Is feminism the solution to what MRAs often complain about?

[Marokai Backbeat]

What about modern feminism (a conversation that is near-impossible since there are tons of different forms of feminisms and what people even think of patriarchy varies wildly) seeks to solve these problems? Like, even if you accept that the concept of "the patriarchy" as some all-encompassing boogeyman still exists in full force in America and the rest of the first world to this day (and I'm not even sure I really buy into the "heads we win, tails you lose" logic that argues about the patriarchy's existence in America in the first place), "dismantling it" (what does this mean? what does this entail? none of this is specific whatsoever) is not some sort of panacea that trickles down to magically hocus pocus every problem that faces men and women away. Like, no social problem is solved this way. It's complete wishful thinking.

I think when MRAs blame feminism for this sort of thing it's obviously idiotic, but I find it no less simplistic than just blaming it on a squishy concept that everyone defines however they like depending on the argument. I just don't agree that feminism (again, what feminism? what does this mean?) is the "solution" because "magically solve every problem! who's with us?!" isn't an actual solution. Modern feminism is very light on specific constructive ideas to meet their desired outcomes (and exaggerates statistics a lot to get awareness while then quietly admitting when pressed they're not as dire), which is why a lot of people respond to it with a raised eyebrow. At least, it's why I do.

[Marokai Backbeat]

Cory more or less gets at what prevents me from lending my sword (however little it matters in the grand scheme of things) to modern feminists; I prefer a little more intellectual honesty and a willingness to call out the unhelpful actors. That, and a focus on actions rather than words.

Being gay instilled me with an inherent desire to always want to help the less privileged and oppressed so no one suffers structural inequalities as I have and do, but please don't piss and tell me it's raining. Pay inequality (though it should be more appropriately called employment inequality) is a good example. I think it's absolutely a huge issue, but must we constantly repeat tired old numbers that people have long since pointed out are far more complicated than they appear? Stop implementing laws that people openly admit are sh**ty and prone to overreach? And while we're at it, no longer cherrypicking numbers about sexual assault or conflating every form of sexual assault with rape, a serious term that should remain serious?

Can we admit situations where women are actually doing pretty well (better than men, even) instead of using rhetoric that implies women are second class citizens when they're not? When Anita Sarkeesian says something ignorant or asinine, can feminists please call that out as dumb without everyone who says a bad word about her being labeled misogynist? Can we not put sexism labels on entertainment products, and drop the long-since-proven-false notion that violent media leads to violence in real life in anything other than astronomically rare instances? Our society is less violent (including sexually violent) than in decades, bros. Some feminists sound like my grandparents after watching the news. "Boy, the world is just getting worse and worse, isn't it." No.

Can we treat the Bechdel Test as what it originally was as opposed to some sort of sacrosanct for-serious code to create media by? An interesting occasional observation and literal joke? And when influential feminists start pushing something called "Indigenous Science" can feminists please call this out for the woo that it is?

Like, if we could do things like that, focus on the things that we can agree on without pushing some sort of distorted narrative, I'd be on board. Women should be safe from harassment, paid equally, given all the same opportunities as anyone else and vice versa. I've never disagreed where it counts. But of course modern feminism isn't doing this, because in the last few years female politics became a forefront wedge issue in American politics more than ever, so now the dialogue that surrounds it is more partisan, tribal, and very very stupid. Calling out idiots means weakening your "team" and "giving the other guys ammo" so each prominent group just fills up with idiots. There's no disincentive.

Feminism is one of the only social movements I can think of off the top of my head that so strongly obsesses over making sure everyone uses that exact label; even this thread just a few posts above contains an example of it. Why does it f**king matter? I'm with you guys where it really counts, I'll vote for the good people, I'll support the issues that help you out whenever I can. Whether or not I call myself a feminist doesn't change how I think and act already and I try to be the best person I can be. It just strikes me as dogmatic and downright religious. I can't think of another force in society that constantly tries to tell you what you are as often and focuses on the petty trivialities, constantly imploring you to prove your piety in a showy fashion, instead of simply doing good with no fanfare. Or spreads unfalsifiable social theories as hard fact with nearly the fervor. I remember a handful of days back on the 2016 board in a thread about Huckabee where it was revealed he "suggests watching soap operas make adultery, lying, divorce, murder, hating, and stealing seem routine and normal to people" and everyone laaughed and laaughed. Except, purely logically speaking, what makes this a more absurd hypothesis than any two bit pop-feminist that says video games or Game of Thrones normalize violence and misogyny? Each one is simply based on the number of people who believe it, and very little more.

I don't hate feminism, and when it's constructive and focuses on clear-cut, honestly-assessed problems with specific solutions, I'm right there with them, but it is more than a little disappointing that modern feminism is often so caught up in arguing about itself that it's forgotten to make specific proposals in solving the structural inequalities. The article effective tumblr reblog masquerading as "news" posted from BRTD is an example of this. It highlights a problem, recites platitudes and feel-goods in gif form, and more or less ends with "man, if we could just solve all the problems, we could solve all the problems!" Thanks. Very insightful.

Sorry for rambling.

[Marokai Backbeat]

Witty. Maybe you'll even make it into the Sulfer Mine.

The truth is though that I never actually have liked the showy and radical side of the gay rights movement anymore than I've liked other radical, showy sides of civil rights groups. But this is all a strawman of what my argument actually was (and of course, you're smart enough to know this, but whatever) because I'm not playing at the "Andrea Dworkin is so unlikable, why don't all feminists condemn her?!" angle. I cede that argument as being pointless to make. The vast majority of the nit that I'm picking comes from the substance of what gets mainstream feminism in the news being based on faulty premises, and how much of what influential, big-name, on-the-news-as-serious-people feminists resembles the unfalsifiable theories of religious hucksters and the instigators of moral panics from years past.

Honestly your entire post is just a poor attempt at false equivalence; none of your examples really line up to what I was saying or even the main points I was making, and even if they were, aren't nearly as mainstream right now, or I would be throwing more shade at those people than I already do. Like 95% of the excerpt you decided to respond to was complaining about common feminist claims and arguments, and like 5% "btw this guy over here is a crank." Except, as opposed to having websites that resemble the 90s, the people I do choose to poke at (in this case being FemFreq I guess) are all over the news with a wealth of attention and following. Queers Against Gay Marriage is no rival in terms of stature or popularity, regardless of the comeback potential.

But I won't give that post of yours more fleshing out than that, because sarcasm is one of the least interesting ways to conduct a conversation like this. I'm not a troll, so you need not engage me as if I were one.

[Marokai Backbeat]

The unfortunate reality about false accusations is that there's really no way to know with much certainty how many actually occur. What is the standard that determines whether or not the accusation is true or not for the purposes of calculating the rate of false accusations? If that standard is anything other than the outcome of court cases, each study is doing little more than pulling standards out of their ass and using guesswork.

Let me make it clear there that I understand that using court outcomes to determine the rate of false accusations is total crap because rapes are exceptionally hard to prove for a number of reasons and obviously a disturbingly high number of them will forever go unproven, it's just that this is what makes trying to come up with an agreed-upon number for what the actual rate of false accusations are almost impossible. Each study invents it's own standard of proof and then people cherry pick the one most favorable to them. Feminists pick up studies that say it's anywhere from 1-5% (this number is so low that it strains logic something fierce to believe) and MRAs throw around numbers like ~40% which of course they would because that just benefits the "bitches be crazy" narratives of creepy MRAs.

I actually tend to believe the feminists in that outright fabricated rape accusations are exceedingly low (not 2% low, but pretty low), yet it's only logical to conclude that when you create a greater incentive to lie by stacking the deck against the defendant that number would naturally increase.

However, even if we set aside that argument entirely (which we probably should because it's not possible to really have an honest percentage anyway, and even if we did, that shouldn't affect the legal process, so whatever) I find it unsettling that people argue about, not the rate of false accusations, but the rate by which there is some sort of acceptable collateral damage in locking up and ruining the lives of innocent people if lowering the standard of proof might benefit other individuals a bit more instead. The presumption of innocence until proven guilt is the foundation of liberal democracy and the fundamental problem with Ezra's argument is that his approach runs contrary to a liberal judicial system; taking potentially innocent people and using them as a scary example is not a liberal-minded judicial argument but there really are people out there who actually think that's okay. Which I find terrifying.

Though Beet is right that the law is not actually as explicitly bad as its harshest critics complained it was, the fact that it is so deliberately ambiguous and open to interpretation should be a bit unsettling in its own right.

I think the problem is too many assume the Duke Lacrosse case was some type of normal happening.

You're right that it's not "normal happening" but the opposite end of this spectrum is just as bad (and, it should be pointed out, actually really damaging to rape victims too!) because there was very recently a story from the University of Virginia that Rolling Stone jumped on, immediately taking the accusers story as gospel out of respect and insistence that since she was probably telling the truth statistically, they didn't need to do their due diligence as a news outlet and properly investigate it before publishing anything, and they completely bungled the story so hard because there ended up being multiple problems with the subjects account of the events that they had to back away from it and apologize.

I don't understand why "rigorously investigate, but treat with respect" is so impossible in all of this. There is a wider spectrum of positions here than "ignore all rape accusations because of some false ones" or "create a system wherein we believe all false accusations and potentially ruin lives because The Needs of the Many, etc."

[Marokai Backbeat]

I don't even know if I agree with the blanket statement of "society is tilted toward being harsh to rape victims." What does that mean? I definitely agree that law enforcement doesn't take investigating sexual assault cases nearly as seriously or undergo them as promptly as they should, and that should absolutely change (emphasis on law enforcement investigations, and not extra-legal sexual assault squads formed by colleges and universities that are ran by young showboaters; the types who will simply dole out punishments before serious investigations have even taken place and maintain them even if the subjects have been cleared) but I don't think the average person seriously treats alleged rape victims with some sort of disdain. Not being as respectful as they should be, maybe, but society treats nothing perfectly.

I think some activists take the low conviction rates on sexual assault as some sort of conspiracy against them but the unfortunate reality of the situation is that these allegations are just really hard to prove. The pushback typically comes from the proposed solutions to getting around the fact that the burden of proof is really high, which are things like aforementioned extra-judical measures that often end up being unfair, social media mobbing, eerily right-wing sounding rules and laws about what the "right" sort of sexual practices and etiquette are, outright lowering the legal burden of proof, or the belief that video games and movies are instilling attitudes that lead to "rape culture." The frustration with how difficult it is to prove the allegations is very understandable, but the acting out from this frustration is often shortsighted and problematic.

When I was in Canada a couple weeks ago I was watching CBC Montreal just for funsies and there was a segment about a local woman who was allegedly sexually assaulted, she went straight to the police, they conducted a rape kit, asked questions, did all the proper procedure. But then weeks went by, then months. It turned out the police took (from memory) like three months to get the rape kit analyzed and sent back. That's f**king outrageous, and thankfully, is one of the aspects of this problem we can directly address, and should be directly addressing. We definitely need more people specifically to deal with sexual assault cases.

Yet in the end the issue always comes back to the courtroom and the legal burden of proof. Most of these instances don't exactly happen around a lot of witnesses and the physical evidence is murky even when it is immediately gathered (which is itself, rare). So what can you actually do? Imagine you're a judge for a moment and you're presented with a case that involves a man and a woman both in their early twenties, clean cut, otherwise totally unremarkable individuals. The man is accused of rape. The incident allegedly happened when they were alone, there are no direct witnesses, each individual has their friends there as character witnesses backing up what swell people they are. There's no physical evidence either way. Statute says the accused could face up to a decade in prison. What do you do? There's no legal rationale for deciding in favor of the plaintiff in a case like that; it just can't be rationally justified. And this is how a ton of these cases like this play out in court. This is why the only reasonable way of dealing with the problem that respects the presumption of innocence is in prevention and increasing ways to find evidence, but this too needs to be done in a way that isn't "hold these innocent men up to society as an example that can strike fear in other mens' hearts!" or "stop depicting sexual assault in media."

[Marokai Backbeat]

Feminists pick up studies that say it's anywhere from 1-5% (this number is so low that it strains logic something fierce to believe) and MRAs throw around numbers like ~40% which of course they would because that just benefits the "bitches be crazy" narratives of creepy MRAs.

Really?  I honestly have a hard time believing that it could be as high as 5 percent.  It seems that the reputable studies floating out there seem to float somewhere in the range of 8 percent, but as I pointed out to Nix even they are riddled with false negatives such that the true incidence of false allegations is most certainly lower than that, and more or less perfectly in line with feminist claims.  If outright fabrications (as opposed to legit cases being dropped for personal reasons, or "ambiguous" situations) were even one percent I'd be surprised.

But as mentioned, there's no real way to know the "true" incidence of false accusations. You're a level headed person and I get the argument for why you "believe" one thing or another, but at the end of the day it's just you looking at various studies and applying your own biases to it. I don't believe the number is particularly high, but it's completely arbitrary to say it's vanishingly low. Each camp is merely looking at the studies that concoct their own standards for what "false" and "legit" mean and then picking the one that suits their interests the most. Which is why I moved on from that particular argument anyway, if there's no definitive way of knowing, and the best way to determine truth on an issue is fatally flawed in this case (the courtroom method), and it doesn't really impact the way a judge should look at it at the end of the day anyway, it's just an academic argument none of us, here, are cut out for.

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Uh?  Really?  Pretty sure that handling these sorts of cases in-house generally leads to perpetrators getting away with it, on the grounds that the college wants to sweep bad publicity under the rug, rather than it being some sort of hangin' judge kangaroo court scenario?  Kinda was under the impression they had the exact opposite problem?[/quote]

I don't believe either situation is ideal, never denied the existence of the situations you're referencing, and what I advocate for is more official law enforcement investigation and less extra-legal interference which we almost certainly both agree with in the end, anyway, so I don't know why you're picking this nit.

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Of course I remember it, I even randomly decided to look back on my posts to see how I reacted to it and it was this:

Maybe the town will reexamine itself after this.

Town? No, no, no. This isn't just a town. This is a cultural infection.

Yep.

But what you're describing isn't exclusive to rape cases. Defending the people you love and admire is a common phenomenon you would be able to observe with virtually any instance of those people being accused of wrongdoing and dogpiling the accuser. If one of your loved ones or best friends were accused of something so horrific would you not think "Man, I don't think ____ could've ever done something like this, I've known them for so many years now"? And being forced to deal with questions and re-living the events on the witness stand? Yes, that's called going to court.

When it comes to the cases where people were acting like "Yeah, maybe they did it, but who cares considering all their other accomplishments" or "She was asking for it, look at what she did with ___ and ___" yes, that's sexist and disgusting and dehumanizing. The harassment of accusers is also indefensible. But it's not fair to act like any questioning of the story, the routine process of answering questions about the event, are there to specifically pour salt on the wounds of rape victims. Are you arguing this shouldn't be happening? Someone should be barred from being cross-examined if they're making sexual assault accusations because that upsets them? That's how the University of Virginia story was so botched.

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I'm not disagreeing with the notion that there are particular streaks of hate that come to the fore in these cases, my issue was that I simply don't think it's fair to act like every obstacle in the way of a man or woman making a rape or sexual assault accusation is there specifically to spite them. It was just the use of "Society thinks ____" that set me off. That's just too broad. Part of society is misogynistic. Part of society is also very much not. If that weren't the case we wouldn't be discussing this. I concede the rest of this argument to you because I think the rest of it is more important.

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Of course, it makes so much difference that the man is "clean cut", and has character witnesses (as if well-liked people can't do horrible things)!  And it's not like the only options are "decade in jail" and "get off scot free"– the law distinguishes between various degrees of offenses.[/quote]

At this point you're just hyper analyzing and getting offended by things you should know better than to think I meant. All I meant was that in this fictional scenario, these two people are both completely average individuals in every respect, from the way they look, their friends, their background, and more. It's a pure "He's guilty" vs "No I'm not." I know very, very well that "clean cut" and well-off people can do horrible things. You're talking to a sexual abuse victim right now.

In a situation like that there's no "offense" to be proved, which was my point. Even if the prosecution was saying "We only want to give the guy only 6 months in jail, it's whatever" you would still have to weigh the decision in your head based on the evidence and arguments provided. In a case like this, which is a very standard way for these cases to end up, you can't make a legal justification that isn't just a complete guess. You're tasked with branding someone a rapist for the rest of their lives on the basis of nothing. You just can't reasonably expect anything other than a not-guilty verdict in a fair system based on arguments and evidence.

[Marokai Backbeat]

Much of the hallmarks of a patriarchal culture - such as men being the chasers, women the guards - manifest itself in rape and sexual assault.

You're right, though should also be noted that the way many people claim we should deal with the problems of sexual assault only seem to reinforce these roles. Though men should obviously ensure consent is present, we should equally be empowering women to take control of the situation and say no if she doesn't want it. Women are not weak damsels in these scenarios, and the social response to rape and sexual assault shouldn't just be "make sure the men get the consent and handle the situation with extreme care" it should also be "make sure the women know they have the power to kick the guy in the balls if he tries anything messed up."

Take for instance situations where both parties are intoxicated; there are many feminists who would argue that drunk sex is always rape because consent is impossible if you're drunk. (And I don't mean black-out drunk, either; in that case I agree with them.) Who is held to account in that situation? It would almost certainly be the man, except using the logic there, he would obviously be just as unable to consent. This reinforces the "men need to be the guardians and handle the situation correctly all by themselves" patriarchal narrative that feminists claim they wish to dismantle. Laws like the aforementioned California consent law seem to have been implemented under the similar auspice of "men need to be responsible for sexual encounters because they're handling them wrong right now." Where are the campaigns to get women to take control and become equal owners of sex? The only way you can think this shouldn't happen is if you assume women are just too scared and weak to do so, so us men need to handle it for them. I strongly disagree with that.

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Yes, what he said there was dumb and needless.

Lots of good responses to the predictable misogynous BS.

What have I said that's misogynistic?

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But this is very easy to say. Virtually any case that goes to court would have the accused claiming they had consent. What can contradict that? It's not a written contract, it's not done under audio or video recording. Some rapists may even actually genuinely believe they had consent.

The problem with affirmative consent laws is that they can, in theory, be just as easily circumvented the way consent law is right now; a person just lies. This is why Klein argued the value of the law was not in the affirmative consent guidelines, but specifically in terrifying people by making an example out of the occasional innocent. That is a frightening path to open.

[Marokai Backbeat]

Goodness gracious, atlas really needs to ban discussions about feminism. I really don't know why I allowed myself to get sucked into these threads.

     Yeah, this thread is also why we can't have nice things. Other than Marokai's posts, everything about this is bad, bad, and more bad.

lol

I'm putting way more of a good-faith effort into these threads than you (and frankly, than most people), dude.

Yes, I do believe that it would be best for Atlas to stop talking about these issues, at least until this place isn't such a sausagefest.  The lack of women's voices in these discussions is a pretty obvious problem.

I want more women on Atlas just as well, but it wouldn't make the identical arguments being made here suddenly infallible.