It is true that popular discourse paints females as the suppressed group and males as the non-suppressed group.
“So I’ve always thought of myself as a feminist.”
Feminism goes beyond technical gender equality of having the same rights and privileges. I’m a feminist too, because I think politics should solve problems facing women. And I’m also a masculist (or a men’s rights activist), since men’s problems should be solved too.
“Of course, some activists (the word has positive connotations to me, BTW) pushed too far, as is the case in all large movements.”
The main problem with feminism today is that all the political gender equality resources are directed to feminism. It should be evenly distributed between masculism and feminism.
Because female circumcision is rare and illegal in developed nations?
There’s obviously a female advantage here, at least in the Western world. Mutilating female genitals draws the appropriate outrage, while mutilating male genitals is ignored or even condoned. (I’ve seen people accused of “anti-Semitism” just for pointing out that male circumcision has virtually no actual medical benefits.)
The mutilation of male genitals in question is ridiculous in itself but hardly equivalent to the kind of mutilation done to female genitals.
Granted. Female mutilation is often far more severe.
But I think it’s interesting that when the American Academy of Pediatrics proposed allowing female circumcision that really just was circumcision, i.e. cutting of the clitoral hood, people were still outraged. And so we see that even when the situation is made symmetrical, there persists what we can only call female privilege in this circumstance.
Can you clarify what you mean by “evenly distributed”?
For example, by “evenly” do you mean 50⁄50 between these two causes?
Do you mean distributed proportionally based on the number of men and the number of women in the community?
Do you mean distributed proportionally to reflect the gender distribution in the community (which is noticeably more complex than “number of men” and “number of women”)?
Do you mean distributed proportionally based on the degree to which different genders experience differential harm under the current arrangement?
Well, my question had to do with the 1:1 aid-resource-split policy suggestion.
If you want to suggest instead that the aid-resource split be N:1 where N<1000, in favor of a group o be determined later, I would support that… though I think it’s a woefully underspecified policy.
In practical terms, this means weighting according to severity, because the quantity of people affected is very close to equal. So we focus on the worst forms of oppression first, and then work our way up towards milder forms.
This in turn means that we should be focusing on genital mutilation and voting rights. (And things like Elevatorgate, for those of you who follow the atheist blogosphere, should obviously be on a far back burner.)
I don’t quite see the connection between the information you cite, and the 50⁄50 split policy recommendation.
From my perspective, if we can spend resources in such a way that we collectively get the most bang for the buck and reduce the spread of the curve, that’s a win. (In real life those goals are often in conflict, but that’s beside my point right now.)
If it so happens that the way to do that is to equally support men and women in a particular community, then a 50⁄50 split of resources makes sense in that community.
If that’s not the case, then a different resource split makes more sense.
Whether that split is weighted towards men or women will depend on the facts of the situation. Maybe I conclude based on the information you cite that I should support Finnish men more than Finnish women, for example.
But I don’t see how that data justifies a 50⁄50 split.
My data justifies slightly more resources for men, but until we have proper scientific research on the question, I’m okay with a 50⁄50 split. The split is currently about 97⁄3 in favor of women, so going to 50⁄50 would help significantly.
Ah, OK. If you are proposing 50⁄50 as a political compromise rather than actually asserting that it’s the correct target, then my questions are beside the point. Never mind, then.
I made a list of problems in a comment on a website. That’s not a good way to make politicial decisions. We need a proper study of the question. I think a priori the 50⁄50 split between genders is a good balance. You can call that a political compromise, I call it “don’t make quick decisions without proper scientific research”.
So, I have to actively disagree with this. Not for any reason having anything at all to do with gender or politics or any of that, just on pure decision-making grounds.
At every point, we ought to make decisions based on our best estimates based on the evidence we have. If your best estimate isn’t50⁄50 (which it isn’t: you believe the data justify slightly more resources for Finnish men) then it isn’t, and there’s no reason to use 50⁄50 rather than your actual best estimate.
This has nothing to do with avoiding making quick decisions. You’d be making an equally quick decision to support 50⁄50 as to support 51⁄49 or 52⁄48.
This has nothing to do with gathering more data. By all means, study the question properly, and change your estimates as new evidence comes in. Absolutely. But in the meantime we still have to do something, and specifically we ought to make decisions based on our best estimates based on the evidence we have at that time, which in your case is not 50⁄50.
Of course, we’ve got a cultural (and possibly genetic, I don’t know) bias towards an equal-distribution strategy… that “feels fair.” So it feels like 50⁄50 is some kind of special number that you should support instead of your best estimate.
But I see no reason to endorse that bias (other than the political one of it being easier to sell a solution that “feels fair”).
The main problem with feminism today is that all the political gender equality resources are directed to feminism. It should be evenly distributed between masculism and feminism.
Ideally this would be true, but it’s not. Women and men are both oppressed by gender roles, but women get the worst of it on net.
Ideally this would be true, but it’s not. Women and men are both oppressed by gender roles,
I agree that any meaningful definition of oppression must apply to both genders. I’ve tried to imagine definitions of “oppression” by which only women are oppressed, but they must be extremely contorted. It’s impossible to define “oppression” as only effecting women without being blind to certain systematic harms that happen to men, or without trying to define it that way.
but women get the worst of it on net.
I’ve heard this claimed, but I’ve always wondered what this comparison means. “The worst of it on net” implies some sort of aggregation function for oppression. What is this function, and what are the units of measurement?
To make a quantitative comparison, your quantities must have the same units. That’s difficult when attempting to compare social harms. If someone asks you, “what’s worse, men being considered more dangerous to children, or women being considered less legitimate in positions of authority in the workplace?” the answer is “what a stupid question… those things have different units.”
Maybe there is some magic oppression function, and someone somewhere has completed the philosophical tour de force that would allow us to meaningfully compare oppressions of different groups in a quantitative manner.
Or maybe the emperor is wearing no clothes, and the people who advance this argument are being biased and self-serving, just like any political advocacy group.
nawitus was talking about an ideal split of resources to aid each gender. Since he proposed a 50⁄50 split of resources, he might well believe that there is an even split of “oppression,” but you’d have to take that up with him.
I’m not sure it makes sense to choose any split, because shitty things that happen more often to women are measured in different units than shitty things that happen more often to men. We would need some way to convert those quantities into the same units to make a comparison. Even in an inconvenient enough world, I’m not sure you can make a split of a quantity measured in feet and a quantity measured in pounds.
You have $100. You must only spend it in some combination on a) issues that are clearly specific to men or b) issues that are clearly specific to women. Which do you pick?
Even less convenient world:
I, the Grand High Poo-Bah of the World, have just appointed you Director of Spending on Gender-Specific Oppression. I have outlawed all charitable spending on gender-specific oppression not routed through your office. I have given you a budget equal to the current spending on gender-specific oppression, or to a randomly selected figure. If you do not pick how to spend it, I will take it back and spending it on professional baby-punchers. How do you spend it?
Any kind of moral ontology is totally irrelevant in a real-world situation where you actually have to pick.
Under circumstances like that I would start by requisitioning some census data from the Director of Figuring Out What Gender Actually Is, to determine the number of males, females, and misc/other. Initial budgeting would assume a uniform per-capita distribution of gender-specific oppression.
Then I would do some surveys, focus groups, statistical analysis of written complaints, and so forth to identify the main problems in each category. Naturally, information-gathering for a specific gender’s problems comes out of the budget for that gender, although there might be some post-hoc fiddling around if a survey intended to address one issue provides unexpected insights outside it’s category.
Once the issues are identified, I would set up teams of economists, anthropologists, etc. (mixed specialties in any given team) for in-depth analysis of causes and possible solutions. Each problem gets more than one team, each team is expected to come up with a predictive model of the problem before anyone proposes solutions, and then to have multiple possible courses of action with cost/benefit analysis for each, including the null option and at least one option which is completely stupid.
After the possible courses of action are laid out, each team is handed the full analysis of two or more interventions proposed by other teams and assigned the task of mapping out how those courses of action might interfere with each other. Bonus points for spotting errors or oversights in the other team’s analysis, or ways that multiple interventions could be cost-effectively combined. The result is one or more new proposals which are then added to circulation.
Eventually, a few ‘gems’ would emerge: plans with exceptionally high cost/benefit ratios, exceptionally low risk of negative externalities, or that would otherwise be unconscionable to avoid acting on. Each of these gets as much funding as necessary, up to… let’s say about 80% of the relevant category or categories.
After the gems are polished off, either to the point of diminishing returns or concern over too many eggs in one basket, the remainder of any given categorical budget is distributed between contingency planning against the possibility of flaws in the ‘gems,’ the various second-string plans (with an eye toward political expediency), and various long term concerns such as follow-up studies.
Yes, but it of course depends on some form of inter-comparability of the costs and benefits of different approaches. Such a tool for comparison should enable you to, with all the analysis that you’ve laid out here, come up with a highly accurate estimate for % of oppression of men vs women vs. other. (For instance, you would probably find that oppression of other is higher than either oppression of men or oppression of women.)
If the various approaches are government programs, costs and benefits could be compared in terms of dollars spent, dollars of taxpayer benefit produced (if someone would have been willing to pay to change, say, a dress code, and obtains that benefit for free, that’s an IPED dollar-value benefit to them) and approval-rating percentage points.
I would expect gender-related oppression of misc/other folks to be higher, in per capita terms, than either men or women, yes. For one thing, earlier stages of this very discussion glossed over them altogether. However, I would also expect that quite a bit of that oppression is not strictly gender-specific, and avoid initially allocating disproportionate funds to that category out of respect for the limits of my department’s mandate.
Presumably there is a Director of Spending on Surgically Correctable Birth Defects or somesuch who would legitimately have at least partial jurisdiction over transsexuality, and a lot of individual citizens who are oppressed for reasons only tangentially related to ambiguous gender. I would of course want to coordinate with other departments to clearly delineate who is responsible for which edge cases and to what degree, erring on the side of too much overlapping coverage, if for no other reason than because broad prohibitions on charity might leave some unaccounted-for micro-minority with absolutely no legitimate recourse.
Naturally, if subsequent investigation reveals the misc/other category to have more low-hanging fruit, or useful externalities on a larger category, that changes things. Evidence based reallocations were explicitly included in my proposal.
So I don’t see why we disagree.
I suspect it’s a matter of technicalities rather than fundamental goal disconnect. If I want to keep the Baby-Punchers Local #403 from getting a new pool table in their rec room, I’ll probably need to come up with some plausible-sounding budget allocations today, not in six-plus months after all the research is already done and paid for.
No actually the reason we disagree is that I was having an argument with HughRistik and asked him a question as a method of argument, and then you answered the question having already internalized my stance and thereby saying a bunch of true but irrelevant stuff, and then I didn’t bother to look up his name and verify that you were different people.
I am reasonably sure you are right, but how useful is that sort of accounting? Society should be fair to each and every individual, not “fair” to both genders on aggregate (the two traditional genders don’t even cover everyone). If one gender suffers from unfairness in certain ways that isn’t made any better by the other gender suffering an equal amount of unfairness elsewhere, it’s made twice as bad because that means twice as much total unfairness.
IMO equality resources should be distributed so as to fix the maximum amount of unfairness. Women suffer more unfairness so presumably most resources would be directed towards them anyway, but there could easily be a number of low hanging fruit on the male side.
“Women suffer more unfairness so presumably most resources would be directed towards them anyway, but there could easily be a number of low hanging fruit on the male side.”
This claim is often made, but I haven’t seen any calculations to back it up. I’m active in the gender equality debate in Finland, so I can only talk about Finnish statistics:
Men are forced to serve on average 8,5 months in “slave work”. No modern work regulations apply. I personally witnessed many broken bones and other health problems which happened to my friends during my service. Work was often 24⁄7 for weeks. Psychological stress is commonplace.
Men make 80 % of suicides, and 80 % of the homeless are men.
Women have higher wages by 2 percent.
Men have less success in studying
Men don’t have sexual power
Men face the majority of violence (and men face as much domestic violence as women)
Mutilation of boys for religious reasons is legal, but mutilation of girls is illegal.
Men die seven years earlier
60% of unemployed people seeking work are men
(I can provide sources for these, but they would be in Finnish, so I don’t think most people are that interested, check http://mies.asia for more information though)
Obviously, women also face problems like rape and lack of leadership positions in corporations. On the political front, we have a female president and a female prime minister.
I’m not claiming definately that men suffer more, but this non-technical examination seems to imply it. At least it has not been proven that women suffer more nowadays.
Until such calculation has been made, I think it should be reasonable to direct 50% of equality resources for feminism, and 50% for masculism.
EDIT: There have been a downvote, but I don’t really understand why. Of course, Finland is only one nation, but similar lists have been made in USA for example. If this site assumes that we should only talk about USA, I think that’s unfair, since there’s a significant Finnish representation. I’m clearly talking about the situation in Finland, and the situation differs from country to country.
There are of course some countries, where women have less freedom than men etc. I don’t think it makes sense to talk about a global average here, since equity politics are not a global, but local question.
What gave you the idea that I was talking about Finland? Or that most of the world is similar to Finland? You are doing precisely the sort of analysis I argued to be useless, and from a world perspective Finland would be among the last places where you’d spend anything from a global equality resource budget. (I have no opinion how one would best spend local non-transferable resources in Finland, but I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if a neutral allocation by issue ended up helping Finish men more, of course I wouldn’t be terribly surprised by the opposite either)
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’m a tall white American male, so sometimes it takes a bit of work for me to understand what it’s like to be a member of a suppressed group.”
Females are suppressed, and so are males. Gender roles suppress both genders. They also offer advantages to both genders.
List of male privileges: http://www.amptoons.com/blog/the-male-privilege-checklist/
List of female privileges: http://masculistadvice.blogspot.com/2008/06/female-privilege-list.html
It is true that popular discourse paints females as the suppressed group and males as the non-suppressed group.
“So I’ve always thought of myself as a feminist.”
Feminism goes beyond technical gender equality of having the same rights and privileges. I’m a feminist too, because I think politics should solve problems facing women. And I’m also a masculist (or a men’s rights activist), since men’s problems should be solved too.
“Of course, some activists (the word has positive connotations to me, BTW) pushed too far, as is the case in all large movements.”
The main problem with feminism today is that all the political gender equality resources are directed to feminism. It should be evenly distributed between masculism and feminism.
Why would you reference a list of “female privilege” that includes circumcision? That’s not exactly helping you prove your point.
Because female circumcision is rare and illegal in developed nations?
There’s obviously a female advantage here, at least in the Western world. Mutilating female genitals draws the appropriate outrage, while mutilating male genitals is ignored or even condoned. (I’ve seen people accused of “anti-Semitism” just for pointing out that male circumcision has virtually no actual medical benefits.)
The mutilation of male genitals in question is ridiculous in itself but hardly equivalent to the kind of mutilation done to female genitals.
Granted. Female mutilation is often far more severe.
But I think it’s interesting that when the American Academy of Pediatrics proposed allowing female circumcision that really just was circumcision, i.e. cutting of the clitoral hood, people were still outraged. And so we see that even when the situation is made symmetrical, there persists what we can only call female privilege in this circumstance.
See, now I’m wondering what the effects would actually be. Is it possible that “true” female circumcision would still have greater adverse effects?
I’ll note that I predict roughly the same outrage level regardless, but it still seems like an important question.
Can you clarify what you mean by “evenly distributed”?
For example, by “evenly” do you mean 50⁄50 between these two causes?
Do you mean distributed proportionally based on the number of men and the number of women in the community?
Do you mean distributed proportionally to reflect the gender distribution in the community (which is noticeably more complex than “number of men” and “number of women”)?
Do you mean distributed proportionally based on the degree to which different genders experience differential harm under the current arrangement?
Do you mean something else?
Thing is, none of these criteria justify a 1000:1 funding ratio. (estimate pulled out of thin air)
Well, my question had to do with the 1:1 aid-resource-split policy suggestion.
If you want to suggest instead that the aid-resource split be N:1 where N<1000, in favor of a group o be determined later, I would support that… though I think it’s a woefully underspecified policy.
The answer should be obvious: Expected utility.
In practical terms, this means weighting according to severity, because the quantity of people affected is very close to equal. So we focus on the worst forms of oppression first, and then work our way up towards milder forms.
This in turn means that we should be focusing on genital mutilation and voting rights. (And things like Elevatorgate, for those of you who follow the atheist blogosphere, should obviously be on a far back burner.)
“For example, by “evenly” do you mean 50⁄50 between these two causes?”
Yes.
More information here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/4vj/a_rationalists_account_of_objectification/3r3j
I don’t quite see the connection between the information you cite, and the 50⁄50 split policy recommendation.
From my perspective, if we can spend resources in such a way that we collectively get the most bang for the buck and reduce the spread of the curve, that’s a win. (In real life those goals are often in conflict, but that’s beside my point right now.)
If it so happens that the way to do that is to equally support men and women in a particular community, then a 50⁄50 split of resources makes sense in that community.
If that’s not the case, then a different resource split makes more sense.
Whether that split is weighted towards men or women will depend on the facts of the situation. Maybe I conclude based on the information you cite that I should support Finnish men more than Finnish women, for example.
But I don’t see how that data justifies a 50⁄50 split.
My data justifies slightly more resources for men, but until we have proper scientific research on the question, I’m okay with a 50⁄50 split. The split is currently about 97⁄3 in favor of women, so going to 50⁄50 would help significantly.
Ah, OK. If you are proposing 50⁄50 as a political compromise rather than actually asserting that it’s the correct target, then my questions are beside the point. Never mind, then.
I made a list of problems in a comment on a website. That’s not a good way to make politicial decisions. We need a proper study of the question. I think a priori the 50⁄50 split between genders is a good balance. You can call that a political compromise, I call it “don’t make quick decisions without proper scientific research”.
So, I have to actively disagree with this. Not for any reason having anything at all to do with gender or politics or any of that, just on pure decision-making grounds.
At every point, we ought to make decisions based on our best estimates based on the evidence we have. If your best estimate isn’t 50⁄50 (which it isn’t: you believe the data justify slightly more resources for Finnish men) then it isn’t, and there’s no reason to use 50⁄50 rather than your actual best estimate.
This has nothing to do with avoiding making quick decisions. You’d be making an equally quick decision to support 50⁄50 as to support 51⁄49 or 52⁄48.
This has nothing to do with gathering more data. By all means, study the question properly, and change your estimates as new evidence comes in. Absolutely. But in the meantime we still have to do something, and specifically we ought to make decisions based on our best estimates based on the evidence we have at that time, which in your case is not 50⁄50.
Of course, we’ve got a cultural (and possibly genetic, I don’t know) bias towards an equal-distribution strategy… that “feels fair.” So it feels like 50⁄50 is some kind of special number that you should support instead of your best estimate.
But I see no reason to endorse that bias (other than the political one of it being easier to sell a solution that “feels fair”).
Ideally this would be true, but it’s not. Women and men are both oppressed by gender roles, but women get the worst of it on net.
I agree that any meaningful definition of oppression must apply to both genders. I’ve tried to imagine definitions of “oppression” by which only women are oppressed, but they must be extremely contorted. It’s impossible to define “oppression” as only effecting women without being blind to certain systematic harms that happen to men, or without trying to define it that way.
I’ve heard this claimed, but I’ve always wondered what this comparison means. “The worst of it on net” implies some sort of aggregation function for oppression. What is this function, and what are the units of measurement?
To make a quantitative comparison, your quantities must have the same units. That’s difficult when attempting to compare social harms. If someone asks you, “what’s worse, men being considered more dangerous to children, or women being considered less legitimate in positions of authority in the workplace?” the answer is “what a stupid question… those things have different units.”
Maybe there is some magic oppression function, and someone somewhere has completed the philosophical tour de force that would allow us to meaningfully compare oppressions of different groups in a quantitative manner.
Or maybe the emperor is wearing no clothes, and the people who advance this argument are being biased and self-serving, just like any political advocacy group.
if they are non-intercomparable, you cannot justify an even split.
Where did I make an even split?
You responded to Normal Anomaly, who responded to nawitus, who suggested an even split. It was a reasonable guess that you supported it.
The general version of my argument is:
You have to choose SOME split, given an inconvenient enough world. Which do you pick? How do you justify it?
nawitus was talking about an ideal split of resources to aid each gender. Since he proposed a 50⁄50 split of resources, he might well believe that there is an even split of “oppression,” but you’d have to take that up with him.
I’m not sure it makes sense to choose any split, because shitty things that happen more often to women are measured in different units than shitty things that happen more often to men. We would need some way to convert those quantities into the same units to make a comparison. Even in an inconvenient enough world, I’m not sure you can make a split of a quantity measured in feet and a quantity measured in pounds.
Clearly some specifics are in order:
You have $100. You must only spend it in some combination on a) issues that are clearly specific to men or b) issues that are clearly specific to women. Which do you pick?
Even less convenient world:
I, the Grand High Poo-Bah of the World, have just appointed you Director of Spending on Gender-Specific Oppression. I have outlawed all charitable spending on gender-specific oppression not routed through your office. I have given you a budget equal to the current spending on gender-specific oppression, or to a randomly selected figure. If you do not pick how to spend it, I will take it back and spending it on professional baby-punchers. How do you spend it?
Any kind of moral ontology is totally irrelevant in a real-world situation where you actually have to pick.
Under circumstances like that I would start by requisitioning some census data from the Director of Figuring Out What Gender Actually Is, to determine the number of males, females, and misc/other. Initial budgeting would assume a uniform per-capita distribution of gender-specific oppression.
Then I would do some surveys, focus groups, statistical analysis of written complaints, and so forth to identify the main problems in each category. Naturally, information-gathering for a specific gender’s problems comes out of the budget for that gender, although there might be some post-hoc fiddling around if a survey intended to address one issue provides unexpected insights outside it’s category.
Once the issues are identified, I would set up teams of economists, anthropologists, etc. (mixed specialties in any given team) for in-depth analysis of causes and possible solutions. Each problem gets more than one team, each team is expected to come up with a predictive model of the problem before anyone proposes solutions, and then to have multiple possible courses of action with cost/benefit analysis for each, including the null option and at least one option which is completely stupid.
After the possible courses of action are laid out, each team is handed the full analysis of two or more interventions proposed by other teams and assigned the task of mapping out how those courses of action might interfere with each other. Bonus points for spotting errors or oversights in the other team’s analysis, or ways that multiple interventions could be cost-effectively combined. The result is one or more new proposals which are then added to circulation.
Eventually, a few ‘gems’ would emerge: plans with exceptionally high cost/benefit ratios, exceptionally low risk of negative externalities, or that would otherwise be unconscionable to avoid acting on. Each of these gets as much funding as necessary, up to… let’s say about 80% of the relevant category or categories.
After the gems are polished off, either to the point of diminishing returns or concern over too many eggs in one basket, the remainder of any given categorical budget is distributed between contingency planning against the possibility of flaws in the ‘gems,’ the various second-string plans (with an eye toward political expediency), and various long term concerns such as follow-up studies.
Does that seem reasonable?
Yes, but it of course depends on some form of inter-comparability of the costs and benefits of different approaches. Such a tool for comparison should enable you to, with all the analysis that you’ve laid out here, come up with a highly accurate estimate for % of oppression of men vs women vs. other. (For instance, you would probably find that oppression of other is higher than either oppression of men or oppression of women.)
So I don’t see why we disagree.
If the various approaches are government programs, costs and benefits could be compared in terms of dollars spent, dollars of taxpayer benefit produced (if someone would have been willing to pay to change, say, a dress code, and obtains that benefit for free, that’s an IPED dollar-value benefit to them) and approval-rating percentage points.
I would expect gender-related oppression of misc/other folks to be higher, in per capita terms, than either men or women, yes. For one thing, earlier stages of this very discussion glossed over them altogether. However, I would also expect that quite a bit of that oppression is not strictly gender-specific, and avoid initially allocating disproportionate funds to that category out of respect for the limits of my department’s mandate.
Presumably there is a Director of Spending on Surgically Correctable Birth Defects or somesuch who would legitimately have at least partial jurisdiction over transsexuality, and a lot of individual citizens who are oppressed for reasons only tangentially related to ambiguous gender. I would of course want to coordinate with other departments to clearly delineate who is responsible for which edge cases and to what degree, erring on the side of too much overlapping coverage, if for no other reason than because broad prohibitions on charity might leave some unaccounted-for micro-minority with absolutely no legitimate recourse.
Naturally, if subsequent investigation reveals the misc/other category to have more low-hanging fruit, or useful externalities on a larger category, that changes things. Evidence based reallocations were explicitly included in my proposal.
I suspect it’s a matter of technicalities rather than fundamental goal disconnect. If I want to keep the Baby-Punchers Local #403 from getting a new pool table in their rec room, I’ll probably need to come up with some plausible-sounding budget allocations today, not in six-plus months after all the research is already done and paid for.
No actually the reason we disagree is that I was having an argument with HughRistik and asked him a question as a method of argument, and then you answered the question having already internalized my stance and thereby saying a bunch of true but irrelevant stuff, and then I didn’t bother to look up his name and verify that you were different people.
I am reasonably sure you are right, but how useful is that sort of accounting? Society should be fair to each and every individual, not “fair” to both genders on aggregate (the two traditional genders don’t even cover everyone). If one gender suffers from unfairness in certain ways that isn’t made any better by the other gender suffering an equal amount of unfairness elsewhere, it’s made twice as bad because that means twice as much total unfairness.
IMO equality resources should be distributed so as to fix the maximum amount of unfairness. Women suffer more unfairness so presumably most resources would be directed towards them anyway, but there could easily be a number of low hanging fruit on the male side.
“Women suffer more unfairness so presumably most resources would be directed towards them anyway, but there could easily be a number of low hanging fruit on the male side.”
This claim is often made, but I haven’t seen any calculations to back it up. I’m active in the gender equality debate in Finland, so I can only talk about Finnish statistics:
Men are forced to serve on average 8,5 months in “slave work”. No modern work regulations apply. I personally witnessed many broken bones and other health problems which happened to my friends during my service. Work was often 24⁄7 for weeks. Psychological stress is commonplace.
Men make 80 % of suicides, and 80 % of the homeless are men.
Women have higher wages by 2 percent.
Men have less success in studying
Men don’t have sexual power
Men face the majority of violence (and men face as much domestic violence as women)
Mutilation of boys for religious reasons is legal, but mutilation of girls is illegal.
Men die seven years earlier
60% of unemployed people seeking work are men
(I can provide sources for these, but they would be in Finnish, so I don’t think most people are that interested, check http://mies.asia for more information though)
Obviously, women also face problems like rape and lack of leadership positions in corporations. On the political front, we have a female president and a female prime minister.
I’m not claiming definately that men suffer more, but this non-technical examination seems to imply it. At least it has not been proven that women suffer more nowadays.
Until such calculation has been made, I think it should be reasonable to direct 50% of equality resources for feminism, and 50% for masculism.
EDIT: There have been a downvote, but I don’t really understand why. Of course, Finland is only one nation, but similar lists have been made in USA for example. If this site assumes that we should only talk about USA, I think that’s unfair, since there’s a significant Finnish representation. I’m clearly talking about the situation in Finland, and the situation differs from country to country.
There are of course some countries, where women have less freedom than men etc. I don’t think it makes sense to talk about a global average here, since equity politics are not a global, but local question.
What gave you the idea that I was talking about Finland? Or that most of the world is similar to Finland? You are doing precisely the sort of analysis I argued to be useless, and from a world perspective Finland would be among the last places where you’d spend anything from a global equality resource budget. (I have no opinion how one would best spend local non-transferable resources in Finland, but I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if a neutral allocation by issue ended up helping Finish men more, of course I wouldn’t be terribly surprised by the opposite either)
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.