Social inequality to women in our society

[Marat]

It is true that some women's attitudes toward pornography are evolving (LEAF supported a lesbian pornography shop in the case of Little Sisters Books and Art, Ltd. v. Canada), but the majority still seem to think that it mystically poisons the social atmosphere and so must hurt women's interests, though detailed studies fail to support this. (See the Canadian Supreme Court case, R. v. Butler (1992), which decided that the evidence wasn't sufficient to prove that pornography is actually harmful, but they let the legislature get away with its unsubstantiated assumption that it was harmful nevertheless.)

 

Women who are sexually active are criticized as 'sluts' while equally active men are respected as 'studs,' but what generates this distinction in the first place? Perhaps women, in order to enhance their social power, have exploited the longer periodicity of the fluctuations in their sexual desire compared to men to create an artificial shortage of sexual partners by withholding their consent to sex. This unnecessary shortage then creates a sex economy in which women have the power of capitalists against the male workers, since the woman possesses the goods she has caused to be in short supply, and so with the promise of these scarce goods she can gain power over men, making them flatter her, bribe her with expensive gifts and dinners, treat her with ritualized acts of submission and self-abasement, ranging from opening doors for her and pulling out chairs for her to giving her a pass on a murder charge under the many infanticide statutes in common law countries, which permit a woman to murder her child during the first-post-partum year without having to face a charge of murder or plead insanity to escape it, even though the reasoning assumes her insanity from post-partum depression!

 

Obviously in such an economy the women who are too generous with the resource whose scarcity secures female power over men are class traitors to the capitalistic women who are sequestering sex, so they have to be denigrated as 'sluts' for their crime.

[lemur]

Obviously in such an economy the women who are too generous with the resource whose scarcity secures female power over men are class traitors to the capitalistic women who are sequestering sex, so they have to be denigrated as 'sluts' for their crime.

I agree that economic analysis of prostitution too often fails to recognize that sex is a drug that is being dealt by women to men (in most cases). The fact that men can mediate the exchange as pimps and thereby exploit BOTH the client and the prostitute shifts the focus of exploiter to the pimp, but why couldn't you view the pimp as a mere security guard and manager used by the prostitute, who is the "star" of the operation? On the other hand, when men are making ridiculous amounts of income and prostitutes are making relatively little in comparison and enduring a great deal more stress and danger, then there is reason to say it is the client who is exploiting the prostitute and maybe even exploiting the pimp as well to the extent that he too is placed in danger.

 

Since you weren't focussing on formal prostitution but just the informal culture of women withholding sexual favors and policing each other not to be "slutty," it should be acknowledged that there are more reasons for this than exercising power over men. There is, for example, the idea that sex addiction makes people bad, which has to be true since every form of addiction makes people bad. So maybe the slut-taboo has more to do with keeping men from running themselves into the ground with sex addiction than it does with subjugating men on the basis of stronger and more frequent sexual desire.

Edited May 4, 2011 by lemur

[Marat]

Since the very close relatives of humans, the bonobos, have sex almost all day long, I am not sure that frequent sex among primates should be characterized as a harmful addiction. It has none of the negative physiological characteristics of an addiction, since indulgence in it satisfies the drive rather than creating further dependency on it, and human physiology imposes natural limits on it. My post elsewhere suggesting a theoretical maximum of about 50,000 occasions of intercourse per lifetime for males, in contrast to an actual realization of this potential which amounts only to about 10% of that, suggests that we humans are anything but sex addicts.

 

People are naturally constantly craving and indulging in drinking water, defecating, urinating, eating, breathing, and having sex, and if some artificial social rule restricts their fulfillment of these natural drives, they start to obsess over them and suffer greatly until they can satisfy them. So I wouldn't characterize these needs, many of which assume a lethal form if they are not fulfilled, as 'addictions.' The characterization of a strong interest in sex as an addiction was just a propagandistic move in the war on sex by prudery, taking a medical term for something which can be objectively shown to be harmful -- addiction to various kinds of drugs -- and transposing the term 'addiction' with its negative connotations to indulgence in natural, harmless, physical needs. A strong interest in sex, since it improves the fitness of the species, is actually a symptom of biological success and health in an individual.

[lemur]

Since the very close relatives of humans, the bonobos, have sex almost all day long, I am not sure that frequent sex among primates should be characterized as a harmful addiction. It has none of the negative physiological characteristics of an addiction, since indulgence in it satisfies the drive rather than creating further dependency on it, and human physiology imposes natural limits on it. My post elsewhere suggesting a theoretical maximum of about 50,000 occasions of intercourse per lifetime for males, in contrast to an actual realization of this potential which amounts only to about 10% of that, suggests that we humans are anything but sex addicts.

 

People are naturally constantly craving and indulging in drinking water, defecating, urinating, eating, breathing, and having sex, and if some artificial social rule restricts their fulfillment of these natural drives, they start to obsess over them and suffer greatly until they can satisfy them. So I wouldn't characterize these needs, many of which assume a lethal form if they are not fulfilled, as 'addictions.' The characterization of a strong interest in sex as an addiction was just a propagandistic move in the war on sex by prudery, taking a medical term for something which can be objectively shown to be harmful -- addiction to various kinds of drugs -- and transposing the term 'addiction' with its negative connotations to indulgence in natural, harmless, physical needs. A strong interest in sex, since it improves the fitness of the species, is actually a symptom of biological success and health in an individual.

What happens when behavior grows increasingly compulsive is that people may have reasons to choose not to engage in the behavior but their compulsion to pursue and engage in the addiction overrides their desire to do other things. So you may want to get other things done, but if you are compelled to seek and have sex constantly, it may make it more difficult for you to engage in other pursuits that you would also like to devote time and energy to. That is why some people try to think up ways of making it easier to resist sexual and other urges, i.e. reduce people's addiction to them.

 

It's also no fun to be so addicted to something that other people can use your addiction to wield power over you. Imagine you go to your prostitute or drug dealer and they tell you the price just went up from $100 to $1000. If you're smart, you will say, "thanks but no thanks," and walk away but if you are addicted, it can be quite painful to walk away. So gaining control over addictions facilitates greater freedom of choice, while accepting the inevitability of addictions allows yourself to be subject to greater power over your free will.

 

Using food or water as an example, yes you need these things to survive so ultimately you will probably choose to obey some unreasonable command(s) rather than die of starvation/thirst, but if you have practiced fasting, you could potentially resist the choice of paying $100 for a sandwich because you're hungry and it's unlikely that you will find any other food until tomorrow. The same is true of prostitution. If you're so sexually starved that you are willing to pay money for sex, you are allowing yourself to be exploited in a way that you wouldn't have to if you had practiced sexual fasting.

Edited May 4, 2011 by lemur

[Marat]

To complete your analogy, we would have to imagine that we live in a world where there is in fact a nearly unlimited supply of food and water, but for various cultural reasons we decide to restrict the supply severely. This then creates an intense desire for food and water because of their artificial scarcity, so people do extreme things to satisfy their unnecessarily heightened cravings. In this atmosphere, there is an advantage to the normally pathological behavior of damaging your electrolyte balance by voluntarily training yourself to go without water or damaging your physiology by voluntary starvation, since you can endure the shortages better than other people and so avoid doing extreme things to slake your thirst or eat.

 

A less warped response would be just to maximize enjoyment of the available food and water, as the bonobos do with respect to sex. As Wilhelm Reich once pointed out, given the essentially equal number of males and females, if it were not for social rituals which create an artificial shortage of sexual opportunities, we could all enjoy our wildest sexual fantasies at any time. Just as people can learn to avoid over-eating to keep from making themselves sick or gaining too much weight, so too we could learn rational rules to restrict sex for various utilitarian purposes, such as not having sex all the time so that society could function. But what is a pure loss is the restriction of sex for superstitious rather than practical reasons, as when opportunities are foregone for the sake of preserving various irrational social values, such as the status of being chaste, of being a virgin and thus having more market value as a marriage partner, or of maintaining the rituals of self-denial required to make oneself a good monogamist, etc.

[lemur]

A less warped response would be just to maximize enjoyment of the available food and water, as the bonobos do with respect to sex.

Do you see any horizon to the pursuit of power to limit resource-access? Even the most generous social-welfare states vehemently restrict access to their social benefits. Do you really expect governments or women individually to guarantee that they will service any and every man's sexual desires upon request? This could actually be accomplished by the elimination of rape as a taboo and crime. I have actually heard that there are some cultures where rape is simply viewed as a cultural norm that can't be controlled, like the village where children are taken by tiger-attacks from time to time but parents have nothing to do about it except pray to the tiger god to have mercy. Once all anti-rape rights have been dismantled globally, there may no longer be the means to resist and control sex, but until that happens it makes sense for people to practice sexual fasting for those periods when it is not voluntarily available. The same is true of food and money. Until there is a global social-welfare guarantor that ensures no one has to endure budget cuts no matter what, it behooves people to practice budgeting, saving, and going without so that they aren't caught off-guard when recession claims their job or reduces their wages against their will. You seem to have the idea that there are ways to guarantee resource-access to everyone all the time regardless of how other people want to treat them, but how many people in this world are immune from access-restrictions where resources like food, sex, and money are concerned?

[Marat]

If people were as relaxed about cooperating sexually with each other as they are about giving directions to lost strangers, which would be the case if we simply de-mystified sex and treated it as any other natural interest, then there would be no motivation for rape. For example, there seem to be many garrulous people -- espeically old people sitting next to you on a bus, for example -- who want to talk with strangers even though strangers do not want to talk with them. But since cooperating in someone else's desire to talk is not culturally regarded as a big deal, most people politely converse for fifteen or twenty minutes with the person addressing them and are willing, if a bit reluctant, to extend the favor. There are no 'conversation rapes' in our society, in which a person drags you into the alley, holds you at gunpoint, and forces you to discuss with him the events of the day whether you want to or not, simply because we don't regard conversation as a sacred commodity whose supply has to be restricted.

 

Similarly, if the default position of our social mores was that it was just polite -- if you could and you had no serious reason for objecting to it -- to have sex with any stranger who wanted to sleep with you, then the demand for sex would lack all of the urgency we see it assume in a society like ours where a massive and artificial shortage of sex partners is deliberately created and maintained, and the supply for sex would probably easily match the demand. If there were occasions when the supply was insufficent, the demand would not prompt rape because everyone would know that sex was in principle not restricted and would always be available later or elsewhere. It is also important to recognize that the current limit in the supply of sexual partners is in large measure artificial, produced by cultural mores which encourage people to think that they should refuse to cooperate with sexual overtures from others unless an elaborate set of rituals extending over a considerable time period has first been complied with.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Do you think rape is really a supply and demand issue? I don't think most theories of the psychology of rape include "hasn't gotten enough sex" as one of the primary motivating factors.

[Marat]

Feminism always likes to say that rape is not a crime of sexual frustration but a crime of violence. Otherwise women might be indirectly blamed for it by having created an artificial shortage of sexual partners by withholding sex so as to augment their social power by generating a 'sex economy' where none would naturally exist.

 

But if our culture treated sex as just some perfectly natural, ordinary biological function, like breathing or eating, which all properly socialized people gladly cooperated in providing and sharing when and where needed unless they had some very good reasons for withholding cooperation in a particular situation, then it would simply never occur to anyone to use sex as a weapon. After all, no one corners you on a dark street in a seedy section of town and threatens to talk you to death, or keep singing tunes from 'Oklahoma' until you scream, since doing those things is no big deal -- if a little odd and anti-social.

[edwardreed]

Equality between women and men is one of the fundamental principles of Community law. We have seen our societies the clear biological difference between men and women is used as a justification for forcing them into different social roles which limit and shape their attitudes and behavior. That is to say, no society is content with the natural difference of sex, but each insists on adding to it a cultural difference of gender. The Social inequality refers to a situation in which individual groups in a society do not have equal social status. Earlier period the men have only authority to voting rights, freedom of speech and assembly. But that was vanished. For the past days many college and university students were written articles and essays about women in society and the Equality between women and men. Nowadays the Men and women have same social equality. It includes voting rights, freedom of speech and assembly, the extent of property rights and access to education, health care, quality housing and other social goods.

 

 

[Appolinaria]

I don't see any inequality in my environment. When I'm making my boyfriend's sandwich he lets me use just as much of the Boar's Head thinly sliced ham as him.

 

 

Ok, but seriously.. I feel blessed to have been raised in a family where the women were genuinely treated equally... if not appreciated for being stronger than the man in many ways.

 

I realized this was not the case in a lot of families. For example; seeing how overly protective/babying some fathers were towards their daughters going off to college- and not doing the same for the boys.

 

Things like that, so deeply rooted into family life, are what contributes to women feeling incapable & not excelling to their full potential. They buy into this stupid stereotype.

Edited October 20, 2011 by Appolinaria

[Anders Hoveland]

Some argue that it is actually men that are the oppressed sex.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Male_Power

 

Why is the main responsibility for supporting the family financially placed on the husband? Even in families that try to be "sexually equal", the women still holds one-sided expectations about her husbands ability to provide.

 

Women have higher educational attainment than men. Although they earn slightly less, it is amazing that the wage gap is so narrow considering the typical unwillingness of women to seek unfulfilling careers with rigid working hours. How much do you think men would earn if they all "pursued their passions" and viewed their careers more as "creative outlets" ?

[mooeypoo]

Why is the main responsibility for supporting the family financially placed on the husband? Even in families that try to be "sexually equal", the women still holds one-sided expectations about her husbands ability to provide.

Again with generalizations.

 

The man has this expectation because some of society gives those expectations. These, however, are changing in the current times. For that matter, there are business-women out there and house-husbands (rather than housewives). Upon divorce, if the children remain with the father, the mother pays alamony.

 

Seeing as men earn more than women on average in the same position (read up) and all the rest of the claims already made in this thread (did you go over it?) I would have to admit I seriously can't see how you can possibly claim a man is 'oppressed'.

 

Women have higher educational attainment than men.

 

Evidence. Evidence. Evidence.

 

Although they earn slightly less, it is amazing that the wage gap is so narrow considering the typical unwillingness of women to seek unfulfilling careers with rigid working hours. How much do you think men would earn if they all "pursued their passions" and viewed their careers more as "creative outlets" ?

Unwillingness of which women? Can you please stop generalizing? If you already do, I suggest you bring quite a large amount of statistical evidence to support what you're saying, because the actual evidence (READ the thread please) do not support your bombastic claims.

 

Reality isn't what you want it to be, it's what it is.

 

We can argue how much these inequalities prevail and whether or not men are unequal in some aspects (they might well be, I can even give some examples myself) but the claims you're making are not supported by evidence, are generalizations to the extreme, and don't support your claim.

 

We're a science forum, not a preaching stage. We ask religious preachers to provide evidence and stop preaching, we do the same to political views. You know, to avoid double standards.

 

~mooey

[imatfaal]

Some argue that it is actually men that are the oppressed sex.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Male_Power

hmmm People argue many things. I think the fact that about 1 in 7 directors of major uk corporations, 1 in 5 ministers of state/parliamentarians in the eu , and 1 in 5 federal judges in the usa are women persuades me that the myth is in fact a reality.

 

 

Why is the main responsibility for supporting the family financially placed on the husband? Even in families that try to be "sexually equal", the women still holds one-sided expectations about her husbands ability to provide.

any evidence for this? anecdotally: of the families that I know that have challenged the stereotype about half have ended up with the woman as the main earner

 

Women have higher educational attainment than men. Although they earn slightly less, it is amazing that the wage gap is so narrow considering the typical unwillingness of women to seek unfulfilling careers with rigid working hours.

"it is amazing ..it is so narrow" - the latest survey I have seen was the Chartered Management Institute - the difference there was damn close to 25%. It is narrowing and some sectors are better than others, but narrow - not yet. Any evidence men seek less fulfilling careers than women, or vice versa?

 

How much do you think men would earn if they all "pursued their passions" and viewed their careers more as "creative outlets" ?

As women fill many of the lowest paid and least rewarding positions in the jobs market it seems that the answer is that men earn more AND ""pursue their passions"

 

 

edit

posted before seeing mooey's v similar reply

Edited December 2, 2011 by imatfaal