102 Comments

"If Kat is right, husbands could sell their joint property without their wives’ consent. Horribly unjust!"

Laughs in child support, alimony, and custody outcomes.

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Taking the position of feminists from two generations ago and presenting them as though they are equivalent to the modern variant is just intellectually dishonest. The current variant tries to implement demonstrably destructive economics policies, and is fundamentally at odds with our culture of the presumption of innocence.

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"Is women’s domestic labor not worth any amount of money?"

Not to the bank!

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1) "but after the dust settles, they will surely be able to see the difference between showing a romantic interest in someone, and harassing her."

I don't see how he could measure or provide any insight on this. At best he offers a poll where I think we can all agree there is only one acceptable answer. Contradicting evidence is ignored.

How can one prove that #MeToo has made it easier for people to distinguish romantic interest and harassment?

To me it just looks like a moral panic flip out that ended in more bureaucracy.

2) The rape stuff feels tiring. It's not clear to me that the prescriptions of #MeToo (affirmative consent and kangaroo courts for sex allegations) have improved the situation here.

3) Women's opinion on abortion is split and about half of all abortions kill a woman.

4) Women have been able to get credit cards and such for some time, so I don't know what this guy is going on about. If your digging for shit fifty years ago, you don't have anything relevant to say.

This whole response is embarrassingly weak.

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Suppose someone told you to vote Republican because Lincoln freed the slaves. Or vote Democrat because Roosevelt won WWII. How would you respond? I know what I'd say, "I don't care what happened in 1860 or 1940, what matters is what will happen in the present if your candidate wins the election. That's what's gonna determine how I vote."

You see this a lot in discussions of feminism. Some centrist, usually a man, will identify as a feminist and list all these good things that the feminists did long ago, with no reference to any of the things they are doing in the present. Because, one suspects, he doesn't actually like any of the things the feminists are doing now and doesn't want to be put in a position where he has to defend them.

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Very weak argument to bring up so many things that are no longer problems. This gives the impression that she does not know many current problems or that she wants to list salacious previous problems to confuse people that they are still current problems or just poison the well.

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Not sure if it's pertinent to the topic at hand, but this struck me: "Putting women in the position of having to ask their husbands for money is demeaning, and worse if the man is unfair." In my case, I make great money but don't dare buy things without getting my wife's permission. I have a number of things we could easily afford that I don't have simply because I don't want to deal with getting said permission and possibly getting into some sort of fight. I don't think this is super unusual, and points to the "hidden" power women have in our culture.

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What all the feminists tend to suppress from their arguments is the power many women had in the family ... Women were not chained to the beds or kitchen sink in the far majority of cases. It were generally men that had a boss at home and one in the office. Women control 80% of the household income, you really do no want have her against you.

I am 64 but my grand ma's were formidable women that could control my grand pa's when needed. So was my mum and, except for a few cases, all the mum's of my friends. As feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, and in Holland Joke Kool-Smit, said, many, if not most, women were more than OK with the arrangement that the men worked outside and the woman around the home.

My grand father left home at 6am, worked on a ship yard all day under a boss, came home at 6 dirty with oil, grease, and sweat, gave her the money, washed himself in the sink, and then rested a bit, and then generally had to do some stuff in the house. At the time, housework was much more demanding but I seriously doubt that many women would have preferred to change roles. Read Orwell's Wigan Pier if you have any doubts.

The problem with feminism is that it tends to be extremely selective in its arguments and this is enforced by a huge army of female journalists & teachers. There is something called gamma bias: For females, positive news tends to get amplified, negative news muted. For the males the opposite. E.g. "The firefighters saved five children from the attic" when all fire fighters were male vs "The plane was landed by the first female captain on a Cessna 172!", or the "The 20 year old man was charged with arson" vs "The journalist doxxed the libs of tiktok account". Once you're aware of the mechanism, you see it everywhere. "Women are paid less due to systemic sexism" vs "Women earn higher salaries at NGO's because due to higher education."

It took 50 years of massive indoctrination by big business to make women believe that the ideal for a woman is to compete on masculine traits ... And even the epidemic mental health problems in young women seems to not be able make a dent in their believes.

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"You’re probably right that men are now scared to show an interest in a co-worker, but after the dust settles, they will surely be able to see the difference between showing a romantic interest in someone, and harassing her. The same goes for the woman, of course."

Every movement claims that the "problems" and "excesses" are just temporary things that will go away once things "settle." The communist apologists told people the shortages would be temporary, and I'm sure they honestly believed this.

One can already see the phrase "sexual harassment" being quietly retired in favor of "sexual misconduct." Might it be BECAUSE the latter is vaguer, and vagueness is the point.

The underlying reality is this: if a man is accused of sexual harassment, his employer will claim to conduct a "fair" and "impartial" investigation. But it will face the following incentive. If it rules in favor of him, his accuser can sue, costing them a boatload of legal fees even if they win the case. If they rule against him, he has no recourse to the law. It's at-will employment, company can fire him any time they feel like it. There's a massive thumb on the scale to just assume he's guilty. That will not change until the law changes.

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Perhaps ironically, at the heart of virtually all right-of-center arguments against feminism, racial issues, welfare/revenue issues, is a hard kernel of deep personal grievance, complaints of unfairness, prejudice, and wholesale bigotry against [men/whites/wealthy]. While I generally recognize the effectors of such grievances on both the left and the right, marginally, these left and right wing grievance are equal and opposite reactions -- if we substitute the adjectives in any of these “great” arguments, it gets hard to differentiate who wrote them. Thus, the obsession to complain against such broad market reactions is the job of both the reactionaries, and the academics. But the academics have a responsibility to discover nuance, not display and defend their own personal biases.

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Just a nit, but women were admitted to the Ivy League way before the late 1960s, unless for some reason you are excluding graduate school. My mother was in the first class of women graduating from Harvard Medical School, in 1949.

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My main beef with the response was "More importantly, you leave out some very serious problems for women: rape, domestic abuse, ... It’s women who are by far the main victims in the first three cases"

Tired of this trope. At least within the US, men are raped more often than women especially once you factor in repeatedly raped. As far as domestic abuse, likewise. Domestic abuse by women in fact is so accepted that's it's not even considered abuse any more and nearly every modern show and movie condones it as does the media, cue the recent Dana White fiasco.

In my five decades, I've never met a single heterosexual man that was not assaulted at least once by a woman, met plenty of women who have never been assaulted by a man ever. Lesbians have the highest rate of domestic violence among relationship types and not let's even talk about which gender is primarily responsible for abuse of elderly or children.

Men primarily abuse strangers, women abuse family. Don't confuse "reported, charged, or convicted" with reality.

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Men enjoyed greater freedom from legal - and to a lesser extent social - restrictions in earlier times than women. But it should be noted that those freedoms were, in practice, often useless. E.g., the overwhelming majority of men wouldn't be able to afford a mortgage anyway until fairly recently in history (only a small minority owned property). Until the 19th century or so, most men worked the same job their fathers and grandfathers worked on the same land because that was the only option realistically available. Many of these freedoms had little to know value for the vast majority of the male population until the world became a much wealthier place.

In some cases this is probably why there was little resistance to the stricture of gender norms: they weren't practically meaningful. Sex and reproduction is a great example of this, which Badhwar presents as an imposition of sexism, but in reality, before modern medicine, sexual freedom wasn't worth much for women: in addition to STDs, they could easily get pregnant and very likely die. It only made sense for women to strongly seek less onerous sexual norms when technology had dramatically reduced the cost of sex for women.

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I think it's worth clarifying a few things with her and seeing if she'd like to add anything.

Because, in trying to summarize these issues, they're kinda weak.

Her best argument, by far, is rape and sexual violence, which are very serious offenses and deserve attention, but she doesn't do much to develop those critiques here. I think this is worth more expansion on her part.

But the other two arguments congeal into access to birth control and, essentially, access to loans. I don't think the access to birth control and abortion arguments are terribly convincing; by any reasonable measure women have far more access to birth control and abortion options than men.

But what feels like the real heart of the matter is financial, basically meaning access to credit cards and mortgages. And this...just isn't that impactful. I mean, access to financial instruments is important but it's not, ya know, voting or a critical human right. Literally billions of people have lived perfectly happy lives without credit cards. This just doesn't feel as important as, say, spousal rape, and I'm curious why she spends so much time on it.

And again, these critiques are stuck in the 60's and 70's. I'm not saying this is ancient history but for you to have any memory of this period, say being 5 years old by 1979, you'd need to have been born in 1974 or earlier, so 48 years old, and to have reasonably been affected by it, say being 18 by 1979, you'd need to be born in 1961 or earlier, so 61 years old. Which means there might be working age adults who remember this period but basically everybody actually affected by is either retired or about to.

This just feels like doubly weak tea. Access to loans and more birth control options aren't just...kinda weak points but they're also basically limited to your boomer grandma, even if the Gen Xers remember this world they never experienced it as adults and within another 10-20 years we will have not living connection to this period.

And that's why I'd double check with her about these critiques because, well, access to credit cards and mortgages just doesn't hit that hard and I suspect on review she'd refocus some of her critique.

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Rape, sexual harassment and domestic violence are interesting, because they get mentioned a lot in contemporary discussions of feminism. I would love to see a breakdown of the differences in feminist and non-feminist opinions on how often rape happens, why it happens and how it can be prevented.

In my own short research on the subject I have found this:

https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2019/11/compilation-ways-you-can-stand-against-rape-culture

Are these claims really proven? How much evidence of rape culture is there?

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She writes that "after the dust settles, they will surely be able to see the difference between showing a romantic interest in someone, and harassing her." Surely . . . not! Everyone knows there are misunderstandings, and that has a chilling effect.

For the rest, she lists past obstacles faced by women, due to the rigidity of social roles imposed on the sexes. Some women chafed at the female role, but some men chafed at the male role. Anyway, society is now much more fluid about these matters; the old rigidity belongs to the dustbin of history, and to some less progressive parts of today's world--not the USA.

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