It’s been a gut-wrenching week for a variety of reasons I won’t go into now, which has had me vacillating between cantankerous fist-shaking and tearful smokes in the backyard. That leaves me vulnerable to bad advice from anonymous internet cranks, such as this recent “Best of Craigslist” entry, “Advice to Young Men from an Old Man.” Several bits ring truer than they probably should: “14. Don’t be afraid to tell people to “Fuck off” when need be. It is an important skill to acquire. As they say, speak your piece, even if your voice shakes.” (For one.)
Some of the Sassy Sallys over at MeFi take issue with his advice about women, specifically this bit:
29. Don’t believe the crap about the patriarchy. More women are accepted and attend college. More degrees are awarded to women than men. Women outlive men. More men commit suicide. Men are twice as likely to be victims of violence, including murder. If you consider sexual assaults in prisons, twice as many men are raped as women (society thinks prison rape is funny). The streets are littered with homeless men, sprinkled with a few homeless women. Statically, women are happier than men. The myth that girls are being cheated by are educational system is belied by the fact that schools are bastions of femininity, mostly run by and taught by women. Girls outperform boys in school. It is the boys in school getting fucked over, and prescribed ritalin for being boys. Real wages for men are falling, while real wages for women are rising. Just because someone says something enough times, doesn’t make it true. You have nothing to feel guilty about.
You could take that one sentence by sentence, really, and some of those points I feel very strongly about. (Especially the issue of making a joke of prison rape, accepting cruelty as systemic. Our not-so-secret shame.)
Frankly, though, I don’t have the wherewithal to form a cogent response to gender equality this morning, but I still wanted you guys to see it while I go stand outside in the sleet and try to use coffee as a catalyst to turn hate to productivity.
See also: Bad News Hughes
Anthropologically, you can trace the point at which global cultures shifted from Matriarchy to Patriarchy, that being the point at which weapons of war became too heavy for women to wield effectively, during the iron and bronze ages.
I know everyone wants to wax philisophical about ethical equity and equallity between the sexes, but the simple fact of the matter is that power and control drive human behavior. Men and Women can be equally loving as they are equally ruthless, its a question of who has the power. Those who have the power want to keep the power and they want to benefit from their power, its not a question of ethics its a question of human nature that we are constantly in a power struggle with everyone in our lives. Obviously, society and culture provide artificial structures where those power struggles exist, but they do.
Patriarchy is a real thing, but there’s no reason to slit our wrists and pine for the sins of our fathers. The advancement of our technology and culture have allowed the playing field to start leveling out, but I hope people don’t hold onto this illusion that women wouldn’t take the power back if they had the chance, thats just romantisized bullshit.
As for prison rape, I find the idea of rapists and murderers being paid in kind by their fellow rapists and murderers oddly poetic, wrong, but poetic. Of course I’m in favor killing them from the get go. Paying taxes for them to live is a travesty.
well, the homeless thing is bullshit. there are more homeless women than men in america. they probably are just not as common on the streets, because of rape and other things.
and just because schools are run and taught by women doesn’t mean that girls are treated better. in fact, women teachers tend to show favoritism toward boys.
In the wage slave fields, women certainly do tend to beat men in the end of the month/week/day pay period; the whole “women make 65 cents to a man’s dollar” argument is based on a curve, which is thrown into radical misalignment by the top dog captains of industry, who kind of fuck everyone over thataway, men and women.
Prison rape isn’t funny, but it sure gets me hot.
Adam, there is some variability, but studies routinely show that the homeless are more likely to be Men, somewhere around 60%.
As for female teachers showing favoritism towards boys, that sorta flies in the face of the last decade of research indicating that teachers, period, would rather exert effort to teach girls who are more likely to want to take part in group activities and the structure of class than boys who are more likely to want to work on their own and chafe under strict rules.
The education ones are probably true. Some of the others are probably false. Many are debatable.
This one is an absolute fact: You have nothing to feel guilty about.
in school, young men have been getting the shaft for decades. A couple of decades ago there was a report about how girls were falling behind boys in science and math and what happened? There were programs started, there were articles written, entire branches of education were dedicated to help figure out how to help girls bridge the gap. Now boys have fallen behind girls in school and there is a big yawn coming from the same circles that were up in arms before. I’ve seen one article about the issue and that seems to have had little to no mainstream influence on the situation.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965522/site/newsweek/