“thousands of much-needed feminist advances” seems to link to the “sex differences in humans” article.
I agree with you about it being silly to have a word for advocating the moral equality of the sexes (although I use this as a reason not to label myself “a feminist”, in much the same way that I would consider it vaguely silly to identify with a word labeling the advocacy of the moral equality of left- and right-handed people).
I don’t really like being summoned to do this consciousness-raising job on the basis of “Sayeth The Girl”. For one thing, I wrote that long enough ago that I now find it (like virtually everything else I wrote long enough ago) embarrassingly badly crafted, and I leave it up only as part of a policy that I shouldn’t delete stuff I publish just because it’s gotten embarrassing. For another, I have never wanted the job of Feminism Police on Less Wrong, and have largely stepped back as more people have been willing to do the needed work.
If you are willing to do your consciousness-raising by reading stuff, you could readsomeblogs and follow links like crazy (feminist bloggers are pretty good about linkage) and keep going until everything you run into looks familiar. This is the sort of topic you need to simmer in more than study like there will be a test later.
If for some reason you think talking to me in particular would be helpful (and you’re reasonably caught up on what I’ve already written onsite on the subject so I don’t need to repeat myself) I’m up for it but would prefer to do so offsite, via IM (or e-mail if IM is impractical).
If you are willing to do your consciousness-raising by reading stuff, you could read some blogs and follow links like crazy (feminist bloggers are pretty good about linkage) and keep going until everything you run into looks familiar. This is the sort of topic you need to simmer in more than study like there will be a test later.
This sounds like saying that you should keep reading authors who share a given ideological standpoint until you’re successfully propagandized by them. I don’t see how this approach could lead to an unbiased understanding of any subject. [Edit: I mean any subject that is an issue of strong ideological controversy, as this one clearly is.]
This sounds like saying that you should keep reading authors who share
a given ideological standpoint until you’re successfully propagandized by
them. I don’t see how this approach could lead to an unbiased understanding
of any subject.
You don’t limit bias by restricting what you read, but by exactly the opposite—by reading more, and from more varied, ideological perspectives. Alicorn didn’t say to reading nothing except feminist ideology; and you completely missed her conditional, “If you are willing to do your consciousness-raising by reading stuff”.
She is obviously speaking to the people who desire to understand the concepts involved. If you want to evaluate feminism, you need to understand the concepts, and to do that you need read things written by actual feminists. I think Cyan is right, you’re arguing in a way that you wouldn’t if this was about about something that wasn’t feminism.
How do you feel about the practice of advising LW newbies to read the sequences?
The analogy would be if someone didn’t understand some well-defined and useful concept that is discussed in the sequences, and you directed him to read the relevant sequence material, which presumably contains an accurate explanation. The assumption is that the concept is useful and well-defined, rather than an incoherent ideological buzzword, and that the sequences contain a correct explanation of it. (And to the extent that these assumptions don’t hold, the advice would be bad.)
However, as a different example, suppose someone is confused about some incoherent ideological concept, like, say, the Marxist notion of “dialectic.” Now if you direct this person to read Marxist authors persistently until the idea starts to make sense, you’re effectively instructing him to submit to ideological propaganda until he is successfully propagandized. (Especially if this person is already familiar with a significant body of Marxist literature and asks a cogent question that seems to expose some flaws in the concept.)
Now, the question is whether the notion of “objectification” and the feminist authors of the linked blogs are more similar to the first or the second example. Clearly, I believe that the latter is a closer analogy, which I don’t find surprising, considering that this is an area of intense ideological warfare and the authors in question in fact represent a more radical wing of one side in this conflict.
Honestly, I don’t see what exactly I wrote that is contrary to my original statement. The content is relevant insofar as the recommended reading represents the output of one side in an ideological struggle, and my original comment is consistent with that.
Could you clarify what precisely you mean by ” approach per se” here?
There’s a tension in your original statement between value-laden phrases such as “ideological” and “successfully propagandized” and the very general remark about the approach not leading to “an unbiased understanding of any subject” (emphasis added). What I’m driving at is that your objection was really to the recommended content; you didn’t quite address this head-on in the original statement but rather made an incorrect fairly general counterargument to reading widely on a given subject (or “simmering”, as Alicorn put it). (The italicized phrase is my reply to your request for clarification.)
Your reply to my question about the sequences did address this head-on. At this point I’m just trying to clarify my rhetoric.
“Go read the Sequences” : “Go read a bunch of Feminist Blogs” :: “Go read ‘Circular Altruism’” : “Go read a particular article about ’Objectification.”
“Objectification” and “Shut Up and Multiply” are buzzwords. They are important concepts that you need to understand in depth, even if you disagree with the ramifications and phrasing of them, if you want to discuss particular issues in a meaningful way.
“The Sequences” and “A bunch of a feminist blogs” are large collections of work that include essays of varying quality and importance. “Go read the sequences” is something I’ve definitely heard a lot here. Outsiders sometimes assume we mean “I don’t feel like talking to you until you’re part of our cult” when we say it. When in fact, they contain a lot of useful information that will change your mind about some things—but you are unlikely to start updating if you just read one particular article, especially if you’ve previously been biased against its topic.
I’m not advocating reading them until one agrees with them on every particular, or even any particular. Familiarity is a different goal entirely. It’s a little like learning another language: which, sure, learning a new language has its effects on your thought process, but it’s not so sinister as you imply. Notably, you could combine simmering in feminism with simmering in men’s right’s advocacy, or even whackaloon level misogyny, without seriously harming the ability to learn the feminist blogosphere’s culture and language.
I’d also suggest looking for blogs of people who were active in the feminist movement and left it because of conflicts between the movement (note: not the concept of feminism itself) and other activism, like racial or class or disability or transgender activism, if one wants to hear about issues with feminism-as-a-movement. I can probably even dig up a few examples, if there’s a call for it.
It doesn’t critique feminism in general, and of course doesn’t shed any light on objectification, but that’s an interesting inside critique of a large part of a particular movement. Thanks for the link.
I know you don’t want the job of Feminism Police. AnI didn’t intend to “summon” you—hence the ? after you name—but I did request help. And it seems you’re offering it—via IM—and I appreciate it.
Let me do some more simmering, and then maybe we’ll chat in IM.
In the meantime, I look forward to seeing if anyone else can provide some insight.
It was the “on the basis of Sayeth the Girl” that I objected to more than the mere fact of the summoning. If you’d summoned me on the basis that I am the most karmalicious female poster or something, I wouldn’t have remarked on it except maybe to verbally preen.
For feminist blogs that aren’t horribly ideological echo chambers, I recommend Clarisse Thorn and Ethecofem.
I’m a big fan of Finally Feminism 101. It shows how badly certain feminist arguments fall down when actually articulated. For instance, good luck parsing the argument for why male privilege exists, but female privilege doesn’t:
No, what is commonly called “female privilege” is better described as benevolent sexism.
If I understand this correctly, FF101 would look at “women and children first” situations like the Titanic, HMS Birkenhead, and Srebrenica Massacre and say that women disproportionately being protected is not “female privilege,” but rather “benevolent sexism.” And keep in mind that by “benevolent sexism,” FF101 means sexism towards women, not towards men. Even though it’s the men who end up dead.
Because it’s so much more sexist to be patronized with a spot on a lifeboat, rather than being left to die. For some reason, men getting disproportionately assigned to death doesn’t count as sexism (towards men) or as a lack of privilege in the eyes of FF101. Something is very wrong with their moral philosophy.
So, why do women lack privilege?
Also, it should be noted that, while men have what’s called male privilege that doesn’t mean that there must logically be a “female privilege” counterpart. This is because, although many strides towards equality have been made over the years, women as a class have not yet leveled the playing field, much less been put in a position of power and authority equivalent to that which grants institutional power to men as a class.
FF101 seems to argue that a group must have institutional power as a class to have gender privilege. Why? Because FF101 says so, evidently. (I won’t even touch the sophistry enabled by the words “institutional” and “class” for now.)
This claim is not at all obvious. In the case of my above examples, the people in charge with “institutional power” were indeed male (officers on the ships, or both the Serbian and U.N. decision-makers in the case of the massacre). Yet these elite men did not behave as if other men were in the same “class” as them. Actually, they used their “institutional power” to throw other men under the boat (literally, in the case of the Titanic and Birkenhead), and into mass graves (in the case of Srebrenica).
Institutional power being held by people who are male does not seem to stop women from being massively advantaged over men in lifeboat situations, and in surviving conflict zones. Not calling this sort of advantage “privilege” makes it look like FF101 is defining it in an exclusionary and self-serving way. I’m quite sure that if the doctrine was “men and children first,” FF101 would consider it to be sexism towards women, and an example of male privilege.
The other curious assumption by FF101 is that women would have to level the playing field for female privilege to exist. This assumes a unidimensional analysis of power, where one group (men) just hangs over another group (women) in all areas. Yet if in certain domains, women indeed experience unjust advantages while men experience unjust disadvantages (see examples above, for instance), then why can’t we say that women are privileged in some domains while lacking privilege in others?
It’s as FF101 thinks that there is a unidimensional hierarchy with men over women, and while that hierarchy exists, women can’t have privilege… even in areas where they have advantages that would get called “privilege” if possessed by men. First, FF101 has not shown that such a unidimensional hierarchy exists, or that men occupy the dominant position in this hierarchy. Second, even if it did exist, I suppose we could define privilege to only be held by the “dominant class”… but why should we define it that way, when it’s rather counter-intuitive (e.g. defining protection of female lives over male lives as “not privilege”), and when it gives at least the perception of double standards? Given multiple ways of conceptualizing oppression, why pick the one that is least inclusive, and most alienating to people you are trying to turn into allies?
I believe that inclusive conceptualizations of privilege and oppression are not only more accurate and humane than the FF101 conceptualization, but also potentially more effective for getting more groups involved in social justice without making them into the bad guys. As I suggested to you in my other response, recognizing women’s advantages could make it cognitively easier for some men to recognize their own. With more inclusive concepts, social justice would actually live up to its name rather than be “social justice for me, but not for thee.”
Of course, if FF101 isn’t just concerned with social justice, and is also trying to maintain power over the terms of gender discourse, while self-servingly brushing harms towards women and advantages of men with a conceptual secret sauce that makes it more special than the reverse… then their language makes more sense. Another plausible explanation is that they are simply uneducated about all the harms towards men and advantages of women they call “benevolent sexism,” in which case their theories are based on highly incomplete data (and we have to wonder how much feminism contributes to that lack of education).
I agree with you completely that being put on a lifeboat is better than not being put on a lifeboat. Full stop. The men are clearly getting the raw end of this deal. They’re being treated as disposable while the women and children are identified as precious. That is sexism, it’s against men, and it’s bad; the 101 FAQ is just wrong about that.
However, that doesn’t preclude the conceptualization of “women and children first” from being sexist against women (although a mere conceptualization does not actually, here, get any women killed and therefore is not as bad as the above, that doesn’t mean it’s not there or does not provide an example of a certain kind of generally propagated sexism-against-women that might call for investigation). The story about the Titanic encourages us to view the men as making a noble sacrifice and interpret the women who were saved as being, yes, precious, indispensable, but vaguely weak and pathetic. Being seen to make a noble sacrifice is inadequate recompense for discriminatory lifeboat assignments, but it is not zero, and the people who wrote the FAQ aren’t hallucinating, they just have tunnel vision.
However, that doesn’t preclude the conceptualization of “women and children first” from being sexist against women
I completely agree, There is plenty of sexism to go around for everyone. The notion of sexism only effecting one gender comes from feminism, and I don’t share it. So by pointing out sexism towards men in one context, I am in no way precluding sexism against women.
However, that doesn’t preclude the conceptualization of “women and children first” from being sexist against women
This is a classic move, first dissected in Jean Curthoys’s “Feminist Amnesia”.
When you are losing the debate about real human beings, when people start to point out pesky facts like the death gap, the homelessness gap, the conscription exemption, the violence gap, the infanticide gap, then change the subject to the concepts of man / women. Abuse Pythagoras for making up a list in which “male” is preferred to “female”. And ignore all the ways that female is preferred to male (nurturing, cooperative, caring, nice, sharing, etc etc).
The trouble with this move is that whatever we may conclude about the relative merit of concepts, the dead men are still dead.
It would be more honest to do a scorecard and see if, on average, men have it better than women. Not the top 0.01%of men, but men in general. According to the OECD’s analysis, in most countries they do not. http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/#/11111111111
Even better, one could analyze how well off people are, and try and work out the factors that contribute to that. It may well be that the usual suspects are not the most important. As long as we stick to crude and prescientific techniques like picking out some semi-random characteristics as important, we are not going to get very far. A case in point: should Barack Obama’s (obviously black, female) daughters qualify for affirmative action and preference getting into college, over a white male who was brought up in poverty?
Out of curiosity: is there any actual evidence that the “women and children first” trope actually does preferentially get men killed due to discriminatory lifeboat assignments (or equivalent) on any kind of significant basis? Or is this more of a cultural trope attached to some suggestive anecdotes?
I mean, I understand how in theory it would have that result if in real emergency situations people actually behaved that way.
And I understand how this can make the aggregate situation worse for men than women, if it is the strongest factor influencing people’s behavior rather than just countering other equally sexist factors (e.g., socially conditioning women to not aggressively seek their own lifeboat seats).
I’m just wondering whether it in fact does so in the real world.
Short version: Men really were more likely to have died on the Titanic, partly because the captain’s order of “women and children first” was interpreted to mean “men not permitted on lifeboats” rather than as “men get remaining seats”. However, in most shipwrecks, men had the advantage. Also, captains typically didn’t go down with their ships.
Note that this study deliberately excluded shipwrecks where it was known women had survived at higher rates.
My reading of the evidence is that, where time exists for an orderly exit, women did better. In exigent circumstances, where it was everyone for themselves, men fared better because they are stronger, better swimmers, etc.
It is interesting that on the Titanic, women survived at much higher rates than children.
“thousands of much-needed feminist advances” seems to link to the “sex differences in humans” article.
I agree with you about it being silly to have a word for advocating the moral equality of the sexes (although I use this as a reason not to label myself “a feminist”, in much the same way that I would consider it vaguely silly to identify with a word labeling the advocacy of the moral equality of left- and right-handed people).
I don’t really like being summoned to do this consciousness-raising job on the basis of “Sayeth The Girl”. For one thing, I wrote that long enough ago that I now find it (like virtually everything else I wrote long enough ago) embarrassingly badly crafted, and I leave it up only as part of a policy that I shouldn’t delete stuff I publish just because it’s gotten embarrassing. For another, I have never wanted the job of Feminism Police on Less Wrong, and have largely stepped back as more people have been willing to do the needed work.
If you are willing to do your consciousness-raising by reading stuff, you could read some blogs and follow links like crazy (feminist bloggers are pretty good about linkage) and keep going until everything you run into looks familiar. This is the sort of topic you need to simmer in more than study like there will be a test later.
If for some reason you think talking to me in particular would be helpful (and you’re reasonably caught up on what I’ve already written onsite on the subject so I don’t need to repeat myself) I’m up for it but would prefer to do so offsite, via IM (or e-mail if IM is impractical).
This sounds like saying that you should keep reading authors who share a given ideological standpoint until you’re successfully propagandized by them. I don’t see how this approach could lead to an unbiased understanding of any subject. [Edit: I mean any subject that is an issue of strong ideological controversy, as this one clearly is.]
You don’t limit bias by restricting what you read, but by exactly the opposite—by reading more, and from more varied, ideological perspectives. Alicorn didn’t say to reading nothing except feminist ideology; and you completely missed her conditional, “If you are willing to do your consciousness-raising by reading stuff”.
She is obviously speaking to the people who desire to understand the concepts involved. If you want to evaluate feminism, you need to understand the concepts, and to do that you need read things written by actual feminists. I think Cyan is right, you’re arguing in a way that you wouldn’t if this was about about something that wasn’t feminism.
How do you feel about the practice of advising LW newbies to read the sequences?
Cyan:
The analogy would be if someone didn’t understand some well-defined and useful concept that is discussed in the sequences, and you directed him to read the relevant sequence material, which presumably contains an accurate explanation. The assumption is that the concept is useful and well-defined, rather than an incoherent ideological buzzword, and that the sequences contain a correct explanation of it. (And to the extent that these assumptions don’t hold, the advice would be bad.)
However, as a different example, suppose someone is confused about some incoherent ideological concept, like, say, the Marxist notion of “dialectic.” Now if you direct this person to read Marxist authors persistently until the idea starts to make sense, you’re effectively instructing him to submit to ideological propaganda until he is successfully propagandized. (Especially if this person is already familiar with a significant body of Marxist literature and asks a cogent question that seems to expose some flaws in the concept.)
Now, the question is whether the notion of “objectification” and the feminist authors of the linked blogs are more similar to the first or the second example. Clearly, I believe that the latter is a closer analogy, which I don’t find surprising, considering that this is an area of intense ideological warfare and the authors in question in fact represent a more radical wing of one side in this conflict.
Yup, that was what I was getting at: contrary to your original statement, your true objection isn’t to the approach per se but to the content.
Honestly, I don’t see what exactly I wrote that is contrary to my original statement. The content is relevant insofar as the recommended reading represents the output of one side in an ideological struggle, and my original comment is consistent with that.
Could you clarify what precisely you mean by ” approach per se” here?
There’s a tension in your original statement between value-laden phrases such as “ideological” and “successfully propagandized” and the very general remark about the approach not leading to “an unbiased understanding of any subject” (emphasis added). What I’m driving at is that your objection was really to the recommended content; you didn’t quite address this head-on in the original statement but rather made an incorrect fairly general counterargument to reading widely on a given subject (or “simmering”, as Alicorn put it). (The italicized phrase is my reply to your request for clarification.)
Your reply to my question about the sequences did address this head-on. At this point I’m just trying to clarify my rhetoric.
Thanks for the clarification. In retrospect, I agree that my original comment was poorly worded.
There’s two separate issues to be compared:
“Go read the Sequences” : “Go read a bunch of Feminist Blogs” :: “Go read ‘Circular Altruism’” : “Go read a particular article about ’Objectification.”
“Objectification” and “Shut Up and Multiply” are buzzwords. They are important concepts that you need to understand in depth, even if you disagree with the ramifications and phrasing of them, if you want to discuss particular issues in a meaningful way.
“The Sequences” and “A bunch of a feminist blogs” are large collections of work that include essays of varying quality and importance. “Go read the sequences” is something I’ve definitely heard a lot here. Outsiders sometimes assume we mean “I don’t feel like talking to you until you’re part of our cult” when we say it. When in fact, they contain a lot of useful information that will change your mind about some things—but you are unlikely to start updating if you just read one particular article, especially if you’ve previously been biased against its topic.
I’m not advocating reading them until one agrees with them on every particular, or even any particular. Familiarity is a different goal entirely. It’s a little like learning another language: which, sure, learning a new language has its effects on your thought process, but it’s not so sinister as you imply. Notably, you could combine simmering in feminism with simmering in men’s right’s advocacy, or even whackaloon level misogyny, without seriously harming the ability to learn the feminist blogosphere’s culture and language.
I’d also suggest looking for blogs of people who were active in the feminist movement and left it because of conflicts between the movement (note: not the concept of feminism itself) and other activism, like racial or class or disability or transgender activism, if one wants to hear about issues with feminism-as-a-movement. I can probably even dig up a few examples, if there’s a call for it.
Yes please!
I also just came across this, which is a quote from a book that looks relevant. (More quotes from the same book here.)
Here is the most recent example from my blogroll, and it has links to a few others as well.
It doesn’t critique feminism in general, and of course doesn’t shed any light on objectification, but that’s an interesting inside critique of a large part of a particular movement. Thanks for the link.
Deliberately infecting yourself with the appropriate set of memes, yes.
I fixed the link, thanks.
I know you don’t want the job of Feminism Police. AnI didn’t intend to “summon” you—hence the ? after you name—but I did request help. And it seems you’re offering it—via IM—and I appreciate it.
Let me do some more simmering, and then maybe we’ll chat in IM.
In the meantime, I look forward to seeing if anyone else can provide some insight.
Cheers.
It was the “on the basis of Sayeth the Girl” that I objected to more than the mere fact of the summoning. If you’d summoned me on the basis that I am the most karmalicious female poster or something, I wouldn’t have remarked on it except maybe to verbally preen.
AIM: Alicorn24; MSN: alicorn@elcenia.com; GTalk: elcenia@gmail.com
(Anyone IMing me should identify themselves early on so I know you are not a random stranger.)
Thanks.
I’m making the rounds on the feminist blogs again. This one is particularly useful, in addition to those you linked to.
For feminist blogs that aren’t horribly ideological echo chambers, I recommend Clarisse Thorn and Ethecofem.
I’m a big fan of Finally Feminism 101. It shows how badly certain feminist arguments fall down when actually articulated. For instance, good luck parsing the argument for why male privilege exists, but female privilege doesn’t:
If I understand this correctly, FF101 would look at “women and children first” situations like the Titanic, HMS Birkenhead, and Srebrenica Massacre and say that women disproportionately being protected is not “female privilege,” but rather “benevolent sexism.” And keep in mind that by “benevolent sexism,” FF101 means sexism towards women, not towards men. Even though it’s the men who end up dead.
Because it’s so much more sexist to be patronized with a spot on a lifeboat, rather than being left to die. For some reason, men getting disproportionately assigned to death doesn’t count as sexism (towards men) or as a lack of privilege in the eyes of FF101. Something is very wrong with their moral philosophy.
So, why do women lack privilege?
FF101 seems to argue that a group must have institutional power as a class to have gender privilege. Why? Because FF101 says so, evidently. (I won’t even touch the sophistry enabled by the words “institutional” and “class” for now.)
This claim is not at all obvious. In the case of my above examples, the people in charge with “institutional power” were indeed male (officers on the ships, or both the Serbian and U.N. decision-makers in the case of the massacre). Yet these elite men did not behave as if other men were in the same “class” as them. Actually, they used their “institutional power” to throw other men under the boat (literally, in the case of the Titanic and Birkenhead), and into mass graves (in the case of Srebrenica).
Institutional power being held by people who are male does not seem to stop women from being massively advantaged over men in lifeboat situations, and in surviving conflict zones. Not calling this sort of advantage “privilege” makes it look like FF101 is defining it in an exclusionary and self-serving way. I’m quite sure that if the doctrine was “men and children first,” FF101 would consider it to be sexism towards women, and an example of male privilege.
The other curious assumption by FF101 is that women would have to level the playing field for female privilege to exist. This assumes a unidimensional analysis of power, where one group (men) just hangs over another group (women) in all areas. Yet if in certain domains, women indeed experience unjust advantages while men experience unjust disadvantages (see examples above, for instance), then why can’t we say that women are privileged in some domains while lacking privilege in others?
It’s as FF101 thinks that there is a unidimensional hierarchy with men over women, and while that hierarchy exists, women can’t have privilege… even in areas where they have advantages that would get called “privilege” if possessed by men. First, FF101 has not shown that such a unidimensional hierarchy exists, or that men occupy the dominant position in this hierarchy. Second, even if it did exist, I suppose we could define privilege to only be held by the “dominant class”… but why should we define it that way, when it’s rather counter-intuitive (e.g. defining protection of female lives over male lives as “not privilege”), and when it gives at least the perception of double standards? Given multiple ways of conceptualizing oppression, why pick the one that is least inclusive, and most alienating to people you are trying to turn into allies?
I believe that inclusive conceptualizations of privilege and oppression are not only more accurate and humane than the FF101 conceptualization, but also potentially more effective for getting more groups involved in social justice without making them into the bad guys. As I suggested to you in my other response, recognizing women’s advantages could make it cognitively easier for some men to recognize their own. With more inclusive concepts, social justice would actually live up to its name rather than be “social justice for me, but not for thee.”
Of course, if FF101 isn’t just concerned with social justice, and is also trying to maintain power over the terms of gender discourse, while self-servingly brushing harms towards women and advantages of men with a conceptual secret sauce that makes it more special than the reverse… then their language makes more sense. Another plausible explanation is that they are simply uneducated about all the harms towards men and advantages of women they call “benevolent sexism,” in which case their theories are based on highly incomplete data (and we have to wonder how much feminism contributes to that lack of education).
Regarding “women and children first” etc.
I agree with you completely that being put on a lifeboat is better than not being put on a lifeboat. Full stop. The men are clearly getting the raw end of this deal. They’re being treated as disposable while the women and children are identified as precious. That is sexism, it’s against men, and it’s bad; the 101 FAQ is just wrong about that.
However, that doesn’t preclude the conceptualization of “women and children first” from being sexist against women (although a mere conceptualization does not actually, here, get any women killed and therefore is not as bad as the above, that doesn’t mean it’s not there or does not provide an example of a certain kind of generally propagated sexism-against-women that might call for investigation). The story about the Titanic encourages us to view the men as making a noble sacrifice and interpret the women who were saved as being, yes, precious, indispensable, but vaguely weak and pathetic. Being seen to make a noble sacrifice is inadequate recompense for discriminatory lifeboat assignments, but it is not zero, and the people who wrote the FAQ aren’t hallucinating, they just have tunnel vision.
I completely agree, There is plenty of sexism to go around for everyone. The notion of sexism only effecting one gender comes from feminism, and I don’t share it. So by pointing out sexism towards men in one context, I am in no way precluding sexism against women.
This is a classic move, first dissected in Jean Curthoys’s “Feminist Amnesia”.
When you are losing the debate about real human beings, when people start to point out pesky facts like the death gap, the homelessness gap, the conscription exemption, the violence gap, the infanticide gap, then change the subject to the concepts of man / women. Abuse Pythagoras for making up a list in which “male” is preferred to “female”. And ignore all the ways that female is preferred to male (nurturing, cooperative, caring, nice, sharing, etc etc).
The trouble with this move is that whatever we may conclude about the relative merit of concepts, the dead men are still dead.
It would be more honest to do a scorecard and see if, on average, men have it better than women. Not the top 0.01%of men, but men in general. According to the OECD’s analysis, in most countries they do not. http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/#/11111111111
Even better, one could analyze how well off people are, and try and work out the factors that contribute to that. It may well be that the usual suspects are not the most important. As long as we stick to crude and prescientific techniques like picking out some semi-random characteristics as important, we are not going to get very far. A case in point: should Barack Obama’s (obviously black, female) daughters qualify for affirmative action and preference getting into college, over a white male who was brought up in poverty?
Out of curiosity: is there any actual evidence that the “women and children first” trope actually does preferentially get men killed due to discriminatory lifeboat assignments (or equivalent) on any kind of significant basis? Or is this more of a cultural trope attached to some suggestive anecdotes?
I mean, I understand how in theory it would have that result if in real emergency situations people actually behaved that way.
And I understand how this can make the aggregate situation worse for men than women, if it is the strongest factor influencing people’s behavior rather than just countering other equally sexist factors (e.g., socially conditioning women to not aggressively seek their own lifeboat seats).
I’m just wondering whether it in fact does so in the real world.
Research on men, women, and children in shipwrecks
Short version: Men really were more likely to have died on the Titanic, partly because the captain’s order of “women and children first” was interpreted to mean “men not permitted on lifeboats” rather than as “men get remaining seats”. However, in most shipwrecks, men had the advantage. Also, captains typically didn’t go down with their ships.
wikipedia
Note that this study deliberately excluded shipwrecks where it was known women had survived at higher rates.
My reading of the evidence is that, where time exists for an orderly exit, women did better. In exigent circumstances, where it was everyone for themselves, men fared better because they are stronger, better swimmers, etc.
It is interesting that on the Titanic, women survived at much higher rates than children.
Thanks for the info!