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OrphanWilde comments on LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny - Less Wrong Discussion
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It is significantly more socially acceptable for a woman to hit a man than the reverse. It is more socially acceptable for a woman to sexually assault a man.
It's more socially acceptable for a woman to suggest a man should be castrated, emasculated (a word which refers to the wholesale removal of a man's genitals, incidentally, as opposed to castration, which refers only to removal of the testicles), anally raped, or <insert horrific act here> than any analogous reversal.
These things happen regularly without comment or outrage in our society.
I'm curious to know what exactly your model of the world is.
This is true in my social circle, but I'm not at all confident that it is true in most.
This is not true in my social circle. Again, not sure about others.
Again speaking for my own social circle only: Things like this are generally said in jest. My guess is that it is more acceptable to joke about this because it is less of a serious problem than male-on-female assault/rape.
But, I'm not convinced at all that this is typical.
Wedding Crashers. Yes Man. 40 Days and Nights (although in that case, there was a bit of popular backlash).
I'm not going to go through cases for the first thing you quoted.
But it's not limited to speech. If a woman hits me, most witnesses will assume I deserved it; I did or said something they didn't see. If I hit a woman - well. Men who have called 911 after being assaulted by their wives or girlfriends frequently find -themselves- locked up.
The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker is an interesting example. He starts by explaining that he became fascinated by finding out how to predict threat levels because his mother was extremely violent. The rest of the book assumes that an aggressor will be male.
The Emotional Terrorist and the Violence-Prone by Erin Pizzey is her account of starting one of the first domestic violence shelters in the British Isles, and being surprised to find that a bit over half the women were habitually violent themselves. I've heard confirming information from at least one other source. This doesn't mean you should assume that any women who reports violence in her marriage is partly at fault-- note that the odds are close to even.
I think women who are domestically violent against men are a serious problem, and it's going to take a lot of men speaking up (something which is quite difficult, and not just because of feminists) to get any sort of a solution.
What on Earth makes you think that I find that dynamic acceptable? Non-consent is non-consent.
I didn't imply you find it acceptable. The question was, if you think social acceptability is predictive of behavior, do you expect to see more violence against men than women - that is, should you expect that violence by women against men is a larger social problem, given that it is more socially acceptable?
I see what you are asking. I think my most relevant response is that I don't think the word "more" in the quoted text is accurate.
The Steubenville victim got death threats from people who knew her. Someone making the unacceptable comments you describe would generally be faced with awkward silence.
Incidentally, I'm no fan of speech codes, but I suspect ridiculous overreactions to stupid speech happens with somewhat equal prevalence on both political extremes. One ridiculous overreaction is too many, of course.
By "more" I don't mean society approves of it more, but disapproves of it less, if the distinction makes a difference.
As I understood you, you meant "Society disapproves of female-on-male sexual violence. But society disapproves more strongly of male-on-female sexual violence."
I just think you are factually wrong in that assertion, based on the differences in responses like the ones I noted.
Ah. I follow you now. And I find your comparison dishonest. First, you're trying the general case against a specific case, and using your assumptions for the first. Second, you're not comparing like cases; you're comparing what angry family members said following a rape trial to reactions to speech. Third, you're using an exceptional and unusual case.
The threats weren't from family members. And the very debate we are having is whether Steubenville is exceptional and unusual for what happened to the victim or simply because it became world famous.
General vs. specific is a reasonable point - but looking at headlines from news sources that we each already agree with is unlikely to help us resolve this issue. I could point to examples from the yesmeansyes blog, but obviously they filter the evidence to focus on what they find problematic. No doubt you could also point to mostly reputable news sources for examples that you find problematic.
Interesting that you accept that narrative as a full explanation, when the link it itself provides refers to one of the girls as a relative.
Indeed, one of the death threats mentioned was: "You ripped my family apart, you made my cousin cry, so when I see you bitch it’s going to be a homicide"
That sounds less like "...women often find it more personally beneficial to go along with sexism than to try to fight the power, on the theory that if you're going to be treated like a second-class citizen anyway, you might as well not get yelled at all the time for speaking up about it" and more like an immature teenager whose life was thrown into turmoil and is looking for somebody to lash out against.
Let's talk Steubenville, but let's compare like to like. What do you think public perception would be of two teenage girls who played with the genitals of an unconscious drunk guy?
In the local community, if the two girls were co-captains of the softball team, and the town was softball-mad in the way Steubenville is apparently football-mad (American football)?
I expect the locals in that hypothetical would react essentially like the locals in Steubenville - laughing at the victim, sharing humiliating pictures on social media, pressuring the victim not to complain. If the local reaction made national news, I expect criminal charges would be brought. Would the judge in the case warn the defendants "to have discussions about how you talk to your friends; how you record things on the social media so prevalent today; and how you conduct yourself when drinking is put upon you by your friends"? Don't know.
Your claim is that society is more tolerant of non-consensual violence on males, so your claims are false if society is merely equally tolerant. (And society is too tolerant of all physically harmful pressure to non-consensually or semi-consensually risk physical harm - consider the enormous social pressure on athletes to "man up" and play through injury).
Regarding Slate magazine (the source I've been linking) - I was linking them only for the facts - I don't expect you to agree with their analysis, and I don't necessarily endorse the analysis in any particular. But the facts they report are facts.
Tangentially, it might be similar to public perception of this writer. From the top-displayed comments:
Also:
Edit: It might be a poor example of a gender-symmetrical act, since one actually can "play with" male genitals non-sexually; I do it whenever I use the bathroom, and have it done whenever I have a medical chekcup.
No, you should not expect that. Social acceptability is only one variable. Other things are not equal.
OrphanWilde: [Factual, empirically-testable claim that:] For Set A: X > Y
OrphanWilde: [Query:] (For Set A) Does X > Y imply f(X) > f(Y)?
(got downvoted)
Response: I don't find X acceptable. (Edit: Or perhaps: "I don't find (X > Y) acceptable.")
(got upvoted)
Someone is being misread and uncharitably misinterpreted here.
Edit: Here's a translation of my pseudologic above:
[Factual Claim] For some culture: Social acceptability of female-to-male violence ("X") > Social acceptability of male-to-female violence ("Y")
[Query, perhaps rhetorical?] Does the social acceptability of gender-to-gender violence ("X" and "Y") correlate with the actual frequency of corresponding gender-to-gender violent actions ("f(X)" and "f(Y)")?
[Implication] If so, we should expect that X > Y ==> f(X) > f(Y) ; that is, we should expect that there are more female-to-male acts of violence than the reverse, by this logic.
[Response] I don't find the fact that (female-to-male violence is socially acceptable) acceptable. (Or perhaps that it's more acceptable than the reverse, but I doubt that would be the intended meaning. )
( Anyone else notice that the response, while probably true and definitely admirable, does not engage in any way with the point? Anyone else notice that the one that points to a flaw in the earlier logic gets downvoted, while the other that responds with something barely related but applause-lighted gets upvoted? Anyone else notice that I got downvoted at first for attempting to point this out (the last two sentences)? )
I don't think my interpretation was uncharitable; I think TimS indicated that reducing social acceptance/increasing social stigma for male-on-female violence would result in less violence, and if this didn't work, his model would be challenged. (Or are you saying I was being uncharitably read? Having reread my comment; my point wasn't very explicit at all, and kind of begged for an uncharitable reading. So I don't hold the uncharitable reading against anybody.)
(Incidentally, don't worry too much about the upvotes/downvotes in this post, they're not necessarily indicative of the reasonableness of your position. There are definitely people who have very firmly taken sides, and are upvoting/downvoting anything they perceive to be on or supportive of the opposing side. Environmental hazard of touchy social issues, not much you can do.)
There's a perfectly good (IMO) non-cultural reason for that, namely that the average man is physically bigger than the average woman and therefore he's more likely to seriously harm her by hitting her than the other way round.
Wait... what? I hear men saying such things about women once in a while, but I can't recall any women saying such things about men (except when talking about convicted criminals, in which case even other men will suggest such things). But then again, I'd guess the situation is worse on the other side of the pond.
On the other hand, some women are bigger and/or stronger than some men. Size is hardly a hidden factor. Why not use that instead of a surrogate?
Indeed, if a small, weak man hit a big, strong woman, I wouldn't expect him to be frowned upon as much as the median men hitting the median woman.
The reason isn't terribly important for the purposes of this line of reasoning, so I'm going to largely leave this alone, and simply state that the iterated situation is considerably different than the one-shot situation.
"Any analogous reversal" doesn't mean "men talking about men." It's not limited to the social acceptability of women as violence-initiators; it also includes the social acceptability of men as violence-receivers.