I didn’t claim you were talking about Finland. However, many of those issues are true in most Western nations. It’s just that I’m not an expert in any other country.
I didn’t claim you were talking about Finland. However, many of those issues are true in most Western nations. It’s just that I’m not an expert in any other country.
My guess is that at least 98% of the world population lives in countries with less gender equality than Finland, and likewise at least 85% of the LW readership.
(EDIT: According to http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm 1.5% of world population lives in countries with gender division in the lower house equivalent at least as close to balanced as in Finland, as do at least 6% (but probably no more than 8%) of LW readers. )
Arguing against “Women suffer more unfairness” with the example of Finland makes about as much sense as arguing against “Cars cause more fatalities than rhinos” with the example of a specific subdivision of an African country with high rhino fatalities (and such a statement wouldn’t imply that car safety should have a higher priority than protecting people and rhinos from each other even there) .
“a global equality resource budget”
This doesn’t even exist..
It makes just as much sense to talk about a global equality resource budget as it makes to talk about “equality resources” in the first place. Or do you deny the existence of international organizations working for equality, and that individuals have some (limited) ability to choose for which cause in which country they fight? I mentioned non-transferable resources in my comment and never implied anything about which of those, if either, dominated.
Since aid for oppression is generally allocated on a local level, it’s quite relevant for nawitus to examine fairness at a local level. nawitus never attempted to generalize beyond Finland.
The reply to me was non-sequitur. I wasn’t talking about Finland, and I wasn’t postulating universal laws. “Women suffer more unfairness” doesn’t mean every set of women will suffer more unfairness than every set of men. Casting doubt on whether a particular highly untypical set of women suffer more than the corresponding set of men is completely beside the point in that context (unless it were intended as evidence against the statement, which apparently it was not).
And I was arguing against a priori allocating everything to women. So if Finish men are suffering more fixable injustice they and not the women would be the main beneficiaries according to the argument in the comment nawitus was responding to. So if nawitus had just been putting things in the Finish context (instead either producing non-sequiturs or perhaps ascribing imaginary positions to me) the fitting reply would have been something along the lines that such a pragmatic allocation might make men the main beneficiaries in Finland for the reasons actually listed.
Nobody has yet provided arguments that women suffer more in e.g. USA. I’d say my points are true to some degree in USA, except for military service and perhaps domestic violence. I’ve talked with a researcher of income equality, and atleast he said that wages are pretty much equal for male and females in the USA. Income is not. In Finland for example, males have 20% higher income, but they do 20% more work hours yearly.
“Or do you deny the existence of international organizations working for equality, and that individuals have some (limited) ability to choose for which cause in which country they fight?”
No, but each country has a local equity resource budget. A global one does not exist, but can be “conjured” up in your mind.
Nobody has yet provided arguments that women suffer more in e.g. USA.
I’ve add that nobody has provided arguments that women suffer more outside the USA, either. It’s just another truism in white liberal middle-class circles. Whether this view is reasonable or not, an argument for it that compares the suffering of men and women worldwide has never been made.
If anyone hold this view, check out the literature on gendercide, and the work of Adam Jones. For example, see his essay on the erasure of male victims in Kosovo. At Gendercide Watch, Jones argues that male victims of gender-related atrocities are systematically erased:
The difficulty with Warren’s framing of gendercide, though—and this is true for the feminist analysis of gender-selective human-rights abuses as a whole—is that the inclusive definition is not matched by an inclusive analysis of the mass killing of non-combatant men. Gendercide Watch was founded to encourage just such an inclusive approach. We believe that state-directed gender-selective mass killings have overwhelmingly targeted men through history, and that this phenomenon is pervasive in the modern world as well. Despite this prevalence of gendercide against males—especially younger, “battle-age” men—the subject has received almost no attention across a wide range of policy areas, humanitarian initiatives, and academic disciplines. We at Gendercide Watch feel it is one of the great taboos of the contemporary age, and must be ignored no longer.
If you check out the case studies at Gendercide Watch, men, particularly men deemed “battle-age” are disproportionately targeted in most forms of armed conflict. In the US, we hear a lot about women being raped in war, while men who die in greater orders of magnitude barely get a mention. The case studies are truly chilling, and when I read them, I wondered “why am I only finding out about this now?” For instance, I didn’t know that the majority of victims in Stalin’s purges seem to have been male.
If you (general “you”) didn’t know the magnitude of the slaughter of men worldwide, then ask yourself: what else is left out from my understanding of gender? What else have feminist not told me?
If you are a guy and you don’t like forced labor, purges, machetes,
chainsaws, or hanging out in mass graves, then it’s really difficult to say that you are better off in many areas outside the U.S. that are experiencing armed conflict. Women have a horrible time in war, too, and experience high rates of sexual violence. But is that really worse than death? Note that men commonly experience sexual violence in conflict zones, also. Jones quotes Dubravka Zarkov:
People who have lived through armed conflicts around the globe know that sexual violence against men, even if random and with fewer victims than violence against women, has been a fact of war for hundreds of years. In the contemporary wars, however, it is a rather well-hidden fact. Experts in the field of conflict studies, or aid workers, may know about it. But a war rape of a man was never a major story in the press, nor castration in a war camp on the evening television news. I had hardly heard of it myself …
It’s not at all obvious that women suffer more in conflict zones, even taking into account sexual violence towards them, due to the high rate of murder, forced labor, and sexual violence towards men in many conflicts. The truism “women suffer more outside the US” should be updated to: “women suffer more outside the US, except in conflict zones,” which just doesn’t have the same ring.
I find this approach rather pointless, though. Playing the victim card on behalf of men is an inherently unworkable strategy. The now sadly defunct Man Who is Thursday blog had a great discussion of this issue, partly excerpted in this OB post.
That said, I find it funny to imagine what would happen if the life expectancy of women were significantly shorter than men’s (i.e. the opposite of what is the case now). The present difference in favor of women is perceived as a not too terribly remarkable biological fact. But if it were the other way around, I’d bet it would be given constant attention as a burning issue of injustice, and in fact, I think it would be dangerous for one’s reputation to suggest that the difference might be partly biological rather than an artifact of oppression.
Playing the victim card on behalf of men is an inherently unworkable strategy.
I’m well aware about the biases against gender politics that support men’s interests.
When I’m posting on LW, I’m not advancing a political strategy for mass consumption. I don’t know the most instrumentally rational political strategy, and I don’t claim to. I am focusing on what beliefs about gender make the most sense, regardless of whether they would be politically feasible in the current political climate.
Since lukeprog is interested in certain feminist concepts about gender, I LW is a good place to examine the reasoning behind those concepts.
That said, I find it funny to imagine what would happen if the life expectancy of women were significantly shorter than men’s (i.e. the opposite of what is the case now). The present difference in favor of women is perceived as a not too terribly remarkable biological fact. But if it were the other way around, I’d bet it would be given constant attention as a burning issue of injustice, and in fact, I think it would be dangerous for one’s reputation to suggest that the difference might be partly biological rather than an artifact of oppression.
I think you’re quite correct about this double standard. There’s a case of bias going on there.
I agree that your arguments are entirely sound, it’s just that when I see links to websites like gendercide.org, I get the same bad feeling as whenever I see people who have a good point but present it in a way that’s guaranteed to fail as a PR strategy. But yes, I also expect that LW should be a place where people are capable of judging arguments on their real and not PR merits.
Another interesting case of bias I thought of recently was inspired by some radical feminist tract claiming that rape is a tool of social control used to enforce patriarchy and subjugate women (a claim not at all uncommon among more radical feminists).
In reality, however, one the main tools of social control is the threat of imprisonment for breaking the law—and one of the main ways in which prison is perceived as awful by men is prison rape. Together with the fact that the overwhelming majority of prisoners are men, this would imply that the threat of rape is in fact presently a powerful mechanism of social control over men, not women. This especially since prison rape of men is commonly perceived as deserved punishment in the general public (one can make gleeful jokes about it without losing respectability), and it’s tolerated and even calculated into the decision-making by prison authorities, while at the same time it’s unimaginable that anyone would dare to treat rapes of women with a similar attitude.
I’m puzzled by the way you seem to frame this as two claims in opposition.
I mean, you surely aren’t suggesting that rape happens only in prisons. So even if rape is used to establish social control over men, that isn’t evidence that rape is not used to establish social control over women… it’s possible on your account that it’s used to establish social control over everyone.
Of course, the kind of social control would be different, in this case. That is, threatening men with imprisonment-and-subsequent-rape would presumably discourage them from getting caught committing crimes, whereas threatening women with rape-without-imprisonment would presumably discourage them from going around unarmed or unguarded.
But leaving that distinction aside and just considering both examples as cases of social control, I don’t see how you get that “the threat of rape is a mechanism of social control over men, not women,” as opposed to a mechanism of social control over men and women.
You’re right, I should have worded my comment more precisely. The part you quote is indeed illogical, so let me put it more accurately.
In order to portray the threat of rape as a mechanism of social control of women in modern developed societies, you have to formulate an intricate, non-obvious, and, in my opinion, rather implausible theory. (Of course, you can trivially assert that the threat of rape restrains women’s freedom in practice, but this is true of every other violent crime as well, and I see no clear way to use it for justifying anything more than a straightforward law-and-order approach.) In contrast, the threat of prison rape against men is an unwritten but obviously significant part of the official mechanisms of social control wielded by the state, and while a similar threat against women by the state would be met with utmost public outrage, this one seems to be widely accepted. Yet based on the feminist theorizing on rape, one could never imagine that something like this might be the case.
So, to word my conclusion precisely: from what feminists say about the topic, one would conclude that insofar as the threat of rape is used as a mechanism of social control (in some meaningful sense of the term), it is directed primarily, if not exclusively, against women. Whereas in reality, it is directed against men openly, extensively, and as part of the official state mechanisms of social control, with nothing comparable directed against women.
Now of course, someone might argue that my account is biased, and that the unofficial and non-obvious rape-based social control of women is in fact similarly, or even more, extensive and severe. But even if you agree with this, it would have to be supported by an argument, whereas the feminist treatments of the issue assume it as obvious and unquestionable.
Nobody has yet provided arguments that women suffer more in e.g. USA.
I’m not interested in that sort of argument. My position is that such arguments are mostly useless, and that you’d do better spending your time fixing whatever injustice is most fixable instead of trying to make the injustice exactly balanced. (As you should know if you read the comment you were replying to)
I made the statement you keep going back to as an aside and because it’s obviously true: There are no places where enough men are treated unfairly enough to make up for places like Saudi Arabia (though apparently even Saudi Arabia has been improving somewhat). I don’t particularly care whether it’s true in particular countries where it’s close enough to be non-obvious because I don’t think that should guide any decisions in such countries (though I think it’s probably true in all but a handful of European countries, and I did give the link on women in parliament which is more evidence than you gave)
I’m not sure why the point about a literal global budget seems so important to you. Promoting equality between Finish men and women would be very far down on the list of things as perfectly rational UNICEF would spend money on, a charity devoted to such would presumably score pretty low on GiveWell compared to other equality causes, and I’d certainly hope a Finish LessWrong group would find a better cause to devote themselves to. Why does it matter to you whether that’s stated in the form of a hypothetical global budget or not? The statement was mostly just to point out that Finland is untypical anyway.
I didn’t claim you were talking about Finland. However, many of those issues are true in most Western nations. It’s just that I’m not an expert in any other country.
“a global equality resource budget”
This doesn’t even exist..
My guess is that at least 98% of the world population lives in countries with less gender equality than Finland, and likewise at least 85% of the LW readership.
(EDIT: According to http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm 1.5% of world population lives in countries with gender division in the lower house equivalent at least as close to balanced as in Finland, as do at least 6% (but probably no more than 8%) of LW readers. )
Arguing against “Women suffer more unfairness” with the example of Finland makes about as much sense as arguing against “Cars cause more fatalities than rhinos” with the example of a specific subdivision of an African country with high rhino fatalities (and such a statement wouldn’t imply that car safety should have a higher priority than protecting people and rhinos from each other even there) .
It makes just as much sense to talk about a global equality resource budget as it makes to talk about “equality resources” in the first place. Or do you deny the existence of international organizations working for equality, and that individuals have some (limited) ability to choose for which cause in which country they fight? I mentioned non-transferable resources in my comment and never implied anything about which of those, if either, dominated.
Since aid for oppression is generally allocated on a local level, it’s quite relevant for nawitus to examine fairness at a local level. nawitus never attempted to generalize beyond Finland.
The reply to me was non-sequitur. I wasn’t talking about Finland, and I wasn’t postulating universal laws. “Women suffer more unfairness” doesn’t mean every set of women will suffer more unfairness than every set of men. Casting doubt on whether a particular highly untypical set of women suffer more than the corresponding set of men is completely beside the point in that context (unless it were intended as evidence against the statement, which apparently it was not).
And I was arguing against a priori allocating everything to women. So if Finish men are suffering more fixable injustice they and not the women would be the main beneficiaries according to the argument in the comment nawitus was responding to. So if nawitus had just been putting things in the Finish context (instead either producing non-sequiturs or perhaps ascribing imaginary positions to me) the fitting reply would have been something along the lines that such a pragmatic allocation might make men the main beneficiaries in Finland for the reasons actually listed.
“Arguing against “Women suffer more unfairness”″
Nobody has yet provided arguments that women suffer more in e.g. USA. I’d say my points are true to some degree in USA, except for military service and perhaps domestic violence. I’ve talked with a researcher of income equality, and atleast he said that wages are pretty much equal for male and females in the USA. Income is not. In Finland for example, males have 20% higher income, but they do 20% more work hours yearly.
“Or do you deny the existence of international organizations working for equality, and that individuals have some (limited) ability to choose for which cause in which country they fight?”
No, but each country has a local equity resource budget. A global one does not exist, but can be “conjured” up in your mind.
I’ve add that nobody has provided arguments that women suffer more outside the USA, either. It’s just another truism in white liberal middle-class circles. Whether this view is reasonable or not, an argument for it that compares the suffering of men and women worldwide has never been made.
If anyone hold this view, check out the literature on gendercide, and the work of Adam Jones. For example, see his essay on the erasure of male victims in Kosovo. At Gendercide Watch, Jones argues that male victims of gender-related atrocities are systematically erased:
If you check out the case studies at Gendercide Watch, men, particularly men deemed “battle-age” are disproportionately targeted in most forms of armed conflict. In the US, we hear a lot about women being raped in war, while men who die in greater orders of magnitude barely get a mention. The case studies are truly chilling, and when I read them, I wondered “why am I only finding out about this now?” For instance, I didn’t know that the majority of victims in Stalin’s purges seem to have been male.
If you (general “you”) didn’t know the magnitude of the slaughter of men worldwide, then ask yourself: what else is left out from my understanding of gender? What else have feminist not told me?
If you are a guy and you don’t like forced labor, purges, machetes, chainsaws, or hanging out in mass graves, then it’s really difficult to say that you are better off in many areas outside the U.S. that are experiencing armed conflict. Women have a horrible time in war, too, and experience high rates of sexual violence. But is that really worse than death? Note that men commonly experience sexual violence in conflict zones, also. Jones quotes Dubravka Zarkov:
It’s not at all obvious that women suffer more in conflict zones, even taking into account sexual violence towards them, due to the high rate of murder, forced labor, and sexual violence towards men in many conflicts. The truism “women suffer more outside the US” should be updated to: “women suffer more outside the US, except in conflict zones,” which just doesn’t have the same ring.
I find this approach rather pointless, though. Playing the victim card on behalf of men is an inherently unworkable strategy. The now sadly defunct Man Who is Thursday blog had a great discussion of this issue, partly excerpted in this OB post.
That said, I find it funny to imagine what would happen if the life expectancy of women were significantly shorter than men’s (i.e. the opposite of what is the case now). The present difference in favor of women is perceived as a not too terribly remarkable biological fact. But if it were the other way around, I’d bet it would be given constant attention as a burning issue of injustice, and in fact, I think it would be dangerous for one’s reputation to suggest that the difference might be partly biological rather than an artifact of oppression.
I’m well aware about the biases against gender politics that support men’s interests.
When I’m posting on LW, I’m not advancing a political strategy for mass consumption. I don’t know the most instrumentally rational political strategy, and I don’t claim to. I am focusing on what beliefs about gender make the most sense, regardless of whether they would be politically feasible in the current political climate.
Since lukeprog is interested in certain feminist concepts about gender, I LW is a good place to examine the reasoning behind those concepts.
I think you’re quite correct about this double standard. There’s a case of bias going on there.
I agree that your arguments are entirely sound, it’s just that when I see links to websites like gendercide.org, I get the same bad feeling as whenever I see people who have a good point but present it in a way that’s guaranteed to fail as a PR strategy. But yes, I also expect that LW should be a place where people are capable of judging arguments on their real and not PR merits.
Another interesting case of bias I thought of recently was inspired by some radical feminist tract claiming that rape is a tool of social control used to enforce patriarchy and subjugate women (a claim not at all uncommon among more radical feminists).
In reality, however, one the main tools of social control is the threat of imprisonment for breaking the law—and one of the main ways in which prison is perceived as awful by men is prison rape. Together with the fact that the overwhelming majority of prisoners are men, this would imply that the threat of rape is in fact presently a powerful mechanism of social control over men, not women. This especially since prison rape of men is commonly perceived as deserved punishment in the general public (one can make gleeful jokes about it without losing respectability), and it’s tolerated and even calculated into the decision-making by prison authorities, while at the same time it’s unimaginable that anyone would dare to treat rapes of women with a similar attitude.
I’m puzzled by the way you seem to frame this as two claims in opposition.
I mean, you surely aren’t suggesting that rape happens only in prisons. So even if rape is used to establish social control over men, that isn’t evidence that rape is not used to establish social control over women… it’s possible on your account that it’s used to establish social control over everyone.
Of course, the kind of social control would be different, in this case. That is, threatening men with imprisonment-and-subsequent-rape would presumably discourage them from getting caught committing crimes, whereas threatening women with rape-without-imprisonment would presumably discourage them from going around unarmed or unguarded.
But leaving that distinction aside and just considering both examples as cases of social control, I don’t see how you get that “the threat of rape is a mechanism of social control over men, not women,” as opposed to a mechanism of social control over men and women.
You’re right, I should have worded my comment more precisely. The part you quote is indeed illogical, so let me put it more accurately.
In order to portray the threat of rape as a mechanism of social control of women in modern developed societies, you have to formulate an intricate, non-obvious, and, in my opinion, rather implausible theory. (Of course, you can trivially assert that the threat of rape restrains women’s freedom in practice, but this is true of every other violent crime as well, and I see no clear way to use it for justifying anything more than a straightforward law-and-order approach.) In contrast, the threat of prison rape against men is an unwritten but obviously significant part of the official mechanisms of social control wielded by the state, and while a similar threat against women by the state would be met with utmost public outrage, this one seems to be widely accepted. Yet based on the feminist theorizing on rape, one could never imagine that something like this might be the case.
So, to word my conclusion precisely: from what feminists say about the topic, one would conclude that insofar as the threat of rape is used as a mechanism of social control (in some meaningful sense of the term), it is directed primarily, if not exclusively, against women. Whereas in reality, it is directed against men openly, extensively, and as part of the official state mechanisms of social control, with nothing comparable directed against women.
Now of course, someone might argue that my account is biased, and that the unofficial and non-obvious rape-based social control of women is in fact similarly, or even more, extensive and severe. But even if you agree with this, it would have to be supported by an argument, whereas the feminist treatments of the issue assume it as obvious and unquestionable.
Thanks for the clarification.
I’m not interested in that sort of argument. My position is that such arguments are mostly useless, and that you’d do better spending your time fixing whatever injustice is most fixable instead of trying to make the injustice exactly balanced. (As you should know if you read the comment you were replying to)
I made the statement you keep going back to as an aside and because it’s obviously true: There are no places where enough men are treated unfairly enough to make up for places like Saudi Arabia (though apparently even Saudi Arabia has been improving somewhat). I don’t particularly care whether it’s true in particular countries where it’s close enough to be non-obvious because I don’t think that should guide any decisions in such countries (though I think it’s probably true in all but a handful of European countries, and I did give the link on women in parliament which is more evidence than you gave)
I’m not sure why the point about a literal global budget seems so important to you. Promoting equality between Finish men and women would be very far down on the list of things as perfectly rational UNICEF would spend money on, a charity devoted to such would presumably score pretty low on GiveWell compared to other equality causes, and I’d certainly hope a Finish LessWrong group would find a better cause to devote themselves to. Why does it matter to you whether that’s stated in the form of a hypothetical global budget or not? The statement was mostly just to point out that Finland is untypical anyway.