Feminism reborn - It's not changed, it's just different

[karaddin]

Ok I gave it a week or two hoping someone else would start another one, but saw something last night I wanted to post so I guess I'll do it myself. From the last thread -

Raidne, you write stuff like this:

and it just slides by. I mean, did you just accuse every woman who obtains some measure of success in a male dominated field of being Uncle Toms and tokens? ('Token' as I understand it means that you don't deserve your success.)

Does everyone here agree with her? Doesn't anyone else find this to be an extraordinarily horrible thing to say?

I always get the sense that people are thinking about something specific but they couch it in abstract terms in order to " unload the emotional and personal baggage from the conversation " and the result is you just don't make any sense.

I'm going to need an example. Please tell me who is a token suck up?

I agree with solo's comment, Raidne (and myself) aren't trying to say that the women who get acceptance are deliberately making themselves more masculine to achieve acceptance and success, but that their acceptance and success is rationalised by men as being due to them being unlike other women. There are plenty of women for whom one form or another of masculinity is perfectly natural, it's just who they are, and women with this personality have an easier time navigating a male dominated environment.

For examples, I would say that Julia Gillard the Australian PM has a certain masculinity about the way she conducts herself. Sometimes when she deviates from this it goes well (at least internationally) such as in the Misogyny speech last year, although I must note that there was a big difference between the way that was received internationally and the way it was received domestically by the political pundits and many conservative women. Other times she gets criticised for showing weakness, such as the automatic assumption of weakness in a recent display of crying.

Now onto the link I wanted to post, it's from 6 weeks ago so some may have already seen it, a Rochester Economics professor ponders whether unconscious rape is wrong in a thought experiment considering public policy. He's of the opinion that perhaps things like the Stubenville case should actually be legal, since the only thing that caused the girl harm was seeing videos about it after the fact. She was unconscious, no harm done! Worst piece of rape apology I think I've read.

[Chaldanya]

Now onto the link I wanted to post, it's from 6 weeks ago so some may have already seen it, a Rochester Economics professor ponders whether unconscious rape is wrong in a thought experiment considering public policy. He's of the opinion that perhaps things like the Stubenville case should actually be legal, since the only thing that caused the girl harm was seeing videos about it after the fact. She was unconscious, no harm done! Worst piece of rape apology I think I've read.

I quite literally have nowhere I can go with this without using a lot of random words, ellipses and the word fuck a lot. I will say this tho' - it is depressing to think of the lengths people will go to to say that rape is not rape and shouldn't be illegal.

N

[Serious Callers Only]

Whoa

[sologdin]

the economist's article is bad, but we've known him to be scum of the earth for years, aye? the linked commentary is not very good, either, though.

[Theda Baratheon]

Rape apology is everywhere these days. Ranging from dudebro rape joke pages on facebook with thousands of likes, to idiots believing the victim is to blame for having a drink or for wearing a skirt, and then to fucking arseholes like that professor saying rape is not rape if ___ happens.

But each is as dangerous as the other. When you've got casual facebook pages like 'Not A Rapist' that have thousands of likes and continually trivialize and mock rape, and attract a lot of teenagers (both male AND female) with their casual and fucking awful internet humour, the word rape and by extension the crime of rape itself is trivialized.

A lot of people don't understand consent. That sounds stupid but it's true. A lot of people don't understand rape.

It's not just a crime that happens in darkened alleyways, by strangers. This shit happens all the fucking time. Rape and sexual abuse, and people think it's okay to blame women or men for BEING raped.

I was reading a really interesting essay 'Rapist Ethics' by John Stoltenberg, a male radical feminist.

Rapist ethics is a definitive and internally consistent system for attaching value to conduct: The concepts of both right and wrong exist within rapist ethics; it is not an ethic in which blame and moral condemnation go unreckoned or unremarked. There is also in rapist ethics a structural view of personal responsibility for acts, but it views the one to whom the act is done as being responsible for the act. It is a little like the driver of a car believing that the tree beside the road caused the car to collide with it. For example, one victim of a rape told an interviewer:

There he was, a man who had the physical power to lock

me up and rape me, without any real threat of societal

punishment, telling me that I was oppressive because I

was a woman! Then he started telling me he could

understand how men sometimes go out and rape

women…. He looked at me and said, “Don’t make me

hurt you” as though I was, by not giving in to him,

forcing him to rape me. That’s how he justified the

whole thing. He kept saying women were forcing him to

rape them by not being there when he needed them

This is something that needs to be addressed very early in Schools, we SHOULD NOT TEACH WOMEN TO BE ASHAMED of a crime against them, we should CEASE SLUT SHAMING AND TRYING TO LIMIT WOMEN'S SEXUALITY and we should definitely start EMPHASISING WHAT AN AWFUL CRIME RAPE IS and teach people NOT. TO. RAPE.

This sounds like common sense, but as a woman, I see rape apology everywhere, I see it on the iinternet, I see it in films, I overhear conversations that imply a woman is a slut or a whore, I witness and have experienced strangers on the street and in passing cars making lewd, sexual comments to me and it's seen as something ''boys do'' it's seen as OKAY to say certain things to women.

If a girl is wearing a tank top, it's seen as okay to stare at her boobs and then make a comment on it and then the belief that this woman wouldn't be wearing such a thing if she DIDN'T want male attention, that she should feel COMPLIMENTED by a strange man telling her she has nice tits, that she doesn't have a sense of humour if she tells him to go fuck off.

This tumblr blog is a good and also quite depressing way of seeing all the sorts of 'casual' sexism that happen ALL THE TIME because it's seen as OKAY.

http://i-once-had-a-...-me.tumblr.com/

'I once had a guy tell me'

[Theda Baratheon]

i don't actually believe in a lot of radical feminism by the way, i don't like a lot of it at all.

but i felt that was an interesting and horrible but true quote to use.

[straits]

I once had my boyfriend tell our friend I would pay him back with a blow job (instead of money like I said I would) for merchandise from a concert.

did she dig said boyfriend out of a dumpster? holy shit

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

Now onto the link I wanted to post, it's from 6 weeks ago so some may have already seen it, a Rochester Economics professor ponders whether unconscious rape is wrong in a thought experiment considering public policy. He's of the opinion that perhaps things like the Stubenville case should actually be legal, since the only thing that caused the girl harm was seeing videos about it after the fact. She was unconscious, no harm done! Worst piece of rape apology I think I've read.

In all fairness, I do think that people should be able to engage in these kinds of thought experiments, even when about highly controversial topics, and they should be engaged on the level that they're presented. I think it's certainly possible to engage Steve Landsburg on the level he presented the issue, and still criticize both his premises and conclusions. But the article you linked, which amounts to multiple paragraphs of "rape is rape!" and "rape culture!" seems entirely besides the point - it's not a dialogue with Landsburg's piece (which I'm certainly not defending - I think it's pretty shallow and from his construction of the scenario, I'm not even sure he buys what he's selling. If only "physical harm" and not "emotional harm" matters, then why is he so fixated on hypothesizing scenarios where an unconscious rape victim is never able to discover the sexual assault? If the previously unconscious victim does remember, the victim is still only being emotionally harmed, and his premise seems to be that emotional harm doesn't really matter). It's a screed that says a lot about the author, but not a lot about Landsburg's piece, however poorly constructed the latter is.

[Tempra]

I saw this the other day:

When 25-year-old Portland, Oregon, resident Julia Hunsaker decided to marry her longtime boyfriend, Connor, she said forever to both him and his name, going from Julia Hunsaker to Julia Martin, with two simple words: “I do.”

Her decision would undoubtedly please the estimated 60 percent of the nation who believe women should take their husband’s name in marriage. But to a different subset of America—led by fiercely independent women’s groups like the Lucy Stone League—it’s a step in the wrong direction. After waging a war against the name-change game for the past two decades, women who kept their name, or hyphenated it, are watching the trend reverse before their own eyes.

The most comprehensive data on the subject is a 35-year retrospective titled "The Bride is Keeping Her Name," published by the Journal of Social Behavior in 2009. Looking at roughly 2,400 wedding announcements printed in The New York Times from 1971 through 2005, researchers began to see a decline in women keeping their maiden names, beginning as early as the ’90s. While roughly 23 percent retained their maiden name in that decade, by the 2000s, the number had dropped to just 18 percent. A more recent study, published in 2011 by Names: A Journal of Onomastics, illustrates that it’s the younger generation of brides leading the charge. Women who married between the ages of 35 and 39, the study found, were 6.4 times more likely to keep their maiden names than those who married between the ages of 20 and 24.

Thoughts? Is this a rejection of feminism or are women bowing to conformity? Are we a post-feminist society?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/witw/articles/2013/05/16/retro-wedding-craze-taking-the-husband-s-name.html

[Sci-2]

Thoughts? Is this a rejection of feminism or are women bowing to conformity? Are we a post-feminist society?

http://www.thedailyb...and-s-name.html

I like the final part of the piece, which notes how gay marriage helps advance feminism. It's a really good point, as both homophobia and sexism are rooted in superstition - unverifiable, and at times illogical beliefs whose foundations are vestigial artifacts from history.

As for the the taking of mens' last names, not sure it indicates much of anything in a broader context?

eta:

On the hypothetical of "harmless rape", I agree with Nestor. What I think was problematic was it was poorly worded and the use of a recent, real life case didn't help him.

What he says he was trying to do was note that it is hard to figure out the place of psychic harm in policy. It's actually an interesting question.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

As someone who ambivalently kept her maiden name, I understand the trend. I kept my name for three reasons (i) my husband said he thought it was weird to change a name that (at the time) I had used for 28 years (I knew there were reasons we are married :)), (ii) we work at the same firm, and I thought it was better to have our own separate names and, most importantly, (iii) I'm terminally lazy and all the paperwork to complete the change seemed like way too much. I completely understand the hassel factor now that I have children though. It's a total pain because on official documents, etc., my last name doesn't match theirs (there was no way on God's green earth that we were going to hyphenate - my last name is slavic, long, and semi-difficult to spell). I also understand Quidlen's amibivalence once you start to get questions from your children. I don't mind being Mrs. [X] for their school and I sign forms "Zabzie Reallastname (X)" so they know who the slips go with, but at some point we'll have to have the discussion. After all, it is relevant to them, being daughters. . . .

[Galactus]

I'm more curious about how someone has NOT encountered economists do this kind of commentary/thought experiment before. It's kind of what they do.

[litechick]

Karaddin, thank you for starting the thread. I appreciate your explanation of how you understood Raidne's remarks. I still need to see Raidne address it and explain what she means because I don't think that's what Raidne was saying.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

My wife took my last name when we married. I told her, before we married, I had no particular preference. She preferred my last name to her Maiden name so now she has mine.

[SilentSense]

I'm more curious about how someone has NOT encountered economists do this kind of commentary/thought experiment before. It's kind of what they do.

What? Not really. Moral philosophers, however, use thought experiments all the time and there's nothing wrong with it. They're really useful to clarify normative concepts and explore our intuitions about them.

[Galactus]

What? Not really. Moral philosophers, however, use thought experiments all the time and there's nothing wrong with it. They're really useful to clarify normative concepts and explore our intuitions about them.

Reduce various issues to questions of various forms of utility in order to propose public policy. They do that all the time.

[SilentSense]

welfare economists do that all the time, agreed, but they're not doing philosophy, which is what that econ prof is doing in his blog post. I see what you're getting at tho

[Sci-2]

welfare economists do that all the time, agreed, but they're not doing philosophy, which is what that econ prof is doing in his blog post. I see what you're getting at tho

Well, according to his clarification, he was going with the assumption that rape is always bad and thus the goal was not to make people think "hey, raping an unconscious person is okay" but rather "psychic harm seems to be something that should be considered in public policy".

I think his attempts to reason away bodily autonomy even in the context of his example weren't very good though. Should he be fired for this? No, no more than Singer should be fired for his logical arguments about killing newborns.

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

Well, according to his clarification, he was going with the assumption that rape is always bad and thus the goal was not to make people think "hey, raping an unconscious person is okay" but rather "psychic harm seems to be something that should be considered in public policy".

I think his attempts to reason away bodily autonomy even in the context of his example weren't very good though. Should he be fired for this? No, no more than Singer should be fired for his logical arguments about killing newborns.

Singer was exactly who I thought of first when I contemplated other academics posing highly controversial thought experiments. Of course, I tend to find Singer very persuasive, where I did not find Landsburg to be particularly persuasive at all - but everyone's mileage seems to vary on that one, as Singer has had a number of very public, very emotional protests, particularly by disabled people.

[Sci-2]

Singer was exactly who I thought of first when I contemplated other academics posing highly controversial thought experiments. Of course, I tend to find Singer very persuasive, where I did not find Landsburg to be particularly persuasive at all - but everyone's mileage seems to vary on that one, as Singer has had a number of very public, very emotional protests, particularly by disabled people.

Yeah, Singer can be irritating but some of his thought experiments are compelling, if for no other reason it makes people who disagree with him think about the origins of their own morality. I suspect it's more likely to convert people to an acceptance of metaphysical morality than into agreement with him, which probably isn't his goal.

I think Singer's argument extending abortion to infanticide, for example, is disturbing/repugnant but few people when first confronted with it can offer a good rebuttal.