I swear, sometimes I wonder if the entire Men’s Rights Movement is an elaborate hoax. Our old friend Fidelbogen weighs in today with a typically pompous post on the cutting-edge issue of women’s suffrage, posted with the almost-too-good-to-be-true headline: Women Couldn’t Vote.That Was “Oppression?” If I didn’t know better, I’d be tempted to dismiss it as half-baked satire – except that FB is serious, deadly serious. (And deadly dull, too, most of the time, but I’ll try to keep this snappy.)
Fidelbogen’s thesis:
It annoys me to hear the feminists say that women were “oppressed” because they didn’t have the voting franchise in olden days. Excuse me. . . oppressed? I would take exception to the semantics in this case, for is not a bit clear to me that what was happening ought to be called by such a heinous name.
While most people are either for or against women having the right to vote – though I’ve never met any of the latter group outside of MRA blogs – FB bravely declares himself “a third way thinker upon this subject.”
Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen, because Fidelbogen is going to get all philosophical on us:
I would submit that women’s historical lack of voting rights was neither a good thing nor a bad thing. Rather, it was a morally indifferent state of affairs, based on a cultural consensus that was shared by men and women alike in the past.
Hey, it was the olden days. People wore silly hats and watched silent movies and no one had iPhones.
Our ancestors lived in a very, very different world than we do, and their cultural norms were very, very different from ours, yet undoubtedly befitting to their world — a world mysterious and unknown to us nowadays. Who are we to judge?
I mean, really, how dare we offer any sort of moral judgment of anything that happened in the past. The Holocaust? Stalin’s purges? Hey, it was the mid-twentieth century – people were just into that shit back then.
Well, FB doesn’t mention either Hitler or Stalin, but he definitely considers women’s former lack of voting rights to be just one of those things that, hey, people were into back then:
[W]as it really, inherently, such a horrible thing after all, that women could not vote? … Why should it even matter? Did the average woman in those days honestly feel that voting was “all that”? Seriously. . . who are we to judge the men and women of past times for their very different way of life which we can no longer entirely fathom?
And besides, most men had been denied the vote earlier, so even if it matters and it totally doesn’t, what’s the big deal if the dudes in charge decided to deny the vote to the ladies for a while longer? As FB puts it:
[W]as it really such an unspeakable crime that the female population couldn’t always go to the polls during that comparatively trifling span of years?
Or is that entire concept nothing but feminist historiography, meant to wring pathos out of history for present-day political purposes by the device of retrojection? That would certainly conform to standard feminist tricknology, wouldn’t it?
Seriously. Those feminologicalnists are totally retrojecting the fuck out of the pastological period using their standard sneakyfulogicalnistic tricknology.
And besides, even though we’re not supposed to judge the past, and even thought that whole denying-the-ladies-the-vote thing was totally a “morally indifferent thing which ought to concern us very little,” FB thinks that maybe it was actually sort of, you know, cool.
I believe a case might be constructed that it was a positive good in the context of those times.
FB decides to leave that case unmade, and returns to the whole “who the fuck cares” argument.
Once upon a time, women didn’t have the voting franchise because societal norms found nothing amiss about such an arrangement. Then times changed, norms changed, and women were admitted to the franchise. That’s all. And women were never, at any point along that general story-line, “oppressed.”
Besides, the whole idea of “rights” is, well, just like, an opinion, man.
Furthermore, women were never at any time deprived of any rights. You see, women’s “right” to vote simply did not exist in the first place — or not during the period when the so-called deprivation occurred. I mean that “rights” are only a figment. Only a mentation. Only a notion. Only a construct. Rights do not exist in their own right. They are not some mystical pure essence which hangs in the air all by itself — they must be conjured into existence by a strictly human will-to-power, and fixed by law or custom.
And so, if the dudes of the world denied the ladies these “rights,” well, uh, it was “morally indifferent” yet also probably good for some reason.
In conclusion, shut your pie holes, ladies:
So in conclusion, I wish that second and third-wave feminists would shut the hell up with their dishonest, self-laudatory rhetoric about “the vote”. They need to quit tooting on that rusty old horn. It is getting really, really old.
Well, unless they’re this lady. She’s actually pretty good at tooting a horn.
Hey Simon, I have A Modest Proposal for you… Read up a bit about Ireland under British rule.
Damn you, Blockquote!
Why are MRA’s such segregationists?
??????
Ants of other species, you ignoramus. And the only way to really demonstrate adaptability in a particular change is a fitness test, which is a fucking monstrous thing to do to humans, not to mention amazingly difficult if not entirely impossible.
No shit, sherlock. It’s an argument against the naturalistic fallacy.
Okay. As a humanist it’s fucking easy, so I fail to see why I should care about your point.
Not generally a thing in Radical Feminism.
I’m not gonna play with Toy Soldier; his solipsism is a huge bother.
… I hate to say this, but NWOSlave was right about something. The Middle Class is dying. However, he’s hilariously wrong about why. According to any evaluation grounded in reality, it has nothing to do with “entitlements” as he means them, or women. It’s because of income inequality and wealth inequality. A tiny fraction of the population (mostly white men, incidentally) control most of the money and assets, and keep them tied up in aristocracy rather than allowing them to circulate and benefit all. What wealth does leave the top 1% simply isn’t enough to sustain the middle or lower classes. This is a prime reason the economy is collapsing, and why raising taxes on the rich to force their wealth back into circulation is a good idea by any reality-based standard.
Incidentally, it’s also why killing the estate tax was one of the stupidest ideas in the history of stupid — it almost solely affects the wealthiest of the wealthy, putting some reins on intergenerational transfer of income. It was one of the only checks on our Aristocratic class. (because that’s what they are, even if we don’t like to say it) Unless you think Aristocrats wielding all the wealth and political power in the US is totally awesome, killing it was a horrifying move, and it would have been far better for the health of our economy and democracy to raise it.
He should ask Ms. Dorothy Cooper if she feels oppressed that she apparently isn’t going to be allowed to vote. (link below) She’s a 95-year-old African-American woman in Tennessee who has no state ID, so she went to the DMV to get one. She had her birth certificate, her voter’s registration card, her lease, and a rent receipt, but because her birth certificate didn’t match her married name (of course) and she couldn’t find her marriage certificate, she was not allowed to get an ID. So, without that, she can’t vote in November.
http://www.projectvote.org/blog/2011/10/elderly-black-woman-denied-voter-id-in-tenn/
I saw an interview with her and what struck me most was that she said that even in the 1950s and 1960s when Southern states were often doing their best to prevent African-Americans from voting, she voted. So, that new photo-ID law has managed to disenfranchise her in 2011.
But I think the Republicans who are voting these laws in know that. It’s a feature, not a bug.
@Rutee:
Athens is more than 3 millenia old; Town councils have played an important political role since the medieval period in Europe. I respect that we must keep our eyes on the big picture in examining history, but at what point is the cutoff for ‘recent’, in the context of human history if it is not 1 or even 3 millenia?
Yes, there are examples of democracy going back several millennia, but at any given point in time a very small minority of people lived in a democratic society. Depending on the definition, the United States has an arguable claim to be the world’s oldest surviving democracy.
You’re kind of slow on the uptake, ain’tcha? You do realize that those elites played divide and conquer, and part of that was on gender, right? It wasn’t a conspiracy; conspiracies are done quietly. It was vocal, vociferous agreement amongst the overwhelming majority of men that kept the system in place.
Conspiracy was perhaps a bad choice of words. I didn’t mean that it was done covertly. But I’m not convinced that an overwhelming number of men kept the system in place. So an overwhelming number of men supported a system in which 80% of men couldn’t vote? Further, since universal suffreage generally followed universal male suffrage by 20 years or so, one could argue that newly enfranchised males must have supported general enfranchisement. Also, I don’t appreciate the insulting words “slow on the uptake” – it’s rude and you’re a hypocrite if you are at all concerned about ableism.
Troll haet Affirmative Action, because he’s ignorant. Wow. Wrongly assumed that I hate affirmative action, and then conclude that I’m ignorant because of said assumption. Classy. So who is the troll and who is ignorant?
There should be steps taken to alleviate ableist discrimination, class discrimination, racial discrimination, gender discrimination, heterosexist discrimination, cissexist discrimination, etc. Some of that is going to be temporary, limited advantages of oppressed peoples. It shouldn’t just be women who are aided; that would be grossly stupid and wrong. Just because you’re an idiot who wants to keep things the same doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t see room for improvement. I fully support most of these steps. I don’t like being called an idiot (ableism again?), nor do I want to keep things the same. I want men and women to have the same opportunities and responsibilities.
My issue is that I feel that women are substantially less oppressed than is generally accepted. Specifically, I feel that women are undervalued for what they do, and men are undervalued for who they are. So men are overvalued in certain workplaces (eg. finance, construction, engineering), as political leaders, as academics. Women, being more valued as people, get better health care, lower criminal sentences for given crimes, live longer, aren’t expected to take risk to protect others, are more valued as friends, and are viewed less suspiciously on the street. Since men and women are advantaged in different areas, efforts to combat sexism should be targeted at areas where there is a legitimate issue. Steps should be taken to value men more as people and value women more for their capabilities. Under my view, if you simply say that men are advantaged in all ways, then you will be exacerbating wrongs if you take steps to reduce female prison sentences, or increase health care spending on women.
@gjdj: I think the evidence you put forward for your “women are more valued as people” argument are perfectly consistent with another explanation, which is “women are more valued *as property* or men reproduction machines”, and that alternative explanation is more in line with other significant pressures in society, such as backlashes against reproductive rights and the fact that women’s sexuality is still, generally, considered to be public property.
Women usually aren’t expected to take risks for others because that would put in danger their patriarchal use as baby making machines.
A few more: After OSHII’s comment, I am now going to refer to NWOSlave as “The MRA From Earth.” *Still wants/needs to watch that movie.*
Does anyone actually know just what The MRA From Earth was claiming a zero sum game is? I could only figure out that bit of incoherence well enough to establish that it wasn’t what a zero sum game actually is.
I am so glad that other people are tackling Toysoldier and Simon. The MRA From Earth’s arguments, despite all their incoherence, occasionally brushed past reality closely enough for me to find a point from which to argue against them. Toysoldier’s and Simon’s are off somewhere in the fifth circle of imaginary space.
If you meant ‘universal sufferage’, you should have said that.
So? Even if true, that doesn’t mean democracy is new, that means governments fall.
YES! Learn something! The perfect example of this is how the rich planters of the South used black people against poor white people! As long as they were placated with the knowledge that someone else had it worse, people would frequently go along with this!
If you were stupid, I suppose you could make that argument, except a 20 year gap is nearly a full generation. If you wanted to make the argument that *Newly enfranchised* males supported general enfranchisement, you would need a substantially smaller gap.
This may be. It’s also the only part I care about; if I had a problem with being rude by insulting you, do you think I’d insult you?
Walks like a duck… Quacks like a duck….
But no, I thought you were ignorant before that. You could have been a jackass, but the arguments you present best support ‘ignorant’. I mean really, “Do you really think men supported the system that kept them from voting”? If you’re USian I can’t really blame you for having shitty history classes, but it doesn’t make you less ignorant.
Then you would be wrong, because they are moreso. The ‘party line’ in general is that women have almost entirely finished catching up. It’s ludicrous how far we have to go while people think we’re ‘almost done’ or even living in a ‘post-gender’ society.
Statement assumes facts not in evidence. Go look at how health care is biased for men; that women live longer is apparently rooted in biology, given how the deck is stacked against us at the doctor’s office.
From sexist judges; it’s not because women are ‘better people’, you idiot; a high criminal sentence equates to a higher degree of responsibility in the judge’s mind. It means they think women are *LESS RESPONSIBLE*.
…only by women who are worried about sexual assault (Which to be fair is a number of us)
Stop torching that straw man, what did he do to you? Straw men are cute 🙁
Well, as The MRA From Earth acknowledged, his only arguments are (deliberately) logical fallacies, so his concepts are not going to be amenable to logic. However, his conception of “zero-sum game” is apparently “I can always one-up you.” Or rather, “I always will attempt to one-up you whenever you try to claim women have been oppressed because I cannot accept that.” It’s an exercise in denial at its most basic and childish level.
And yes, I realize that still doesn’t make sense.
Moewicus: I’ve pretty much given up on NWO’s logic in any way resembling Earth logic.
Pregnancy is taking risk for another. The risks of dying of complications from pregnancy are lower in some places but it is still not zero. I’ve heard an abortion has less risk than taking a pregnancy to term. Some would have women have no choice on whether or not to risk their life taking a pregnancy to term. Seems like a draft to me…
The MRA From Earth seems to have confused the concept of the zero-sum game with the Oppression Olympics. And he really, really wants that gold medal. He’s like a contestant on Queen For a Day or something.
BlackBloc, but women are expected to take risks for others. The US Congress is considering the ‘Protect Life (sic)’ Act that would allow Catholic hospitals to refuse to abort a fetus even if it means that not having the abortion will kill the woman. Women are regularly expected to risk their health and lives by pregnancy and childbirth.
Biology prevents men from having the same risks, but increased healthcare for women and access to contraception and abortion reduce those risks. But gjdj appears against that, since he believes women “get better health care” already.
I won’t even go into the number of women who are in the medical profession risking their health and lives, female police officers and firefighters, women in the military. MRAs note the lower percentages of women in the last three jobs, but neglect to mention how many hurdles women (and often minority men) had to overcome to get access to those jobs.
An aside. I no longer have to worry about pregnancy and I don’t know if I would have had an abortion if I ever had an unwanted pregnancy. But to me, to value the life of a fetus over that of the woman carrying it shows how little women’s lives matter to a lot of people.
Wait, what? NSWATM does silencing tactics? Fuck, man, if the bloggers at NSWATM wanted to silence people who disagreed with us, we’d have banned half our commentariat already. As long as someone seems to be making a good-faith effort to contribute, we let them, no matter how much we disagree, you know?
Trust me, if I were interested in silencing people, I’d have way fewer blog-related headaches.
@BlackBloc:
I think the evidence you put forward for your “women are more valued as people” argument are perfectly consistent with another explanation, which is “women are more valued *as property* or men reproduction machines”, and that alternative explanation is more in line with other significant pressures in society, such as backlashes against reproductive rights and the fact that women’s sexuality is still, generally, considered to be public property.
Women usually aren’t expected to take risks for others because that would put in danger their patriarchal use as baby making machines.
I guess there is an argument to be made that that is the case. I don’t agree because I’ve never heard anyone say as a legitimate argument, for example women shouldn’t be soldiers because they are too valuable as baby-making machines. Generally I hear the idea that women aren’t as capable or that they’d be too concerned for the women because they love them too much. This plays into my idea that women are undervalued for their capability, but particularly valued as people. (I guess I have heard the idea that successful societies didn’t send women to war, because if they did the next generation would have been greatly diminished in size. However, when I’ve seen this it’s been used to explain the past, not prescribe an appropriate future)
The highest profile crimes usually involve a victim who is young, blonde and female. My belief is that this is because that group is the most valued as people. Your belief is that this is because that group is most valued as baby-making property. I think that if your belief was true then men would pay more attention to such stories than women (since men are more likely to care about baby-making property). I don’t have any stats to back this up, but my feeling is that it is actually women who pay more attention to those types of news stories.
What counter evidence do you have?
I meant it this way: look at what you write all the time – how can it be that the evolution of the homo sapiens, which took so long, left us with these females?
I think the charge of naturalistic fallacy is a fallacy in itself.
Well there are many people that are not humanists, for example myself. If you meet such persons is the discussion always finished?
@Xtra, Wisteria:
Good point about pregnancy being a risk taken for others. Most people who oppose abortion see fetuses as people and see women as taking a risk for the fetuses.
@Wisteria, Rutee:
The reason I think that women get better health care already is because they live longer, and most health care dollars are spent on women.
http://www.amcp.org/data/jmcp/JMCPSupp_April08_S2-S6.pdf
Take a look at Figure 1 in this paper. For the 18-64 year olds, many more health dollars are spent on women than men. Now you can probably point to a few diseases where men have better outcomes, and some female-targeting ailments that are not handled well. But I think you’d be seeing the trees and ignoring the forest.
These are man-centered arguments, though. They don’t consider what women want or think; only what men want and think. And this disproves the idea that women aren’t valued for their personhood how?
So, here you’re talking about the media and who the media like to cover. The media cover who they think will draw the most attention, sure, but the media are often wrong. So, Missing White (blonde, young, attractive, cis, straight, upper-middle class) Woman Syndrome is an actual thing, I’m just not sure it says that much about actual women being valued as actual people. At the very most, it might say something about the interest the media think society has in young, white, affluent, attractive women. Does that mean these women are valued for their personhood? No. Does it mean that poor women, women of color, old women, trans women, queer women, etc. also are valued in any particular way? No.
There are many people who have problems with feminism, one would expect a big movement and not the lunatic fringe MRM.
So probably the MRM is the best that could happen to feminism, while people like Pelle Billing are the real threat.
It’s probably like when I read this and you are baffled that the only space where the words “preserve” and “race” are uttered in one sentence is Stormfront.
PS: Spare me the ad hominems, that was just an example.
Oh, passive voice! Fun! What you really mean here is that women spend more money on their health care than men do. From the paper you linked to:
“Women use more health care resources and generate more costs than men. Yet, they are often receiving a suboptimal quality of care.” (Emphasized without comment.)
This isn’t a case of “many more health dollars [being] spent on women than men.” The actors here are the patients. Women and men spending money on their own health care.
If men would like to spend more money on health care, they are free to do so, as their budgets allow. Myself, I’m all for socialized medicine. I think health care is a right, not a privilege. So I’d love to see people of all income levels able to get the health care they need. But none of that is going to increase the money men spend on their health care unless men go out and spend more money on their health care.
The living longer thing … yeah. Part of that is biological, part is preventable (risktaking behaviors and such). Again, not really proof that women get better health care already, but it is a compelling argument to take efforts in your own life, if you’re a man.
I missed the moment that somehow attractive women are valued mostly in our society somehow is connected with “valued as people” is explained.
Because it is a bit odd, that if women are unattractive, non-white or poor but are still highly valued as people are missing from the screens of our tv, sets, music, media and so on. Because the likely-hood of such women to be victims of violence is a bit bigger than the white/upper class/cis women.
Explain the discrepancy to me?
@Bee:
I was trying to find an example that supported my belief and didn’t play into “women valued as property”. The one I really wanted to use was the fact that men convicted of crimes against women get longer sentences than men convicted of the same crimes against men.
That’s a fact. Here’s a study showing that vehicular homicide offenders who strike female victims get 56% longer sentences. Conversely if a black victim is struck, then the sentence is 53% shorter.
http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=13&ved=0CCsQFjACOAo&url=http%3A%2F%2Fciteseerx.ist.psu.edu%2Fviewdoc%2Fdownload%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.160.2366%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf&rct=j&q=length%20of%20prison%20sentence%20by%20victim%20gender&ei=oCmfTu6RK6jX0QH–_iPCQ&usg=AFQjCNHpQolQaW9qhlIe7QwvwnT15PZ3YQ&sig2=-FZ4vdDKftEphN9CsFmqWQ
But – ideally we’d have a breakdown based on who does the sentencing. If male judges showed this bias but female judges didn’t then I would see that as support for the “women as property” view. But if both male and female judges showed the bias, then I prefer my view – “women more valued as people”.
As it is, I think people get more upset about female victims of crime, even though males are more often victims. http://www.victimsweek.gc.ca/res/r512.html
For instance, universities provide female-only shuttle buses and walksafe programs for women.
And personally, I feel this bias is more pronounced amongst women than men, which I really feel supports the “women are more valued as people” idea. If it was because women are property, then men would be more in favor of female protection than women.