The Cellar Bar wrote:Our society is also stacked against young, straight, white men in one important way - they have far less opportunity to consider their place in the world. They have fewer chances to come to understand minority issues. They are not constantly caused to think about what they think, and what others think, and how those things interrelate.
A statement that surely ranks up there pretty high on the Cartman/Nixon Scale. It reminds me of an episode of "South Park" where Cartman was beside himself with grief and despair on account of the fact that no matter how much he might try and no matter the efforts he might make, he would never be able to be a NASCAR driver. Practically inconsolable, he finally revealed that no matter how hard he might try he would never achieve such a goal.....because he would never be as poor and never be as stupid to fulfill that ambition.
Well, quite. That’s why I introduced that line of argument as ‘an aid to understanding’. It’s not that I think that this, of all things, is the true inequality, and woe, let us resolve it. It was a device of the argument – a way of showing how, specifically in the debate for equality, people from a position of privilege are likely to be at a starting disadvantage. And of course, it’s not intrinsic to the fact that they’re white, or straight, or male. It stems from that position of privilege that they enjoy. And of course, it’s a *starting disadvantage*, not an outright block - it doesn’t mean something like that ‘the value of a man’s opinion is worth less’, period.
I can't think of any other situation in which that can possibly apply. The argument seems to be that in not being poor, physically or mentally handicapped, living in a war zone, of belonging to an ethnic population that is constantly discrimintated against, they are not in a position to identify the basic injustice of such a situation and be prepared to commit to resolving the issue to the satisfaction or betterment of those directly involved.
It doesn't mean people with privilege cannot spot inequalities, or will spot no inequalities. But they will probably spot less of them, may fail to understand the significance of some of them, or may fail to draw other important connections.
There are many daily issues for someone who is, for example, physically disabled which are simply less obvious unless you are facing them daily. And there are many effects and side effects of that kind of casual discrimination which are also non-obvious unless you’ve experienced them.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t understand the issues, from the outside. It just means that it’s harder to do so. And I don’t actually think that this is a terribly controversial point: no more so than the idea that a joiner is likely to be able to build a cupboard faster, and better, than I can.
That no matter how much effort or commitment [the privileged] might make they will constantly remain part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
No, I don’t believe that. The point is that it is likely to be more difficult for people from a privileged position to appreciate some of these issues, and easier for them to be overlooked: not that it can’t be done.
My problem, having sorted out the notion of Cartman and Nixonian thinking, is that sitting within that view of the "rights of men" is a reservation on your part, and certainly of others, that those "rights of men" are unsatisfactory and excessive and should be revised downwards away from some perceived position of ascendancy. Take any of those other issues of race or poverty or health and the one element that relates to all of them is that there are those who perpetrate the "wrongs", those who would seek to end them....and the injustices themselves.
No. Although revising to the lowest denominator may technically be an egalitarian position, it’s not a liberal one, so I don’t personally support it. I think we should work to maximise rights, to the extent that is reasonable.
Some states of affairs obviously are really detrimental to others in this balanced equation, so need to be reigned in: Where it’s purely a question of finite resources, which one party have more of than another, then obviously that needs to be balanced down. But only because there’s no other way to achieve equity.
Where it’s a question of fundamental access to the same opportunities, I personally think that it is more helpful to us if we can open those opportunities up for everyone, not take them away from everyone.
There is a target. There is a goal of injustice that can be approached and resolved. The disinction in terms of "feminism" and "sexual equality" however identifies one of the parties involved as being the perceived target.
Yes. I think that this is an important point.
The constitution of Feminism (mostly women) and the motivation behind Feminism (often discontent with specific inequalities that women are more likely to face) are not significantly in question. That does not mean Feminism is not an egalitarian project. It does not mean that Feminism does not work towards egalitarian goals.
Or, if it does, it means there are NO egalitarian projects. Anywhere.
We are all motivated selfishly. It has been argued, and argued well, that there is no such thing as altruism. I don’t believe that’s necessarily the case, but I do believe that there’s probably no such thing as altruistic motivation. We are *motivated* selfishly, but through the application of reason, we can pursue unselfish ends.
As such, whilst both men and women who identify as Feminists may have been motivated to do so because of something that directly affects them, that would no less be true if they identified as, for example, Humanists. The question is still one of whether they act as good moral agents and of whether they rationally choose to pursue egalitarian goals.
I can’t speak for all those moral agents, but I struggle to think of a movement which has taken more pains to identify egalitarian goals than Feminism.
That these "young straight white men" are the problem and their almost congenital disposition to never ever be able to right their thinking in any constructive way and therefore will remain to the ends of time as the problem
There are some Feminists who believe that. I don’t defend that viewpoint. I don’t think that viewpoint is a core part of Feminism, and I don’t think you can show that viewpoint to be a core part of Feminism.
There is a battle of sorts raging in the States right now in which some "feminists" are arguing that the refusal on the part of employers to include contraceptive pills as part of their Health Insurance to women employees in "anti-women" and sexist.
The formulation of this argument that I think was more important was where there are specific medical conditions that certain contraceptive pills could be used to treat, and that these medications were off the list to those people, because of a blanket ‘no free contraceptives’ rule. That is clearly a poor state of affairs.
That employers are controlling women's fertility and the right to choose when to have children… The question would be whether or not, in the spirit of "egalitarianism" whether or not it would be reasonable for instance for men to demand the same rights. To essentially say to their employers, "I have no intention of becoming a father in the near future and I therefore feel it is your responsibility to pay for my condoms".
This one is a massive can of worms. I don’t think it can easily be used as an example, it would instead be a massive conversation, and a lot of it would be about your economic position. In Scotland, we don’t have to pay for contraceptives explicitly, it comes out of national insurance. I prefer that situation.
Or "maternity leave" versus "paternity leave". Is it "egalitarian", is it reasonable to accept the fact that women are entitled under law to take say 11 weeks maternity leave before birth and a total of 52 weeks in all.
That is another interesting question, although your information is a couple years out of date.
I am currently taking a period of what is known as ‘Additional Paternity Leave’, but is in effect the beginnings of a right to share the Statutory Maternity period.
It will probably always be the case that more women will take long-term Maternity leave than men will take long-term Paternity leave. The egalitarian question was one of whether, when circumstances made it favourable to an individual family, the men would be permitted to do so. And there is a law in place now, which though restricted in some ways, makes this possible to do. And there is a plan to revise and extend this law before 2016.
Now whilst this new law clearly expands parental rights upwards for men, it also has positive effects for women. You should have seen the outrage the law generated amongst small businesses, when it was introduced. It was almost as if they’d constantly been discriminating against women for years, and now didn’t know who to employ… Many of them suggested they would no longer bother to employ people under 40 at all.
Go back far enough, and you have no idea the sort of righteous outrage you could generate by stating, as a guy, that you were a feminist. Now, apparently, we have reached a place where everyone is expected to be one on pain of being branded something akin to the anti-Christ if you don't.
No. I think people should identify however they like, or refuse labels if they want to do so. I personally think that RedCelt’s lecturer saying they ‘hoped everyone was a feminist’ was wrong to do so. The lecturer was almost certainly using this as careless shorthand for ‘hope everyone supports sexual equality’.
I think we should all be concerned with equality, but that doesn’t mean that you need to be in a specific grouping to do so. Although perhaps it’s a mark of progress that the two terms can now be carelessly conflated. As you suggest: memebership of an egalitarian group should not be cause for righteous outrage.
] ) mental acrobatics just to justify the facts of your existence (SSA) with vast, Byzantine edifice that's a massive hangover from two-thousand years of other peoples' existence (Church)?