It’s Question Time again. I’ve been reading through Susan Faludi’s Backlash and her more recent book on men, Stiffed, as well as some of the discussion surrounding Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men and Kay Hymowitz’ Manning Up. Faludi, writing in 1991, obviously saw the 80s as a time of antifeminist backlash.
My question is how you would characterize the years since she wrote her book. A continuation of that backlash? A time of feminist resurgence, from the Riot Grrls up to Rosin’s predicted End of Men? A mixed period of progress and regression?
I’m wondering both what your general assessment of the situation is, and also what specific evidence you have — either hard data or personal experience — that underlies your overall view. This could be anything from data on employment segregation or the prevalence of rape to your sense of how media representations of women and men have or haven’t changed, or even how people you know have changed the ways they talk about gender. What do you think are the significant data points to look at?
The question isn’t just what has changed for women but what has changed for men as well — with my underlying question being: what if anything in the real world has changed that might be making the angry men we talk about here so angry? I think we can agree that most of their own explanations are bullshit, but could there be a grain of truth to any of them? Or something that they don’t see that’s far more compelling?
In the interest of spurring discussion and providing some data to work with, here are a bunch of articles responding to (or at least vaguely related to the issues raised in) Rosin’s End of Men, including a link to her original Atlantic article. In addition, here are some posts by sociologist Philip Cohen challenging many of Rosin’s claims, as well as more general posts of his on gender inequality. (Feel free to completely ignore any or all of these; I just found them useful resources.)
Nah, it’s a cane toad – one of the very few animals I really dislike. They’re so toxic they poison carnivores that eat them.
But do they eat some brzzzzz’ing creatures?
Hopefully no random bear will be stupid enough to try to eat Brz, so we won’t be able to test out the suitability of your toad as a comparison.
AHAHA, not true, but I love this one.
The “I won’t say you’re creepy even if you’re a fucking creepy asshole because you’ll maybe say that it’s just us who find you creepy” is in competition with we won’t say that males are inherently assholes, not because we’re against the idea of accusing a whole group of human beings of being naturally bad but because it can sounds like they’re not completely responsible for their assholiness which can attenuate their assholiness, so we’ll say that men are acting like assholes ON PURPOSE” for the contest of the most ridiculously malicious and disingenuous thing I’ve heard feminists say.
Cane toads eat pretty much anything they can get into their mouths. They’re almost as unpleasant as MRAs, but considerably more dangerous. There are also a lot more of them.
So we still haven’t come up with anything that’s just as unpleasant? I guess the poor toads can’t help being poisonous, so it’s really not a fair comparison.
Forgive my haste, back in February. The elision to which I was making reference was more properly that you elided the rest of the article, and chose one quotation, out of context.
Forgive the lack of accents in this passage, (borked html would be harder to comprehend) from earlier in the piece:
La guerre contre les mere, je pense en effet qu’il faut la faire; qu’il faut s’interreser a se cote tres particulier de la societe contepmoraine ou les enfants, pendant le douze premiers annees de leur vie, sont eleves sous vide avec des individus asexues, des especes de fourmis ouvrieres. Et il y a une guerre a mener, non pas contre les femmes en particulaire, contre de meres ou contre de memeres, mais simplement une guerre contre les droits culturels exclusif de la famille, a cet especte de sous-produit humain en quoi les femmes sont changees.
Which I translate as:
No, French isn’t my native language, neither is Russian. I understand both fairly well; even if I have trouble controlling my grammar when I compose them.
Yes, that’s their saving grace – they can’t be other than they are, and it was human fucking stupidity that introduced them here in the first place.
What about Spanish? Same alphabet, after all!
Kitteh: Nope. I don’t understand Basque, or either, nor can I read Dutch. Same alphabet. It’s like different languages have different rules, and ways of looking at the world.
Kitteh — considering he knows a passing amount of Latin, I’d assume he can muddle through it on a grade school level anyways (I can read enough to get the gist of it, usually, cuz Latin)
And sometimes I mangle English (see above, where I meant to say, “Understand Basque, neither can I read, Dutch, nor Romanian: same Alphabet)
You can’t muddle through Spanish? I’m mildly bemused.
Argenti (shhh…. it’s a secret): Ok, in a pinch I can read some, and make use of survival spanish. Let’s say I can pull a DLPT level 1 score. I wouldn’t say I could speak it; not unless I can pull a weak 2/solid 1+
” It’s like different languages have different rules, and ways of looking at the world.”
Don’t say that, you’ll throw Owly into even more confusion!
Oh, yeah, grade school level at best. But enough that I’m not screwed if I can’t find the English directions (lol, did I tell you about the ikea wtf moment when I realized I was skimming the Romanian? Directions so easy you can get the point in a language sorta related to one you absolutely hate reading!)
Ikea… able to tell you to get your friend with the cute butt to come help.
Actually Spanish is weird. I grew up in/around E. LA. I understand more than I think I do, because I never studied it, just saw/heard it. I studied french.
I’m still not quite sure why, but I find spoken Spanish much easier to understand (and to speak without sounding ridiculous) than French. Whereas French is easier for me to read.
What’s odd is that this holds true even here, where the Spanish I’m hearing has evolved quite a bit from the classic castiliano that I was taught at school.
“Ikea… able to tell you to get your friend with the cute butt to come help.”
OMGS that was hilarious!
For everyone else — I was reading something ikea that said “be two people” instead of needing two people. And smart ass here commented on how you should be your friend with the cute butt.
And I don’t want to discuss how long it took me to grok the point!
…oh wait, feminists are against jokes about sexual things. Sorry, didn’t mean to joke about butts, they’re oh so serious! (And their delicate feefees might get hurt)
Pecunium — ah, ok. I took two years of Italian, nearly failed because my great-grandmother never learned English, so my grandmother was fluent and my oldest aunt knows quite a bit (idk if she’s fluent, she might be) — my mother knows passing amounts and yells in it when pissed. So my grammar is that a dialect from a hundred years ago, through multiple generations taught mostly by yelling at kids to knock it off. Formal Italian and I are not on speaking terms, capisce?
Capisce. When american troops got to Italy (WW2)… the Italians were confused/amused at the language they were speaking, because it was old, and wierd; the dialects had muddled, but the basics were ossified. Oddly the Germans didn’t have that problem.
The text doesn’t say that, it says “de plus en plus refilés à cet espèce de sous-produit humain en quoi les femmes sont changées” which means “[exclusive rights of the family] which are more and more granted to this kind of human by-product into which women are transformed”, also the text doesn’t say “a war against motherhood”, but “a war against mothers”.
Anyway, I don’t understand what’s your point here : how does your quote give a “context” which changes the meaning of my previous quote?
I translated another passage of the text in the other thread which says almost the same thing, so what?
A human by-product into which woman are transformed?
You know, no matter how you structure the grammar there, that’s fucking fucked up.
lol oh you
Also, creepy people who know they are being creepy and don’t give a shit deserve to be shamed i.e. called out for being creepy.
If you don’t want to be shamed then stop doing and saying shameful things.