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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsRumination on misogyny.
I have been ruminating a bit on the issue of misogyny here at DU, and thought to share the fruits of my labor so far. And I will start by referencing a different, if related subject, that of rape.
When the woman says the man raped her, and the man says she loved it, in the absence of witnesses, whom are we to believe, or if not believe, grant the greater benefit of the doubt? Now, the moderate and even-handed individual might, at first blush, sadly shake his head and say that, since it is the man's word against the woman's, no determination can be made. Let's look a little deeper at that, though. The first objection to that position that occurs to me is this: by proclaiming neutrality, we automatically cast doubt on the woman's word. This is inescapable: we are telling her that her assertion has no validity unless she can prove it. Yet no such burden lies on the man, and in fact we implicitly endorse his assertion that she loved it by not questioning it. Of course, if the opposite were true, and we discounted the man's word out of hand and accepted hers, then we are denying validity to him while placing no burden on her. But since this is not the practice, it is an empty point, although one might wish to ruminate in an idle hour on whether it is a greater injustice to be falsely accused, than to be bereft of recourse.
But let's look a little deeper, if you will. The second thing that strikes me in this situation is that the woman, in asserting rape, is making a statement about herself. She is telling us what happened to her body, her psyche, her right to her own physical and emotional integrity. The man who asserts she loved it, however, is making a statement not about himself, but about someone else. One might reasonably ask which has the greater claim to authority, in this case: the one who speaks of herself, about whom she could reasonably be assumed to have rather more certain knowledge and understanding than you or I, or the one who speaks of another person, and arrogates to himself the final word on what she did or did not feel, did or did not experience. To me, this seems rather a telling point.
So now we proceed, willy-nilly, to misogyny. I have seen, recently, rather a number of conversation threads that go like this: A, a female, states "I have seen/experienced a lot of misogyny here on DU. B, a male, responds "It's not a lot, and those who do it are banned." These threads usually go rapidly downhill from there.
How, then, does my earlier rambling about rape relate here? Well, it occurs to me that if an individual says she has experienced certain behavior, she is rather more of an authority on her experience than the interlocutor who tells her she is misrepresenting/misinterpreting the situation. Whereas the individual who asserts that her experience is a misrepresentation/misinterpretation is arrogating to himself veritable status as arbiter of what does and does not constitute misogyny, and who does or does not experience it.
Another thought occurs to me, unrelated to the rape illustration, but with bearing on the question of misogyny. I am a male. In 58 years of life, I have never been subjected to misogyny, and never shall. It is, one might say, a biological necessity. I may have experienced other forms of bigotry, insult, belittlement: I have never felt misogyny. I may have witnessed acts, been exposed to circumstances or statements to which I would attach my own definition of the word, still I have never experienced misogyny. It is not, therefore, for me to define the phenomenon for those who have had such experience. It is rather for me to learn from them, that I might become wary enough to recognize it, and courageous enough to oppose it.
-- Mal
dsc
(52,130 posts)given the fact that prison rape in this country is far from non existent, a false accusation of rape in at least a non trivial number of cases is the same thing as raping a person with no recourse.
malthaussen
(17,066 posts)The same might be said of any false accusation or false conviction. As I said, we can turn over many an idle hour trying to determine the calculus of injustice.
-- Mal
seabeyond
(110,159 posts)dsc
(52,130 posts)but the OP said, and I paraphrase, that a false accusation of rape was not as bad as getting raped with no recourse. My point is that in a non trivial number of cases people who are falsely accused and convicted (in her theoretical world where the woman gets believed and the man has to prove his denial) that person will indeed be raped without any recourse. In her theoretical world, false rape convictions would be at least 2% (using your figures).
malthaussen
(17,066 posts)I said we may ask which is the greater injustice. I did not presume to pronounce on the question.
-- Mal
dsc
(52,130 posts)seabeyond
(110,159 posts)as all crimes. with false claims not being relevant, or the same relevancy as all crimes.
one whole big fat reason people are against the death penalty is the fact that people might be wrongly executed. It is the first reason given by many, many people who oppose it. It is why we require unanimous juries to convict people. It is the entire reason we have a jury system and the pardon.
malthaussen
(17,066 posts)... the post is about misogyny, not rape, and no one suffers the threat of prison rape for misogyny.
-- Mal
mopinko
(69,806 posts)wtf?
I guess the fact I am a paying member here means nothing. Pardon me for thinking I could actually participate in a thread on a website that I have been a paying member of for over a decade.
mopinko
(69,806 posts)to be called on your hijacking of a thread that is important to at least half the membership here. if this exact behavior hadnt been the subject of a half dozen gbcw threads from feminist members who have been paying members as long as you, it might not have bugged me so much.
civility. used to be rules about that shit. just because you cant get banned as easily as the old days doesnt mean those rules should go out the window.
if this place is important to you, dont shit here.
dsc
(52,130 posts)if you want to have your views echoed and not challenged then post them a safe space. Otherwise, people get to post things you disagree with, that is the way discussion boards work.
mopinko
(69,806 posts)dont try to pretend you dont know the difference between discussion and trolling.
it isnt a good look for you.
take your medicine, apologize, maybe even delete your post. show yourself to be one of the good men who doesnt do this sort of crap.
delete yours and i'll delete mine.
dsc
(52,130 posts)the fact is the OP, not me, not some other person, the OP brought up the idea that being falsely accused of rape might not be as bad as being raped. It wasn't my idea, it was the OP's. It isn't my fault the OP wrote that and it should be responded to.
XemaSab
(60,212 posts)we should be paying more attention to the mens?
Makes sense.
The Magistrate
(95,237 posts)malthaussen
(17,066 posts)Feel free to use it at pleasure.
-- Mal
etherealtruth
(22,165 posts)Thank you so much for your post.
I think it is very important for all of us to listen ... I can never know what an African American man feels ... but by listening to African American men ... I can empathize and I can understand that what they experience.Knowing it isn't for me to define. The same goes for many other groups ... I am never going to actually know what the LGBT community feels (via their experience) ... and I am not going to question their feelings and perceptions ... I accept that I cannot know ... I can empathize and offer support.
I truly appreciate seeing this applied the experience of women in America ... listening with an open mind is the only way we can learn how others experience reality.
BainsBane
(53,003 posts)What stands out most is your willingness to subsume your ego rather than positing yourself as the arbiter of women's experiences. We need more of that. Thank you.
seabeyond
(110,159 posts)malthaussen
(17,066 posts)The world needs more empathy, yet so much of what we see tends in the opposite direction.
-- Mal
leftstreet
(36,081 posts)Excellent post
This shouldn't be a stunning conclusion, but sadly for many it is:
malthaussen
(17,066 posts)I would be pleased if it did stun. Like the story about the army mule, first you have to hit him in the head to get his attention.
-- Mal
sulphurdunn
(6,891 posts),and the man says she loved it...
This statement sort of poisons the well of your position. Don't you think?
malthaussen
(17,066 posts)You may argue that the two are not congruous, but I might equally argue that is quibbling. However, if you wish to argue that the central point of rape is that of consent, and that the man's statement might better be given as "She gave her consent," and hers be given as "I gave no such consent," then you still must address the point that, in matters of consent, a person knows their own mind best, and can not as certainly speak of another's.
-- Mal
Jim Lane
(11,175 posts)I'm not clear whether you're addressing rape in the context of a criminal prosecution in which the jurors must weigh conflicting testimony. Your post is open to that interpretation, so I'll explain why I think it's wrong in that context.
We would reject a defendant's argument that "Even though she said 'No' I could tell she really wanted it, so I went ahead." That amounts to saying that No means Yes, and I'm sure almost everyone on DU agrees that No means No.
The flip side of No means No, however, is that Yes means Yes. If she gave consent -- and was not under any coercion or incapacity -- then it wasn't rape. If she gave consent, but later states that she didn't really want it, we can sympathize with her situation, we can tell the man that he should be more attuned to a woman's attitude, we can think about educational campaigns to reduce the incidence of this -- but we can't convict him of rape. If you reject the No means Yes defense, you should also reject the Yes means No prosecution. "Oh, all right, go ahead, let's just get it over with" is quite unenthusiastic, but it's still legally effective consent.
That's why I disagree with your argument for giving her testimony more weight than his. What matters is not what she thought, but what was expressed between them. On that subject they are equally knowledgeable.
I'll reiterate that I'm talking about the legal context. In my personal life, if a woman said "Oh, all right, go ahead, let's just get it over with," I would not go ahead. Such grudging consent would be a complete buzzkill for me, no matter how ardent I had been five seconds earlier.
malthaussen
(17,066 posts)... that the example was not meant to be taken in a legal context. Since the post was about misogyny, which is not an actionable offense, I thought that was self-explanatory.
-- Mal
Jim Lane
(11,175 posts)The second and third paragraphs of your OP were about rape. I took sulphurdunn (in #18) to be responding to that part, and your reply (#20) addressed consent in the context of rape.
Your point remains (from #20) that in matters of consent, a person knows their own mind best, and can not as certainly speak of another's. Even outside the courtroom, I still disagree. Consent is not a state of mind; it is what is expressed between the two people, and each is equally knowledgeable.
Putting aside consent and considering only subjective feelings, I'd agree with you. If the woman says that her consent was unenthusiastic and that the sex was unpleasant for her, and the man says she loved it, then I agree that her statement is entitled to more weight. I don't know if I'd call that misogyny, though. The guy was clueless about what his partner really felt, and/or he's so egotistical that he considers himself a superb lover and won't consider any evidence to the contrary. Cluelessness and egotism don't equate to hatred of or prejudice against women, though. I don't think it's fruitful to apply the term "misogyny" to anything that works out to the detriment of a woman.
malthaussen
(17,066 posts)Let's agree communication is fraught, and that A is just as much an authority on what he heard as B is on what he heard. It still remains that A or B may be mistaken in what he heard. In matters of "what did you mean by that," the person who makes the statement is the best judge of what he intended to say.
I see another problem has arisen here, so let me clarify that I am not equating miscommunication with misogyny. What I'm addressing here is who has the better claim to define if misogyny has occurred, the one making the assertion, or someone in the listening audience.
As for the bad sex = misogyny thing, seems like a reach to me. I'll have to conclude that "the man says she loved it" was an unfelicitous turn of phrase, here.
-- Mal
mythology
(9,527 posts)Because legally we can't presume guilt in one crime when the basis of our legal system is that there is a presumption of innocence. If you are saying in terms of being supportive of a woman in one's personal life, then yes.
I also don't know that I agree that it's enough to say that if a woman feels as though she's been the victim of misogyny that she has by default. I wouldn't say that if a man says he has been the victim of discrimination that he has been by default. Even if you discount that because you believe a man can't understand the position due to the fact that our society has been male dominated for years, you still have to deal with the fact that misogyny means many things to different people.
Take for example the recent clip from Fox News where a bunch of female hosts said that cat calling was a compliment. I think most people here would say that cat calling qualifies as boorish misogynist behavior. If we simply use any word to mean whatever the individual who is saying it means, then words becomes meaningless. Words only have meaning if they are adequately and consistently defined. Saying that it's up to any one individual's perspective is kind of pointless to me.
It stands to reason that if I could be wrong that something is misogynistic when I think it isn't, then a woman can be wrong about something not being misogynistic when she thinks it is.
malthaussen
(17,066 posts)I think this is where quite a bit of difficulty arises. One asks for immutable definitions of conditions that are inherently subjective, and by seeking to impose those definitions, unintentionally undermine the validity of the feeling. Say the definition of misogyny is "hatred of women." What constitutes "hatred?" Is there an objective standard? Or is it one of those messy things you know when you see it? It is precisely because misogyny covers a multitude of sins, that a recent poster made a list of misogynistic indicators, and was then accused of creating a means test. See the difficulty there?
"Misogyny means different things to different people." Indeed. But when a person says, "I have been attacked," they are using the word with their own meaning, and if you wish to communicate with that person, you must understand and agree to that meaning. Or seek to impose your own meaning on that person, which would seem to be a denial that he has experienced what the discussion is about. You may ask for clarification if you don't understand, you may ruefully confess that you don't get it, but to say to someone "that is not what you experienced because my definition is different" is, patently, dismissive. And to flip that and say the other is equally dismissive, because he will not agree to your definition, is to forget that he is the one claiming offense, not you.
Now, in terms of the legal process, of questions of right, since these must be codified to be enforced, they must be defined as precisely as possible. Yet even statutory law often falls short of precise definition. I was once ticketed for driving with a bumper sticker that was claimed to violate a statute prohibiting "vulgar or obscene" language. No more precise definition was embodied. As it happens, the ticket was thrown out on a wholly unrelated technicality, but this is one example where even statutory law doesn't help us much in defining what is to be regulated.
As to your last point, it might "stand to reason" if there were an objective definition that completely covered the phenomenon. But there is not. But a person knows when he feels attacked. Certainly, attack may have been the farthest thing from the other's mind, and the controversy might be all a terrible misunderstanding. But there is a world of differnce in responding "I had no intention of attacking," and "you were not attacked." It is the latter response that most reliably tends to drive people up the wall.
-- Mal
marym625
(17,997 posts)Well thought out.
What came to mind for me while reading are the multiple times I have experienced discrimination based on my sex while the person discriminating was clueless.
K&R
seabeyond
(110,159 posts)no solutions possibly and none looked for or needed, but just the exploration of thought, well written.
sufrommich
(22,871 posts)hfojvt
(37,573 posts)when a male makes a charge of misandry?
Further, is that how the arguments went? I mean, I was not here to see them. If, however, I was to read a thread where a female was saying "I have seen a lot of misogyny on DU" I would probably ask for examples, because clearly it does not jump out at me.
I mean, I generally read DU every day, or at least parts of it. I have asserted, and stand by it, that 90% of DU does not read 90% of DU. There are, after all, about 10,000 posts per day on DU. If somebody read 1,000 of them they'd likely be doing a whole lot of reading and that would only be 10% of the total. Nobody sees it all, we all see a different portion of the elephant even though we are NOT blind.
But if I am reading 3-500 posts per day and cannot remember even THREE examples that struck me as misogynist, then what am I supposed to believe? Somebody else, or my own lying eyes?
Quite possible that I am insensitive to it even when it bites me in the a$$. I have my own sensitivities, but am not a big fan of misogyny. Way back when somebody came to the lounge and complained that their joke was not well received in GD and the punchline was that French bicyclists rode like "little girls" and I kinda peed in his cornflakes by explaining that his "joke" was NOT funny.
But I was going to mention my own sensitivity. Much of my childhood I had low blood count - I was anemic. Most people are probably unaware but the word 'anemic' is fairly regularly used as a pejorative in writing and in speech. I notice this because it never fails to slightly raise the hackles on my neck when I see it. Other people, like I said, don't even notice it.
And another point is on focus. Take, once again, the 10,000 daily posts of DU and take 30 DUers reading them at random. Collectively they could read all of them. And suppose they were all very vigilant and when they saw a misogynist post in their reading they would start a thread about it in a DU group titled something like "another example of misogyny". Then people who frequented that group would certainly be seeing a lot of misogyny especially if misogyny was broadly defined.
I mean, come on, I read one thread where sexism was defined, in part as "disagree with me/us about the Hobby Lobby decision and it's relative importance".
And that is one of my main points - can we not just disagree? Do we have to fall into where "disagree with me and you are not just wrong, you are evil"?
But that's what Vonnegut anemically wrote "Ideas on earth are badges of friendship. Friends agree with friends in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagree with enemies in order to express enmity."
I think that is from Galopagas, but I might be evil.
I might also not know how to spell Galopagas and be too lazy to look it up.
malthaussen
(17,066 posts)Here's a point to consider, though. I see you are equating "you're misogynist" with "you are an evil, worthless bastard." Yeah, yeah, those words don't appear in your post. Let's not quibble. I'm a guy, remember? Been there, done that. Honest to bog, if you can get past the feeling that a challenge on misogyny does not equate to "Burn in Hell, Filthy Devil-Worshipper," you'll be a whole lot relieved and open the door to fruitful discussion.
Now, personally, I've been a guy for a lot of years, and I have certain reactions -- which I would normally not share in DU -- to some things. When a male poster claims misandry, I pretty much knee-jerk to "what tree did you fall out of?" Insensitive brute that I am. And then, even on reflection, I lean more towards "suck it up, you're a man." See, I'm actually an unreconstituted sexist. The irony here is I am quite sure most of the feminists around DU would never even be able to conceive of either reaction. Men are much harder on other men than women are. (The tyranny of the bell-curve applies, of course) And because of that, we often will ascribe to women a reaction which is not at all where they're coming from, but instead how we would react ourselves in the situation.
Take your example of the infamous list of misogynistic traits. A whole lot of people, presumably mostly acting in good faith and good will, have construed that as a means test. As you say, it translates to "Agree with me, or you are worse slime than Hitler and Stalin rolled together." But the text does not support that construction. Let's look at a direct quote: "Among the positions some feminists identify with sexism and misogyny are the following: "
"Among the positions" ie, this is a list of concerns, and not comprehensive. "some feminists," ie, not to be taken as a platform statement for feminism, "identify with sexism and misogyny..." ah, there's that problem again. The reader makes the leap: poster doesn't like sexism and misogyny, so if I don't agree with her, she hates me. You know, you can be sexist and misogynist and not be a bad person. Persisting in it, however, when called on it... well, that might just well be a different kettle of fish. Really, Hfojvt, what would you have had her do? Especially considering that the original "list" was a direct response to a question as to what positions were considered key issues to feminists?
I'll note one thing further, as a point of tactics. Rending the garments and heaping dust on one's head can often be interpreted as insincere. Which is sad, since I think it is more often a sign of insecurity. It becomes even worse, if one starts to believe his own rhetoric.
-- Mal
hfojvt
(37,573 posts)That may not be agreed to by everybody. That's not how I view things.
To be is to do, or to do is to be.
Or not.
It depends on if one is describing behavior or attaching a label.
The difference between telling somebody "what you just did is NOT nice" versus "you are an a$$hole". I guess you could say that "TO DO something not nice is TO BE an a$$hole" at least for a moment. But, like you said, a real a$$hole is shown not by just one statement or one act, but by persistence, a long train of abuses and usurpations.
But persisting in what? Persisting in disagreeing with somebody when called on it?
Listing "key issues for femininsts" is a little bit different than "listing positions that are considered sexist or misogynist".
And as for people who do not like me, well, true story, I had a post hidden some eleven days ago. It was a 4-3 vote. I considered the post I had replied to, to be very hateful, and yet my post was the one hidden. One juror said, of my post, "this post is not hide-worthy, but because it's hfojvt I am voting to hide it". Another chimed in with "tick tock, I cannot wait until he gets booted".
Just because I am paranoid does not mean they are not out to get me.
There simply are many here who subscribe to the view that there are two kinds of people in the world. Those who agree with me, and a$$holes. And they are not shy about saying it when you disagree with them.