Men still don’t get it, do they?
I’ve been following (from afar) the discussion that has been taking place about the misogyny in the disbelieving community, and the frequent, troubling use of epthets directed at women bloggers which imply that they are nothing more than bitches, slags, and dismissible by synecdoche as though they were simply female body parts (and we all know what parts these are), and therefore of less value than men. Ophelia Benson, Greta Christina, Rebecca Watson and others have tried very hard to convince us that it’s really unacceptable in any context to treat women this way, and yet the abuse goes on. And this, despite the fact that, for disbelievers, surely one of the most salient aspects of the religions is that they are misogynistic, refuse to give women leadership roles, and treat them (broadly speaking) as mere appendages of men to be used as and when men can find a use for them. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be in that position, but when the Prime Minister of Australia has to get up in the House of Representatives and excoriate the leader of the opposition for his misogyny, it is clear that there is something deeply amiss with the way men in general regard women. Here’s Prime Minister Gillard’s speech:
As I say, the fact that Prime Minister Gillard felt she had to say this speaks volumes for the attitude towards women of many men. (I know that this is all wrapped up with the matter of the Speaker of the House, Peter Slipper, and his crude comments about women, but it is still apt and powerful, and is not, I think, compromised in the way that Michelle Grattan suggests in her article, “Misogyny war has no winner” in the Brisbane Times.)
This should come as no surprise to us. Here in Canada, we have the spectacle of male Members of Parliament dreaming up bills that will bring the question of abortion back to political life, without any consideration at all being given to the women who are at the centre of their attempts to get their religious beliefs embedded in law. In England, the story about the abuse of young girls in BBC studios by Jimmy Saville continues to unfold in a distressing way — abuse that went on for years, but was simply ignored. And yet, for all that, we are surprised when the Taliban shoot a girl in the head for going public about her desire to learn. Why should this surprise us? When will we ever get it? What does it take to see misogyny as all of a piece? Dressing women in bags is one way of erasing them from public life. Another way, as Prime Minister Gillard says, is to speak of them in demeaning terms, simply assuming that women are of lesser importance or significance, whose words do not have the same weight, the same importance, as the same words spoken by men.
Today, as I notice from a number of newspaper reports, is the “Day of the Girl.” I’m not altogether sure what this means, but at least it should mean that we all stopped and thought again about how we treat girls and women, and how girls and women are so often encouraged to treat themselves, and stopped disadvantaging them from the start by the kinds of misogynistic stereotypes that so many men seem to have of them, stereotypes which allow them to be treated in contemptuous ways, to be called contemptuous names, and to be dismissed as not worthy of attention. I recall reading the first chapters of Ophelia Benson’s and Jeremy Stangroom’s Does God Hate Women?, and being brought face to face with a kind of virulent hatred of women that was so searing that I found it hard to read. I was reminded of the experience anew when the news came in of a 14-year-old girl (Malala Yousufzai) being shot in the head by the Taliban because she went public with her desire to learn. (And yet these are the people, with whom, after over ten years of war, we are negotiating terms of peace! Does it make sense to make peace with people who shoot little girls in the head for wanting to learn? It doesn’t make sense to me. If we haven’t been able to achieve more than this after all the killing and destruction, what were we doing there in the first place?)
You have to be simply astonishingly committed to learning to do what Malala did. But it’s the inner self-confidence, or sense of self that she must have, to do such a thing, to fly in the face of centuries of tradition, that really resonates, and hopefully will keep on resonating down the years. The same goes for young women like Jessica Ahlquist, who stood up, and did not flinch, when faced by religious bigots who simply took it for granted that they had the right to foist their beliefs on others, and who was threatened with murder (in the US of all places!) because she wanted the Lord’s Prayer taken down from its place of prominence in her school. It just goes to show that it really wasn’t the prayer itself that was important. No one, surely, could use that prayer sincerely and then threaten someone with murder! [I stand corrected on this. Please note Comment #1 below. It was not the Lord's Prayer but a banner of the "School Prayer," expressing, as Eamon says, mostly noble ideals, all of them violated by Ms. Ahlquist's detractors.] But you have to see these things together. You have to see what Prime Minister Gillard is up against in the Australian House of Representatives with what Malala is up against in Pakistan, and what Jessica faced in her native Rhode Island, because they’re fighting the same thing, the presumptive right of men to rule and to tell women what they may and may not do.
Lately, I’ve written a few posts on abortion, because male politicians in both Britain and Canada have taken it upon themselves to reopen the abortion question. In Britain it was started by a woman (Maria Miller, Minister for Women and Equalities, of all people!), but then, predictably, to nail his conservative Christian colours to the mast, was intensified by a man, Jeremy Hunt, who wants the limit lowered to 12 weeks instead of 24. In Canada there is no law governing abortion — which seems appropriate to me. Women’s lives are their own. They don’t belong to the state. In Britain abortion is legal up to the end of the second trimester of pregnancy. If you read the Church of England’s take on the abortion law, its intended purpose was to allow for abortion in situations of extreme emergency only. And since that’s not the way it’s used, or was, from the start, likely to have been used, and abortions are more common than this interpretation would predict, the church makes the argument that a law governing assisted dying would go down the same slippery slope. And that’s just stupid. If they didn’t know, they should have known, that women have abortions for all sorts of reasons, and have been doing so since the beginning of time, whether it is legal or illegal. Women will not put their lives on hold because just because the law says they must. They will make decisions about their own lives. The same is becoming increasingly true of people in unrelenting suffering. And the church’s pretence that their position is based on respect for life is contemptible. It’s based squarely on religious beliefs about God’s role in creation (and, in particular, the creation of “man”). Since God is the creator, life in the womb is sacred, and life, no matter how miserable, is holy, and belongs to God alone. It’s patriarchy, all over again.
So, Richard Dawkins’ response to Rebecca Watson’s concern about her being accosted in an elevator late at night is far more apt than he seemed to think. He thought he was putting the issue in proper perspective by saying, “See, here are women who are really suffering. You had no reason to respond as you did to an invitation in a hotel elevator late at night.” Here’s what Dawkins said (as quoted by Watson):
Dear Muslima
Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.
Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so . . .
And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.
Richard
Watson, or Skep Chick, put this under the heading
The Privilege Delusion
But the point is just the same. It’s the assumption of male privilege, the bland assumption that women need to know their place, and should simply accept that being “invited” to a man’s room for coffee late at night on an elevator, an enclosed space with no exit, is nothing to be concerned about. For some reason, Dawkins’ imagination simply didn’t run that far, that a woman being accosted in this way in those circumstances has a right to feel threatened, however faint that feeling might be; and that men don’t have the right, in those circumstances, to suppose that such an invitation would be considered welcome and unthreatening. Just listen, if you will, to Julia Gillard again. She speaks of being offended, but she was being threatened. She was being called a bitch, and she knows what that means. It means, as Watson pointed out, that assumptions can be made about you, assumptions that lead to the kinds of threats that were made to Watson, that she should be raped, tortured and killed. And pretending that this isn’t a problem is due to a serious lack of imagination.
So, since this is the Day of the Girl, perhaps we need to give a lot more thought to the way that girls and women are thought about and routinely treated. As I say, I have followed Ophelia Benson’s discussion of these issues over the last few months. I have very seldom commented. It’s hard to know what to say. What do you say, when the whole structure of things is so out of joint? When women can be dismissed with a word of contempt, often, as I say, by synecdoche, by making a part of the body signify the whole significance of women, or by reducing them to female animals, bitches, as was done to Julia Gillard. That speech of hers, it is said, has gone viral. Well, it should go pandemic. It’s time to address these issues forcefully and without delay. And, let me tell you, the story is not a pretty one. Patriarchal assumptions are deeply embedded in our traditions, traditions, almost all of which, I remind you, are religious. Pornography, besides playing to our animality, is a religious spinoff. It almost always puts women in their place, by making them sexually omniovorous. No doubt there are evolutionary explanations for patriarchal tendencies and for the patriarchal ordering of societies, but they cannot be allowed to be excuses. Dawkins said — in terms that are called into question by those who declare free will to be simply an illusion — that we have the ability rise above the selfish replicators. I think we do, but it’s not going to be done if it is not done consciously and with forethought. It is time we stopped buttressing religious assumptions about women. Every religion second lists women — every single one. Some of them are slowly making a difference, but the difference they are making is very small, and it is very slow. The big religions — every one of them — place women in second place. Islam is one of the worst, but the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches are all misogynistic, and so are most of the fundamentalist, evangelical sects, springing up like poisonous mushrooms all around. Their gods hate women with a vengeance, because their gods are the creations of men. This should not be a problem for unbelievers, secular humanists, atheists, or what you will. We say that we can be good without god. Well, let’s do it.
Posted on 11 October 2012, in Misogyny. Bookmark the permalink. 43 Comments.
Trivial and tangential correction re the Ahlquist case: the banner was not the Lords Prayer, but a composition of unknown authorship (Wikipedia gives the full text: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Ahlquist). The reaction is notable for the extent to which Ahlquist’s detractors violated every one of the (generally noble) values expressed therein. The banner, for these people, was not an expression of moral or pious sentiment, but a tribal totem.
Thank you for the correction, Eamon. I’ve inserted a correction linking your note.
I think you will find that attitudes to abortion etc among women are not significantly different from those among men. So, the idea that the evil men are forcing some abortion laws on women is a bit too simple, unless you believe that the patriarchy has brainwashed women etc.
Also, the idea that the motivation is to take away choice from women is not correct in most cases; the motivation is that these people actually believe that the fetus is a person. You might not agree with that, I don’t (at least in the early stages of pregnancy), but the fact is that they believe this. You can criticize this, but I don’t see the point in claiming a false motivation for the other side, even if you disagree with their goals. If anything, this will probably create the impression that you haven’t understood their arguments, so they certainly won’t listen to you. In other words, your claim that their motivation must be taking away choice holds only if you assume the fetus is not a person. Assume for the purpose of argument that this is objectively true; this doesn’t change the motivation of the other side one iota, which is their belief in personhood, not (in most cases) some desire to control women.
I don’t think that you can group Ahlquist with the other two because she would have been persecuted whether she was male or female.
Andrew,
It’s true that she would have been persecuted if she were male but the kind and tone of that persecution wouldn’t have been of a sexually threatening nature. She didn’t just get death threats, she got death-by-rape threats.
Aha, I stand corrected then. It’s still not quite the same as the Taliban case (they’re fine with 14 year old BOYS being educated, if you can call that educated), but I take your point.
This male attitude is not a modern phenomenon. Far from it.
In Ecclesiastes 7 we read:
The Teacher has been searching far and deep for wisdom, but is not sure he was able to find her.
25 I turned my heart to know and to search out and to seek wisdom and the scheme of things, and to know the wickedness of folly and the foolishness that is madness.
26 And I find something more bitter than death: the woman whose heart is snares and nets, and whose hands are fetters. He who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her.
27 Behold, this is what I found, says the Preacher, while adding one thing to another to find the scheme of things—
28 which my soul has sought repeatedly, but I have not found. One man among a thousand I found, but a woman among all these I have not found.
Qoheleth, a wise man if there ever was one, already reflected the deep-seated misogyny of the ancient Hebrew culture.
How about Proverbs 7:
1 My son, keep my words and treasure up my commandments with you;
4 Say to wisdom, “You are my sister,” and call insight your intimate friend,
5 to keep you from the forbidden woman, from the adulteress with her smooth words.
10 And behold, the woman meets him, dressed as a prostitute, wily of heart.
11 She is loud and wayward; her feet do not stay at home; 12 now in the street, now in the market, and at every corner she lies in wait.
13 She seizes him and kisses him, and with bold face she says to him,
14 “I had to offer sacrifices, and today I have paid my vows;
15 “so now I have come out to meet you, to seek you eagerly, and I have found you.
18 Come, let us take our fill of love till morning; let us delight ourselves with love.
19 For my husband is not at home; he has gone on a long journey;
20 he took a bag of money with him; at full moon he will come home.”
21 With much seductive speech she persuades him; with her smooth talk she compels him.
22 All at once he follows her, as an ox goes to the slaughter,
24 And now, O sons, listen to me, and be attentive to the words of my mouth.
25 Let not your heart turn aside to her ways; do not stray into her paths,
27 Her house is the way to Sheol, going down to the chambers of death.
However, Proverbs ends with a Praise of the Perfect Wife:
10 An excellent wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels.
11 The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain.
12 She does him good, and not harm, all the days of her life.
25 Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come.
26 She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.
27 She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness.
28 Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her:
29 “Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.”
30 Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.
31 Give her of the fruit of her hands, and let her works praise her in the gates.
This completes the round-up of the close environment of the patriarchal Israelite: respected parents; good neighbors; faithful friends; disputatious brothers; a perfect, efficient wife.
Sirach 23 warns of the danger of sexual transgressions:
16 …Hot passion that blazes like a fire will not be quenched until it burns itself out;…
22 So it is with a woman who leaves her husband and presents him with an heir by another man.
24 She herself will be brought before the assembly, and her punishment will extend to her children.
25 Her children will not take root, and her branches will not bear fruit.
26 She will leave behind an accursed memory and her disgrace will never be blotted out.
Sirach 25 says it even louder: Oh my son, beware the evil of a wicked woman!
15 and [there is] no anger worse than a woman’s wrath.
22 There is wrath and impudence and great disgrace when a wife supports her husband.
23 Dejected mind, gloomy face, and wounded heart come from an evil wife. Drooping hands and weak knees come from the wife who does not make her husband happy.
24 From a woman sin had its beginning, and because of her we all die.
So, this misogyny goes a long way back.
The distrust of women has been a key bias of all the ancient Mediterranean civilizations. Was it any better in Egypt, India, or China? The Norse had their Walkyries, though.
Can attitudes so long implanted in mindsets be modified with stern warning of political correctness?
Men’s physical strength and the need to protect women always pregnant with children has continued to be a major factor for hundreds of thousands of years.
Can this be turned around on a dime, when we have had electrical appliances, the right to vote and own independent financial resources even less than 100 years?
Can we change human nature with imperatives? Moses didn’t succeed, and neither did Jesus. Civil laws are the obvious answer to control behavior, and education the hope to slowly modify it , but they won’t change human propensities overnight.
This is where moralists fail, and the door is opened to anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists.
Andrew, I was going to leave Ahlquist out precisely for the reason that you give, but I left her in for the reason that Kevin gives. I think it took a great deal more courage for her to do what she did than it would have for a reasonably privileged male in the school. That’s only a guess. Of course, a “nobody” male would have received rough treatment, but a boy with social standing in the school would have had a rough ride, but nowhere so rough a ride as Ahlquist received.
Roo, well, yes, precisely, that’s why religions are so deeply sexist. It`s there in the holy texts, ineliminable. Christianity, Islam — there all much of a muchness in this respect.
As an amateur evolutionary psychologist I often point out that there are two distinct kinds of sexual passion. There’s the familiar one that makes you want to have sex and the other one that drives you to stop others from getting any. If you can prevent your rivals from having offspring then you can prevent your offspring from having rivals.
As phiilip points out both men and women engage in this behaviour, women maybe more than men. The patriarchy is just the cultural explanation for something that is a genetically based instinct which explains why it’s so pervasive across almost every culture and why it is so difficult to struggle against. It just keeps coming back in every generation.
Yes, Kevin, no doubt that’s true, but, like anger management, you can learn to use your sexuality in a civil way. It doesn’t have to be expressed in uncontrolled and predatory ways.
Quite so. The whole civilizing project is about managing our instincts.
I just hate the fact that our politicians, and by this I mean to include churchmen, have to pander to our basest passions in order to gain and hold power. There’s a reason why conservatives try to prevent effective education. And I don’t just mean the Taleban.
Phillip raises a good point. While a lot of the ridiculous laws against women’s reproductive rights that were passed in America this year were, I think, created by male legislators, views on abortion *are* very similar across genders (<a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/127559/Education-Trumps-Gender-Predicting-Support-Abortion.aspx#1"data!). Education and political party create much starker contrasts. So I’m not sure to what extent the opposition to abortion is imposed by men. It would be interesting to know the history of opposition to abortion in the United States. Many states made it illegal, but why? And was it the men only who thought it should be so? Were religious values to blame?
That said, I would point out that there is a great deal of hypocrisy when it comes to abortion. Many women *say* it’s wrong, until they actually become pregnant when they don’t want to be, and then many of these women go ahead and have the abortion. Some of these women undergo a change of heart after such an experience, and decide that abortions are not such a terrible thing after all. But this is not, however, an avenue of enlightment that is open to men, since they are not the ones that get pregnant and then are forced to reconsider their values. So perhaps women are in a position to have clearer thoughts about abortion than men?
Tim,
Good point. Education would be a better predictor than gender. The more I study it, the more convinced I become that the essential difference between liberals and conservatives is that the conservative is the closest to the natural man.
Our dear Prime Minister is a case in point. He has what is regarded as the most effective poker face in politics. Playing close to his vest he just makes his moves without letting on the thinking behind his decisions. Or so, up until lately I thought. Now I don’t think that there is much if any thought going on. He just does what feels right.
Generation after generation the conservatives acting on instinct keep making the same mistakes while we liberals find ever newer mistakes (along with some smart moves) as we blunder our way forward.
I’m pretty sure animals are not as evil as humans. It’s not our instincts or animal passions that need to be suppressed, it’s our own capacity for evil, which far worse.
The whole civilizing project? Managing our instincts? This has been going on ever since humans lived and moved in groups and had to balance individual needs versus social restrictions? Nothing new. Bands of monkeys and chimpanzees have the same problems. We’re just adding another level of complexity with out hyper-developed social brains.
Our “basest passions”? Counterbalanced by some “noblest passions” hidden somewhere. This sounds so much like a Christian sermon. No evolutionary psychology in that. This “baseness” business is such a copout to religious “commandments”. An open door to hypocrisy and deception.
Roo, I’m not sure I understand your post.
You say “This has been going on ever since humans lived and moved in groups and had to balance individual needs versus social restrictions? Nothing new. Bands of monkeys and chimpanzees have the same problems. We’re just adding another level of complexity with out hyper-developed social brains.”
Exactly my point. It’s not sermonizing to try to explain what is, I’m not making a moral point.
Animals are amoral, they can’t understand what they’re doing. We can. We just make up religious excuses to keep from thinking about it.
@philliphelbig
Even if we are to grant the very dubious proposition that fetuses are possessed of personhood for the sake of argument, the anti-abortion stance still remains largely hypocritical. Children do not have a right to the organs of their parents, even when withholding said organs will result in death. You are never required to give blood, even when it may be lifesaving. Everyone (women included) has a right to withhold the use of their bodies however they see fit. It is this choice that is being denied, and the issue of personhood is never raised in a context outside of abortion.
Given the congruent stance opponents of abortion tend to have against birth control (a very effective method of reducing the overall number of abortions); the motivation seems largely to be the punishment and shaming of women who would have sex without the intent of having a baby. Personhood of fetuses is certainly a frequent talking point, and I do not doubt that believers are capable of the cognitive dissonance to genuinely believe it to be the main issue. Still, the effects most certainly limit the choices and autonomy of women, even if abortion opponents delude themselves into thinking otherwise.
Phillip, I’m not willing, in the absence of an argument, to grant the personhood of the foetus, and you have yet to say why it should be so considered. Religious reasons there are aplenty, but I can’t think of one good non-religious reason. It must be a reason that can trump a woman’s decision about herself and her life. I don’t think you can find one.
Secondly, control women by controlling their fertility and reproductivity has been one of the chief ways of subordinating women to men, and this is made clear every time a man acts in a sexually controlling way with a woman, something that happens lamentably often. There is an illusion of privilege which is often written into religious ways of organising society. Free women from that and they need no longer consider themselves so bound. Many women take this for granted.
The ideas of woman and the family, upon which conservative notions of women’s right to a abortion come to grief, are all about the control of women and their fertility. It seems odd to suggest that they are not. It is hard to separate the prohibition of abortion from the control of women’s fertility, since in order to control abortion you have to prevent women from acting according their own conception of their interests — which, while they often favour bringing a child to birth, they sometimes do not. Of course, abortion could be largely controlled by making contraceptives freely and confidentially available to women, regardless of age or marital status. It is not something that is widely practiced. Why not, if people are so opposed to abortion?
Sorry, John K. I didn’t see your comment until I had posted mine. My computer got hung up, and I rebooted and saw your comment, which raises a similar concern to at least one that I raise above. Quite right too.
Kevin:
I don’t understand what makes you an “amateur” evolutionary psychologist. You like to invent psychological forces from your armchair?
Or perhaps you’ve read a couple of books, like Steve Pinker’s “The Better Angels of our Nature”? But there are no better angels, no more than your “basest instincts”. Where did you ever learn about those “basest instincts”? If not invented by you, where do they come from? That is the key point. Where on earth did you ever learn about “basest instincts”?
Steve Pinker is still animated by the distillation of Judeo-Christian morality of “grace, peace and love”. There’s no guarantee anywhere that they are the triumphant “noblest instincts” or “bettter angels” of our nature. The game is not played out. Our story has not come to its end when we can pass a final judgment.
The rosy picture that Pinker depicts is only the assumption that the values or our Western Enlightenment and our choices of science and democracy, (inherited from the Ancient Greeks by the way, and certainly not from Hebraism and Christianity) will eventually prevail thanks to some natural engineering. Nature would be harboring some hidden Providence leading us to a happy ending.
It ain’t necessarily so. There’s no guarantee of that anywhere, only our optimism and activism. We can make deliberate choice of values, and naively believe that our efforts will make them supersede all obstacles and lead us to a Golden age in the future.
We “can understand what we’re doing”? Meaning what? That we know when we are breaking commandments and taboos ordered by our morality commanders? With conscience comes not a desire to be a goody-two-shoes but a commandment breaker. Thinking is not passive and gullible belief, it is first distrust, saying no and being critical.
Read what Egbert wrote. It’s because we do have those super-brains that we can concoct the most destructive contraptions in the world, up to nuclear weapons. Let’s thank Einstein and Oppenheimer for that. And let’s wait for Iran to get its nuclear bomb, and let’s see what will happen when the dust settles.
The belief that the world will end up in “grace, peace and love” and harmony, and Mozart music, and bread for all, and opportunities for all, may be our modern epoch’s cultural dream, at least in the West. Let’s see what happens when we come to the end of easy-oil availability, when the oceans are all polluted, and acid rain falling everywhere. Are we blessed by some god to help us avoid all those calamities? Will our “noblest angels” come to the rescue?
Pinker is tapping into our modern lovely liberal Western dream. But he and his wife Rebecca Goldstein are steeped in old-fashioned Jewish wisdom, transmuted into modern psychological research. His views may be slanted by unconscious bias. The danger is not in our instincts, they’re all right, and they’ve brought us all the way up to now. The danger is in our brains and its power to search, invent and destroy.
@Eric
Ha, you are free to agree with me and reiterate at any time, accidentally or otherwise.
I think Eric’s morality is ‘fatherly’ in a good way, but that’s still patriarchal. I’m not knocking it either, but I don’t think Eric really wants to face up the fact that his morality is paternal in nature. I actually think all our moral systems are either patriarchal or matriarchal, we just don’t realize it, and in fact we repress and deny it much like Victorians denied their sexuality.
We might think that these archaic moral systems don’t really apply well in our modern age, and that is exactly true. They’re family and tribal orientated, but since they’re so central to our identity, they manifest in how we organize. Politics can be divided between patriarchy (conservatism) and matriarchy (socialism) for example. We all hold various values between the two, as our minds are a combination of the two.
Now the modern world does not fit into our mental archetypes of morality, and it seeks instead to make us all universal and strip us from our archaic identities, so that the state replaces the ‘father’ archetype and society replaces the ‘mother’, so that we end up being like children or even ‘slaves’.
It’s this system that I choose to fight against, because I see it as a kind of eventual tyranny. If we reclaim our moral identities, then that means embracing both patriarchy and matriarchy in the right context, where is belongs in family, and not in society or the state. There’s nothing wrong with men feeling paternal or women feeling maternal, but it is only wrong in our modern Platonic world, which wants to enslave us all.
Alright, I’ll bite, Egbert. Point out something specifically “patriarchal” about my morality, or “morality”, as the case may be. As to the rest of what you write here, it makes no sense to me. Why patriarch, matriarch, children or slaves? Why not adult human beings?
Well, I don’t mean disrespect Eric, and I actually think you’re a good person, unless you’ve mislead me all these years! But do you not see that your values are fatherly values? And why shouldn’t they be, since those are very good ethics to have. But are they appropriate when applied to the political world and all its darkness? No, I don’t think so, because politics is supposedly (at least in liberal democracy) based in rational self-interest, not ethics.
“Men still don’t get it, do they?”
I guess they don’t, and this post is evidence of that fact. Every time I see a post written by a man on the topics addressed above, I cringe. This one in particular makes me cringe because this post and the ?all male? commenters have missed the point; Prime Minister Gillard’s speech is the point. Outspoken attacks on misogyny by a woman or women will solve the problem(s), not posts like this one by a male or posts like “Speaking Out Against Hate Directed at Women” written by men at Rebecca Watson’s request.
The video of Gillard’s speech was posted on Canadian Atheist yesterday with a short preamble: http://canadianatheist.com/2012/10/10/methinks-the-lady-doth-protest-quite-well/
I was the first to post a comment:
“Wow! Thank you, this video made my day. Julia Gillard is so eloquent she should be a role model for all women.
Joe says,
“If that is a feminist, I kinda want to be one, maybe, a little.”
I say, “That is the kind of feminist I try to be all the time; a feminist like Gillard could wrestle crocodiles.”
That is the point: men defending women is not as effective as women defending themselves and other women.
Why trot out Dawkins’ “Dear Muslima” letter? Dawkins doesn’t need to speak for me on the topic of how women are treated by men; I should speak for me. That’s what needs to happen; women need to speak up as emphatically and as unflinchingly as Julia Gillard has.
Even assuming your dichotomy is a reasonable taxonomy of moral values, why assign it labels depending on gender stereotypes?
Veronica,
Not sure which post of Eric’s you were reading, but he has always claimed that men should get out of the way and let women do what women need to do. So men should never mention misogyny?
Veronica, men are half of humanity. We can’t remain silent in the face of injustice. We have to stand in solidarity with women and proclaim that we are feminists because it’s the right thing to do and because by doing so we may encourage other men and women to join our side.
Eric has every right to speak out on the subject, and I only wish that all of us were so eloquent.
Can I just say that ‘rational self-interest’ is no longer the ethics that I support. While it makes sense rationally and in light of the Enlightenment, the consequences historically, socially and politically are disastrous. They are responsible for allowing the psychopathic to control more and more resources while the majority obediently let the state and society control them. Here in the west, we are still caught up in the tyranny of monotheism, but now of a secular kind: the state, which is the most destructive kind. Men have slowly been stripped of their liberty, dignity, their self-respect and their honour, and have been turned into children, while women have been stripped of their own maternal values and turned into sexualized objects of the market.
The war between religious and non-religious, between men and women, between liberal and conservative are only forms of divide and conquer, to distract us from the growing Orwellian control of the state over us all. We can choose either to become wise to that, and stop these wars that divide us, or we can play into the hands of the psychopaths, that are the real tyrants.
Michael Fugate
I didn’t say “men should never mention misogyny”; I said it is and will be more effective when women mention it. I would rather listen to Gillard and read Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf on the subject
Jim Sweeney
“Eric has every right to speak out on the subject.”
I was not attacking Eric MacDonald’s right to address misogyny. Men’s rights are not in question. “I only wish that [women] were so eloquent.”
However, your replies support my point. Where are the women commenters and why are they not agreeing/disagreeing with me”
I’m not sure. There are many countries where contraceptives are freely available (confidentially? probably, but most people wouldn’t see any need for that, since it preassumes that there is a reason for shame) where no-one would even think of asking about the marital status, often paid for by national health insurance. There are fewer unwanted pregnancies, partly because of this but also because of a more relaxed attitude to sex in general. Nevertheless, I don’t think one of these countries would have your views regarding abortion. In most cases, there is some sort of law such as “legal up until x weeks”. If x is larger than the typical time to notice a pregnancy, then in practice, as you point out, it really doesn’t matter what x is, since late-term abortions are rare (and if they occur for medical reasons are usually allowed anyway). I think this demonstrates that it is possible to separate the two issues, and indeed they are separate in many places.
I think your last sentence sums up what I criticize about your position. (I don’t think we differ much regarding what laws we think would be correct; I question the logic of your argument.) You assume that the religious folks are opposed to abortion because they are opposed to abortion at any “cost”. Wrong. They are opposed to abortion because they believe the fetus is a person. Again, you can disagree with this statement, but what is the point in claiming that the other side believes something it doesn’t? Yes, if the goal is preventing abortions, or unwanted pregnancies, or maximizing sexual freedom, then both contraceptives and abortion should be freely available. That might be your goal, that might be my goal, but it is not the goal of the religious anti-abortion activists. You seem to think their position is contradictory. It isn’t. Within their system of beliefs, it is a logical position. Again, you might disagree with their beliefs, but they are not so stupid that they haven’t thought “gee, if we allow free contraception we will reduce the number of abortions, so let’s do that”. The reason for this is that they are also opposed to sexual freedom. Unwanted pregnancies and perhaps even abortions are, from their point of view, just collateral damage.
Yes, there are folks who are interested in controlling female sexuality by all means, but this is not the main motivation of religious anti-abortion activists. Even the fact that they are opposed to sexual freedom doesn’t imply this is their goal, since in their eyes sexual freedom for males is just as bad.
I don’t think I pointed this out. You seem to be implying that a patriarchy would lead to more abortion, since that would mean fewer children for the competition.
Veronica, I largely agree with you, and that is why I have not addressed this question over the last few months, why I felt that I could not comment effectively on some of Ophelia’s posts on this issue. However, I felt a certain amount of guilt by simply staying away from the issue entirely. What decided me, I guess, was the renewed attack on women’s reproductive rights, which concerns me deeply, since the right of people to shape their own lives is something that I am committed to, and it troubles me a great deal when religious voices intrude into places where they don’t belong.
But then, with PM Gillard’s speech (a classic), and a little girl being shot simply for wanting to learn, I felt impelled to put my oar in too. I felt awkward doing it, and you may notice that just from the style. Yes, I agree, this is something that women need to do, but I think they also deserve the support of men, and it’s really a man problem too, since men are so deeply implicated in the reigning attitudes towards women, an attitude which many women have internalised, I’m afraid.
So, while of course it is important for women to say these things, it is also important for men to say them too, because it’s going to take a big change in men and their attitudes. Men are going to have to become more sensitive to the concerns of women. Gillard’s speech is so important in this, because she is pointing to one man in particular and giving him a lesson in sensitivity. Men are socialised this way, to hypersexualise women, and then to dismiss them, precisely because of this, as being one dimensionally physical, instead of thinking, feeling human beings as they themselves would wish to be considered. But the result is that men are themselves, as a consequence, seriously one dimensional, and the only way they’ll become more than one dimensional is to try very hard to think and feel themselves into an understanding of women. As I say (at least I think I do) in the above piece, it’s very hard for men to put themselves into women’s shoes. I quote Richard Dawkins, not because he’s a particularly bad man or an insensitive man, but simply to point out that men’s imaginations very often do not carry them far enough for them to understand, imaginatively, how different men’s and women’s experiences of these things are. They can’t feel the kind of offence and threat that Rebecca Watson felt on that elevator. I can a bit, because I know how Elizabeth felt about being hit on, and she was a great feminist, and I have always, to the degree that this is possible, considered myself a feminist too. But I recognise the ambiguity, as a man, of trying to address this issue, and I largely agree with you. At the same time, though, as I say, it’s a man’s problem too, and we need to be able to address it, otherwise nothing will really change.
There’s another dimension that is of interest to me. Dying people, suffering people, disabled, vulnerable people, are very much like women in this respect. They’re second listed, even by their most avid supporters. And because they’re second listed, other people feel that they can talk about them, decide for them, defend them, as though they can’t do it themselves. Of course, as you know, that is a particular interest of mine, and I want to argue on their behalf (and on my own, because I will be in that demographic some day) that they are full human beings too, and have the right to make their own decisions, to take their health care and their dying into their own hands, and grab these things back from the experts and the religious, who seek to control the lives of others.
@ Verionica
The thrust of your first comment does seem to be a criticism that Eric and most of the commenters here are the wrong gender to be talking about feminist issues. Surely males will not have the same understanding of misogyny as women in a misogynistic society will, our discussion is poorer for that, but we have little control over who we are and who chooses to comment on this blog.
I would never want to imply that women are in need of saving from misogyny by the intellectual males, that is a staggering contradiction. It would be very unfair, however, to expect women to pull themselves out all on their own. PM Gillard in no way requires my agreement or support in her inspiring speech, but she has them none the less. Things are reaching an excellent level when women are in no need of defense by anyone else, and her speech seems to be an encouraging sign of this in at least the one case.
I firmly believe that misogyny, much like racism or homophobia, is a problem for everyone. The harm is not equally shared, that is certain, but the effects are harmful to everyone in some measure. I am inspired by and want to support Gillard not as a rescuing male, but only as a decent human being.
Bah, I guess it was my turn to cross comment on you Eric. I considers us even.
Phillip, as you know, I have already provided a part of an answer to your concerns on another thread. (Yes there is an RSS feed, I think, if you just click on the RSS feed button at the top of the page. Let me know, if you use it, how it turns out.) But I do still have some concerns with the way that you address the issues here. At the end of your last comment (#30), you say:
Yes and no, as you can see from the response to the clergy abuse of children. I think that, if you look at what is said about female chastity, and what is said about men’s sexuality in the Catholic tradition, that there is a very different emphasis on female chastity. Augustine, for instance, in The City of God speaks of male sexuality in terms of the refusal of the male organ to be controlled by reason. But he doesn’t make the same allowance for women at all. When he speaks about rape, he says it is not the woman’s fault, so long as she takes no pleasure in the act. He does not seem to consider that women’s sexual response is as uncontrollable as the man’s, and yet it is well known that some women, upon being raped, actually achieve orgasm, quite involuntarily. Augustine would take this as a sign that they consent to the act. So male and female sexuality are treated very differently in some respects, and that is important I think when it comes to considering the issue of birth control and abortion. Only women can conceive, and the refusal to permit them to use contraception is, in fact, a claim that women’s sexuality is always to be reproductively present to the male sexual act, whether it is or is not desired. Indeed, it has been pointed out (by Uta Ranke-Heinemann) that, by this logic, an act of rape that is open to procreation is morally to be preferred to an act of marital sex that is closed to it. That has something very powerful to say about the difference between male and female sexuality, and it is not a particularly nice thing either. Women’s sexuality has a very different valence in Christian tradition, and this is largely due to the differential weight attached to female chastity, and the subjection of women’s sexuality to the male prerogative. This is why women tend to be treated so one dimensionally by men, and why, when women were finally ordained to the priesthood in the Church of England headlines appeared screeching “SEX AT THE ALTAR!”
All right Veronica, here’s another female poster. Yes, Gillard’s speech was excellent, and yes, women need to speak out more. I have resolved never to keep silent again. However a change in cultural attitudes can only come the faster for having men speak up as well as women; we need to have the egalitarian perspective become dominant in social discourse. So thank you to Eric, Jim Sweeney, John K. and others expressing their active support for feminist concerns. It’s a fine thing to advocate for justice, whether or not it’s directly in one’s own interest.
Thank you Isabel, I agree that a change in cultural attitudes can only come the faster for having men speak up as well as women; however, women need to make their voices heard. I have (I hope) clarified my position here: http://canadianatheist.com/2012/10/12/recommended-reading-6/
That clip made me want to move to Australia and become a citizen, just so I could vote for her. She wiped that smirk off his face, that’s for sure. But that’s not the main reason for my chiming in here.
This is:
I continue to be puzzled by the attitude that someone offering support and encouragement to a group of people who are being systematically dismissed and “second listed” is somehow wrong.
Was it wrong for me as a white person to have supported the civil rights movement in the 1960s?
Is it wrong for me as a straight person to support gay rights?
Is it wrong for me as a male to support feminism?
Unless you declare that it indeed was wrong for me to support the first two causes, then you cannot declare that I have no standing in supporting the latter cause.
As a human, I support human rights. And frankly, it angers me more than a little bit to be told that it’s not my right or my place to do so. And I’ll thank each and every one of you who would argue otherwise to stop it unless you want to get on my bad side.
Kevin
I didn’t say I didn’t want support and encouragement from men; i said I didn’t want men to be the only voice. “I would like to see comments from women as well as comments from men. We woman can and should be as forceful in attacking misogyny as Gillard is, and each one of us should indicate by actions and words “I am woman, hear me roar.” Please see my complete take on the topic: http://canadianatheist.com/2012/10/12/recommended-reading-6/
Re: “I’ll thank each and every one of you who would argue otherwise to stop it unless you want to get on my bad side.”
I don’t even know you, so I don’t even know if you have a good side.
Veronica, in all fairness, I think you have to acknowledge that your point was put more strongly than you say here (#39), for your first comment on the post was includes this:
That, while I was not going to mention it earlier, is putting it rather fervently, to say the least. I find it hard to see what was cringeworthy about my having written what I did. Indeed, in saying that the post itself was evidence for the fact that men still don’t get it, you are basically suggesting that I am as oblivious as the Australian leader of the opposition to the women’s feelings and needs, and that does, I have to admit, strike me as unfair. I did say that I have not engaged the conversation for precisely the reasons that you suggest, but, at the same time, feeling that my non-participation was, in some sense, a failure to engage with something that should concern me. So, you leave it very unclear to me just where you do stand. You can scarcely fault men for participation in the discussion of the issue just because no women have (until your and Isabel’s contribution) joined in, and I should have thought, other things being equal, that you should welcome that rather than rebuff it. What is the alternative? That we should remain silent, and so, in some sense, complicit in the general masculiniist put-down of women? Or that we should only comment when invited? As I say, I as perfectly willing to let this pass unnoticed, until you said to Kevin that
But that is not, in all fairness, what it means to say that my post was an example of men not getting it, and that reading it made you cringe — is it?
And also, to be fair, again, you do know something about Kevin, something reasonably thought to be part of his good side, and that is that he said something supportive of women, indeed, something very supportive, for he said:
It seems harsh to dismiss him so curtly, when he has expressed himself so forcefully as being on your side. How else can we do that, if we cannot say so and be believed?
Of course, you could interpret this whole comment as an example of my not getting it, because commenting critically on your response; but if we are to discuss this way, then what would it look like to be supportive and understanding of women in the current climate? I say this because I am concerned that what I meant as genuine support, and criticism of the many failures of men to understand how women feel in a society so deeply influenced by traditions that subordinate women, seems to be being interpreted as exactly the reverse. And remember that, in your own post you say:
Surely, if what you want is more female voices, it is not my stand that you cannot support, but my taking it, and that, to be plain, troubles me.
Well I think it’s a great post, Eric, and I say the more of that kind of thing the better.
Just a short note to Eric’s last response to me above: this appears to be a Catholic-specific view. Among other religions which disapprove of sexuality (essentially all) it is not necessarily as one-sided.
As to Ute Ranke-Heinemann: an interesting case, since she is both critical of the Catholic church (at least some aspects of it) but also converted to Catholicism as an adult.