Saturday, May 11, 2024

Links - 11th May 2024 (1 - Feminism)

Richard Hanania on X - "Korea got western ideas without any of the antibodies. Western men can brush aside the rants of deranged feminists. As an Arab I have to work hard to take women seriously at all, but I'm making progress all the time. Korean men seem to get genuinely hurt by them."
Elections reveal a growing gender divide across South Korea - "They grew up seeing girls in their class enjoying equal opportunity and getting better grades than them, he says.  "Men feel they are falling behind in competitions. And they also have to serve in the military at an important time of their life. But the Democratic Party and the liberal side were only talking about discrimination against women," Jeong says.  He found in a 2019 survey that nearly 70% of men in their 20s think discrimination against men is serious. Many point to mandatory conscription as an example. All able-bodied men must serve for at least 18 months, but not women... Young men see efforts for gender parity as unfair, she adds, because of the zero-sum thinking that women's gains come at men's expense... During his election campaign, in a bid to attract young male voters, President Yoon Suk Yeol said structural sexism no longer exists in South Korea and pledged to abolish the ministry for gender equality.  He has failed to implement the pledge due to resistance from the main opposition Democratic Party, which holds majority control. But in February, two months before the parliamentary elections, he accepted the resignation from the gender equality minister that he had sat on for five months. He did not appoint a replacement.  Meanwhile, the distance between men and women is growing, not just politically but also emotionally.  In a 2021 survey conducted by South Korean news magazine Sisa IN, over 66% of men in their 20s said they cannot accept feminists as neighbors, colleagues, friends or family.  Pollster Jeong Han-wool, who participated in designing and analyzing the survey, found that anti-feminist sentiment is increasingly determining 20-something men's voting behaviors. Their view has even spread to men in their 30s and 40s."
Clearly, if 50% of management roles are filled by females through a quota, this is not at men's expense because feminism and "equality" are good

Matt Walsh on X - "The WNBA salary discourse is the dumbest thing I've seen on this website so far this year. The league has been in existence for 30 years and has never once turned a profit. None of the idiots complaining about the salaries actually consume the product. The league is a charity case, kept afloat by the NBA which generates well over 100 times the revenue and gives some of it to the WNBA so that we can all feel good about the fact that a women's basketball league exists, even though none of us have any interest in watching it.
What is a "fair share" of zero dollars in profit? Someone go ahead and do the math for Biden here."

Sydney Sweeney slams claims she was objectified in Rolling Stones video - "Sydney Sweeney is clapping back at critics who claim she was objectified in the Rolling Stones' "Angry" music video...   In a new interview with Glamour UK, the Anyone But You star said of her starring role in the video: “I felt hot. I picked my own outfit out of racks and racks of clothes. I felt so good in it.”"

Meme Woman 1: "OMG, GET LOST DWEEBLE. YOU'RE SUCH A DWEEB" *nice neighbourhood*
Nerd: "DEAAAUUGHHH"
Nerd: "I'M JUST SO UNLUCKY WITH THE LADIES. MAYBE IF I TOOK MORE INTEREST IN WOMAN'S ISSUES... THEY'LL TAKE MORE INTEREST IN ME"
*votes for feminism*
Woman 1: "THANKS FOR WALKING US HOME DWEEBLE" *rough neighbourhood*
Woman 2: "YEA, THIS PLACE SUCKS ASS"

A new type of feminism doesn't turn back the clock but insists on common sense - "A new movement of young British and American women is challenging liberal feminist orthodoxy, exposing its inconsistencies, contradictions, and downright harms. Two prominent members of the movement, Mary Harrington and Louise Perry, published books in the last year and a half, each different in focus but with similar themes. In Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress and Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, both authors—one a Gen Xer, one a Millennial—explore the challenges with being a woman in the early 21st century, from the failures of consent-based sexual ethics to the commodification of female bodies (or the erasure of them)... any feminism for which the goal is to deny sex difference, whether in dating, the workplace, or parenthood, fundamentally fails women...  in general, women neither want to have sex like men, nor benefit from it.  Perry’s focus on hook-up culture, the harmful impact of pornography, and the inadequacy of consent for sorting out the appropriateness and potential harm of a given sexual encounter are uncomfortable to confront. For women raised to be good liberal feminists, freedom trumps everything. We’re supposed to think of women involved in prostitution and pornography as empowered. To question their choices (or coerced “choices”) is to question their personal autonomy.  But Perry deftly confronts the reader’s discomfort, drawing on powerful research to show that real, meaningful differences between most men and women—their preferences, their physical attributes, and the power dynamic that results—make the harms caused by a libertarian approach deeply unethical. Perry’s response is not mass vows of chastity, but a practical (if rarely heard) call to women to get to know men before having sex with them and to seek out loving marriages... Harrington aims her critique at capitalism and the commodification of the female body. She pulls no punches, calling out companies offering employees egg freezing, the exploitative treatment of many birth surrogates, the proliferation of daycare for all, and the medicalization of so-called “gender-affirming care.” In her view, the aim of liberal feminism is to extract labour and money from female bodies, with no concern for the interests of women themselves. This despite the clear desire many women have to prioritize motherhood, even if they choose to work. Harrington attacks these trends, blaming technology and classism, explaining that wealthier women perpetuate liberal feminism because they have the means to avoid its downsides while lower-income women suffer its dehumanization... Evocative examples of the hypocrisy we live with, which champions women’s rights but stands idly by while female bodies are sold for sex, which calls out #MeToo-style sexual harassment but allows natal male violent offenders in women’s prisons, and which champions #girlboss feminism but seeks to split women off from pregnancy and mothering, treating children and motherhood as inconvenient inefficiencies... no reader will put these books down thinking the old orthodoxy, that women should just behave more like men, and that if we try hard enough, we can erase problematic sex differences and set women free, isn’t sorely lacking."

Gina Bontempo on X - "I was talking to an OBGYN today who said that, as uncomfortable as it is to admit it, when he has to deliver teenagers and women in their early 20s, they usually have a much easier time with birth, never tear, and tend to fly through labor. Their bodies are just equipped to handle birth so much better.  He also said one of the reasons there are so many C-sections now (of course in addition to many doctors just scheduling them or prematurely performing them) is because women are simply having babies much later than ever before. This has an impact on how they labor.  It was a fascinating conversation. Biology is not politically correct.
I also interviewed a midwife recently who has been delivering babies for 20+ years, and she said the women who are giving birth later in life generally perform much better during birth and recover much better if they started having children at a younger age, like early 20s. She said in her observation, the earlier you start, the easier it is. Another midwife she knows posted this same sentiment once on social media and lost work because of the rabid backlash. She said even the crunchiest midwives aren’t allowed to share their most honest observations without getting mauled by the online mob. Fascinating."
Patriarchy is so powerful, it affects biology

Shay 🌈🌸✨ on X - "I’d love for Nike to explain why male and female athletes can’t wear the same kit but adjusted for size. Why do the female runners cheeks and genitals need to be half out?"
"They tried to sell the women and men the same stuff, and the men and women said no. Girls want to look pretty, men want to look strong."
"The difference is we got dicks and balls, since apparently you don’t know about anatomy let me tell you, we have these things that protrude from a body while you guys lack that specific part of genitalia so the clothes and the form fitting that you wear are completely different."
"Do you like running with a wedgie? I don’t know about you but I have thigh fat and a shapely rear end, when I run it’s going up my cheeks regardless. Just say you’re shaped like SpongeBob and move on."
Katie Moon on X - "Hey! Athlete that wears the kit here! Totally understand your frustration and love you defending women, but actually we do have the option to wear just that if we want to 🤗 with all the top and bottoms they send us we have at least 20 different combinations! For reference please look at what Laulauga Tausaga wore when she won the discus 🤗"
Anatomy and athlete preferences are sexist

Wilfred Reilly on X - "For everyone ranting about "sexism" and - for some reason - "porn," these uniforms are usually designed by/in consultation with the athletes."

Richard Hanania on X - "Major happiness study finds that women enjoy taking care of children more than working. Media reports this as people are miserable when taking care of children, ignoring that work does worse."

Alex Contreras 🍉 on X - "Men who mock women for enjoying astrology are gross. Men who mock women for enjoying various things are gross. Let people live.
The people who are QTing this are mostly men mocking women for enjoying astrology. Once again, mocking women for enjoying things is an entry point to misogyny and gross. If you're a man and your first reaction is to mock women as a whole for enjoying astrology, that's a problem."
julzzz says ceasefire now🚰 on X - "not gonna lie, as a woman and longtime hater of astrology, I deeply resent astrology’s contemporary rebrand as this special space of sanctity and reprieve for women and queer people, which inevitably has the effect of putting it above criticism"
Of course, the fact that men get mocked all the time doesn't mean misandry is a thing, because power relations means never having to say you're sorry

US astrology influencer worried about eclipse killed partner, baby: report - "A US astrology influencer worried about the recent solar eclipse stabbed her partner to death, then pushed her two children out of her moving car before fatally slamming the vehicle into a tree, a report said Wednesday.  Danielle Johnson, who peddled weekly “aura cleanses” on her website and offered online zodiac readings, told followers that Monday’s total solar eclipse in North America was “the epitome of spiritual warfare.”  “Get your protection on and your heart in the right place,” she wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, on April 4 under her online pseudonym Danielle Ayoka."
Damn misogyny!

Christina Hoff Sommers on X - "Want to close wage gap? Step one: Change your major from feminist dance therapy to electrical engineering. #NationalOffendACollegeStudentDay"

Jack On All Trades on X - "Women really saw their husbands come back from 12 hours of work, tired and miserable, and thought gee I want to do that too."

Meme - "Say women belong in the kitchen and feminists lose their minds. Say men are better chefs than women and feminists lose their minds."
Feminists always lose their mind, so

The Feminist Rediscovery of Artemisia Gentileschi - The Atlantic - "historians have found that such trials were common in early-17th-century Rome, and Gentileschi’s experience “strongly follows a sort of formula.” (She maintained a relationship with Tassi for several months after the assault, and to the court, his offense was refusing to marry her, rather than the rape.) In other words, we should not impose modern ideas about sexual consent onto the situation in order to turn Gentileschi into a modern feminist heroine. “She was probably in love with her rapist,” Germaine Greer wrote of Gentileschi in her book on female artists, The Obstacle Race. “He was a dashing figure, handsome and black-bearded, often to be seen on horseback and sporting a golden chain.”... allowing an artist’s biography to dominate her critical reception—finding the Judith paintings more interesting as an expression of revenge than as a work of art—concerns Treves. “There is no question that her personal experiences, like any artist’s personal experience, shape the making of their art,” she said. “But I also think just to look at these paintings in that vein, it’s not particularly helpful. It diminishes her artistic achievement.”  So when does feminist celebration become patronizing, an implicit silver medal? (Isn’t she good—for a woman?) As rarities and exceptions, women are often defined by their biography. Never mind the talent—how do we feel about her? Feminist rediscovery risks saving women from obscurity only to conscript them into a reductive triumphal narrative. Gentileschi is such a striking example of this debate that we could name the dilemma after her: the Artemisia Problem. Is she good—for a woman? Or good enough to deserve a place in the canon, regardless of her sex? The danger of “rediscovery” is an implicit demand that women must be good people, inspirations, role models, trailblazers—people worth rescuing—something that is not asked of lecherous Picasso; violent Caravaggio; or Francis Bacon, the sadomasochist. A related version of the argument insists that women who reach high office are worth celebrating only if we agree with their politics. At its worst, well-meaning feminist rehabilitation can create a new prison to replace the old one. The quest to reverse our condescension toward muses, the novelist Zadie Smith has argued, resulted in off-putting biographies that were often “unhinged in tone, by turns furious, defensive, melancholy, and tragic.” These underdog narratives “kept the muse in her place, orbiting the great man.”"

Derailing Australia’s Campus Rape Panic - "new regulations were introduced by a number of universities to establish committees and secretive processes to investigate and adjudicate sexual assault. These reversed the burden of proof, denied the accused normal legal rights, and required only a “balance of probabilities” to secure conviction. Many other universities have apparently made plans to proceed down the same path.  This followed a campaign orchestrated by activists who have spent the last decade successfully convincing the media that young women are unsafe on our campuses. As a result of their lobbying, the Australian Human Rights Commission spent a million dollars on a survey intended to uncover evidence of this alleged rape crisis. However, the survey found that only tiny numbers experienced sexual assault (an average of 0.8 percent over each of the two years studied), even when a broad definition of sexual assault was applied that included touching by a stranger on public transport to campus. The main finding was low-grade sexual harassment (mainly unwanted staring) which the universities then promoted as alarming levels of “sexual violence.” Despite this setback, the higher education sector continued to toe the feminist line, setting up new measures to respond to the perceived crisis. Our university regulator—the Tertiary Education, Quality, and Standards Agency (TEQSA)—swiftly issued a “guidance note” advising universities to provide evidence of how they respond to sexual assault. This was widely interpreted by universities as a requirement to get involved in the criminal law business.  The kowtowing of key players to activist demands has been extraordinary... A video shows bureaucrats squirming as Stoker points out that the resulting university regulations contain barely a word about ensuring proper legal rights for accused young men...  a university administrator admitted in private correspondence with a student representative that his university had assumed they might still proceed with a misconduct hearing to determine the guilt of the perpetrator even if the accused had been found not guilty in criminal court. The reason? The university had a lower standard of proof, he said. That’s the point of this whole exercise—to use “victim-centred” justice to ensure more rape convictions... That was widely acknowledged as the goal in 2011 when President Obama required all publicly funded universities to establish tribunals to adjudicate rape on campus. This led to over 200 successful lawsuits against universities for failing to protect the due process rights of the accused —rights the Trump administration is now seeking to restore. Given that recent history, it is extraordinary that our higher education sector has allowed itself to be led down the same path. Universities Australia has just commissioned a new survey on sexual assault intended to cook up more impressive rape statistics after the failure of the AHRC to produce the desired results... I’d made a complaint to the university about key organisers of the Sydney protest, providing hours of video evidence and numerous witnesses to show they were breaching the university’s bullying and harassment regulations. After an investigation that lasted over 8 months, the university finally took action, suspending the key organiser, Maddy Ward, for a semester. Ward is a serial troublemaker who already had a strike against her following a notorious protest at which she exposed her breasts to an anti-abortion group. Ward proudly took ownership of the protest against me but was outraged that I had succeeded in “weaponising the university codes of conduct” against her. It was the authoritarian Left that insisted on regulating behaviour on campus, but they do not, it seems, like being held to the standards they impose on others."
From 2019

Meeting The Enemy: A Feminist Comes to Terms with the Men's Rights Movement by Cassie Jaye (Transcript) - "In 2013, I decided to meet my enemies. I was a 27-year-old, award-winning documentary filmmaker and a proud feminist. And I was determined to expose the dark underbelly of the men’s rights movement. At that point, all I knew of the men’s rights movement was from what I’d read online, that it’s a misogynistic hate group actively working against women’s equality... when I learned that no one had ever documented the men’s rights movement in a film before, I saw it as an opportunity to continue fighting for women’s equality by exposing those preventing it.  So for one year, I traveled North America meeting the leaders and followers of the men’s rights movement. I spent anywhere from two hours up to eight hours, interviewing each individual men’s rights activist, also known as MRA, and I filmed 44 people total. And there is an important rule in documentary filmmaking. As an interviewer, you do not interrupt. So I’m asking questions, and I’m getting their full life story. And in the moment, I didn’t realize it, but now looking back I can see, that while I was conducting my interviews, I wasn’t actually listening. I was hearing them speak, and I knew the cameras were recording, but in those moments of sitting across from my enemy, I wasn’t listening. What was I doing? I was anticipating. I was waiting to hear a sentence, or even just a couple of words in succession that proved what I wanted to believe: that I had found the misogynist. The ground zero of the war on women...  I was typing out every word meticulously, and through that process, I began to realize that my initial knee-jerk reactions to certain statements weren’t really warranted, and my feeling offended did not hold up to intense scrutiny. Was that statement about men having built the skyscrapers and the bridges anti-women? I thought, well, what would be the gender-reverse scenario? Maybe a feminist saying: Just look around, everyone you see was birthed by a woman. Wow! That’s a powerful statement. And it’s true. Is it anti-male? I don’t think so. I think it’s acknowledging our unique and valued contributions to our society. Well, luckily, while I was making The Red Pill movie, I kept a video diary which ended up tracking my evolving views, and in looking back on the 37 diaries I recorded that year, there was a common theme. I would often hear an innocent, valid point that a men’s rights activist would make, but in my head, I would add on to their statements, a sexist or anti-woman spin, assuming that’s what they wanted to say but didn’t... I couldn’t keep denying the points they were making... It’s not a contest. But I kept making it into one. Why couldn’t I simply learn about men’s issues and have compassion for male victims without jumping at the opportunity to insist that women are the real victims.  Well, after years of researching and fact-checking, what the men’s rights activists were telling me, there is no denying that there are many human rights issues that disproportionately or uniquely affect men... most people can’t name one because they think, “Well, men have all their rights; they have all the power and privilege.” But these issues deserve to be acknowledged.  They deserve care, attention, and motivation for solutions. Before making The Red Pill movie, I was a feminist of about ten years, and I thought I was well-versed on gender equality issues. But it wasn’t until I met men’s rights activists that I finally started to consider the other side of the gender equality equation. It doesn’t mean I agree with all that they’ve said. But I saw the immense value in listening to them and trying to see the world through their eyes. I thought if I could get my audience to also listen to them, it could serve as a rung on the ladder, bringing us all up to a higher consciousness about gender equality. So in October 2016, the film was released in theaters, and articles and critic reviews started to roll in. And that’s when I experienced how engaged the media is in group think around gender politics. And I learned a difficult lesson. When you start to humanize your enemy, you, in turn, may be dehumanized by your community. And that’s what happened to me. Rather than debating the merit of the issues addressed in the film, I became the target of a smear campaign, and people who had never seen the movie protested outside the theater doors, chanting that it was harmful to women. It certainly is not. But I understand their mindset.  If I never made this movie, and I heard that there was a documentary screening about men’s rights activists that didn’t show them as monsters, I too would have protested the screenings or at least sign the petitions to ban the film because I was told that they were my enemy.  I was told that men’s rights activists were against women’s equality. But all the men’s rights activists I met support women’s rights and are simply asking the question: “Why doesn’t our society care about men’s rights?” Well, the greatest challenge I faced through this whole process, it wasn’t the protests against my film, and it wasn’t how I was treated by the mainstream media – even though it got pretty disgusting at times. The greatest challenge I faced was peeling back the layers of my own bias. It turns out I did meet my enemy while filming. It was my ego saying that I was right, and they were subhuman. It’s no secret now that I no longer call myself a feminist... if we want to honestly discuss gender equality, we need to invite all voices to the table. Yet, this is not what is happening. Men’s groups are continually vilified, falsely referred to as hate groups, and their voices are systematically silenced.  Do I think either movement has all the answers? No. Men’s rights activists are not without flaws, neither are feminists. But if one group is being silenced, that’s a problem for all of us. If I could give advice to anyone in our society at large, we have to stop expecting to be offended, and we have to start truly, openly, and sincerely listening. That would lead to a greater understanding of ourselves and others, having compassion for one another, working together towards solutions because we all are in this together."

The Distracted Boyfriend Who Took Over the Internet Is Deemed Sexist in Sweden - The New York Times
When the demand for sexism is higher than its suppl

Lucas Lynch - "Some self-professed radicals want Billie Eilish to stop trying to look traditionally sexy, because this is somehow vaguely 'harmful'?  Why not force her to put on hijab then, honestly? Coming from a different angle, the motivation is the same.  This faction would find it less objectionable that she were cast in a violent movie where she cuts men and women's heads off than she dare consent to display her body in a traditionally sexy way. The Puritain's lament may not repeat itself, but it rhymes down through the ages, always wrong for the same reasons.   Those arguing that the sight of the female body is harmful - and even worse, somehow responsible for the harm that comes to others that have one - are inevitably on the wrong side of the debate, and on the wrong side of history. At some point, in some enlightened society in the future, men and women will stop penalizing women for simply existing. The Saudi clerics would have it be otherwise, and this is exactly the reason why anyone who professes to give a damn about freedom and an enlightened society should choose otherwise.   'My body, my choice' seems to come to a screeching halt when that choice involves choosing to be traditionally sexy. This contradiction should be obvious to anyone intelligent and well-educated, and yet it is often the intelligent and well-educated who choose to intersect with the clerics on this very mistaken point."

Meme - "Women: Schrodinger's little victim and empowered adults at the same time!  Reddit(and the Left tbh):  "16 Year olds are adult enough to vote!"  also  "20 year old women are CHILDREN!""

Urban Dictionary: Schrödinger’s Feminist - "A woman is simultaneously a victim and empowered, until something happens. Then she chooses which state benefits her the most…"

Meme - "Chennai. Vellore Institute of Technology
MINI MARATHON
RUN FOR GENDER EQUALTIY
MEN 10 KM
WOMEN : 5 KM"

Why the Life Expectancy Gap between Men and Women Is Growing - "In 2010 women were projected to live 4.8 years longer than men. By 2021 this gap widened to 5.8 years, the largest disparity since 1996. During the 20th century, heart disease was the main cause of death that created the difference in life expectancy among women and men. But now COVID fatalities and a growing number of drug overdoses among men are to blame"

Meme - "r/sexworkers. want to hear what leftist "ally" guys really think of you? read how they describe Melania.
there are plenty of ways to say that she sucks, or that Trump sucks, without bringing up her former modeling/escorting career. but for some reason that's the first thing they reach for. every dumb joke, cliche, crude stereotype and insult gets trotted out, but it's okay because she's married to Trump.  look I can't stand this woman either. that has nothing to do with her being an escort. I'm just tired of men who make an effort to be "socially conscious" good guys dropping the mask when they get a chance to make a funnee whore joke"
"I'm quite liberal politically, and I hate it when people denigrate Melania for her nude modeling. I even hate it when people make fun of Trump for being fat. There are endless legitimate reasons to criticize them both. No one should need to resort to superficial attacks."
"It is the same way they talk about MTG and her appearance where they mock her for looking like a man or something. And they justify saying shit like that by saying she deserves it for her politics, but there's tons of things you could say negatively about her without mentioning her looks. It just shows that all these values they supposedly espouse are hollow."
How about (female) feminists? (if you believe men can't be feminists - only allies)

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