Engendering Discussion…
Long time readers of Feminist Critics: You know the drill, you can skip reading this.
For those of you who are somewhat new, however: The issues of rape and sexual consent are a very important part of discussions about gender. However, they are so important that discussions about other topics can be (and often are) derailed by a casual mention of rape. I’ve seen it happen here repeatedly.
Continue reading →
Here’s a fresh open thread to discuss things other than issues related to sexual consent. (All NoH rules apply.)
I don’t have time at the moment to do justice to this sad news, but I didn’t want to let the event pass unmarked here at FC. The brilliant, occasionally-androgynous, occasionally-bisexual superstar had an enormous impact on society’s perception of gender. He certainly had a big impact on mine, and I suspect many readers here will feel the same.
(I am just now noticing that our “Obituaries” tag is misspelled — we’ve only used it once before, a long time ago — but it seems a particularly fitting tag for Major Tom. ETA: Daran has now fixed it, but it had been “Orbituaries.”)
In part I and part II of this series, I responded to the first sections of this post by Bailey Poland, a great example of the fallacious arguments used to try to deny the validity of the concept of female privilege.
Here is my analysis of the final portions of her article.
Bailey claims that women are not privileged when it comes to child custody:
[R]esearch shows that men have a 50/50 chance of being granted custody when they actively seek it during a disputed divorce. Fathers who lose custody of their children either were not working very hard to get it, or had a basically equal chance of success and simply lost the metaphorical coin toss.
There are a number of serious difficulties with this claim.
Continue reading →
In my previous post, I responded to the first couple of sections in this post by Bailey Poland, in which she deploys a number of fallacious arguments to try to deny the validity of the concept of female privilege.
Here is my further analysis of her piece.
Bringing up the draft is a perennial favorite for MRAs — particularly young men in the U.S. Women don’t have to sign up for the draft, and this, to them, confirms the idea of male disposability and female privilege. … While it’s true that women are not required to register for the draft, the rest of their argument about this being a female privilege is based on an inability to see the big picture.
She raises several objections to the ‘male-only draft registration is a female privilege’ idea:
The first problem with this line of argument is that the draft in the U.S. was effectively retired over 40 years ago. … it’s unlikely that any [men] will ever be drafted.
This objection may counter the notion that the male-only draft registration requirement is a major female privilege; it does not counter the idea that it’s a real one.
Continue reading →
Over at Alas, Amp linked to this post by Bailey Poland which attempts to rebut the notion of female privilege. I found that post worthwhile, because it was a great compendium of the many fallacious arguments often used to try to deny the validity of the concept of female privilege.
Bailey breaks her piece down into a preamble followed by six sections, which I’ll address in turn.
The existence of “female privilege” is intended to derail a discussion into what they believe this privilege looks like, and to force women to spend time debating its existence rather than focusing on the original problem that was being addressed.
Here we see Bailey’s first argumentative sleight of hand, shifting the focus from whether there is evidence to support the notion of female privilege to attacking the motivations of those who propose it.1 In my experience, this is an extremely common tactic, the beginning link in a chain that inexorably asserts some form of: Someone who espouses the existence of female privilege –> is claiming to be egalitarian –> is really MRA –> is really anti-feminist –> which is really anti-female –> TA DA! People who espouse the notion of female privilege are misogynists!
There are of course two fatal flaws to this argument.
Continue reading →
Kristen Page-Kirby1 is scared she’s going to be killed by a stranger:
Gentlemen! Let’s play a little game. I call it “Creep or Normal Guy?”
The way you play is you have less than a second to decide whether a man you don’t know is a threat or not. If you identify a normal guy as a threat you could get called a bitch; if you identify a creep as a normal guy you could end up dead. This is fun, isn’t it? Now play it every day, with nearly every man you see, in nearly every situation you’re in, from the time puberty hits to … well, I turned 38 this week. Can someone tell me when I can stop playing?
[...]
Being a woman in this world means paying a certain price.
Page-Kirby’s thesis is the “murderer” variant of the Schroedinger’s rapist argument, so named and most famously articulated, (though doubtless not originated) by a writer calling herself Phaedra Starling.
What Page-Kirby – like Starling before her – fails to mention is that being a man in this world means paying a price, in the form of being actually violently victimised far more often than women, particularly so in cases of violence by strangers. In Scotland, where I live, men and boys are more than seven times more likely to be murdered by strangers than are women and girls2. In England and Wales men are five times more likely than women to be murdered by strangers3 In the United States, Males over the age of 15 were five times as likely as their female cohort to have been murdered during the seventies and eighties4 All these figures, both for men and for women, are dwarfed by the death rate from traffic accidents, yet nobody lives their lives in fear of Schroedinger’s Motor Car.
Instead of trying to persuade those many times more likely than they are to be violently victimised, how terribly oppressed they are by violence. Page-Kirby and Starling would do better to examine the mismatch between the fear they and other women feel, which I don’t doubt is real, and the freedom-from-violence privileged reality of most women’s lives.
I have written about the discrepancy between the categories and definitions used by the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) and the uniform definitions the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) had published at that time (UD2009) which was a minor revision of the uniform definitions published in 2002 (UD2002).
I recently became aware that last December the CDC have published a new version of the document, “Sexual Violence Surveillance: Uniform Definitions and Recommended Data Elements” (UD2014), on their website. A panel of 11 experts which received comments from seven leaders in the field wrote this document. The panel started its work in October 2010 with this stated agenda:
The key issues discussed and considered by the in-person expert panel that were directly relevant to the SV definitions document were the following: 1) how and if to include unwanted non-physically pressured sex, 2) how and if to include sexual harassment, 3) whether or not to expand the meaning of “completed sex act” to identify who penetrates whom, and 4) how and if to update the Recommended Data Elements.
Things have changed here at Feminist Critics since our busiest days. One of the biggest changes has simply been that both blogging and moderator attention have been sporadic.
We’ve posted a couple of new pieces recently, and I have my fingers crossed that you’ll be seeing new more posts on a regular or semi-regular basis. In the mean time, there will be some revisions to our commenting policy. (Some of these changes have already been alluded to in prior posts.)
1. While the clunky NoH/RP bifurcated discussion thread policy isn’t being killed, it’s being suspended for the time being because our comment volume simply doesn’t warrant the extra effort involved at the moment. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, all discussion threads will be considered NoH threads. A separate RP thread will be created when comment volume and type indicate an RP thread is needed. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about here, please read the Ahoy Newcomers! page on the sidebar.)
Continue reading →
