Men's rights/issues thread- Grab 'em right by the willy

[Theda Baratheon]

1 minute ago, James Arryn said:

The White Feather campaign is a tragic one, and has all kinds of sad connections to gender relations/'men's issues'. I've never been able to understand why so many of the volunteers were feminists/suffragettes. I just don't see the connection. 

Yep. Women were specifically recruited to emotionally shame CO's and men who had moral reasons not to join the war. 

I appreciate the history but the suffeagettes were not above being total shits towards various people.  

I just HATE stigma against mental health, especially towards men as it is usually BY men.

I think women face specific stigma for being weak and lying/being dramatic and this bleeds into it being seen as feminine and unmanly to seek help for mental problems  

[baxus]

10 minutes ago, Einheri said:

Okay, but what does that have to do with the point I was making?

For starters, if you're talking about women who "trick" their partner into conceiving a baby, I'd like you to elaborate on how you know whether it was a planned action and not a failed birth control?

[Savannah]

48 minutes ago, Einheri said:

There is always a chance that intercourse will result in a pregnancy even if precautions are taken, and it’s still a possibility that it will happen even if you wear a condom, but this is very different from outright lying about being on birth control or secretly removing the condom, which is a clear breach of the agreement that was made before lovemaking ensued.

 

Yes, but paternity laws however are there to protect the child so they have to extend to those cases as well. 

[James Arryn]

1 minute ago, Theda Baratheon said:

Yep. Women were specifically recruited to emotionally shame CO's and men who had moral reasons not to join the war. 

I appreciate the history but the suffeagettes were not above being total shits towards various people.  

I just HATE stigma against mental health, especially towards men as it is usually BY men.

I think women face specific stigma for being weak and lying/being dramatic and this bleeds into it being seen as feminine and unmanly to seek help for mental problems  

No, I get that being a suffragette doesn't make you immune to human failings, what I don't understand is why proportionally there was such an extreme component of the volunteers who were. I suppose any kind of power appeals if you feel disempowered? Either way, it's an ugly chapter. Way too many stories of like 15-16 year old boys who looked older being cornered by the shame squads, thereafter finding some way to sign up, and never coming back. And wounded/gassed men whose injuries were not as apparent spending the remainder of the war as recluses, hiding in their homes in fear of the feathers. Just gross. 

 

[Theda Baratheon]

3 minutes ago, Mikael said:

I'd still be interested in hearing what kind of individualisation people think would help boys in school. Personally, I think that the opposite is true, kids need to fall in line and do what's asked of them more, not less. In my experience, boys' problems aren't that they are "rowdy", it's that they don't value education.

I really don't like the "kids need to fall in line" stance to be honest.

What do you mean by individualisation? Is it spending more time with individual students as well as teaching the group? 

To be honest I just think the way we educate needs to DRASTICALLY change.  I lead school workshops last year for an engineering project and the children had to build their own cars. And boys and girls were totally and I mean totally equal in terms of creating crazy amazing LOOKING cars and cars that were plain looking but functioned beautifully and went very fast. I was shocked I couldn't see a difference between the boys and girls in terms of their behaviour and realised I was a bit sexist myself in that I expected to see a massive difference but in in relation to that history and engineering and creativity project the kids were really similar. 

[Mlle. Zabzie]

9 minutes ago, James Arryn said:

The White Feather campaign is a tragic one, and has all kinds of sad connections to gender relations/'men's issues'. I've never been able to understand why so many of the volunteers were feminists/suffragettes. I just don't see the connection. 

As @Theda Baratheon said, suffragette =/ perfect human.  But more broadly, I think a lot of it was driven by the Nationalism/Patriotism that arose in the last few decades of the 19th Century and bled into the 20th.  I could certainly see a logic in "I am not permitted to fight, but I would, so you, who are permitted, are a coward for not" or some such rot.  Anyhow, the Victorians have some stuff to answer for in general

[Einheri]

1 minute ago, baxus said:

For starters, if you're talking about women who "trick" their partner into conceiving a baby, I'd like you to elaborate on how you know whether it was a planned action and not a failed birth control?

Like you said it will probably be very hard to prove short of an actual confession, but that does not make the men out there who might actually have been on the receiving end of such a ploy any less of a victim, which was the point I was making.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

6 minutes ago, Einheri said:

Like you said it will probably be very hard to prove short of an actual confession, but that does not make the men out there who might actually have been on the receiving end of such a ploy any less of a victim, which was the point I was making.

Yeah, a lifetime commitment to a human who in all likelihood will outlive you... what a clever way to gain control over another individual.

[James Arryn]

11 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

As @Theda Baratheon said, suffragette =/ perfect human.  But more broadly, I think a lot of it was driven by the Nationalism/Patriotism that arose in the last few decades of the 19th Century and bled into the 20th.  I could certainly see a logic in "I am not permitted to fight, but I would, so you, who are permitted, are a coward for not" or some such rot.  Anyhow, the Victorians have some stuff to answer for in general

Yeah, I agree it's all tied up in the attitude of the era towards war/duty/honour...though to be fair you're blaming Victorians for an Edwardian crime.  But yeah, this was in many ways the most extreme example of a complete 180 on attitude towards war, in terms of how it was viewed at the beginning vs. how it was viewed at the end. 

And as mentioned above, I'm not surprised that suffragettes were as likely as other women to participate, but rather why they were so much more likely to do so. At one point I thought maybe they were just easier to organize along previously existing lines, but a friend of mine who specializes in the era pointed out that pretty much all middle-upper class Edwardians were members of all kinds of organizations, so that doesn't explain the disparity. The whole armchair hero/chicken hawk idea you mention probably played a role. 

 

[Einheri]

17 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Yeah, a lifetime commitment to a human who in all likelihood will outlive you... what a clever way to gain control over another individual.

Chances are that someone who’d be willing to do something like this is not going to be the sanest person around, and I also don’t doubt that there are men out there whom this would work on.

[Jo498]

3 hours ago, Savannah said:

I might regret asking but what is a cuckoo kid? 

If a man raises and pays for a child that is not his without being aware of it. I don't doubt that there are many men who dearly love kids not their own and gladly support them but I think that both a child has a right to know about his paternity (not only for medical reasons) and that women should be forced to reveal the actual father if they cheated and got pregnant. Sure, these are often difficult situations but if push comes to shove, I do not think a possible right for cheating in privacy trumps the rights of the cheated husband and the child.

As for the case when a woman secretly stops using contraception, this is not a nice move because it should be discussed in a relationship but that's not a cuckoo kid. That's his kid and despite regrettable behavior by the woman he has to accept the responsibility. As other people said, he can use contraception of his own and a main point of a more traditionalist stance is to make people aware of the simple fact that sex makes babies and therefore they'd better behave responsibly.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Jo,

What's your take on the Mississippi Legislator who doesn't want to allow "domestic abuse" as a grounds for divorce in Mississippi?

[Isalie]

1 hour ago, Theda Baratheon said:

I really don't like the "kids need to fall in line" stance to be honest.

What do you mean by individualisation? Is it spending more time with individual students as well as teaching the group? 

There are certainly plenty of cases where individualisation is needed. Various learning disabilities for instance. The more time a teacher can spend with an individual student the better, and so on. 

The question was though, what the proponents of individualisation mean by it, what do you mean by it? Also, how would you change the way we educate kids?

[James Arryn]

3 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Jo,

What's your take on the Mississippi Legislator who doesn't want to allow "domestic abuse" as a grounds for divorce in Mississippi?

This is really a thing? Wtf?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

22 minutes ago, James Arryn said:

This is really a thing? Wtf?

Sadly, yes.

http://mississippitoday.org/2017/02/28/domestic-violence-as-grounds-for-divorce-killed-by-committee-chair/

From the article:

“At a time I think we need to be adopting policies that promote marriage and people sticking together, I have some serious concerns about opening the floodgates any more than they already are,” Gipson said. “I think the floodgates are already open and this just tears the dam down.”

[James Arryn]

Well, Mississipi does have a long history of standing as a bastion against...let's call it 'change'. Still, though, wtf.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

My home state can beat this:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/12/31/just-stop-daddy-a-lawmaker-beat-his-wife-as-his-children-pleaded-with-him-officials-say/?utm_term=.97c993efa6df

From the article:

No one is talking to the dispatcher. All that can be heard are screams of “Stop!” in the background.

“Please stop! Just stop, Daddy. Just stop.”

The call was made Monday night from the home of South Carolina state Rep. Chris Corley, a young politician who made headlines last year when he staunchly fought to keep the Confederate flag flying on the statehouse grounds. The screaming voices appear to have come from his children.

Corley hit his wife in the face and threatened to kill her in front of their children, according to an incident report from the Aiken County Sheriff’s Office. His wife told investigators that Corley only stopped hitting her because the children were screaming and her head was bleeding. He then went out to his vehicle, came back with a handgun and pointed it at his wife, threatened to kill himself, and then went to the bedroom, the report states.

...

 

Corley’s arrest comes after a legislative session in which South Carolina lawmakers passed a sweeping reform bill that toughens punishments in domestic violence cases and bars offenders from possessing guns.

In a December 2014 interview with the Aiken Standard, Corley, then newly elected, had some reservations about imposing a gun ban to solve domestic violence.

“As far as what we can do as government, you know, stiffer mandatory penalties. I don’t know that saying you can’t have a gun because you get convicted of domestic violence, I don’t know if that’s going to stop someone from future domestic violence,” Corley said.

[James Arryn]

What are the odds that Corley has a safe in his car?

[Jo498]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Jo,

What's your take on the Mississippi Legislator who doesn't want to allow "domestic abuse" as a grounds for divorce in Mississippi?

I have no take on that. As I said above I tend to refrain from opinion on divorce laws because while it clearly is a men's issue as the stats of custody going almost by default to the woman show I am not a lawyer (and neither married nor divorced) and the laws and customs wrt divorce, custody, support are apparently quite different between countries. I have also said nothing about what should be admissible as grounds for divorce for similar reasons. The only opinion I have expressed is that divorce is most of the time a bad thing. Of course it can be the lesser evil in many cases, this goes without saying. But I guess that domestic abuse is not the most frequent reason for divorce. Of the divorced or separated people I know this never was the reason but cheating/affairs of one partner (but this is probably the privilege of having mostly solid middle class acquaintances).

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

10 minutes ago, James Arryn said:

What are the odds that Corley has a safe in his car?

Slim to none.