knife he brought from home and slashed Sanchez across the neck, chest and face. [URL="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/connecticut-high-school-students-attend-seaside-vigil-murdered-classmate-maren-sanchez-article-1.1769402"]She was pronounced dead at 7:43 a.m[/URL].

[eldargal]

Horrible, horrible case. Very intelligent young woman with her college all planned out. All because boys are emotionally fragile little ****ers who can't handle rejection. There is that old quote from a survey on online dating concerns, men are afraid of being laughed at, women are afraid of being murdered. There are reasons for that, even if actual murders like this are relatively rare. Violence and the threat of violence is not.

On Periods: Let’s put this **** to bed right now: Women don’t lose their minds when they have period-related irritability. It doesn’t lower their ability to reason; it lowers their patience and, hence, tolerance for bull****. If an issue comes up a lot during “that time of the month,” that doesn’t mean she only cares about it once a month; it means she’s bothered by it all the time and lacks the capacity, once a month, to shove it down and bury it beneath six gulps of willful silence.

[URL="http://the-feminist-fangirl.tumblr.com/post/83998773679/on-periods-lets-put-this-****-to-bed-right-now"]Source[/URL]

A lot of the problems men face in society in terms of “being a man” comes from the idea that manhood must be different from “womanhood’, that to be a man is to not be a woman, it’s to be better than women, separate from women. So, as what women can do expands, manhood retreats. If women can play hockey, then men must play violent hockey because simply playing hockey no longer separates you from women. Or if women can work and be successful, men must work more and be even more successful. The bar gets raised for men to keep it away from women, to keep women from being seen as equals, and it can leave men struggling to keep up and “be a man”.

But the solution to this isn’t to then re-expand manhood, and push women back out of the way, it’s to get rid of the idea altogether, and rather than “liking My Little Pony doesn’t make you a girl” as a response to “nyah nyah that’s a girl thing”, how about “what’s wrong with being a girl?” “what’s wrong with liking girl things?”

If all we’re doing to address toxic masculinity is to expand the masculine box, we’re not fixing anything. The problem with the male “box” getting smaller as the gender roles for women expand isn’t feminism, it isn’t women, it isn’t “female privilege”, it’s masculinity, male privilege and the idea that being a man MUST BE BETTER than being a woman, that MAN STUFF CANNOT TOUCH WOMAN STUFF, that being a woman is bad, that being called a girl is the WORST THING EVER, that being told you throw like a girl will DESTROY YOU. That’s the problem. And the solution isn’t to push women back, and take all their stuff, and put up a flag saying I PROCLAIM THIS LAND IN THE NAME OF MANHOOD, it’s for “manhood” to get the **** over itself, and understand there’s nothing wrong with sharing qualities, interests, traits, and identity with girls and women.

[URL="http://ami-angelwings.tumblr.com/post/56225316480/i-dont-know-where-this-came-from-or-if-its"]Source[/URL]

[Kaptain Badrukk]

That's just messed up.
Seriously that sociopath needs to spend the rest of his life in a padded room.
Not sure that this is a demonstration of male privilege so much as a twisted mind though.
Not denying that it exists, or the horrific statistics involving violent crime and women, just want to hear the full story before I cry misogyny on this one.
Still, ****, hope they throw the book at that jerk off.

E.G. That video is awesome. I don't do that to women, never have, and I found that distinctly amusing.
But then I reserve a fair amount of contempt for men who act this way.

[eldargal]

It is misogyny, and it isn't an isolated incident. Women are constantly, literally constantly, being killed or injured for rejecting men. Men are taught (though culture, not deliberate lessons) they have a right to women and when they are rejected it reflects on their masculinity. They are also taught the easiest way to reaffirm your masculinity is with violence. As always, 'not all men'.

[Kaptain Badrukk]

It is misogyny, and it isn't an isolated incident. Women are constantly, literally constantly, being killed or injured for rejecting men. Men are taught (though culture, not deliberate lessons) they have a right to women and when they are rejected it reflects on their masculinity. They are also taught the easiest way to reaffirm your masculinity is with violence. As always, 'not all men'.

Whist I agree that is all true, dude brought a knife AND (implied by reading the article) knew she was going to say no because he hung with her boyfriend.
That, to me (with some mental health knowledge), says this guy was WAY out there on the fringe of cogent.
Same thing (almost literally, apart from victim survived and the setting) happened with a mentally ill woman who was obsessed with a guy she worked with in Bournemouth while I was living there, only made the local news because no-one was killed.
Again I entirely acknowledge that the are a large portion of men who are not messed up stalkers who behave at best awfully and at worst violently when their "masculinity" (airquotes required by law) is threatened by rejection.
Those guys need to be taken to task and addressed.
This guy we need to know about before we label, because it doesn't quite add up.
When we get a real look at motive, if he turns out not to be having a psychotic delusional episode THEN I'll label it.

Interestingly, I have been reading up on murder and violent crime rates based on your assertions, and I'm finding it extremely hard to find any supporting evidence for them.
I'd really appreciate it if you'd point me that way so I can make a comparison to the UK crime statistics I've been perusing.
My discoveries are based on 2013 in the UK.
What I am finding is that 90% plus of homicide is performed by men, which given the nature of patriarchal masculinity is depressingly unsurprising.
And that 69 percent of murder victims are male.
In babies (who have their own statistics) victim spread is 50/50.
Where things do support your assertions are the statistics involving victim relationships;
53% of female murder victims were killed by their male ex/partner.
In contrast only 4% of male murder victims were killed by their partner, and only 64% of these murders were performed by women.
Men are most likely to be killed by a friend, stranger or acquaintance about 35% each.
So whilst a woman is less likely to be murdered, it's almost always the male partner.
Murder victims per million population ranks out as follows (2010-2013);
Black males 55
Asian males 16
Black females 13
White Males 12
Asian Females 7
White Females 6

And the comparative racial profiles on victim to attacker relationship also tells an interesting story;
That the highest incidence of murder is within your own racial group.
The highest cross-racial murder rate is white on asian (28%).
So (in the UK at least) women are 1/3 as likely to be the victims of murder as men, but when they are killed they are most likely to be killed by a male ex/partner of the same racial profile.

This supports the supposition that the majority of murder committed against females is the product of male privilege.
But given that that accounts for 76 murders out of 551 homicides in the UK (2013) that's just under 15% of all murders in the UK committed by men against their partners.
That's kinda scary if you're a woman.
But then the vast majority is still white men killing other white men they are acquainted with.
The logic, if we use the rape victim blaming logic, is that to avoid being murdered all we have to do is never meet anyone else. And avoid risky encounters, as a woman avoid committed relationships, and men avoid knowing people of the same racial profile as ourselves.

Non-murder stats aren't identical, but they match up fairly well, with the highest incidence of crime being males of the same racial profile attacking other males, and the majority of crimes against females being perpetrated by their partners.

Data all gathered here.
[url]https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/crime-statistics[/url]

There were 7.1% of women and 4.4% of men who reported having experienced any type of
domestic abuse in the last year, equivalent to an estimated 1.2 million female victims of domestic
abuse and 700,000 male victims.
• In the last year, partner abuse (non-sexual) and stalking were the most common of the separate
types of intimate violence: 4.0% of women and 2.8% of men reported having experienced partner
abuse (non-sexual); 4.1% of women and 1.9% of men reported having experienced stalking.
• Out of the separate types of intimate violence categories, family abuse (non-sexual) had the
lowest difference between the prevalence experienced by men compared with women (1.5% and
2.2% respectively). This is still a statistically significant difference.
• Two per cent of women and 0.5% of men had experienced some form of sexual assault
(including attempts) in the last year. The majority of these were for less serious sexual assault,
such as indecent exposure, unwanted sexual touching or sexual threats.
For all headline measures, the difference between the prevalence for men compared with women
was statistically significant. However, prevalence of severe force2
was not statistically different
between men and women in both the family abuse (non-sexual) and the partner abuse (non-sexual)
categories. This was also true for family abuse (non-sexual) minor force.

Male privilege alive and well when it comes to violence against women, of that there is no doubt, but it would seem that male violence against their immediate contemporaries is the most likely form of violence for anyone to experience.

Worth noting that the UK reported crime rate for non-homicide is about 45% so the government believes things are a little over twice as bad. that means that an english woman's biggest concern remains domestic abuse. And that more than 4% will be the victim of some kind of indecent assault.
That's just ****ing scary frankly, my little sister still lives there and so does my mum!

[eldargal]

Also worth remembering that male-male violence is also a product of the toxic notions of modern masculinity. Men are taught violence makes you a man and that men solve problems through violence. 'Talking about things' is considered weak and girly, and the vast majority of pop culture reinforces this. Men take action, women talk. Taking action is manly, talking is feminine. So when you have a problem, you react violently or aggressively. This is another reason why feminism is good for men, we disassemble these absurd gender roles and men can go about being men without having to resort to violence to reaffirm their manliness.

Something else to remember is the geder break down in murders changes each year, obviously, at least one year in the past five or six years women have been close to half the victims while men remain the perpetrators overwhelmingly.


Related:

So some dudes were complaining lately, “Women are telling guys to stop telling them how to dress, but not all guys are total misogynists! Women do it to each other too!”
So. People. Let me tell you a thing.
This is a picture of a panopticon. It’s a kind of prison. See, it’s a giant circle, with all the cells around the rim. The tower in the middle is where the guards are. The guards can see into all the prisoners’ cells, but the prisoners cannot see each other, and they have difficulty seeing the guards. Each prisoner knows that at any time, they are being watched, and if the guards see them behaving incorrectly, they will come with truncheons and beat the prisoner up. They learn to feel that gaze on them, all the time; every movement makes them think, “What if this breaks the rules, and they see, and they come and punish me?” Soon, prisoners don’t need guards standing over them all the time to follow the rules; they do it themselves, because that gaze is omnipresent. Even when the guard house is empty, they still think, “What if someone is watching me?” (This is all from Michel Foucault. You want more on this, go read Discipline and Punish, enjoy the descriptions of medieval torture.)
The panopticon is a metaphor. In our society, we are constantly watched, tracked, disciplined, and punished, from childhood. The school says you skipped class today. The babysitter says you wouldn’t follow the rules. The police saw you at the park with your friends. We are held to valid rules, and to bull**** rules; some of them are necessary to make our society safe, and some of them just make us easier to exploit.
You are held to rules. I am held to rules. They vary. As a woman, I am held to rules that say be small be pretty defer to someone else and I’m punished in different ways if I don’t obey. My brother is held to different rules, that say be strong don’t feel dominate the situation. We end up policing each other; we meet and he says, “Looking good,” and I remember: people are watching how I dress and how I look. If I disobey, they will notice, and I could be punished. I meet him after his job and ask, “Do you think you’ll be promoted soon?” and he remembers: people pay attention to whether or not I’m in charge, and if I’m not dominant, I could be punished.
Sometimes the guardhouse is empty. Sometimes nobody is paying close attention to what I’m wearing. Sometimes the guards don’t come to punish me, so whether or not I am pretty or attractive does not affect whether I get to own property. (It used to: whether or not my ancestresses were married affected their legal and economic statuses hugely)
Feminism is about the work of dismantling the prison when it comes to bull**** rules. It’s about saying that we shouldn’t be held to stupid rules based on gender. So it’s about the work of getting rid of the cells and the watchtower, and getting rid of the guards with truncheons. We can stop telling each other these stories about all the rules we’re held to, and we can stop punishing each other for breaking them. My brother stops telling me, “You’ll never get a date if you dress like that.” I stop telling him, “You need to be strong and work hard so you come out on top.”
So no, feminists don’t believe that all men everywhere are 100% misogynistic. It’s just that a lot of women are conditioned to think that 100% of the time, there is a risk that someone is watching us, and we will be punished if the break the rules. It is really hard work to break the social structures and the internal attitudes that imprison us.
And yes, women can enforce the panopticon. Hell, I’ll even tell you a womanly secret: I cannot count the number of times I’ve received cruelty at the hands of fellow girls for the way I looked or dressed. My entire middle school experience was basically that and algebra. We’re working on fixing that! Please, do not doubt that we’ve been working on that among ourselves as a gender. Women have spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears trying to change how we treat each other. Now we’re asking you to pitch in.

[URL="http://albinwonderland.com/post/83958000248/star-anise-so-some-dudes-were-complaining"]Source[/URL]

[Kaptain Badrukk]

Also worth remembering that male-male violence is also a product of the toxic notions of modern masculinity. Men are taught violence makes you a man and that men solve problems through violence. 'Talking about things' is considered weak and girly, and the vast majority of pop culture reinforces this. Men take action, women talk. Taking action is manly, talking is feminine. So when you have a problem, you react violently or aggressively. This is another reason why feminism is good for men, we disassemble these absurd gender roles and men can go about being men without having to resort to violence to reaffirm their manliness.

Something else to remember is the geder break down in murders changes each year, obviously, at least one year in the past five or six years women have been close to half the victims while men remain the perpetrators overwhelmingly.

Agree on the first point, not on the second, it has the numbers all the way back to 1997, and the only year we get a spike in female killings is Harold Shipman's 172 murder killing spree (130 of which were women). And that wasn't about gender, he killed old people, and the happy truth for you is that women live longer

[Kaptain Badrukk]

[url]http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/27/iraqi-shiites-protestproposedfamilylaw.html[/url]
Now I want to punch someone.

[Denzark]

When you say 'men are taught violence makes you a man' it is a very big generalisation. Particularly in the UK. Violent crime is down, violence in schools is certainly not accepted, especially since the instigation of the Children's Act (1988). Teachers, a naturally left leaning demographic in the UK, would challenge this. I doubt you can back this up with any credible statistics that violence (physical assault by one person against another) is either implicitly or explicitly 'taught' to be what makes one a man.

In the UK.