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Lyanna Stark

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The article used, like, a pillow or a mattress as an example.

Frankly this is all news to me.

ETA: As in, apparently you are supposed refrain from humping things. :)

Wow, that just sounds uncomfortable.

what kind of job do you have that this is an option?

TSA employee

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Okay, so of all the things in this thread, circumcision and male masturbation gets everyone going enough to start a spin off thread. Because that was apparently more offensive than anything else mentioned here. Like men talking about how (not) bad a clitoridectomy is.

And there's no such thing as male privilege.

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Okay, so of all the things in this thread, circumcision and male masturbation gets everyone going enough to start a spin off thread. Because that was apparently more offensive than anything else mentioned here. Like men talking about how (not) bad a clitoridectomy is.

And there's no such thing as male privilege.

Well, the male privilege thing falls pretty closely within the realm of the thread, and clidoridectomies are at least tangentially related. Male masturbation, yeah, spin-off thread.

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To throw a general medical history comment to the 'America-specific' thing: To my knowledge circumcision was generally not practiced to prevent masturbation - you got all sorts of things now used as fetish sex toys for that, plus a lot of medical treatises explaining how you got anything from syphilis to cancer and psychosis from masturbation in case people hadn't developed a complex yet (you get letters to the editor for sex-advice manuals in the early 20th century. It pretty much goes 'Dear Dr Summer, I am suffering from severe paralysis and will die of smallpox next week. It is all due to having a wank when I was 16. Please publish this letter to inform gentlemen that they must refrain from this awful practice.'). So to my knowledge it's more of a psychological assault than a physical one in the case of men.

Cliterodectomy, by contrast, was advocated by various psychiatrists (or equivalent, because psychiatry is sort of a new or nonexistent profession at that time) as a treatment for hysteria (by which one means a lot of things ranging from severe schizophrenia to 'not wanting to marry that jerk because being a novelist is a much more reasonable way of life'. If you want, there is ample material for a spin-off thread about how sexist psychology is, because people got shot for mental health issues being a female thing, and other people got put into asylums for wanting to live their own life rather than being a reproductive apparatus). I'm talking mostly 18th/19th century, btw. (apart from the being shot part, obviously, that was more of a 20th century fashion). Genital mutilation is thus to my knowledge not an exclusively American thing, nor an exclusively religious thing.

And yeah, it's pretty much cutting off the penis, which I thought had been established as a nasty thing people did when harems or contratenor opera voice was en vogue. Why are we even having this argument?

[And what happened to acknowledging that a lot of stuff is going wrong and men and women should cooperate to remedy it rather than having a fight about who is being more discriminated? Just a thought.]

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Raids, your failure to start a breakout thread on FGM before I started one on MGM (however tangentially) does not constitute an expression of male privilege. If anything, it indicates a lack of initiative on your part -- if you insist on categorizing it, it's more like an expression of stereotypical female passivity.

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Okay, so of all the things in this thread, circumcision and male masturbation gets everyone going enough to start a spin off thread. Because that was apparently more offensive than anything else mentioned here. Like men talking about how (not) bad a clitoridectomy is.

And there's no such thing as male privilege.

c'mon, now, this is just the penis envy talking.

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Raids, your failure to start a breakout thread on FGM before I started one on MGM (however tangentially) does not constitute an expression of male privilege. If anything, it indicates a lack of initiative on your part -- if you insist on categorizing it, it's more like an expression of stereotypical female passivity.

Bwahahaha. You got me. Someone else please take over the thread. Like Mo. Thanks.

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C'mon Min, you know no feminism thread is complete without 'what about the menz' being thrown into the mix...

N

I hereby suggest that Jaerv or others concerned can start their own thread to talk about the oppression of the straight, white male.

Apparently this is a group with a lot of grievances to air...

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It does my nut in that people on the internet are continually comparing FGM as equal to male circumcision. Anyone with half a braincell can see they are very different operations, and drawing a false equivalence between them is utterly offensive. FGM is more similar to castration than circumcision. It's like saying "In Iran, gay people are executed, and in the UK they are stereotyped as girly. Clearly, both nations are equally homophobic, and should be condemned equally!" The issues about FGM and circumcision are utterly separate, and it is possible to criticise both without holding the ludicrous opinion that they are the same.

I'll give you that.

Is this the old chestnut of "My ex wants to keep the baby, I don't want to pay support, so why do I have to?" Because that logically leads to either forced abortions or fatherless children growing up in poverty because their feckless dad doesn't want to pay for the consequences of his night of fun.

Or I guess you could be talking about the pill, but do you want to take the heightened risk of cancer to go with it? If so, you'll be pleased to know that the medical research establishment is continually trying to create a male pill. It's just a harder task than a female pill, so they have not yet succeeded - blame nature.

Blame nature for that, and paternity tests has fixed it for most societies.

The German law applies equally to men and women. It bans women from getting paternity tests without the man's consent, too.

That's because women, fearing rape, are generally very cautious about where they go at night and who they are alone with. If men acted the same, they'd be just as safe. A man will think nothing of walking home alone from a bar at 2am after drinking, and most women would rather walk through a snakepit than do that - so the man in that case is more likely to get mugged.

It's the same in every country. For some reason, women commit less crime. The only way to even out prison populations would be to sentence men more leniently or women more harshly.

The death penalty is wrong for all sexes.

This could be helped by changing social attitudes and persuading men that it's ok to ask for help, and ok to admit you can't cope.

Bollocks is it. You are continually comparing apples to oranges, drawing false equivalencies, and railing against nature.

An advantage given by nature to either sex is not worthy of mentioning in a discussion of "privilege" because "privilege" is not a synonym for advantages in general, but a term referring to the unspoken advantages a group has in society. This confusion often results in people saying things like "No one has ever given me a single thing for being a white male. Therefore I don't have any privilege, and the concept of privilege doesn't exist". Uh-uh.

Privilege is the absence of prejudice towards your group, not some special club membership. So a white guy walking into an expensive shop might not get the assistants fawning over him and offering discounts, but if a black woman did the same, she might get followed around by store detectives, or the assistants might snidely direct her to the cheaper ranges. The white guy's privilege is in avoiding all that, and since it's hard to see a negative, he falsely thinks he didn't get treated better at all.

Okay Lyanna, this is my last post in this thread and then I will leave you alone.

Brienne,

I am comparing apples and oranges because the issue at hand is fruit. :-)

Societies and people’s lives are incredibly complex phenomena and the negative impact of gender roles (of both gender roles) cannot be restricted to direct discriminatory behavior IMHO. You brought it up yourself: Men are unable to seek help when they need help, resulting from the self-damaging assumption that as a man you have to be autonomous, in control, should never show weakness etc. etc.

In my opinion, what really counts are the end results, the quality of life (and its extent) an average female or male person gets during her/his existence. Therefore, all aspects of gender roles are relevant when it comes to a discussion of a supposedly male “privilege”, because in the end all differences between people are socially created in modern societies.

It is also legitimate IMHO to raise disadvantages resulting from “natural” sex differences. Take the issue of men’s lack of control over their own procreation, for example. It is clearly a disadvantage for men to be unable to get a child without depending on the help of a woman. Women can decide, and sometimes do, to intentionally become a single mother. Men cannot. Men who would like to do this may be seldom, but they exist. I remember one guy here on this board who wanted to try to circumvent that problem by the help of a surrogate mother, obviously a difficult solution. Since we live in the 21. century, this problem could probably be solved in a better way if some money were invested in research on high-end incubators. I know that this idea sounds very strange to most people, but if you think about it, its simply the next step after in vitro fertilization and preimplantation diagnostics. And I believe that many women could also benefit from that development. Thus, this is a “natural” difference between the sexes, but one that could probably be changed with modern science. Therefore, it should be included in discussions about Privilege IMHO.

So I do not agree that privilege is the “absence of prejudice towards your group”. This description is too narrow IMHO, because the absurd mask of masculinity that we men are expected to wear throughout our lives may not have the negative aspects of typical prejudice, but it is nevertheless harming us (see suicides, reluctance to visit doctors, disregard of symptoms of illness, etc.). If you say that a woman is disadvantaged when she has difficulties in being assertive when it comes to bargaining with her boss about her wage level, then the same must apply for a 16-year old male youth who starts smoking because he thinks he has to be “cool”. Both gender roles have rather shitty aspects.

What really bothers me about the feminist usage of the word “Privilege” is the implication that a group of persons can be privileged whose sum of live outcomes is below average. That is simply absurd. And if applied to single cases it becomes rather annoying: A homeless man dying in his excrements in the street is a privileged person according to that usage of the word. That is insulting.

My impression is that feminists, at least the ones here in this thread, are not really interested in equality. If they were, they would agree that end states are very important, that the true goal must be a good life for everybody, whatever the reasons for his/her current problems are. Instead, feminists’ ideal appears to be “nondiscrimination”, which is something very different and it should not be equalized with equality.

One detail: Your argument pertaining paternity tests is logically equivalent to saying that making oral contraceptives illegal does not disadvantage women because men are also not allowed to use these contraceptives any more.

And here one final piece of evidence that I would like to share, though I am not sure whether people here will be interested in it:

The scholars cited below conducted a study about ethnicity and life satisfaction. They used two very large American datasets (one with > 20 000 persons, one with > 300 000 persons). They found, of course, that Black and Hispanic people had a significantly worse life satisfaction than white people. They also reported, as contextual information, correlations between other socially relevant variables and life satisfaction, for example socioeconomic status, health, social exclusion. These correlations from table 2 on page 185 of the article I have reproduced below. As you can see, life satisfaction works very well as an indicator of a disadvantaged situation: Uneducated people, poor people, unemployed people, tenants, disabled people and people with chronic diseases, single people, socially isolated people, black people, Mexican people… they all are characterized by reduced levels of life satisfaction, as one would expect.

Only the women, interestingly, do not differ from the men…

Correlation with Life satisfaction: (N1 > 20,070; N2 > 333,350)

Education: 0.16 / 0.15

Family income: 0.22 / 0.25

Unemployed: -0.14 / –0.15

Own home: 0.14 / ---

Disability: -0.18 / -0.20

Self-rated health: 0.29 / 0.31

Chronic diseases: -0.09 / -0.09

Married: 0.18 / 0.18

Emotional support: 0.39 / 0.39

Frequency of social contacts: 0.25 / ---

Male: 0.01 / 0.00

Source:

Barger, S. D., Donoho, C. J., & Wayment, H. A. (2009).

The relative contributions of race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, health, and social relationships to life satisfaction in the United States

Abstract:

Purpose: To evaluate racial/ethnic disparities in life satisfaction and the relative contributions of socioeconomic status (SES; education, income, employment status, wealth), health, and social relationships (social ties, emotional support) to well-being within and across racial/ethnic groups.

Methods: In two cross-sectional, representative samples of U.S. adults (the 2001 National Health Interview Survey and the 2007 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System; combined n>350,000, we compared life satisfaction across Whites, Hispanics, and Blacks. We also evaluated the extent to which SES, health, and social relationships explained racial/ethnic group differences and compared the magnitude of variation explained by life satisfaction determinants across and within these groups.

Results: Relative to Whites, both Blacks and Hispanics were less likely to be very satisfied. Blacks were somewhat more likely to report being dissatisfied. These differences were reduced or eliminated with adjustment for SES, health, and social relationships. Together, SES and health explained 12–15% of the variation in life satisfaction, whereas social relationships explained an additional 10– 12% of the variance.

Conclusions: Racial/ethnic life satisfaction disparities exist for Blacks and Hispanics, and these differences are largest when comparing those reporting being ‘satisfied’ to ‘very satisfied’ versus ‘dissatisfied’ to ‘satisfied.’ SES, health, and social relationships were consistently associated with life satisfaction, with emotional support having the strongest association with life satisfaction.

Quality of Life Research, 18, 79–189

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My impression is that feminists, at least the ones here in this thread, are not really interested in equality. If they were, they would agree that end states are very important, that the true goal must be a good life for everybody, whatever the reasons for his/her current problems are. Instead, feminists' ideal appears to be "nondiscrimination", which is something very different and it should not be equalized with equality

You really don't bother to really comprehend anything do you? Feminists, at least the ones that I have encountered want equality for everyone and if you make it so women are considered equal in everything that's a plus for men because then men also have the choice of going into teaching, being a secretary, liking the colour pink, sewing, being a stay at home husband and it being OK. Whereas at the moment because all of those things are coded feminine and the feminine is seen as less than or other it's not OK for men to do those things and the men that do those things are often looked down upon because they are doing womanly stuff. (Here's a link that speaks more eloquently than I on coding male/female: http://shakespearess...sogyny-and.html)

But no, you just come out with the same sort of shit time after time. Maybe in your head feminists don't want true equality, but I have to say you are just seeing what you want to see. Feminists fight all the time for things like more paternity leave; less gender essentialism (which can only be a good thing) and things that would make everyone's life easier. But it doesn't fit into this mindset you have constructed where we are the bad guys putting upon the downbeaten man.

As to your frankly weird assertion that the homeless man couldn't have privilege. He had privilege of being white but he was homeless and poor which in itself are marginalised sub-sets of the populace. Do some more reading around this stuff and maybe you'll realise people have actually put some thought into this and don't just throw these words around without thinking about what they mean.

N

ETA:

Take the issue of men's lack of control over their own procreation, for example.

Men do have control over their own procreation they can either choose not to have sex, use a condom or get a vasectomy.

ETAII:

Another cool link about how feminists report less hostility towards men than non-feminists http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2009/07/non-feminist_mo

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So I do not agree that privilege is the “absence of prejudice towards your group”. This description is too narrow IMHO, because the absurd mask of masculinity that we men are expected to wear throughout our lives may not have the negative aspects of typical prejudice, but it is nevertheless harming us (see suicides, reluctance to visit doctors, disregard of symptoms of illness, etc.). If you say that a woman is disadvantaged when she has difficulties in being assertive when it comes to bargaining with her boss about her wage level, then the same must apply for a 16-year old male youth who starts smoking because he thinks he has to be “cool”. Both gender roles have rather shitty aspects.

You can disagree all you like, but "privilege" is a technical term with a precise definition. I didn't define it. Your idea of "privilege" has meaning in itself but does not match up with the technical definition of the term, which is what we are discussing. It's not as straightforward as the common definition of the word.

Here's a link to explain it:

http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/03/11/faq-what-is-male-privilege/

What really bothers me about the feminist usage of the word “Privilege” is the implication that a group of persons can be privileged whose sum of live outcomes is below average. That is simply absurd. And if applied to single cases it becomes rather annoying: A homeless man dying in his excrements in the street is a privileged person according to that usage of the word. That is insulting.

It refers to groups not individuals. "Privilege" != "born with a silver spoon in the mouth". As the link above explains, people can be privileged in some situations, but not in others.

My impression is that feminists, at least the ones here in this thread, are not really interested in equality. If they were, they would agree that end states are very important, that the true goal must be a good life for everybody, whatever the reasons for his/her current problems are. Instead, feminists’ ideal appears to be “nondiscrimination”, which is something very different and it should not be equalized with equality.

It's a lot more achievable than true equality. For a start, true equality would mean pushing groups down that got an advantage, instead of just giving a leg up to disadvantaged groups. Think of all the stink that gets raised about taxing the rich for ideas about the problems this would cause. What's wrong with "nondiscrimination" exactly? If there was no discrimination, everyone gets a fair chance in life, even if some people do more with it than others. That sounds ideal to me.

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Yeah, the thing is, just because you have privilege in one respect doesen't mean you can't be mariginalized in others.

But you still have that privilege. I'm disabled, but I'm still a man, and that gets me certain things.

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In my opinion, what really counts are the end results, the quality of life (and its extent) an average female or male person gets during her/his existence. Therefore, all aspects of gender roles are relevant when it comes to a discussion of a supposedly male “privilege”, because in the end all differences between people are socially created in modern societies.

Right, so being underpaid and double-working is not an issue? Being the far less wealthy sex is also not an issue to you? Being the sex that does better in school but worse in the job market and in academia is not an issue to you? Being the less researched sex in health related research is not an issue to you? the MASSIE AND OVERWHELMING amount of women still sexually harrassed in the work place, school etc is also not an issue to you?

This, and far many more issues is what creates Male privilige. Google Tina Thorner. She is a rally driver and navigator, not the most meek of women, yet she is currently suing for sexual harrassment and she can tell you a tale of extreme harrassment against women, even though she is more hardcore than most.

It continues to baffle me that middle-class white men can claim without receiving a black tongue from lying that there is no female privilige, when at the same time they are so immensely blind to their own privilige.

It is also legitimate IMHO to raise disadvantages resulting from “natural” sex differences. Take the issue of men’s lack of control over their own procreation, for example. It is clearly a disadvantage for men to be unable to get a child without depending on the help of a woman. Women can decide, and sometimes do, to intentionally become a single mother. Men cannot. Men who would like to do this may be seldom, but they exist. I remember one guy here on this board who wanted to try to circumvent that problem by the help of a surrogate mother, obviously a difficult solution. Since we live in the 21. century, this problem could probably be solved in a better way if some money were invested in research on high-end incubators. I know that this idea sounds very strange to most people, but if you think about it, its simply the next step after in vitro fertilization and preimplantation diagnostics. And I believe that many women could also benefit from that development. Thus, this is a “natural” difference between the sexes, but one that could probably be changed with modern science. Therefore, it should be included in discussions about Privilege IMHO.

Again, you are shooting yourself in the foot with claiming that a woman's right to her own body is a privilige. Nobody ever claims a man's right to his body is privilige, why should a woman's be? What, in your opinion, separates the sanctity of a man's and a woman's bodies and why is woman the one losing out? Why do women have to MOTIVATE why our bodies should be our own?

This is totally ridiculous.

So I do not agree that privilege is the “absence of prejudice towards your group”. This description is too narrow IMHO, because the absurd mask of masculinity that we men are expected to wear throughout our lives may not have the negative aspects of typical prejudice, but it is nevertheless harming us (see suicides, reluctance to visit doctors, disregard of symptoms of illness, etc.). If you say that a woman is disadvantaged when she has difficulties in being assertive when it comes to bargaining with her boss about her wage level, then the same must apply for a 16-year old male youth who starts smoking because he thinks he has to be “cool”. Both gender roles have rather shitty aspects.

So men's suicide rates are compared to women's lack of assergiveness in salary negotiations? For real? You don't bring up any comparison to the plight of single mothers, sexually harrassed women everywhere, the complete acceptance of "it was her own fault" when drunk girls get raped, systematic exclusion of women from positions of power everywhere (it's been shown over and over again that men recruit other men).

As I mentioned upthreads: women make less money, own less money, have less power and are over-represented in cases of sexual harrassment. Further, women do more housework, while also working almost similar hours away from home.

Please tell me again that it's unclear that men aren't the priviliged group?

What really bothers me about the feminist usage of the word “Privilege” is the implication that a group of persons can be privileged whose sum of live outcomes is below average. That is simply absurd. And if applied to single cases it becomes rather annoying: A homeless man dying in his excrements in the street is a privileged person according to that usage of the word. That is insulting.

Why are you talking about individuals when the concept is about a group? That means you don't understand what "privilige" means, at all. You have completely and utterly missed the point.

My impression is that feminists, at least the ones here in this thread, are not really interested in equality. If they were, they would agree that end states are very important, that the true goal must be a good life for everybody, whatever the reasons for his/her current problems are. Instead, feminists’ ideal appears to be “nondiscrimination”, which is something very different and it should not be equalized with equality.

Why is non-discrimination not compatible with a good life for everybody exaclty? Is discrimination included in what you think of as a "good life"? In that case, you can take your good life and keep it, thank you very much.

Non discrimination is not incompatible with equality. In fact, the difference ought to be semantics.

And here one final piece of evidence that I would like to share, though I am not sure whether people here will be interested in it:

The scholars cited below conducted a study about ethnicity and life satisfaction. They used two very large American datasets (one with > 20 000 persons, one with > 300 000 persons). They found, of course, that Black and Hispanic people had a significantly worse life satisfaction than white people. They also reported, as contextual information, correlations between other socially relevant variables and life satisfaction, for example socioeconomic status, health, social exclusion. These correlations from table 2 on page 185 of the article I have reproduced below. As you can see, life satisfaction works very well as an indicator of a disadvantaged situation: Uneducated people, poor people, unemployed people, tenants, disabled people and people with chronic diseases, single people, socially isolated people, black people, Mexican people… they all are characterized by reduced levels of life satisfaction, as one would expect.

Only the women, interestingly, do not differ from the men…

Correlation with Life satisfaction: (N1 > 20,070; N2 > 333,350)

Education: 0.16 / 0.15

Family income: 0.22 / 0.25

Unemployed: -0.14 / –0.15

Own home: 0.14 / ---

Disability: -0.18 / -0.20

Self-rated health: 0.29 / 0.31

Chronic diseases: -0.09 / -0.09

Married: 0.18 / 0.18

Emotional support: 0.39 / 0.39

Frequency of social contacts: 0.25 / ---

Male: 0.01 / 0.00

Source:

Ok, you use a survery that compares ethnicity and happiness to prove something about male privilige...how? It's about ethnicities, and also high-lights that ethnic minorities are less priviliged than the default standard: which is white and middle-class.

The surveys aim is not to check the difference between men and women at all.

If my work computer would allow it, I'd link a survey from Finland showing that women take out 50% more sick-leave due to depression, stress related problems and burn-outs, which clearly should impact their happiness.

Happiness is also a problematic concept: how do you measure it? and against what standard? It's by its very nature going to be extremely subjective.

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  • 8 months later...

Christ, seriously. Just reading the last page of this thread to catch up is an illustration of why necromancy is banned by all major religions.

Not all major religions.

Remember, it's ok if Jesus does it.

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