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Pentashagon comments on LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny - Less Wrong
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It looks like A went through some significant physical and emotional abuse early and often, probably left with a PTSD or other emotional scars. I wonder how common this is, vs a more subtle version, like the academic workplace discrimination stats linked in the OP.
Bodies? Minds? I don't understand what the submitter means here. If this is about status signaling, then it probably isn't gender-specific, though I can see how women might "dote" over their partners more than the other way around.
B: almost all men watch porn, though few compulsively, and the tastes vary wildly. I am not sure how often guys cannot tell a porn fantasy from reality, but probably no more often than playing violent videogames translates into real-life violence. I'm sure there have been plenty of research on the subject.
I can totally see the workplace creepiness case B describes, and it's unfortunate that she was not equipped to articulate it at the time. I have no idea how this creepiness plays out in "East Asian cultures".
In general, I expected more of LW-relevant feedback, given the overrepresentation of young males here, probably coloring the discussion (likely inadvertently) with content and style females may find grating.
Something like a third of women worldwide experience domestic violence. In the U.S. over 10% of college students have reported being raped and between 15% and 20% of women report being raped during their lifetime (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_the_United_States). Compared to violence, my smart-ass guess for how many women experience discrimination some time in their life would be closer to 100%.
If I used the same metrics that are used to get the "XX% of women are domestically abused!!!!!" talking points, I myself would be a victim of domestic violence, but I am not.
Reasonable estimates of what percent of women who have been victims of what is normally thought of when the phrase "Domestic Violence" is used, stuff worth doing something about --not being pushed out the way once in your life--, is very small and not more than a few percentage points.
See
Johnson, M. (1995). "Patriarchal Terrorism and Common Couple Violence: Two Forms of Violence against Women". Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 57, No. 2 (May, 1995), pp. 283-294.
I think that is an overly subjective judgement. I have met people who have experienced what I would consider abuse if it happened to me, but who don't consider it abuse.
I just use the "modern" definition which includes physical, emotional, sexual, verbal, and economic abuse. There are extreme forms of all of these types of violence, as well as occasional and mild forms. All of them have negative utility, but I agree there is a significant difference between patriarchal terrorism and a single instance of mild abuse in a lifetime. I also don't think the survey results for rape and attempted rape are related to the CTS surveys in the article you referenced.
My smart-ass guess for how many humans experience discrimination some time in their life would be closer to 100%.
Sure, but there's experiencing discrimination for any of 1,000 reasons, and there's experiencing discrimination because of your gender.
I'm a male and I had an emotionally abusive father. The abuse I received was rarely, if ever, related to me being a boy, while my older sister was regularly insulted as a girl. For example, getting called gendered insults aka dad screaming repeatedly "you fucking whore!" to his 12 year old daughter in the middle of a crowded street. I didn't have an gendered equivalent.
Were we both abused? Sure. Was my sister's abuse worse? Eh, I don't see that as a worthwhile question. Did her abuse negatively affect her view of herself as a woman more that mine negatively affected my view of myself as a man? Absolutely.
How do you know that? The expectations he had for you had nothing to do with being a boy? Did he give all the same abuse to your sister? He never called you wimp, faggot, queer, etc.?
After listening to a little men's rights talk, there really is a lot of discrimination against men that is entirely approved of by society, and not recognized at all. "It's not because they are boys."
It would be helpful to get beyond the competition over who has it worse, and just be opposed to any and all unfair discrimination. I think the problem are the proposed remedies. They're not opposition to discrimination, but further discrimination claiming to balance the game. Problem is, that requires a comprehensive balancing of all factors in the game, and not just opposition to particular agreed injustices.
Lots of dads get particularly wound up about their daughters sexuality. One of the uglier bits of life.
Being obligated to be a more or less normal boy is something that a lot of boys can manage. It's an abusive requirement when it's something a particular boy can't do or strongly dislikes doing.
A girl can't stop being a girl.
What westward is talking about is a girl being attacked for being a girl. What you're talking about (and it's a quite serious issue) is boys being attacked for not being good enough at being boys.
I'm not denying that there's gender-based abuse of boys. I even know a couple of men who grew up in families that strongly preferred girls.
It took me a lot of years to understand what "misogyny" meant, and I'm usually good at figuring out words from context. My problem with the word was that I'd grown up in a family which valued girls and boys about equally, and I had a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that there are a lot of people (mostly but not entirely male, I think) who hate women.
I don't this particularly convincing. She likely could have "managed" his oppressive expectations with sufficient obedience and deference as well.
And I don't want to be speculating on his situation in the third person. Unless you've discussed these issues personally with him, I think you're jumping to conclusions based on what he said.
I get the feeling we've been here before. The previous installment of The LW Women Speak? One limitation I saw last time was the arguing over broad generalizations, particularly over the balance of harm. This tends to look and feel like the minimizing of harm.
So to be concrete, I strongly disapprove of a father shrieking "whore" at their daughters, and see great harm to a daughter in it.
For a series of videos on the lifelong liability of child abuse, see Stefan Molyneux: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB3F2CF45EEB95C80
If there are more failure modes for being female than male, it's worth noting that the target a girl would be trying to hit with expectation management is a lot smaller.
If social expectations are for women to be expectation-managers more than men ... possibly related?
I don't think smaller vs. bigger makes sense - basically incommeasurable in terms of size. In terms of being comparable, off the top of my head I'd that that girls are expected to refrain more, while boys are expected to achieve more. It's more stultifying to have to refrain, but in one sense easier, since it is a matter of will and not talent. From the judgment of their parents, girls may be considered rule violators, but they aren't subject to failure as much as boys are.
Eric Raymond has a post here explaining why that statistic is massively exaggerated.
The statistical analysis is interesting, but the author's implicit assertion that non-forcible rape is somehow less rape-y than forcible is extremely offputting.
There are necessary gradients.
I don't think my then-girlfriend waking me up with oral sex - that's sex without consent, incidentally, and she and I had a very serious conversation about that afterwards, and set some boundaries for implicit consent for future use - is the same kind of act as what is commonly thought of as rape. I certainly don't think the legal punishments should be the same.
I believe the the original 1 in 6 statistic comes from a national survey conducted in 1996 (not by the Colorado Coalition against Sexual Violence, pace ESR), in which 17.6 % of the surveyed women said they had been victims of completed or attempted rape in their lifetimes. In the survey questions, rape was explicitly defined as vaginal, oral or anal penetration under force or the threat of force.