You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

FAWS comments on A Rationalist's Account of Objectification? - Less Wrong Discussion

43 Post author: lukeprog 19 March 2011 11:10PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (325)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: FAWS 24 March 2011 12:35:44PM *  4 points [-]

I am reasonably sure you are right, but how useful is that sort of accounting? Society should be fair to each and every individual, not "fair" to both genders on aggregate (the two traditional genders don't even cover everyone). If one gender suffers from unfairness in certain ways that isn't made any better by the other gender suffering an equal amount of unfairness elsewhere, it's made twice as bad because that means twice as much total unfairness.

IMO equality resources should be distributed so as to fix the maximum amount of unfairness. Women suffer more unfairness so presumably most resources would be directed towards them anyway, but there could easily be a number of low hanging fruit on the male side.

Comment author: nawitus 24 March 2011 01:50:57PM *  14 points [-]

"Women suffer more unfairness so presumably most resources would be directed towards them anyway, but there could easily be a number of low hanging fruit on the male side."

This claim is often made, but I haven't seen any calculations to back it up. I'm active in the gender equality debate in Finland, so I can only talk about Finnish statistics:

  • Men are forced to serve on average 8,5 months in "slave work". No modern work regulations apply. I personally witnessed many broken bones and other health problems which happened to my friends during my service. Work was often 24/7 for weeks. Psychological stress is commonplace.
  • Men make 80 % of suicides, and 80 % of the homeless are men.
  • Women have higher wages by 2 percent.
  • Men have less success in studying
  • Men don't have sexual power
  • Men face the majority of violence (and men face as much domestic violence as women)
  • Mutilation of boys for religious reasons is legal, but mutilation of girls is illegal.
  • Men die seven years earlier
  • 60% of unemployed people seeking work are men

(I can provide sources for these, but they would be in Finnish, so I don't think most people are that interested, check http://mies.asia for more information though)

Obviously, women also face problems like rape and lack of leadership positions in corporations. On the political front, we have a female president and a female prime minister.

I'm not claiming definately that men suffer more, but this non-technical examination seems to imply it. At least it has not been proven that women suffer more nowadays.

Until such calculation has been made, I think it should be reasonable to direct 50% of equality resources for feminism, and 50% for masculism.

EDIT: There have been a downvote, but I don't really understand why. Of course, Finland is only one nation, but similar lists have been made in USA for example. If this site assumes that we should only talk about USA, I think that's unfair, since there's a significant Finnish representation. I'm clearly talking about the situation in Finland, and the situation differs from country to country.

There are of course some countries, where women have less freedom than men etc. I don't think it makes sense to talk about a global average here, since equity politics are not a global, but local question.