Misogyny and its cause. (accuse, fence, party, abuse)
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What I know I can do is to work on the change in my own head, and to share ideas and speak to others whenever I can. Walking AND talking the talk to try and be the change I want to see in the world.
I feel some pretty deep stuff about the plight of men of color in America. I've seen (and been disgusted by) automatic suspicions and mistrust of black males, by white people I've known. When Trayvon Martin was killed, all I could think of is how I am a mother and my own sons were on the threshold of their teen years and it was so...automatic...for me to react to that from just a place of shared humanity. He was a kid, and his mother was grieving him. That one hit me really hard.
And what has felt like a punch in the gut ever since, is how much contortion I've heard white people do to try and justify and excuse these cases. I don't understand the lack of compassion. I just don't.
I wish I could project my remembered experiences on a wall like a movie to show other people sometimes, maybe that sounds crazy, but... I wish I could show people about my time as a poor person in Cincinnati. Because I first lived in a poor white area. I was pregnant, like "pregnant out to there" pregnant, and I was walking to a clinic in the neighborhood for a regular checkup. A group of white boys (who were not in school why? I don't know) came out of nowhere and chased me, throwing bricks and chunks of concrete at me and laughing. I didn't know them. They didn't know me. I was just a target for them, for no other reason than unrestrained juvenile savagery.
Then I moved to a different area, on the edge of a neighborhood called "Over The Rhine." It has since been gentrified, but at the time, in the late 90s and right before the "race riots" it was considered to be one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the entire country. It was almost completely a black neighborhood. I walked through it many times, with my baby in the stroller. Went to the mission to get free food, tied the plastic bags to the stroller and walked back up Vine St. to get home. I never had anyone threaten me, attack me, or treat me badly. I showed courtesy to others and they showed courtesy to me. Sure, people asked me for change, if I had it, I shared it. Offered to sell me drugs, which I just politely smiled and said, "no thanks, man! Hope you have a good day, though!" Never had an issue.
How can a race with so much blood on its hands, my own, have people who think that other ones are somehow degenerate or criminal, it's pretty damn well beyond me. Only they have bought what they were sold, I guess.
But I think that it does illustrate how systemic power generates these feelings of entitlement that breed hostility in certain situations. I personally believe that what POC in America deal with is a lot more serious than what most white women are dealing with. I think in my day to day, I'm most likely to run into misogyny as just words on the internet. The odds of someone feeling like they might have to shoot me, even with a psycho ex lurking in the wings of my life, are not very high.
I can't rep you, so I'll simply thank you for this post and the empathy therein. :-)
I think that's what is missing in a lot of guys today, both on the internet and IRL, when it comes to the issues that women deal with on a daily basis. A lack of empathy to begin with because they haven't experienced it, followed by defensiveness where they feel they have to take up for themselves. If only I could wave a magic wand and make everybody (guys especially) step out of their own perspective.
Oh, definitely agreed. Athena/Athens being a classic example of this. There are historical examples of positively regarded female deities that reflect a more generally positive regard for women in those societies, but yeah, worshipping female deities in and of itself isn't automatically an indicator of a lack of misogyny. But I would argue that the reverse - eliminating female elements from a religion - does almost always indicate some pretty deeply seated misogynistic tendencies in a culture.
There's so much diversity in the human experience. It's really fascinating.
The greek mythologies also are replete of everyone raping everyone, particularly the female goddesses. We cannot draw any conclusions about how that affected the adherents of the religion. I think people see divine beings follow different laws and culture from mortals. One reason why a goddess who is worshipped is not the same as a women and their bodies.
This is pseudo-anthropology...the kind of "just so" story that sounds truthy until you actually dig into the topic.
In very short, the archaeological record actually there was less gender division of roles prior to the development of settled farming. In migratory or nomadic hunter-gatherer societies women generally don't have more than one small child at a time, allowing them to be more mobile. It was agriculture and the associated advent of women spending much of their lives pregnant and/or nursing, with larger families including more small children, that placed huge practical limitations on the time and movement of the average woman. Off the top of my head, agriculture was "invented" maybe 13,000 years ago, but we're looking at more like 10,000-8,000 years ago before it really caught on as something sizeable groups of people could do year-round in areas like the Fertile Crescent, along the Nile, and in the Yellow River Valley, and later than that before it "took root" (haha, pun) in other parts of the globe that weren't as easy to farm...much much later in certain regions. Not that thousands of years isn't a long time, but you're way off on scale.
Also, it's patently absurd to think that women (and others too old or young to roam) didn't also "band together" to take care of tasks nearer to home. Prior to the invention of the sort of equipment that makes farming and domestic tasks less labor intensive, collaboration was absolutely crucial for survival.
I would also caution that men and women having different roles did not automatically indicate endemic misogyny in all societies. You do, as a natural consequence of early rulers being mostly warlords of one sort or another, see mostly men as national figureheads, but that doesn't mean men in general were correspondingly so dominant in all societies, nor that the female contribution was was automatically considered lesser, let alone that women were looked down upon. There are plenty of cultures across history that venerate powerful female deities, celebrate the feminine, place women in areas of influence and/or authority, feature matrilineal succession, etc. There's a lot of variety in history beyond, say, the Abrahamic or Athenian legacies that currently dominate so much of the world's thinking.
Okay, so please explain why for thousands of years women never banded together, beat men and took over? If women are so great and just as capable as men why didn't they just take over? I know women hate to hear it and won't admit it, but there is a reason men always ruled until VERY recently.
Okay, so please explain why for thousands of years women never banded together, beat men and took over? If women are so great and just as capable as men why didn't they just take over? I know women hate to hear it and won't admit it, but there is a reason men always ruled until VERY recently.
Have you ever watched Naked and Afraid, or looked at how people who currently live in hunter-gather societies behave to one another? In survival situations, the last thing anybody is ever thinking about is banding together and beating anyone. They are thinking about SURVIVAL, and that can only happen when they cooperate with one another.
In most of human history even well after the agricultural revolution, life was tedious, filled with disease, and short. Women were lucky to even survive a single childbirth, and luckier still if they had 1 or 2 children survive into adulthood. This was a world where you would have been thrilled to live to the ripe old age of 35.
Again, to answer your question, the reason women and men didn't just band up against each other and have pointless hand-to-hand combat wars is because they were too busy COOPERATING with each other, in order to not die. Had they done what you are suggesting, you wouldn't be a live today to even ask the question.
Not to mention the fact that all it takes to keep a woman not only so busy/distracted that she doesn't give a hot damn who's in charge, AND to make her willing to make any personal sacrifice you can imagine just about, is to have her pregnant and raising an infant.
I did not want to be a mother or a wife, I was actually very much opposed to the whole idea. But I knew in under 24 hours that I had conceived, and the hormonal insanity that followed turned me into a different person. I was in that moment and thenceforth, until my kids were well into their teens, devoted to their needs entirely.
I accepted that I had to sacrifice my own happiness, for a bunch of years, to be wed to the man who fathered them, though I didn't even like him much by that point, to do whatever it took to TRY to make a good and safe environment for them to grow up in.
Under those circumstances, which are largely chemical and involuntary, and often can override one's reason, a Mother is not going to put her energy into "banding together and beating men and taking charge." Y'all fellas want to swagger around and call yourselves fancy names and lord it over each other, be our guest. We've got things to do, like feeding our children.
At least...that's how I imagine it.
But something has shifted in a big way where parenting kids is concerned, too. And it has altered the landscape, for gendered and family dynamics. In my great grandparents' time, and even my grandparents' time if you were poor especially, you had lots and lots of kids. Some of them would die. It was fairly understood. But you had as many as you could, and you acquired as many animals as you could, too, because kids would, as soon as they could learn how, become part of the family's labor force. And animals were practical, they were livestock and working animals.
Kids now, are more "liability" than "asset" to a family unit. They will not be working and contributing to the household's needs for the most part, they will be protected, helicoptered over, showered with toys and it costs many thousands of dollars to raise them. Most people, if they have animals, have pampered pets that also cost more than they contribute, at least in practical/material terms. I'm quite sure I've spent at least hundreds of thousands of dollars on my two sons, and I am not a rich person, never have been.
So in a way, women now have to be part of the workforce just to PAY for the privilege of raising children. And parents can't even count on the kids to take care of us when we're old anymore.
It's pretty incredible when you think about how much has changed for humanity in like...just a few generations. So I think that it's reasonable to say that as our roles, our society, and our needs are all shifting, adjustments are needed.
Which is why sometimes I look at a lot of this, "Well what did the cavemen do?" talk as...irrelevant, at best. Just because something was wired into our psyches at the dawn of humankind, does not mean that we cannot change it and should not try, or excuse primitive behavior in modern people who know better.
I stated, earlier in the thread, that I think modern misogyny is rooted in the entitlement and unwillingness to share power. I think this is something that most people would agree with and that getting into debates about the gender or demographic composition of paleolithic hunting parties, while interesting to study, won't really solve the problem of sexism TODAY.
Honest question, what then is the solution? If patriarchal sexism and oppression is rooted in the unwillingness to share power, entitlement, and males in society being raised to "be tough" "stop crying" or "man up", what do you do about it??....What would inherently make to power holders give up their advantages to those who have less? What would be the inherent incentive for them to do so, outside of the argument that they should because it's morally right? We ALREADY agree that gender, racial, and social equality is right but the powerholders and many of their wives and children don't care because they love having those advantages.
Legislation. Punitive laws that would hold companies and institutions that discriminates in hiring and promotion policies accountable; enforce and prosecute sexual harassment, rape and hate crimes, and domestic violence; educate the police force about gender violence and domestic abuse; control, ban, guns.
We dont wait for minds to change, that is not happening. We change the mind set with education, calling out misogyny by what it is.
Not to mention the fact that all it takes to keep a woman not only so busy/distracted that she doesn't give a hot damn who's in charge, AND to make her willing to make any personal sacrifice you can imagine just about, is to have her pregnant and raising an infant.
I did not want to be a mother or a wife, I was actually very much opposed to the whole idea. But I knew in under 24 hours that I had conceived, and the hormonal insanity that followed turned me into a different person. I was in that moment and thenceforth, until my kids were well into their teens, devoted to their needs entirely.
I accepted that I had to sacrifice my own happiness, for a bunch of years, to be wed to the man who fathered them, though I didn't even like him much by that point, to do whatever it took to TRY to make a good and safe environment for them to grow up in.
Under those circumstances, which are largely chemical and involuntary, and often can override one's reason, a Mother is not going to put her energy into "banding together and beating men and taking charge." Y'all fellas want to swagger around and call yourselves fancy names and lord it over each other, be our guest. We've got things to do, like feeding our children.
At least...that's how I imagine it.
But something has shifted in a big way where parenting kids is concerned, too. And it has altered the landscape, for gendered and family dynamics. In my great grandparents' time, and even my grandparents' time if you were poor especially, you had lots and lots of kids. Some of them would die. It was fairly understood. But you had as many as you could, and you acquired as many animals as you could, too, because kids would, as soon as they could learn how, become part of the family's labor force. And animals were practical, they were livestock and working animals.
Kids now, are more "liability" than "asset" to a family unit. They will not be working and contributing to the household's needs for the most part, they will be protected, helicoptered over, showered with toys and it costs many thousands of dollars to raise them. Most people, if they have animals, have pampered pets that also cost more than they contribute, at least in practical/material terms. I'm quite sure I've spent at least hundreds of thousands of dollars on my two sons, and I am not a rich person, never have been.
So in a way, women now have to be part of the workforce just to PAY for the privilege of raising children. And parents can't even count on the kids to take care of us when we're old anymore.
It's pretty incredible when you think about how much has changed for humanity in like...just a few generations. So I think that it's reasonable to say that as our roles, our society, and our needs are all shifting, adjustments are needed.
Which is why sometimes I look at a lot of this, "Well what did the cavemen do?" talk as...irrelevant, at best. Just because something was wired into our psyches at the dawn of humankind, does not mean that we cannot change it and should not try, or excuse primitive behavior in modern people who know better.
Good point. Until recently, most chores took a long time if you owned a small farm. It wasn’t like you could just pop a few loads of wash into the washing machine and call it a day. Laundry was a full-day or even 2-day affair (one for washing and one for drying/ironing). You were probably growing and preserving all the foods you ate other than some basic dry goods that you made into bread, etc.
Now these tasks can generally be outsourced. Go to the store to buy premade meals and clothes, send out our laundry, and hire someone to come out once a week to clean. You don’t have to care for an animal or multiple animals just to have transportation.
Even though men were in power, for the most part, people had very little power. A lot of what we see and learn about in school is just the top of society- the people in power- but far more people were working on small farms or doing other fairly dirty work in cities and living in very cramped housing. I often watch the historical reenactment reality shows, and they are pretty enlightening about how hard. The work is for both the men and the women.
I think this is something that most people would agree with and that getting into debates about the gender or demographic composition of paleolithic hunting parties, while interesting to study, won't really solve the problem of sexism TODAY.
You don't think it makes sense to look back at the features of societies that had more misogyny, versus the features of societies that had less misogyny, in an attempt to glean a greater understanding of what conditions and practices can foster greater misogyny (in order to ameliorate or avoid them) and which conditions and practices can foster greater equality and amity (in order to promote them)? So many generations have engaged in so many trial-and-error attempts at forming functional and stable civilizations throughout history - IMO it behooves us to at least attempt to learn from their examples.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gerobime227
Okay, so please explain why for thousands of years women never banded together, beat men and took over? If women are so great and just as capable as men why didn't they just take over?
Equating "greatness" with a willingness to kill and oppress is at best an error in thinking. What women have fought for is equal rights and equal opportunities, a better society, not a society that's just as bad, but in a different way.
You don't think it makes sense to look back at the features of societies that had more misogyny, versus the features of societies that had less misogyny, in an attempt to glean a greater understanding of what conditions and practices can foster greater misogyny (in order to ameliorate or avoid them) and which conditions and practices can foster greater equality and amity (in order to promote them)? So many generations have engaged in so many trial-and-error attempts at forming functional and stable civilizations throughout history - IMO it behooves us to at least attempt to learn from their examples.
Theoretical debates, on message boards, about the demographic representation of paleolithic hunting parties hundreds of thousands of years ago will do absolutely NOTHING to move forward the agenda for gender, racial, social or economic inequality.
Not a single act of legislation will be put on the President's desk for signature, Not a single Executive Order will survive a challenge in the Supreme Court, Not one CEO or board will be forced to promote more minorities or women, Not one racist cop will stop putting their knees on the necks of handcuffed black men, Not a single racist cop will stop shooting unarmed black men and get cover from internal affairs departments, Not one woman will be any safer from sexual harassment on the street from a sexist idiot, Not one woman will be any safer from sexual harassment or improper touching from a man in power (like a New York Governor or a 42nd, 45th, or 46th President), Not a single person of color or woman will see their salaries fairly increased, and Not a single greedy corporation will be forced to pay all of their workers a fair wage as a result of these arguments.
I personally, as do others here, have to live with the consequences of racial and gender inequality everyday of my life. I want to see change NOW, not after my body has turned to dust! Nobody, in congress or in the courts, care a hill of beans about who threw which spear into which wholly mammoth. No rich lobbyist gives a hoot about arguments over ice age hunting party demographics.
The only way to move the ball forward TODAY is to go out and fight for it. Protests, even destructive ones, are immensely more effective than ivory tower paleontological debates. Always have been, always will be.
Last edited by SerlingHitchcockJPeele; 08-06-2021 at 08:15 AM..
]Legislation.[/b] Punitive laws that would hold companies and institutions that discriminates in hiring and promotion policies accountable; enforce and prosecute sexual harassment, rape and hate crimes, and domestic violence; educate the police force about gender violence and domestic abuse; control, ban, guns.
We dont wait for minds to change, that is not happening. We change the mind set with education, calling out misogyny by what it is.
I admire your spirit!
This will be a difficult task in a political environment where we can't even pass an infrastructure bill or a agree on a budget proposal. The House, Senate and Executive Branch are all controlled by a single party and they still can't get anything done thanks to Manchin, Sinema, Tester, and other red state Democrats. The Republicans, as you know, will not cooperate at all especially on anything dealing with guns. Things like this are much easier to accomplish at the state level, depending upon the make up of their legislature.
I don't say this to upset anybody or take the fire out of anyone's belly, I'm simply acknowledging the reality in which we live now. People just have to keep making noise and protesting, especially against red states Democrats who won't kill the filibuster.
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