If you live in New York state, you may have seen the poster above plastered on a bus shelter; or you may have seen it posted somewhere on the internet. The message is pretty simple, and it’s sad that it has to be said: kids are pretty impressionable, so teach your sons to treat women with basic respect.
The purpose of the ad campaign, sponsored by the New York state Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence, is pretty clear as well: teaching boys respect for women lessens the chances that they will abuse women as adults.
Numerous studies have found that men with sexist attitudes towards women are more likely to try to control their wives or girlfriends with physical abuse. Indeed, one recent study even found that brief exposure to sexist jokes made men more inclined to brush off violence against women, at least amongst men with sexist attitudes to begin with.
Speaking of which, the sexist jokes over at A Voice for Men have unveiled a hilarious new “meme,” which just happens to be inspired by the “awaiting instructions” PSAs we’ve been discussing. And here it is:
The logic here is airtight: because some women get drunk and urinate in public, women don’t deserve respect.
I guess men never get drunk and urinate in public, or ever do anything vaguely embarrassing that gets caught on camera?
Is it really asking too much to respect people as people, foibles and all?
I obviously (reading comprehension!) meant irrelevant to the point of the comparison. The whole discussion was started by Travis’ claim that there is no difference in the amount of domestic violence men and women suffer. People then began to take a look at the sources he provided. So, Fade made a comparison between the male “percentage of homicides where the victim knew the suspect out of all homicides” and the female “percentage of homicides where the victim knew the suspect out of all homicides”.
However, this has no informative power about whether one gender suffers more violence, and also no informative power about whether one gender is more likely to suffer violence at the hands of those they know, because that percentage also depends on the number of all *other* homicides members of that gender suffer. Two variables are at play here, but the second has nothing to do with the discussion/the point Fade wanted to make.
As I’ve said, if we were to follow the logic of Fade’s comparison, then this would mean that women are more likely to face death from somebody they know, simply because men are way more likely to be killed in other categories of homicide. Obviously, such a causal relation does not exist.
Also:
“The second is a subset of the first. So this comment of yours ” You’ll get a higher percentage of homicide cases where the victim was acquainted with the suspect for women than for men simply because there are much less female homicide victims than male homicide victims in other categories” is fucking wrong, because the denominator is already a subset.”
No, that’s just… wrong. Just because a is a subset of b doesn’t make b not an own variable (because it also depends on other subsets independent of a)! With statements like that, yeah I think I can tell you at least that you have some faults in your statistical arguments.
We actually have a statistics equivalent person to Fibinachi
Zir tricks is to be able to do stats in
a quick manner, able and matching
with neat numbers lined up as a win
Google, you might
If you value stats tight
The diagrams of Manboobz users yore
We’ve all all sorts of stat before,
Which Argenti argued ably as ample affirmations of our good intentions and wide spread of nations, but I digress —
For this case, Holmes, I offer some words of ill made filler rhyme
If one adjusts for acquaintence , it’s a matter of statistical equivalence
that the preference of killing someone in cold blood of self defence
is reliant on a variance of factors, ambient and latent
But statistical percentages of totals tells us much,
it’s a touch awry to claim that it’s a useless game
When the breakdown works out to what percentage of who suffered what
and who was killed by someone they knew
We are, after all, looking at who someone once called a friend slew.
“It’s dependent on the total number of cases!”
Aye, that’s the rub, that’s what percentages are for
Therefore
If we find cases galore of aquaintences murdered by the score
I must implore
That that the total number of cases matteres not a wit
to wit, the hit, that’s just it, 2 outta 20 or 20 outta 200
is ten percent last I numbered
(Speak good english do well, often
in great language words get my thoughts in)
For instance, I beseech!
Good grief, you’ll get a higher count of acquaintence kills
when the woman dies
because… more women are brought low by the ill wills
of people they knew before they became stills?
Well, yes, them’s the words we use
That’s what ’em words mean
T’is hardly a surprise, t’is the point of the exercise!
What it tells us is this much: If you know someone, and you’re a woman made
always bring a back up shotgun for any date
Or that date’ll be the gravestone touch
Morbid, much (I joke, a touch)
Now, I grant you a thing, Octo!
It’s possible that with enough to
Balance all numbers in all ways entire
The situation might not be so dire
In a perfectly equal world all scales aligned
Much maligned “friends” might be less inclined
to find their wills defined by murderous minds
in that gender-specific violence of certain kinds
would go towards a more middle ground, and we, sitting here, would divine
that the decline of internecine homicide, species wide
would be more in line with our fond wishes for equal treatment along all lines
Until then, the blight is that the truth offers a different plight.
(Or to be less nattering; total number of homicides broken down by gender lines and homicide type is exactly the point, and if we witness statistically significant higher percentages of one kind of action against one kind of group, that means something, despite any other situations of that group, unless our data sets are skewed by unrecognized factors (say, male on male killings in combat zones wasn’t classified as “homicide”, or some such))
Back to reading comprehension, Octo you said:
and then followed that with
Which focused the conversation on homicides, which is what Fade was assessing.
Now you say:
which is true, but the conversation on homicide has been around the accuracy with which Fade performed the male/female homicide estimates.
We’ve all agreed that homicides =/= domestic abuse.
What Fade’s statistics do is show that there are gender differences in who a victim is most likely to be murdered by.
So back strictly to homicide, you said:
FFS, women *are* more likely to face death from someone they know, compared to males. What the hell is your point?
“Good grief, you’ll get a higher count of acquaintence kills
when the woman dies
because… more women are brought low by the ill wills
of people they knew before they became stills?”
Actually no, if you look at the statistics, the *absolute* number is higher for men 😉 That is what Fade tried to set in context, by showing that while this is true, the percentage of homicides where the victim knew the suspect out of all homicides is higher for women. But,.. what does this actually tell us? That percentage is only higher because less women are killed in other homicides, so it has little informative power.
“FFS, women *are* more likely to face death from someone they know, compared to males. What the hell is your point?”
I was never making a general point on that. I was only arguing statistical methodology. And apparently, in England and Wales in 2000-2011 what you say was not actually true:
“male victims acquainted w/ suspect: 2643″
female victims acquainted w/ suspect: 1778”
As said above, Fade tried to set that in context by forming those percentages, but actually, those percentages don’t tell us anything. The percentage is only higher for women because less women are killed in other homicides. Comparing absolute numbers of men and women killed by people they were acquainted with actually has way more informative value.
Is it just me, or is this entire “people they were acquainted with” a huge derail from the point that MRA trolls are lying/stupid/both when they claim domestic violence is evenly spread across the genders?
Sorry, I’m… really confused now. I’d try to be clever or witty, but I’m just genuinely confused. You repeat that “The percentage is only higher for women because less women are killed in other homicides”, and, well… yes. Yeah. That’s.. the point? Am I misunderstanding something here? Is there something I am missing, that’s blindingly obvious to everyone else?
If… the percentage of one kind of homicide is higher than the others… that would exactly be because less people are killed by other kinds of homicide. It’s… I don’t… I can’t? The words? I… Sorry, it just fails to make much sense to me as to why this is a repeated point. If one kind of homicide has a higher percentage than the others, then, obviously, other kinds of homicide see less people being killed that way. It’s like a perfect tautology.
It’s like saying “Oh yeah, lots of people crash their car into a tree, but more people crash their car into a building, so, statistically, less people crash their car into a tree”. Yeah. Exactly.
… so what? If more women were killed by other kinds of homicide (Say, strangers. Say, pre-meditated murders), the conversations we would be having would be… “A lot of women sure seem to get killed by XXXX kind of homicide”.
The absolute numbers of deaths by kind / male female has no informative power beyond that absolute number. If a million men died, but only 1 % of those deaths where attributed to someone they know, and the rest was “From falling down the stairs”, that’d tell us: “Yikes. Safety rails!”
I… what… what is going on here? What conversations are we having? My brain is broken.
i admit to being a nooby at math, so i’ve been kind of laying low after that first foray into it, but… it was comparising homicides, not causes of death…
as far as I can tell, my main problem was a) not knowing exactly what domestic violence means (whether it’s violence in the household or partner violence, and also it not having “in victims household” separate from “people victim knew”) and b) not knowing what Travis thought the study would prove about domestic violence
haha, i’ve already mention this was due to me not knowing exactly what domestic violence means. ;P probably should’ve checked the definition *before* I did that math.
That one’s easy: the same as all MRAs spout. Women are just as violent as men! Why are there shelters for women and not men! Why are there shelters for women at all!
It’s not that they give a shit about actual violence toward men. They just want women to have no resources to protect themselves from male violence.
Fade, yeah, but Octo seems to want to take that and run with it. It’s become irritating for me, which your breakdown/questions weren’t. It’s reading like a troll’s red herring now.
“Sorry, I’m… really confused now. I’d try to be clever or witty, but I’m just genuinely confused. You repeat that “The percentage is only higher for women because less women are killed in other homicides”, and, well… yes. Yeah. That’s.. the point? Am I misunderstanding something here? Is there something I am missing, that’s blindingly obvious to everyone else?”
(ah, can somebody please tell me what the quoting code here is?)
The problem is… well, what do you want to tell us with that comparison? Usually, you don’t just form percentages, or do other math things to statistical raw material, unless you want to tell something. So, what exactly does the percentage Fade formed tell us? Well, since she’s here now – Fade, what exactly were you trying to say?
It appeared to me it was about using those homicide rate where the victim knew the suspect to derive a point about domestic violence, especially the comparison of men and women. But if that is so, then the comparison of those percentages has no informative value for that (since that percentage also depends on a second, unrelated factor), and instead comparing the absolute numbers (that is the absolute number of men being killed in homicides where they were acquainted with the suspect vs the absolute number of women being killed in homicides where they were acquainted with the suspect) makes much more sense. Because obv… surely (heh), the amount of men or women killed by strangers has no causal bearing on how likely either men or women are to be killed by people they know.
“Fade, yeah, but Octo seems to want to take that and run with it. It’s become irritating for me, which your breakdown/questions weren’t. It’s reading like a troll’s red herring now.”
The discussion only became so longwinded after Kiwi barged in here and made a BIG FUCKING POINT about my post. And since she attacked, yeah I take the liberty to defend myself.
using the already-admitted-to-be-wrong-definition, I was comparing the homicide rate proportionately against men and women by people they knew.
I assumed Travis was going to go along the lines of “well, it happens more to men!! Proportionately” but he may have been talking in raw numbers, which doens’t really make sense. I mean, if you have 5000 lamps and 5 of them break, and 10 kites and 3 break, way more kites are being broken than lamps per the same amount, but you could try to inaccurately phrase that as “lamps are in so much more danger of breaking than kites!” if you looked at raw numbers.
quote code is {blockquote} blah blah quote {/blockquote} but use instead of the curvy ones
* use the pointed ones! It got rid of my “<" ?! Why?!
okay… i’m not kiwi, so I can’t know what they meant, but it seemed like they were critiquing your critique of my math? I mean, it just seemed to be like an innocent math discussion revolving around something that is admittedly off topic/ not incredibly on the point. They just disagreed with your POV?
I am not going to touch any of the math, because I kind of reaaalllyy suck at math, so have fun, the rest of you guys! 😀
@bina
Hey, I could use that kind of entertainment from the troll 😛
@katz
Yay Aregenti! 😀 Ze even makes some of the math understandable for me, which is saying a lot.
@fibinachi
::applauds:: Nice poem 😀
Thanks… so, curvy…
Ah. I see your logic. But the problem is that the homicide rate itself is variable. It’s not set in stone that there will be this or that many homicides in a year. Continuing your analogy, you don’t start out with 5000 lamps. Rather, your shop receives, say, 200 blue lamps and 600 red lamps. Your neighbouring store receives 300 blue lamps and 1500 red lamps. Now, in your store a fourth of all lamps are blue, and in the neighbouring store only a sixth, but a customer will still have a better chance of finding a blue lamp in the neighbouring store, because there 100 blue lamps more there and the amount of red lamps doesn’t matter.
Or, to leave the area of analogies: Suppose there suddenly was a epidemic of gang violence breaking out in England and Wales. Homicides by strangers skyrocket as a result. This would not actually change the threat men or women face of being killed by people they know… and yet it would still skew the percentages you have formed. Since there is no causal relation between “homicides by people the victim was acquainted with” and “homicides by strangers”, you have to treat them as two independent factors, instead of looking at overall homicides – that number can raise or fall by either of the two factors.
Yeah, that’s how I saw it, too. Apparently, Kiwi disagreed.
no… i was saying kiwi was continuing the innocent math discussion :facepalm:
Yeah, well, not with a “fuck you” comment. That kinda isn’t “innocent” anymore.
@octo
Okay, I had to roll back a while to find this whole terrible ‘fuck you’ response, or whatever. And found
And..whining about Kiwi girl saying fuck you (teh horrors) aside, it seems like a reasonable response. Since you seemed to be implying you weren’t really going to be listening to anyone’s statistic analysis unless they came in above and beyond qualified (or known for being qualified, since I don’t actually know how much kiwi girl knows, just that she doesn’t have a reputation for being ‘statistics person’ like argent.) And, you know, yeah. You were kinda being a jerk. Because other people are allowed to argue with your analysis, Octo. Even if they aren’t known for being Super Awesome Statistics person.
*like Argenti, not argent. :/
i’m going to be honest, my brain kind of auto-filters out swear words. XD
*shrug* idk.
i’m not kiwi.
i assume they got mad, annoyed, or any other kind of emotion people have. they’re allowed to be mad. Especially since it seemed to be implying you were thinking like, some of us can’t do statistics (I mean, it did seem like you were insinuating only fibinachi could do the statistic thing and you wouldn’t trust the others of us).
but i’m gonna step out of this, b/c i think it’s officially not my business atm and i don’t wanna put words into kiwi’s mouth
The Fibinachi comment was actually a reference to another thread, where Fibinachi thoroughly schooled me on economics (something Kiwi knew). So it was actually meant as a reference to something where I was wrong… basically saying I could be wrong here, too, but unless that’s demonstrated to me, I will stick to what I said.
I’m not particularly upset about the fuck you, but yeah… calling that post innocent would go a bit far, don’t you think?
Octo, you’re still whiffing of troll to me. You seem eager to prove any of the commenters here wrong if you can, just happening to support known trolls and MRA myths. You try and set commenters against each other. You back-pedal on what your comments are saying while telling us that the problem is with our reading comprehension. And then you bounce onto a different thread and act like none of that has happened.
Walking, quacking, ducks.
I’m with Kiwi girl – prove you’re here in good faith or fuck off.