Earl Silverman
Words fail.
Earl Silverman, Battered Men’s Advocate, Hangs Himself
1
DOUBLE STANDARDS – The tide seems to be turning – Joan Walsh denounces a London gym; no, she praises it by faint damnation
Joan Walsh has a good article up at Salon on a man in London suing his gym because they restrict hours to male patrons to provide male-free time to female customers but still charging the same fees. Walsh concedes he has a point, this is sexist discrimination, but where her article shines is she goes through all the reasons for this kind of discrimination and rejects them.
Note about the article on Peter Lloyd. Yes it’s in the Daily Mail and yes I am aware of what people say about the Daily Mail. But the Daily Mail is exactly where this sort of thing should be published, because this is about broad cultural change. This might be published in some publication with a little higher tone perhaps, so that the “right people” would read and consider it, but in this case the “right people” are the voting masses of people who read the Daily Mail. So that’s where it should go.
Lloyd is quoted:
“Several weeks ago, I formally complained to the general manager, asking him to change the policy with one of three alternatives: A) maintain a women’s hour but introduce a men’s alternative for fairness, B) keep women’s hour (and only women’s hour) but annually charge men less, or C) scrap single-gender sessions altogether.
Hardly controversial.
After all, if demand for women-only sessions is so great then the gym should put their money where their mouth is and fund it themselves.
Unsurprisingly, they declined.
‘A report by the Women Sport and Fitness Foundation showed that a significant proportion of women (26 per cent) “hate the way they look when they exercise”.’ they replied in an email.
‘This takes on an even greater significance when you consider that women feel even more self-conscious when taking part in sport and physical activity when men are present. If you are wondering who or what [we are] it’s a charity that specialises in increasing women’s physical activity levels.’
Translated into plain English, this means that a group of agenda-driven feminists say a minority of women ‘feel’ bad about their bodies. And because heterosexual men are naturally attracted to women, their very existence makes it worse, so they should be banned.
No, seriously.
That’s like trying to clean a dirty face by rubbing a mirror.”
In one of the comments a commenter named “Brittany Elizabeth” displays the smug and witless lack of empathy we associate with sociopaths:
“Please excuse me while I fetch a box of tissues and my tiny violin because this story has made me tear up. It’s so hard to be a man in this world. I don’t know how you all do it.”
You are so right, Brittany, my dear little spider – you have absolutely no idea how we do it. It would probably break you if you tried to do it.
Walsh points out:
“For many of us, there’s a vulnerability that comes with fitness training, with exposing our bodies and moving them in ways that may not always be perfect or graceful or deferential to the world at large. The appeal of safe, supportive, private environments — to both men and women — is understandable.”
Understandable but toxic. That sense of vulnerability is a problem in and of itself. It is not healthy, it is poisonous. And it is surely not something that should be honored and enabled. One of the female commenters makes this point.
Walsh sums up with:
“God knows I missed my Boston health club tremendously when I moved back to New York and found myself briefly at Club Juicehead, where the equipment room perpetually rang out with the EAAAAAAGGGGGHS of thick-necked musclemen.”
Well it couldn’t have been any worse than a gym perpetually ringing with the slap-slap-slap of hammy thighs (once again we see this trope of women’s bodies being inherently benign in a way men’s are not) but can’t we all just get along????
Admin Announcement: New Spam Filter
I’ve(typhon) installed a “bad faith spam filter” at the site.
It uses a complex algorithm that picks up on key phrases and terminology to determine if a commentator is employing bad faith in their comment. It is, apparently, 99.9% accurate although we’ll find out if this claim is true.
If someone’s comment ends up in the “bad faith filter”, it will appear as “under moderation”. If the admin team has time they will look at the comment to see if there is anything on-topic and substantive. If there is the admin team will remove anything that will trigger the bad faith filter and post it.
Off-topic posts are highly likely to trigger the filter; likely off-topic posts are identified through use of key words. Excessive use of the word “you” is also likely to trigger the filter, as well as insults.
Thanks for your patience!
Clarence is also on moderation for the time being.
(This is a joke, it just pulls into moderation every post with the word “you” in it.)
How To Stop Rape
Author’s note: Subsequent to a controversy regarding the final footnote, I added a word. I now realize that the passage can still be misconstrued. Further I believe that the controversy surrounding the last paragraph of this article is an exercise in controlling speech. People are free to misread this article however they wish–I will not recognize attempts to control speech as legitimate forms of criticism. This article was originally published on A Voice For Men.
I’ll tell you first how you don’t stop rape.
Seeing a poster that says “My strength is not for hurting” or “don’t be that guy” won’t do anything that a law doesn’t.
You see an anti-rape law is sorta like an anti-rape poster except with a punishment attached for not following what the poster says.
So how is saying “men, don’t rape” going to be more effective than saying “men, don’t rape” and then adding “if you do, you go to jail?”
Because this is what these feminist inspired posters essentially are. They are a law, against rape, but without the actual criminal punishment. If the law isn’t an effective deterrent, than how is a poster going to be an effective deterrent?
Men who rape are not raping because they’ve been told it’s cool or fun or awesome, or because they heard an off color joke, saw a naked ankle or watched porn… they rape because they have a powerful emotional compulsion to do so.
Let’s get something clear. Human beings—barring the congenitally emotionally disabled such as sociopaths—don’t want to rape. They don’t like rape. Rape is the exact opposite of what a human being wants when they engage in sex. Men, who happen to be human beings just like women, want to feel desirable.
Most men are devastated after being rejected by a woman. What makes anyone think that the average man is going to enjoy enduring the most profound rejection one human being can muster for another—which is exactly what the rapist endures in order to rape.
If you saw someone eating broken glass, would you assume the glass is tasty or conclude there’s something seriously wrong with the person chowing down?
What the current crop of male targeted anti-rape posters will do is normalize rape. It won’t normalize rape for men who aren’t compelled to rape in the first place. Nope. It’ll just shame them. But it will normalize rape for men who are rapists.
Instead of seeing themselves as damaged individuals who are engaging not just in harm to others, but harm to themselves, rapists—male ones at least—will see themselves as the guys who do what every other guy really wants to do, but doesn’t have the balls.
They aren’t hurting, they’re edgy.
Rapists are in the business of rationalizing their compulsion to repeat, rationalizing their sense of powerlessness, and current anti-rape posters help them do just that. Rape is normal male behaviour, dontchaknow? Something men teach each other to do when feminists aren’t there to stop them.
But if jokes, naked ankles and porn don’t cause men to rape women, what does?
Being raped.
That’s right. In fact, having been sexually abused by a woman[1] is a stronger risk factor for becoming a future sexual abuser in boys than having been sexually abused by a man.
This is where the emotional compulsion to abuse comes from. This is the motivation. This is the manufacture process for adult male rapists.
Yet despite being sexually violated, only a fraction of these boys go on to abuse! That’s how resistant to raping the average male human is; even the most effective method of training a boy to become a rapist—by raping him–is only effective for one out of every ten boys.
The idea that a bad joke, a naked ankle or porn will cause men to rape is demonizing. The idea that there exists a “rape culture” teaching men to rape in any way but by raping them and then ignoring their subsequent emotional disorder is depraved.
And here’s the thing. Right now, in the US, there is an epidemic of institutionalized sexual abuse that is being ignored in favor of manufactured statistics about sex trafficking of girls and other juicy sexualized and sensationalized threat narratives designed to push our buttons.
In fact this epidemic of sexual abuse makes the Catholic Church scandal pale in comparison.
Since the 1950s approximately 12,000 men have come forward to admit abuse in the Catholic Church sex scandal.
So here’s the equation. Boys learn to be rapists by having been raped(even if only a fraction of them go on to enact their abuse), and we’re turning a blind eye to women raping boys in juvenile facilities—better termed “boy rape camps”—and then we’re ignoring, denying and minimizing female-on-male sexual abuse in order to prop up a morally bankrupt feminist empire built on the backs of rape victims—both victims of actual rapists and victims terrorized by rape hysteria itself.
And then we normalize rape with posters that suggest rape is not the abnormal behavior of the emotionally damaged, but a manifestation of masculinity or male culture. Men will rape for trivial reasons because they saw a naked ankle, or porn or hear a rape joke. (Or are dope fiends or black or Jewish or…)
By normalizing rape, these posters do the opposite of what they intend. They empower rapists and disempower emotionally healthy men who would never rape. They promote a distorted, simplistic view of rape as an emergent property of maleness rather than an emergent property of sexual abuse.
As for male victims of female rapists, they never see themselves in these posters. They are never acknowledged at all. This forces the problem of female perpetrated sexual abuse underground; in fact we could see the existence of male-perpetuated sexual abuse as a symptom of our society’s absolute inability to recognize male victims and give them timely help.
So how do we stop rape?
We acknowledge female rapists. We acknowledge why boys grow up to be rapists. We provide services for male survivors of sexual abuse so they have a place to heal. Not just to stop the cycle of abuse but because men and boys who are sexual abuse survivors deserve as much compassion as women and girls. We kick the ideologs out of our institutions of healing because what matters is helping people, not perpetuating feminist pseudoscience.
We start by telling the feminists to shut the fuck up.
There is no ‘rape culture’ and if there is—if the idea of “rape culture” really is ‘a culture which enables rape’–you better start backpedaling because it’s looking like you’re the biggest purveyors of it.
[1] Salter D., McMillan D., Richards M., Talbot T., Hodges J., Bentovim A., Hastings R., Stevenson J., Skuse D., Development of sexually abusive behaviour in sexually victimized males: a longitudinal study, The Lancet, Vol. 361, February 8, 2003
(While we’re on the subject of female-perpetuated sexual abuse, most surveys that ask college age women about the sexual abuse they perpetrate find a shocking levels of female-perpetrated sexual abuse. Other surveys find that men who perpetuate sexual abuse are also sexually abused, suggesting a cycle of sexual abuse on college campuses. Perhaps rather than being victims of an indifferent system these silent female rape victims–who are part of a culture of cyclical sexual abuse–fail to come forward to the authorities about their abuse because it would mean admitting that they also are rapists? So the constant drumbeat of feminist agitprop about making these women “comfortable” never will, unless feminists invent a ray gun that neutralizes cognitive dissonance.)
ERRATICA – App alerts Icelanders if they are hooking up with a cousin
….which is a real possibility in Iceland. The population is small, on the order of 300,000, and it’s been isolated long enough that by now everyone is related to one degree or another. That’s not an insuperable obstacle, after all humans are related to some degree or other, but the degree of the relationship does matter.
Well now there’s an app for your phone that links to the Íslendingabók, kind an AKC for humans, rather like the pedigree books the First Families of Virginia keep to see who to marry. All you have to do is bump your phone, which of course knows who it’s registered to, against the phone of your lovely companion, which of course knows who it’s registered to, and your phones will alert you if you two are too consanguine.
So for those of you who are still dating and hooking up and feeling sorry for yourselves over the difficulties you face, cheer up. You could have real troubles.
MALE DISPOSABILITY – Mary P. Koss and influencing a government entity to erase male victims of rape
SUMMARY:
1. Mary P. Koss insists on a definition of rape that conceals the incidence of female-on-male rape.
2. The center for disease control (CDC) is a government entity charged with serving the entire public and all citizens of the United States equally.
3. There is an appearance that Mary P. Koss has by her association with the CDC influenced it to formulate findings in a way that favors one group of citizens over another, that in fact significantly disadvantages the second group of citizens.
4. Anyone in a position of public trust, including any position supported by public funds, has a responsibility to prevent her or his private opinions from compromising the mission of the organization she or he serves to serve all citizens equally.
5. There is an appearance that rather than preventing her personal opinions from compromising the mission of the organization she is associated with, she has allowed those personal opinions to influence the function of that public entity.
DISCUSSION:
Mary P. Koss is a widely-quoted writer on the incidence of rape. Her methods and her claims have been controversial. In 2009 a controversy developed around a paper of hers – articles and threads here, here, and here.
She is an influential writer on the subject and her methods and results deserve scrutiny.
In a post earlier this year commenter Tamen noted a tendency in Koss to minimize the scope and incidence of rape of males, especially by women. He said at the time:
“However, Victory_Disease on Reddit made me aware of this paper by Mary P Koss: Detecting the Scope of Rape : A Review of Prevalence Research Methods which show that it’s not simply a matter of focusing on female victims, but rather a conscious effort to exclude male victims of rape from the term rape.”
He specifically noted a section in that paper where she says:
“Although consideration of male victims is within the scope of the legal statutes, it is important to restrict the term rape to instances where male victims were penetrated by offenders. It is inappropriate to consider as a rape victim a man who engages in unwanted sexual intercourse with a woman.
p. 206”
He goes on to point how she chooses terms that emphasize or exaggerate male agency and minimize or trivialize female agency. He finishes by noting a paragraph in which she recommends a formulation of “rape” that is gynonormative, such that if the crime does not involve penetration of the victim, it is not rape. The effect if not the intent is to erase the crime of rape by envelopment.
Later Tamen noted a similarity between Koss’ position and the one reflected in the CDC’s formulation of rape in its NISVS 2010 Report. In the course of pursuing the matter with the CDC (the text of his correspondence with the CDC is at the end of this post.), and getting a dismissively tautological and circular answer, he stumbled across a piece of information that may bear on the similarity in positions he had noted.
This is the history of association between Mary P. Koss and the CDC he found:
1996: Expert Panel Member, “Definitions of Sexual Assault,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
2003- : Selected to direct the Sexual Violence Applied Research Advisory Group, VAWNET.org, the national online resource on violence against women funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
2003- : Member, team of expert advisors, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on teen partner violence
2003- : Panel of Experts, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control on scales to measure intimate partner violence, resulted in the publication of CDC Intimate Partner Violence compendium, 2005
2003-4: Consultant, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC Intimate Partner Violence compendium, 2005 IPV Compendium on assessment of sexual violence and inclusion as recommended standard assessments in the field of two Koss-authored assessments (Sexual Experiences Survey-victimization, and Sexual Experiences Survey-perpetration)
Again, Mary P. Koss is entitled to hold any personal opinions she chooses, however odious. She has however no right to use her position of trust to impose these personal and private opinions on public policy or results of research intended to form that public policy. Furthermore public entities with which she or anyone is associated have a responsibility also to ensure that the barrier between private and personal opinion and public policy is maintained and safeguarded.
If this were simply an isolated instance of one person misusing her position, it would be a small matter and simple to correct. It is however part of a larger consensus and pattern of distortion of evidence and erasure when it concerns male victims of rape in general and especially male victims of female rapists. The probelm is quite structurla and goes to the locla level where evidence is distorted by either a failure or a refusal to report and record even quite clear cases of rape as rape, as in the case of this mother who sodomized her two-year-old son so forcibly with a vibrator that surgery was necessary to remove it. Note how the incident is being charged: as child abuse and sexual misconduct with a minor rather than child rape. If sodomizing an infant so severley that it requires surgery to remove the rape device is not child rape, then nothing is.
Absolutely vile.
Tamen’s correspondence wiht the CDC as posted on Reddit Men’s Rights:
CDC’s response to whether they will categorize “being made to penetrate someone else” in future reports (self.MensRights)
submitted 2 days ago* by Tamen_
I had a mail account failure and forgot/missed that I a year ago sent this mail to the CDC:
Hi,
One finding of the NISVS 2010 Report which was not reported anywhere in press releases and media (as far as I could see) was that 1.1% of men reported being made to penetrate someone else the last 12 months. That 1.1% of women reported being raped the last 12 months puts this into a perspective which goes very much against common beliefs about male victimization.
Was this finding not interesting or conclusive enough to at least mention in press releases?
The lifetime numbers differs more. Did CDC look into why there was such a difference in lifetime prevalency numbers and numbers for the last 12 months for male victims of “being made to penetrate someone else”?
Will future CDC Reports continue to keep “being made to penetrate someone else” as a category separate from rape or will they be put together/seen as the same as in the new FBI definition of rape?
Best regards, Xxxxxx Yyyyyy
A week later I got the response (my emphasis):
Mr. Yyyyyy,
Thank you for your interest in the NISVS Survey. The NISVS subject matters experts have provided the following information in response to your inquiry:
We understand your concern that the 12 month prevalence for Made to Penetrate was not included in the press release. Unfortunately, due to space limitation in a press release, we were not able to highlight many of the important findings. This information, however, was included in main summary report. In addition, we are currently working on preparing a number of more in-depth reports to follow our first summary report, including one that focuses specifically on sexual violence.
With regards to the definitional issues you mentioned, Made to Penetrate is a form of sexual violence that is distinguished from rape. Being made to penetrate represents times when the victim was made to, or there was an attempt to make them, sexually penetrate someone else (i.e., the perpetrator) without the victim’s consent. In contrast, rape represents times when the victim, herself or himself, was sexually penetrated or there was an attempt to do so. In both rape and made to penetrate situations, this may have happened through the use of physical force (such as being pinned or held down, or by the use of violence) or threats to physically harm; it also includes times when the victim was drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent.
In summary, rape victimization constitutes times when the victim is penetrated. Made to penetrate are incidents where the victim is forced to penetrate their perpetrator, so does not meet the definition of rape.
Appendix C on page 106 of the report lists the victimization questions. As you will see, the questions were asked in such a way that the perpetrator was the one being penetrated by the victim in made to penetrate cases, not a third party. For example, “how many people have ever used physical force or threats of physical harm to make you have vaginal sex with them?” Or “how many people have ever used physical force or threats of physical harm to make you perform anal sex, meaning they made you put your penis into their anus?” Or “when you were drunk, high, drugged or passed out and unable to consent, how many people ever made you receive oral sex, meaning that they put their mouth on your {if male: penis}?”
The FBI definition of rape does not apply here – made to penetrate as we have defined it is distinct from rape and should not be included in a definition of rape.
Until the special reports are available and/or the data set is ready for public use, if there are additional specific questions we can answer, we would be happy to do so. We appreciate your interest in these data.
Sincerely, CDC NISVS Team
Apparently they thought my question about whether “being made to penetrate someone else” would be categorized as rape as per the FBI definition which was revealed shortly after the NISVS 2010 Report was published was due to my inability to read the definitions of rape and “being amde to penetrate someone else” in the report itself.
Apparently it is self-evident for them that it’s not rape and hence they are perfectly aligned with Mary P Koss recommendations (“It is inappropriate to consider as a rape victim a man who engages in unwanted sexual intercourse with a woman” page 206 in the full article) also in future surveys and doesn’t plan to align the definition with the “new” FBI definition of rape – which can and in my view should be interpreted to include rape by envelopment.
I know that that paper on how to measure rape prevalency by Mary P Koss has been cited by CDC in other contexts (Reference 7).
I decided to look at Mary P. Koss’ CV:
1996: Expert Panel Member, “Definitions of Sexual Assault,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
2003- : Selected to direct the Sexual Violence Applied Research Advisory Group, VAWNET.org, the national online resource on violence against women funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
2003- : Member, team of expert advisors, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on teen partner violence
2003- : Panel of Experts, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control on scales to measure intimate partner violence, resulted in the publication of CDC Intimate Partner Violence compendium, 2005
2003-4: Consultant, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC Intimate Partner Violence compendium, 2005 IPV Compendium on assessment of sexual violence and inclusion as recommended standard assessments in the field of two Koss-authored assessments (Sexual Experiences Survey-victimization, and Sexual Experiences Survey-perpetration)
No wonder it’s self-evident for the CDC that it is inappropriate to consider as a rape victim a man who engages in unwanted sexual intercourse with a woman.
Edited for readability and quote-fixing
Edited again: The title of course should be: CDC’s response to whether they will categorize “being made to penetrate someone else” as rape in future reports
MALE DISPOSABILITY – How an abuser portrays herself as the abused and how her enabler goes down in flames –the Ballad of Jodi Arias and Alyce La Violette
Daisy Deadhead asked a few weeks ago if anyone here was paying any attention to the Jodi Arias trial. She considered this particular murder trial, with the now customary accusations of spousal abuse by the murder victim, to be a huge men’s rights issue. She was right.
Background – Jodi Arias shot her husband, Travis, and stabbed him 29 times. She can’t keep her story straight enough for anyone to figure out where she did it or quite how it all happened. Nevertheless there is an even chance she’ll be acquitted – because Patriarchy or something and the Duluth Model. Murder victim or not, he’s the only man in the situation, so he must be the abuser, right? That seems to be the way La Violette’s, expert witness for the defense, sees it.
But this is the real news. The star defense witness, a domestic violence expert named Alyce La Violette has stirred up a hurricane with her biased testimony portraying Jodi as a DV victim. Look at the reaction in the comments about her book at Amazon. DV victims and DV professionals are lining up – over 500 comments so far – to say how she disgusts them as DV victims, how she shames them as DV professionals, what a fraud she is. It is really quite the firestorm. And in comment after comment her man-hatred is excoriated. That’s a new development too.
And when someone ventures a positive comment it immediately attracts five and ten comments calling them frauds, maybe even Alyce herself, or else duped idiots. One such comment has 55 comments in response – that’s five pages of comments.
In fact the reaction has become so violent that saner voices, Janice Harper for instance, have had to speak up – not to defend Alyce La Violettee so much as to insist on some kind of civilized moderation.
This is news indeed. What’s news is that the enablers of these abusers are paying the price, for a change. There will always be Jodi Ariases and Ted Bundys – sociopaths who feel free to treat others as objects and simply do not see how the most basic rules apply to them. That’s not the issue. The issue is how society deals with that. In the case of a Ted Bundy no one saw it for years, but when they finally did, the hammer came down. No one testified at his trial trying to excuse his behavior on the grounds of some kind of mistreatment he allegedly suffered. Yet when it‘s a woman – this time it’s Jodi Arias, but it happened with Mary Winkler, with Andrea Yates and with many others – there is a heroic attempt to portray the perpetrator as a victim, and a willing audience, because that narrative fits their narratives.
And the enablers like La Violette are crucial to this. And always even in those rare instances where the woman does get held accountable, the enablers skitter out scott free to wreak havoc another day.
Well, maybe not for much longer.
GENDER ROLES – Hypoagency: Neoteny as a Feminine Gender Norm
Neoteny is the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood. Here I am using it is a social sense. Here I am using it to mean the expectation on women and the permission they have to act in childlike ways and thereby also to be able to call for the prerogatives of a child – provision and protection to the point of putting the child’s interests and physical safety before one’s own. It is an appeal to privilege.
Helplessness and Victimhood – The narratives in Anglophone culture linking femininity to helplessness and victimhood are too familiar and too pervasive for me to have to go into any detail. I have called them toxic femininity. 2nd Wave feminists took dead aim at them in the 70s and then for some reason there was a retreat. For whatever reason, these memes have become entrenched in modern feminism.
“Rape culture” and the insistence that only men can stop rape are examples of this helpless victim mentality, but the impulse is much more pervasive. It seems as though whenever some harm to men is brought up it is simply de rigueur to find some way to say that women have it worse. Do men get raped too? Well, it’s worse for a woman to get rapaed than for a man! (Why? OMG! What a sexist question!!!) Well, when men get rpaed it’s always a one off, but when woemn get raped it’s a structural feature of teh Patriarchy, as revealed by prophetic utterance when the word of the Lord came to Susan Borwnmiller.
Here’s Typhonblue detailing one woman’s attempt to make a massacre of Serbian men and boys and only them into a harm to the women who survived because the deaths of their men deprived the women of their utility. That’s right – the men die but of course it’s the women who are the real victims.
This extends to the way feminists have latched on to black people’s oppression with the expression “women and minorities”. As Commenter Chris pointed out in the thread on toxic femininity:
“I know I’m late to the party, but this touches on something I’ve been wishing more people would talk about. To me, the feminist history of endless female oppression always read like a badly hijacked version of black history as told by the Civil Rights movement in the 60′s. When I first read feminist theory the whole oppressed/oppressor class dichotomy immediately jumped out at me as something borrowed from Civil Rights. It never sounded right because it sounded like language that was designed to talk about race and class but it was repurposed for gender instead.”
The common thread here is that in every situation women must be seen as the ultimate and most fundamental victims as if it’s a feature of their gender identity.
Men collude with and defend women in this for their own reasons, all of which ususally boil down to either getting to feel like the big, strong protector or else the one good man, the one with the refined moral sensibility. So when it comes to this social neoteny, you will find both tolerating and defending juvenile behavior in women as some kind of natural right, often by vociferously denying that women act less mature than men, that in fact on the contrary it’s men who act immature.
What’s the point here? What benefits do people expect from this insistence on victimhood?
Claim to Protection and Provision: All this neoteny and the benefits it confers come at a price. You get controlled like a child. (Not property. You are not property, you are a ward. Property can be sold at will.) If you ask someone else to defend and protect you to the point that you lose the ability to do that for yourself, then when they tell you they’ll defend you within a certain perimeter but not outside, you have no choice but to stay inside. If you don’t till land for your own food, then you live at someone else’s gift. If you live in a house someone else built, or that he inherited from his family instead of you from yours, then you do it at his pleasure.
So what’s the pay off? The payoff is that you stay inside and do housework while the men go out and do fieldwork. And as hard and grueling as housework was a hundred years ago and in all the ages before then, there was no question in anyone’s mind which was harder, housework or fieldwork.
(And yes I am quite aware that “Well, men kept women out of thiose jobs!” Yes of course they did; thanks for making my point. Men kept women out of those jobs just as they strove to keep other men out too. Organisms compete for resources – these nasty horrible, hard jobs paid better than anything else available to these men. Men competed for them. Women could have too; why did they fail? The question is how men succeeded at keeping women out. They succeeded because these jobs went to those who were strongest and most determined. Why were the women less determined, less strong? Because they could be. Because they had people for that – their men.
And lest his sound like these women were “living off their men”, if they were, then their men were living off them just as much. The cathedrals would never have been built without beer and we all know who invented that, and a man could not work a 12-hour shift in a coal pit for very many days wihtout someone feeding him when he got home. A man doing this kind of work could not possibly live, could not continue doing that work, living on his own. Running a household was a full-time job before “labor-saving devices” and packaged foods came along, and his choices were either a boarding house or a marriage.)
Indicators of Neoteny: There are two sets of indicators of neoteny – physical and behavioral. Dogs show a lot of physical neoteny as compared with wolves, but where they really differ is in their behavior – face licking, tail wagging, barking – and all these are juvenile behaviors.
With humans when it comes to changing one’s appearance from male to female, the experts are drag queens. And what do we see them doing? They make themselves up so that their eyes seems larger, their mouths smaller, they raise the timbre of their voices, and if they happen to have a long jaw and a square chin or big hands, it is grounds for despair. Those are all neotenous features and they all come down to smallness and daintiness.
The same thing applies to humans and their behaviors. Let’s look at some neotenous behaviors:
Language behaviors – Word elongation, increased of rapport-building discourse markers, extra fast speech, high-pitched voice (higher than a person’s actual voice) – these are all humilific, ingratiating behaviors and are typical of juveniles. Raising the pitch of your voice makes you sound smaller and younger.
Ditziness – Women complain about this neoteny and the burdens it imposes but the complaint that recurs the most is the need to appear stupid. But this is as far as this goes. There are other kinds of ditziness – retreat into emotionalism (see below), antipathy towards logic, changing one’s mind, shifting the goalposts and other refusals of accountability – yet oddly enough we see women embracing these. Logic as patriarchal oppression, language as androcentric whatever, the general impressionistic style of so much feminist argumentation – these are not behaviors of people who take themselves seriously. They are juvenile behaviors.
Ditziness.2 – The exaggerated, histrionic emotional demonstrativeness we associate with feminity is another form of ditziness or lack of gravity. In Anglo culture this is gendered although it quite obviously is not inherently gendered – men in certain cultures are quite deminstrative. interestingly this has the same devaluing effect when they are viewed through Anglo yes. and it’s not just Anglo culture – Sinosphere cultures consider emotional self control, like any other form of self-control, to be a sign of maturity and the lack of it to be a sign of immaturity. The difference is they expect it in both genders.
The rawness goes into thjis in pretty good depth here.
Youthful colors and dress – Pink is for girls and not for men, but have you ever wondered why? And not just pink either; all kinds of bright colors and pastel colors. What’s the common thread? These are all youthful colors, the colors of spring – bright, gay, happy and light-hearted. Serious people don’t dress like this, carefree kids do.
Age and weight – When I was little one of the many rules I was taught was that you never ask a lady her age, or even refer to it. It was just hideously insulting for some reason. And then I found not just ladies but women in general really felt this way. That’s neoteny right there, but it gets worse.
Have you noticed how grown women will refer to themsleves and their peers as “girls”? This was a feminist shibboleth once upon a time and it may still be; I hope it is. But callin a woman “girl” is nowhere as insulting as calling a man “boy”. that is because of gendered expectations of maturity.
Fat people are big, not dainty. Not dainty and feminine. So fate is heinous. Fatphobia is a form of neotenous fixation on smallness and daintiness. When fat women say they get worse treatment than men do because fat is more accepted in men, this is what they are talking about.
Compliance with authority: We hear that girls mature faster and act more mature in the early grades, and this is probably true – depending on your definition of maturity. If you are a classroom teacher looking for cooperation so you can keep order, compliance is going to look like maturity. We hear that women are socialized to “please people”, but when we look to see they are striving to please, it is usually someone of higher status – a boss, a woman or higher social status, or someone they elevate to that level (as when a mother in a restaurant makes a servile display of trying to get a child to order something and starts talking like a waiter talking to a customer.)
Now in the main, this is the mechanism of living together as humans. Compliance with legitmate authority is crucial to a functioing organization or even just getting along in civil soceity. But where adults make conscious decisons to comply or not, children are usually expected to comply as a matter of course.
Note how the traditional Anglo male role eschews a lot of this, as if in reaction to it.
Man up: A couple of years ago there was some discussion in the gendersphere about the expression “Man up”. The discussion went into how the term was both misogynist and misandrist, but mainly along the axis of gender. The expression was thought to imply that a man was deficient by not being masculine enough or by being too feminine. This missed half the semantic load of the expression. The other half had to do with adukthood, as in “man” vs. “boy”.
Why was that missed? I think it’s because people were making a false equivalence between “man” and “woman”, and “woman” did not imply an expectation of adulthood. If you look at the situations where the expressions in employed, and usually deployed, against a man, it comes down to urging him to take on some adult burden or other. Why is there then no “woman up”?
So that’s how hypoagency in the form of neoteny functions and how it appears in the traditional feminine gender role, and the kind of privilege it confers. It comes with a horrible cost – oh, the burdens of privilege! – but next we will see how that cost is dodged when we discuss how class is gendered and how gender has developed into a class system.
DOUBLE STANDARDS – Dick jokes, dick staring, hypocrisy and control
EquilibriumShift commented in the thread on DOUBLE STANDARDS – Jon Hamm and the Female Gaze:
This is absolutely related to the previous post re: Adria Richards power play to police sexuality to her standards.
He’s right. This really is about women controlling men’s behavior and speech. Adria Richards had the management of a conference throw out two men based on her accusation, and this accusation later caused one of these men to lose his job. That’s power. In the case of Jon Hamm’s package, women are indulging in behavior they excoriate in men.
And that excoriation is not the impotent rage of the powerless; women have all sorts of powerful allies they can marshal against men they can portray as offending or threatening them.
It is the same vein of thinking that allows a woman to become offended when he makes a pun that alludes to a penis, when that very same woman has no problem making dick jokes herself. It’s the same thinking that allows women to become offended at the sight of pixelated titties in video games, while ignoring the hundreds (thousands?) of bare chested men. (Ever played the video game “Heavy Rain”? As a check on how highly you value sexuality of the two genders, were you more shocked by Ethan getting nude and taking a shower, or by Madison doing the same? I know I didn’t bat an eyelash when the guy got nude, but I was a little shocked I would “get to” see the chick get naked.)
Then he picks up on the false equivalence of breasts and penises when it comes to staring.
Somehow, breasts are always compared to penises, as you noted, Ginkgo. Sexual economy (and it’s inherent devaluation of men’s sexuality) at its finest. And the women who do so are the self-same writers who rage, all full of sound and fury, at “objectification” of women, and how women’s sexuality is valued so highly. Of course, they would never say it like that, because it doesn’t sound ominous that way. They would of course say a woman is judged by her sexuality, or that women only matter to men because of their sexuality. One might as well say that men only matter to women because of their ability to provide stability and safety.
This misuse of “objectification” is just one more instance of damseling, in this case, the form I call “Turning privilege into oppression.” Is female sexuality more valued than male, i.e., does it confer privilege? Then it must immediately be spun as an oppression, and the objectification narrative is trotted out.
He continues:
At any rate, I think this very well presents a solution to the argument that many 3rd wave feminists put forth:
1) An oppressed group always understands what it is like to live as both oppressed and oppressor
2) Women are oppressed by men
Therefore: Women understand what it is like to live as a man.
I don’t think the bullshit level on this argument really needs to be pointed out to people here, but the whole John Hamm situation really highlights just how wrong at least one of those two premises is. FWIW, I think both tend to be wrong, with 1) being pretty much wrong, and 2) being utter crap.
His point is that the women writing about Jon Hamm clearly have no clue about men, what men experience, what’s going on here.See Arwa Mahdawi’s article in the Guardian for an example. In other words, they are femsplaining.
To which I add:
The first half of that syllogism is false. Sun Zi tells us that if you understand your opponent and yourself, you will prevail. It follows then that if you do not prevail, you probably do not understand your opponent, your oppressor, as well as you imagine.
The second half of that syllogism is a matter not in evidence. Every instance of oppression of women that can be sited is a result of women’s social neoteny, a neoteny that obligates men to feed, house and protect women form the outside world and its perils. Women can decry this all they like but until they stop enjoying the benefits of that neoteny, those objections are hypocritical.
Hypoagency: These two cases put hypoagency and its uses on display. Here in both cases we see women being as agentive as they want to be and then disavowing that agentivity. Adria Richards aggresses two men, resulting in the loss of livelihood for one of them – and yet gets to present herself as the victim, and the believed! Women stare at Jon Hamm’s crotch, and yet somehow he’s the one aggressing them, he’s the one who needs to and his behavior.
Hypogency really is benevolent sexism. Its benevolent to women and sexist towards men.
IT’S SHIT LIKE THIS, FEMINISTS – Wonder why women are reluctant to call themselves feminists? Try listening to them!
Ever since studies began coming out showing that large numbers, majorities even, of young women are reluctant to call themselves feminists, the subject has attracted comment.
Most recently Ally Fogg has posed the question in about as serious a form as I have seen. Here he is discussing a post by Laurie Penny on the issue. Go read the whole post there because it is too intricate and well-constructed to excerpt. The comment section is expecially good on this on, and don’t miss Nico’s excellent comment at March 23, 2013 at 7:41 am. She says quite a lot in what is actually a short space.
And then I ran across this post that takes it to a higher level of dudgeon.
And if you’re a man whose motto is “Listen to the women!” it would behoove you to take what I have to say into account because I am one of many. People are free to determine what they want and need, and I’m happy to do everything I can to support them. On the other hand, I feel that feminism has fallen apart completely. Women are not a minority; educated middle-class Western women are not oppressed; and when prominent feminist men attack successful women as gender-traitors and chill girls, that’s the end of the line for me. Why? Because they’re being sexist and encouraging victim mentality. And that’s the last thing women need.
“We piped you for you but you would not sing, we sang for you but you would not listen.”
… or words to that effect.