Return to rigint

I made the mistake of looking into the misogyny thread which still rages on without me on rigint. Of course Project Willow continues to threaten to leave if her opponents aren't silenced, people continue to misrepresent me, and cetera. I had assumed my leaving might placate Willow a bit, but apparently not. Rather some other people lamented my passing and she objected to that too, which is understandable.

One statement of hers in particular: "Or is misogyny not comparable to racism, as Stephen claimed?" Well, of course not. Sexism, that is what is comparable with racism. Well, sort of, anyway. Obviously racism is largely objectionable because of the long history of slavery and conquest of other races, that's why no-one minds racism against the French, because they always gave as good as they got. More or less. The core of my position on feminism is that no similar position was ever occupied by women. The idea that women were eternally oppressed, and continue to be, that every man in history, let's forget monks and so on, has had his mortal enemy sleeping beside him each night is sheerest idiocy.

It probably comes from the historians' tendency to look at the top of society: women had privileged but constrained roles, a sort of golden cage. Look at pretty much any era in English history and you'd find men and women at the bottom working on similar terms, varied slightly due to the implications of child bearing and so forth. Even working naked together down coal mines, until prudish government types banned it for fear of a grand unifying pinko orgy overthrowing religion and the state, or something along those lines. Were the sexes equal? No. Was one sex oppressed and persecuted, maybe burned so as to break their resistance to capitalism? No. The sexes worked together, along with their children, to survive in style. Maybe a few women were prohibited from becoming heads of state, or had to pay money to hire a man to perform their feudal military obligations for them. Boo hoo.

So misogyny is not the same as racism. Even sexism isn't the same as racism, because it doesn't have the same sort of historical context. Sexism, nonetheless, is not desirable. I don't object to women becoming doctors being legalised. I don't even object in theory to measures to encourage female participation in higher education when women make up only twenty or so percent of the total, although such measures obviously become actively objectionable when women make up 60% of the total. I don't object to making it legal for women to own property. Obviously, contrary to what you might have heard, that's been legal in England since at least the end of Roman times, but I wouldn't have objected to it stopping being as it was, when it was, if it had been, and changing to how it is now, if it had ever been different. Which it wasn't. Which is sort of my point.

Rather, my position is that the main pushers of sexism in the world today are the feminists, peddling myths, fear-mongering, presenting men as the scapegoats for all society's ills, trying to better the relative position of women to men when they are already privileged in so many ways. Despite all the talk of equality you rarely get a feminist so much as paying lip service to, say, the preferential treatment of women in family courts, the lack of women in dangerous jobs which are left to men, the lack of female selective service in America, national service in Norway, &c., the lack of higher education for men, the higher rate of male unemployment and incarceration and victimisation by violent crime and so on. When something is, or can be made to seem to be, bad for women, the feminists are right on it. When there's a bigger problem for men, they are conspicuous by their absence. So much for equality.

Another RI poster, one "Kate", writes 'However, here's the bright line, I think. When Stephen would refuse to stop beating the drum, the rhythm of which kept signalling the message, "There IS gender oppression; and WOMEN ARE THE OPPRESSORS. And any historical analysis which concludes that women have been oppressed for many centuries in many ways which are still ongoing in many cultures, is a MISUNDERSTANDING OF HISTORY. (cf. the history of laws concerning rape/marital rape)." (Obviously a paraphrase, not a direct quote, and how I understood what was offensive by my lights.)'

Well, on the rape issue I was actually saying that domestic violence had always been illegal and therefore that rape, although not a criminal offence in itself in a marriage, could still be prosecuted as assault which was illegal even against one's own wife. Also, my entire position is based on English history. I don't mind delving a bit into foreign cultures, Europe and America are pretty similar even if Holland don't have no juries and so on, or I don't mind arguing against the feminist claim that 90% of the work in Africa is ddone by the women, which seems like a rather racist impugning of dem damn lazy niggers to me. I can see there might be oppression of women in, say, Saudi Arabia, although it's hardly a picnic being a man there either. But there is a disparity against women in Saudi Arabia.

Also it's my position that there is oppression, but it's not women behind it, it's the elites. Feminists, by sowing division between men and women, by pushing the pro-women line which encourages the growing disparity in favour of women in our culture, by mongering fear of the male other to women, stops change for the better. It keeps the poor divided, divide and rule. It makes "progressives" channel their efforts into the counterproductive cul-de-sac of feminism, rather than the more productive values of socialism. So it is that since feminism rose back in the seventies our democratic socialist state, as seen from 1945 to 1979, in its declining form, has been destroyed. We lost the battle because they set us against each other, with feminism the cat amongst the pigeons and the elites as an aristocrat with a gun, blowing us out fo the sky.

So it goes.