Here’s the entirety of a recent post by an MRA who calls himself Snark:
Uh, dude, I think you’ve confused “feminists” with “Daleks.”
Our new friend Fidelbogen thought this was such a brilliant idea he devoted a post to it himself, declaring:
Such economy, such concision. …
Really now, we wouldn’t go far wrong to make our rhetoric revolve around this above all, and very little more. The saying is deceptively simple, for it goes deep and reaches into many corners.
It puts them on the spot, and nails them there.
I knew Fidelbogen was a bit of a pompous doofus, but this is a whole new level of stupidity for him. I don’t even know what to say about something this idiotic.
Also, check out the comments to Snark’s piece. There’s something about potatoes you kind of have to see to believe.
Your reality may be “that matriarchy does not exist” but my dictionary says otherwise. What you object to is my putting it in the context of THE Matriarchy, and refering to it in the same context as feminists do THE Patriarchy; as a cohesive and deliberate force of all evil in the world. I’m sure in your reality “all men are potential rapists,” but you probably would not agree that “all women are potential whores.” It’s the same thing. I would comment that the majority of rapists and whores were abused as children. But then again, pathological malnurturing doesn’t fit into your definition of reality.
Rutee: My previous comment was directed to you as well as this one. I made no such attempt to “force” through child protective legislation in the U.K. The Violence Against Children Act was introduced by American Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Bower several years ago and has languished in Judiciary Committee ever since. Since then American feminists have “forced” through the Violence Against Women Act and the White House Council for Women & Girls. I stand by my sentiments that if American feminists truly cared about child abuse the Violence Against Children Act would be the law of the land. They “forced” the others to be ratified.
Note, the word matriarchy exists as a definition of concept. The point being made is that matriarchy is not a societal force in the same way that patriarchy is. Both are abstract concepts, but looking at a basic distribution among law and wealth (Strong indicators of overall power in a society) we can note that they serve as indicators of patriarch system. Do note, that along intersection lines you can still have a system that disadvantages some men over others and it can remain a patriarchy (and could still be what we think of as a matriarchy), but when tracking for what places itself on the top of the hierarchy, and what has historically been the top of the hierarchy, patriarchy exists as a system where as matriarchy primarily exists as a concept. Individual and interactional levels can provide exception to this. But we are not describing that level of view, we are describing systemic. There are no strong indicators of a matriarch type system when looking along lines of classical power.
If we want to talk about what words exist in the dictionary, that’s another thing. As a practical matter in a societal context, there is no matriarchy; women are the disadvantaged class, not the advantaged one. There is not matriarchal oppression, because there is vanishingly little advantagement of women specifically and in general it is a side effect of the narratives that advantage men.
You don’t really understand the concept of patriarchy either. Color me unsurprised. Go read a book, you might learn something.
In that you do not understand the positions you oppose? I’m inclined to agree.
No, you insisted feminists do it. Your choice of words betrayed a lack of understanding over who possesses power in the USA, and it isn’t primarily feminists. I don’t mind that these bills are passed, if that’s the case. I would like them passed. I mind the implication that feminists control congress. THis is demonstrably untrue.
Flib: Thanks for the thoughtful comment. The dictionary definitions of matriarchy and patriarchy are pretty much the same. But I do agree with you that patriarchy is much more of a social system while matriarchy is more of a “concept” as you say, or a philosophy. That social philosophy traditionally denies maternal domestic violence even exits. Moms, like feminists, at least the true blue ones, just don’t abuse… ever. But those maternal concepts, or matriarchal philosophies depending on your semantics, are based on women having procreative power, which is undeniable. And procreation was a force of nature that largely created the so-called patriarchy. The pill changed all that. But it was none the less real power that is unrecognized by feminists, who prefer women think of themselves as powerless to patriarchal domination.
Rutee: American feminists have huge political lobby with big funding. If they made as big an issue for child abuse as they did for breast cancer the Violence Against Children Act would have been passed years ago.
For those in need of citations: I knew I still had this article from the American Journal of Psychiatry, which is published by the American Psychiatric Foundation. It’s the 2005 “Child Murder by Mothers: A Critical Analysis of the Current State of Knowledge and Research.”
ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/162/9/1578
Why do some links copy and paste, and turn blue like an actual link, and others not?
because they have http://in them
I disagree. I’d argue Patriarchy itself denies maternal domestic violence. We can’t argue that a matriarchal system would deny the idea of maternal domestic violence because we don’t have any strong examples of such a matriarchal system that has been developed. Where as we do have empirical evidence of a patriarchal system. Do note, I am not defending matriarchy, I’m saying it does not exist as a demonstrable power structure.
What you are describing above is a system that identifies individuals with a form of power (or lack of power) based on biological characteristics (Women have reproductive power). If a true matriarchy were to exist, I have no doubt that, by it’s definition, it may construct similar biologically determinist arguments, even if those ‘roles’ that were determined are not actually biologically deterministic. The issue comes up again that such a matriarchy does not exist in any form of primacy.
Take discussions of child rearing for instance (part of this ‘reproductive power’ concept), in the form of how gender roles were constructed (Sociology of Childhood) even though the basis we see constantly in this day and age (that is slowly changing due to economic shifts) is that “Women must be caretakers, and men must be breadwinners”. This is not something that is biologically determined. The primary child rearing duties was once that of the father for a period of time, until we had a massive change in the form of economics and ‘bread-winning’ was becoming more of a norm. The role shifted to women, and the discourse around it vastly changed (Cue a billion nature/nurture statements and a need to explain why all of a sudden it was ok for women to be primary caretakers). This is largely why the concept of “reproductive power” isn’t really considered a major power. The discourse around it has changed so much. This is also where much of the anthropological roots of women as caretakers in our western society comes from. The notion that women can’t abuse children also comes from this. I sadly don’t have my resources on me for this, they are back at home, but areas to investigate would be to look at how writings on children shifted from early 19th century to how they were in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Phillippe Aries goes into this discusses this in his book “Centuries of Childhood”, though he is a little dated at this point for contemporary discussions. Another thing to take note on the writings of the era on children, look at who wrote them and from what positions they were writing. Anthropologically, child rearing no longer became an aspect of male identity (Though there are other aspects of control) due to a change in economy, the discourse of the time de-emphasized the male role as it shifted to the nurture concept once work was no longer near home, yet men were still the primary earners. This is a thing born out of patriarchy, created because of an economic need.
Now, in the modern age, we have it thus that because of that shift, child-rearing is strongly identified as the purview of women, not men. We know that these roles are entirely socially constructed however. We also know why those roles changed due to economic shifts in the environment and power structures. In modern feminism, I’d say it seeks to deconstruct those roles of care-taking so that both men and women can be care-takers.
As for the feminist lobby, keep in mind when comparing it to the vast power exerted by business, prisons, and many other lobbyist groups, they pale in comparison. Having a lobby that is feminist is not indicative of a dominant power structure within law and government. I’d ask to do a quantitative count of the amount of money lobbies spend, who they are represented by, and how much does their stuff get passed to determine power. Ideologies differ, obviously, but when looking at systemic power, you look at what is considered the norm, not the exception.
Finally, as a constant reminder, I am speaking in systemic terms. I know for a fact that there are individual exceptions and experiences.
As a quick apology, I am quite busy right now. So my editing is atrocious. My bad >_<.
No apologies necessary. I’ll write more later. Give me a chance to let all this sink in. I appreciate your candor and well-reasoned diplomatic approach. Downright civilized compared to some of these posts.
Are you connected to reality at all? Do you not remember 2010 and 2011’s huge increase in anti-abortion laws throughout the country? Those are flatly unconstitutional and they still got pushed through. Planned Parenthood almost lost all federal funding. And feminists control congress and have a big huge lobby with superpowers? Whatever planet you’re from, take me there.
No, no you’re not connected to reality at all.
“huge increase in anti-abortion laws throughout the country…”
Does that mean some states passed laws against late term abortions or Republicans were trying to shut down Planned Parenthood? What else is new? They want to shut down PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts every chance they get too.
It’s ridicules to claim Feminists don’t have a powerful lobby and even more power in the media. Title 9 is ancient history at this point and feminist political clout has grown from there.
The word unicorn is in my dictionary, hence unicorns exist. The word communism is in my dictionary, hence the US is a communism, right?
It is bleeding obvious that the western world is not a matriarchal system. There are a few extant matriarchies, but there are very, very few statistical studies of specific social phenomena within them (though anthropologists who have done observational work tend to suggest that violent crimes of all sorts are very low in these cultures). The big colonial powers of both Europe and Asia were patriarchies, and they destroyed a variety of matriarchal cultures. Of pre-colonial matriarchies of non-isolated colonized peoples, we have some small collection of data on their cultures and legal systems, but rarely anything extensive. Due to hundreds (in some cases thousands) of years of colonialism and genocide, there are no large scale matriarchies left. This means that the issue of controlling for things like family group dynamics in tribal cultures makes comparisons difficult, unless one finds a similarly situated patriarchal tribal group (this is difficult, considering that contacted tribes have been usually exposed to major patriarchal world powers, often leading to cultural conflicts distinct from patriarchal tribes).
Also, RevSpinaker, quite conflating all “abuse” statistics with murder, intentional assault, etc. Women only make up the bulk of abuse death and injury perps when “neglect” deaths are considered. Let me give you an example of what could be considered a neglect death in a large number of US jurisdictions: Parent A is giving Child B a bath. B is three. A leaves B alone for less than four minutes to answer the door. B drowns in A’s absence. This could be prosecuted as a neglect death in many jurisdictions (things like income class and race make a big difference in which deaths are considered accidental and which are considered negligent as well, but that’s another point). While A was not being the most cautious/best parent in the world, A did not murder B. This is not the same issue as if A goes and stabs B with a butcher knife. And, only the person who is the primary caretaker of the kid is liable for neglect (with certain exceptions in some jurisdictions regarding leaving children with known violent felons, for example). So, the fact that women, who make up a good 90% of primary caretakers, are the majoriy of perps in neglect cases is sort of a no brainer (women do not neglect at disproportionatly high rates). Neglect is a pretty broad category (in some cases, too much truancy from school can be criminal neglect), and it is certainly not the same as intentional murder or assault in most cases.
If you are discussing murder and physical abuse deaths, fathers commit these crimes at similar or higher percentages as mothers (according to the department of justice’s 2001 report, more recent stats fall into the neglect inclusion trap again). Only if neglect homicides are included do you get dramatically higher rates of female perpetrators. The typical neglect perp lives below the poverty line, has no high school diploma (very young parents are neglect perps more often), and has a high incidence of depression. Putting higher penalties on neglect deaths is not effective, providing social and financial resources or education is a much better strategy.
I know, you hear abuse death and you think of someone beating their child do death, but that is not the majority of cases, and women do not dominate physical abuse death cases.
And my point remains that the opinions of Catholics, even influential ones, is not the same thing as the teaching of the Catholic Church as an institution. Pecunium’s claims were consistent, in that he was referring to the second one the whole time.
Here’s a social work journal piece on gender and child maltreatment that may be of interest to you. http://www.socwork.net/2006/1/articles/maychahal
And my point remains that the opinions of Catholics, even influential ones, is not the same thing as the teaching of the Catholic Church as an institution.
Both are still terrible.
darksidecat: See if your defense of “neglectful” mothers stands up for mine. My mom left me in the bath like that. I was little enough to swim back and forth a couple feet in the tub. She’d go off and do laundry until my fingers looked like prunes from soaking. I’d call for her and she wouldn’t come. Sometimes if I got real quiet she’d lear around the corner and then walk away. I don’t ever remember her touching me. If I drowned you bet she would have been crying crocodile tears and carrying on about going to the phone for a few minutes. She used to leave me to look at toys while she indulged her shopping fix for a couple hours at a time. The American Psychiatric Foundation study I linked earlier mentions women are being accused more because the evidence is there. Mothers are also more suspect these because of that growing body of evidence.
Also, men do kill more children than women. I never said they didn’t. Your stats are close to the CDC. Mothers and fathers murder children, I believe five or less years old, at about the same rate, 30% each (though some stats spike way higher for mothers if questionable “neglect” cases are classified murders). The other 30% are male paramours and 10% other, baby-sitters abductions… Mothers, however act on their own more often than natural fathers and are either tacitly involved with or are co-offenders in the majority of child murders.
The Canadian Child Care Federation classifies my mother’s behavior as “Target Abuse” when one child is singled out for abuse. I heard Joy Behar make a joke about “women who pick out one of their kids just to hate them.” When the joke fizzled and everyone looked uncomfortable she repeated, “you know, we’ve all seen that… when a mother picks out one of her kids just to hate them… Unfortunately, we HAVE all seen that. And it could feasibly be construed as evidence of how entrenched child abuse is in the matriarchal system. Women even make jokes about it on mainstream TV and no one complains. Accept people like me.
One point we do agree on. “Neglect” as a sentencing guideline is vague, ineffective and antiquated. I refer to it as “abandonist malnurturing” and if it results in the death of a child it should be considered a crime. Redefining and criminalizing “neglect” is the reason we need to ratify the Violence Against Children Act. And that’s exactly the reason Feminists are dead set against it.
darksidecat: Found this on the link you provided.
“In addition, a national incidence study found that in the US boys were significantly more likely to be reported as emotionally neglected and that rates for boy’s physical neglect increased greater than for girls over a 6 year period (Sedlak and Broadhurst 1996). Cawson et. al. (2000) hypothesise that this may be because boys are allowed more freedom than girls and are subject to less supervision, again reflecting cultural norms in gendered socialization (see also Straus et. al. 1998).”
“Emotional Neglect” sounds alot like abandonist malnurturing and target abuse to me. While hard to prove and impossible to prosectute, it needs to be included in discussions about domestic violence as criminal behavior. Even if it’s just for the emotional and psychological liberation of those effected by it.
At the moment, your arguments are doing a brilliant job of proving the feminist case. Please keep going.
There already are “criminal neglect” laws in the US, in every state. The exact limits of those laws varies state to state. But the US still has far higher rates of child death than other developed nations. In fact, nowhere else in the developed world has infant mortality stats as high as the US. And none of the psychological institutions or social work institutions advocate harsher penalties as the solution-they advocate education and resources. Because neglect perps generally lack just that-resources-they lack medical access, safe housing, educational resources (they typically do not have a high school level education), etc.
In the US, cooffenders are charged as primaries, so they count in the statistics. So you can’t just state that women who were not offenders “tacitly approved” of their children’s murders without sufficient evidence of that fact.
That might be criminal neglect, it might not. There are a lot of social issues around what is considered neglect and who gets charged. But there is no evidence that women who are caretakers neglect more than men who are caretakers (the opposite, in fact). There is no reason to be more suspicious of female parents than male parents. Male parents commit murder and physical abuse in comparable numbers. Male parents sexually abuse in far higher numbers. You are grasping at straws here to try and make women the scapegoat for all child abuse, rather than just the abuse they actually perpetrate.
Again, you are not living in a matriarchy. Acts of women in “women’s sphere” positions of a patriarchy do not suddenly become matriarchal acts. Considering that most recorded matriarchies involve kinship group models different from the “nuclear family” model, projecting acts of women within a patriarchal society’s nuclear family roles social dynamics becomes more absurd.
Emotional and psychological abuse and neglect are not grouped in with physical abuse and neglect in the study. Emotional neglect does not include starving.
“Similar patterns can be found in relation to ‘emotional abuse’. Intra-familial childhood violence studies find that emotional or psychological violence is more prevalent amongst girls but that if extra familial emotional violence is included the rates are high for both boys and girls, who seem to be affected in almost equal proportions (see Table 7).”
“In addition, a national incidence study found that in the US boys were significantly more likely to be reported as emotionally neglected….”
Notice the distinction? Boys are more likely to not receive affection and support from parents, girls are more likely to be proactively attacked (metaphorically) emotionally and psychologically by parents.
tatjna: I’ve never heard a feminist use the term pathological malnurturing because, to my knowledge, I coined the phrase and I am not a feminist. I’m not an anti-feminist but will be if confronted with misandrist harangue-banging. And I’m not an MRA, or MRM, or LGBT or ROTC. If you need to categorize me lets say I’m a CRA, Children’s Rights Advocate. And that’s no bollocks. That’s a great word. Is that feminist term? Canadian?
darksidecat:
“There already are “criminal neglect” laws in the US, in every state. The exact limits of those laws varies state to state. But the US still has far higher rates of child death than other developed nations.”
As we agreed earlier “neglect” is vague. “Criminal neglect” like “felony neglect” sound more like oxymorons than sentencing guidelines. And the fact that there are no clear standards and laws vary state to state is all the more reason to ratify the Violence Against Children Act.
And bollocks to you too!
darksidecat: The theory does not just apply to broad societal scenarios like a government position, but to all situations, such as interpersonal relationships. Read Hugo Schwyzer’s blog if you need an example of feminists applying it like that. According to the Child Maltreatment 2009 report shows that mothers account for the majority of child fatalities, and most of the fatalities include a combination of neglect and some other type of abuse.
Rutee Katreya: Some of us develop faster than others. One person’s disprivilege is not another person’s privilege. Your rape analogy is off. This is closer: do you think that a rich woman has power and privilege over a poor man as he rapes her? If she does, why does she not use her power and privilege to stop the rape? That is the fallacy and contradiction of “patriarchy” argument. If the power and privilege only applies in the broadest sense, then no individual person possesses power and privilege over others. If power and privilege do exist on an individual level, as feminists argue, then all males, regardless of their social status, are always privileged and empowered over all women. If person’s privilege and power stops applying at any point, you must explain why this could not happen broadly.
Bagelsan: My contention is only that feminism caused my aunt’s thinking, which then led to her actions. Curiously, you do not disagree with this. You stated, “if anything I’d say she abused despite her feminism”, implying that feminism would normally affect her behavior for the better. Look, I understand that no feminist wants to believe feminism can cause harm, but you cannot have it both ways. Either feminism affects a person’s behavior or it does not. If can prevent a person from being violent, then can also cause a person to become violent.
That…makes no sense whatsoever. “We know ideology can influence people, so if Mormonism can persuade people that Joseph Smith was a prophet, it can convert people to THE EXACT OPPOSITE of that belief and become athiests. It’s all influence, right? RIGHT?”
The stated position of feminism is anti-abuse, which is what Bagelsan said in the first place.