Let's talk about privilege.

Like "patriarchy," "privilege" is another one of those "gotcha" words that, when challenged, result in accusations of ignorance, willful or otherwise, and demands that one "educate yourself." So let me start out by saying, privilege is definitely a thing. "Privilege," in the sociological sense, means a benefit or advantage that you have just by belonging to a [dominant] social identity group. It should be noted that privilege is possessed innately; it doesn't matter whether you want it, you acknowledge it, you intentionally use it, or what you think of it. It's just the way things are.

Examples of straight and cis privilege are fairly common, along with examples of white privilege, Christian privilege, economic privilege, and several others. But the group I hear most often run down for their privilege is men.

Is "male privilege" a thing? Sure. But unlike the other groups, the alleged "dominant group" here is not an overwhelming majority, overbearing a smaller population through sheer numbers, nor a conquesting minority, dominating with superior technology. I covered in a previous post the lack of logic behind suggesting that women are an systemically-oppressed minority. Feminism 101 would have you believe that there is no such thing as "female privilege," that areas where women benefit from The Patriarchy are more aptly called "benevolent sexism." This may work for examples like women and children being loaded into lifeboats first. But there's at least one clear example of female privilege where the "benevolent sexism" concept just doesn't wash, and that's paternity.

We women know who are children are. Barring an mix-up at the hospital, the baby we pop out of our bodies is ours, for better or worse. Men? Men have no idea. Men have to have faith and trust-- and with fidelity rates what they are these days, that's trust and faith bordering on naivete. But, luckily for men, these days they don't have to rely on blind trust-- science is on their side! For the first time in history, men can now easily, accurately, and cheaply know if they in fact fathered the child purported to be theirs. And a median 3.7% of children, around the world, are, in fact, subject to "paternal discrepancy."

So how have some women reacted? 

Many men have, of course, ended up raising children who were not genetically their own, but really, does it matter? You can feel quite as much tenderness for a child you mistakenly think to be yours as for one who is. [Source]

Spoken like someone who will never have to experience unknowingly raising a child who is not genetically her own.

#YESallpeople #nonotthiswoman

I am, once again, baffled. Angrily baffled. Frustratingly baffled.

I don't get it. I'm admitting it, this one time: I DON'T GET IT.

I've been around in my life. No, really. I've been to drug-laced parties. I drank before I was twenty-one. Once, in my early twenties, driving alone at night, I picked up two male hitchhikers, and we drove around for a while and just talked. I've been to clubs and bars. I spent the better part of a year using the Los Angeles public transit on a daily basis. I've been on the brink of having sex with a man (I mean, right there) and changed my mind. I've been politely propositioned by older random men and swinger acquaintances alike, and declined. I can check off most of the list of "stupid, risky things women aren't supposed to do"-- and not only have I never been raped or sexually assaulted, I don't feel like I've ever come close. I've never been threatened with violence from a man for being a woman.  I've never been groped or harassed or gotten more than what I feel is reasonable attention-- a quiet proposition, a statement of interest, a once-over and compliment-- that didn't just lose interest when met with a polite but firm "no."

That's not to say that the experiences of women who have experienced harassment or violence aren't valid. But inherent to the idea of #yesallwomen are two premises: first, that all women share this pervasive fear of men, based on these universally shared experiences of ill-treatment by men; and second, that violence and harassment experienced by women is somehow fundamentally different-- and worse-- from the violence and harassment that men experience.

But that's not surprising. No, what's making me angry is this blog post from Courtney Enlow, "#YesAll Women, #YesAllPeople and the Dangers of Misunderstanding Feminism." What makes me want to cry and rage and scream is her stubborn, self-defeating opposition to empathy. Elliot Rodgers killed men, too. More men than women. Men are harassed, men are abused, men are raped, men are objectified. As she herself points out, "someone sharing their unique, specific experiences does not diminish anyone else's." Instead of spitting on the shared experience with men, why not take the opportunity to empathize and work together to reduce all the violence? Why the need to insist that your "unique and specific experience" isn't actually unique and specific to you, but is common to people with vaginas-- but arbitrarily exclude people with penises?

She ends by pleading:

I want to be loud. I don’t want to accommodate. I want to be heard. We want to be heard. Please. Someone please listen.

Why is it so important for you to be heard as a woman? If the essential part of your message is "I was hurt and I want someone, anyone, to know it," why does it matter whether that other person over there who was also hurt is a man or a woman?

Like I said, I don't get it.

False rape claims have "silver lining," according to local newspaper (via Community of the Wrongly Accused)

via Community of the Wrongly Accused

"Last Sunday morning at Union College in New York, an official emails alerted students about an atrocity that never happened. It stated that a female freshman had been sexually assaulted by three "males" (one of whom might have been approximately 16-years-old) at 1:41 a.m. The alleged victim refused any medical treatment, and did not seem traumatized. Police investigated for two days until finally the alleged victim retracted her statement and left the school. A video camera reportedly had captured the young woman on her phone at the time she said the assault occurred. After she ended the phone call, she jumped into a clump of bushes, and stayed there until her friends arrived and pulled her out, the sources said."

[Note 1/11/2014 - COTWA, for whatever reason, has taken their article down since my posting, so I have changed the below link to SAVE Services, which reprinted the COTWA article on their site.]

Read more...

Finding common ground

Just wanted to take time and space to thank @Lancestrian for taking the time over the last five or six days to have a dialogue over Twitter, of all media, about the gendering of rape. Earlier today she posted:

@ConversiveBlog 1) I am coming around to your view on this. It's not possible to accurately determine what proportion of the population are
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 2) perpetrators based on victimhood stats (my revelation of last night) and no research has been done into how many perps
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 3) are female and how many are male. We can't even infer that women don't sexually assault other women because a woman might
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 4) not recognise another women's unwanted contact as being sexually-motivated (man stroking my hair is assumed to be sexual,
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 5) woman stroking my hair isn't). So in the absence of clear evidence like a Lisak and Miller type of study, we simply don't
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 6) know what proportion of women perpetrate sexual assaults and it's unfair to presume that more men are perps than women
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 7) without evidence. Also on reflection, I realise that framing sexual violence as something men do to (usually) women harms
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 8) the feminist goal of eliminating all sexual violence, by encouraging misogynists to see it as a "women's problem" and
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 9) hence ignorable. I would welcome research into the prevalence of female perpetration.
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

Baby steps. But still felt good to find common ground.

Equality? I think you missed that exit about a mile back

Since I started actively blogging as an anti-feminist, I've seen a lot of feminists criticizing anti-feminism with variations of "How can you be against feminism? Feminism is about equality." We're told that a lot. The dictionary backs them up. But when you look at issues, you quickly see that equality is just not good enough.

For instance, we are told women need affirmative action initiatives in higher education in order to level the playing field against historical, systemic sexism in admissions. It's not enough to accept women, to treat them the same as men, universities and colleges must actively encourage and incentivize women to enroll, to excel, to graduate. The latest data shows that this approach seems to have been successful: women at all levels of higher education have been earning the majority of degrees since 2009. We were already out-graduating men at all levels short of doctorates since 1999, and I saw one article that women started outpacing men around 1982. So that's it, right? The women in education people can pack it in; they won. Set up a smaller watchdog organization to make sure there's no backsliding, and go celebrate.

Instead, in an inspired burst of goal-post shifting, the new complaint is that women are under-represented in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) fields. Meanwhile, all the incentives and scholarships and grants and benefits that were set up to correct the female under-representation in higher education are still going strong, even though women are no longer generally under-represented.

When women surge ahead of men in STEM fields, next year, or five years from now, or ten, or twenty, I wonder what the new goal will be? 

Oppressive patriarchy is oppressive

Feminism is built on the concept that historically, women have been institutionally oppressed by men, and that that oppression continues through today, visible in our male-dominated and male-controlled society (a.k.a., The Patriarchy).

Because any disagreement with a feminist over patriarchy theory usually starts with accusations that the dissenter doesn't understand what patriarchy is and/or is deliberately misdefining patriarchy and/or privilege to support their argument, and generally ends with the feminist ordering the dissenter to come back when they've "educated themselves," let me demonstrate my working understanding of patriarchy as put forth by feminism. We're talking institutional discrimination, not individual; things like executive glass ceilings, the wage gap, and abortion rights. Systemic stuff. It's not a conscious, intentional conspiracy by men to keep the wimmins down, but a system of male domination and female subordination largely benefiting men and limiting and/or disadvantaging women. I invite corrections in the comments.

The elephant in the room is the question of why, if women are so strong, smart, capable, competent, and all around equal to men, then how have they been oppressed by men since the dawn of time? Other groups commonly accepted to face institutional discrimination are overwhelmingly outnumbered. For example, blacks are 13% of the population in the United States. Jews are 2%. Gays are 1.8-10%, depending on who you ask, and transgenders just 0.3%. But women are roughly half the population, and always have been. So either women are so weak and fragile and incompetent that they took literally thousands of years to rise up against their oppressors and even begin to finally demand equality, or, the idea that women are oppressed is a new one that is being applied retroactively.

Let's end the rampant bias against... Men?

I know! As if there’s one group that does not need protection, it’s men; am I right, ladies? Everywhere you look, men are in charge. Men are Presidents, the majority of judges, and the vast majority of top corporate executives. Women in the United States earn seventy-seven cents for every dollar a male earns. Little boys are encouraged to grow up to be astronauts, engineers, scientists, and doctors, while little girls are told that “math is hard” and encouraged towards nursing, teaching, or full-time housewivery. In 2009, men were responsible for 81.2% of the violent crime in the US and 62.6% of the property crime. And we all know that all rape is committed by men and that domestic abuse is mainly comprised of men beating their wives or girlfriends and often their children or step-children. They just stick it in anything and then skip along on their merry way and leave women to pick up the pieces of their lives, whether it’s trying to put together money for an abortion or track down a deadbeat dad later.

Yes, clearly, it’s a still a man’s world out there.

Until you look closer.