So the professional misser of the point Erin KLG has defended her
article “When Women Don’t Want Daughters. This seems to be
at least in part in reply to girlwriteswhat completely disembowling
said article. Erin claims that "the world was harder for women.
". Let's take a look at her justifications and see if they hold
water or more hot air.
Number one men have almost all the positions of power. Therefore
there lives are all easier. Here Erin fails to make the basic logic
distinction between "All of X are Y" and "All of Y are
X". The fact that I share a type of chromosome with almost all
world and national leaders doesn't actually help me. It's not like I
can say "Hey I'd like special treatment from you Mr. Powerful on
account of how we both have dicks.". Well I could but unless
he's really into dicks that's not likely to help. Having a vagina,
which most powerful men are into (not all but a large majority)
generally helps a lot more. Maybe that's why, as GWW pointed out,
more money is spent, anything from 8 to 100 times more on female than
male problems.
For the second point Kan't Learn Gentleness (I'm going to try and
give her as many deserved acronyms as I can) complained "We"
haven't had a female president. By this she means just the USA,
presumably. But a female US president would be a massive advantage
to the men's right's movement because she would not have to prove her
feminist credentials and could look at men's disadvantage without
being massacred in the press. I don't think it WOULD happen but it
could. In any case I haven't lead a country either and I don't whine
about it.
For sheer assininity (real men don't just use words they CREATE them)
the third point can't be beat. Women get portrayed badly in the
media. She gives a number of examples of the horrible, horrible ways
they get portrayed. Of these some didn't mention women at all, some
didn't imply any judgements on women and NONE showed unambiguous
violence against women. There was one ad that showed a woman in a
sexual situation with several men, but whether it was consensual or
not wasn't clear. Another showed a woman dead, but it she didn't
appear to have died by violence.
Being the distractable guy I am I then clicked some links from these
pages and got to one allegedly showing the 10 funniest TV ads. One
of these showed a man who looked like a Pinata with a broken arm and
bandage on his head, the joke being that he had been beaten with a
stick to get skittles. Not on the violence against men specifically
mentioned, and the results clearly visible but it was played for
laughs. So possible violence against women, (admittedly sexual which
is touchier) ad gets banned. Definite violence against a men, ad
gets laughed at. Note that I didn't look for an ad like this. I
didn't need to. A few minutes clicking links about advertising and I
get to one. Count the number of ads where the woman is stupid,
insensitive, insane or evil, then count the number of ads the man is,
it's not a contest.
Nor is the actual entertainment any better in this regard. Aside
from the occasional show like "Modern Family" or "Married
with Children" (both with the brilliant Ed O'Neill) which treat
the male and female characters about equally, most TV shows show men
to be incompetent, inconsiderate, insensitive fools. Sometimes like
in Tim Allen's "Home Improvement" that's most of the joke
of the series.
Her fourth point is that 85-90% of the people in the USA with eating
disorders are women. My fourth point is that 80% of the people who
suicide are men. Her point is "Not unrelated" to media
portrayals, at a guess I'd say mine is too. But if you had to
choose, gun to your head so to speak, would you rather be the person
who splattered chunder all over the floor or brains all over the
wall?
Then she brings up the most horrible thing in the world. The wage
gap still exists. So does the huge amount of differences between
male and female labor that create it, including but not limited to,
the willingness of males to work stupid hours*, to work outside often
in terrible weather, to do dangerous work, to remain in a job without
taking time off for a child etc. anyone who doesn't know that the
work men and women do is very different is startlingly ignorant.
Erin Knowledge-Less Girl tries to claim that justifying the wages gap
on the grounds of, "lifestyle choices" (which are also
choices about work) is condemning women because they can give birth.
This is poppycock and if she actually watched to GWW's video she's
know this. I suspect she does unless she's totally ignorant of how
men and women run their lives. It's not giving birth reduces a
woman's value to the employer. No doubt taking time off to deal with
the physical aspects of pregnancy and childbirth is a factor but it's
a minor one. If it were not then women would be back in the
workforce 2 months after giving birth. Instead many women drop paid
employment for years, even decades, after becoming a mother, and/or
radically reduce their hours of paid work. They could choose not to
do this and have their husband do the stay at home thing (this is not
unknown, in fact Stefan Molyneux the biggest philosopher on the web
did exactly that). The choice is a lifestyle choice and it's one
that negatively impacts their value to their employer.
Then she's gets on to men graduating with the degrees that pay the
most. Yeah I'm guessing that women's studies and social work degrees
don't pay that well. How is this a case the world being harder on
women? The women made the choice, presumably they had their reasons
to believe that it would make them happy. Men also had their reasons
to believe that the higher paying degrees would make them happy. I
don't see why the fact that one choice leads to more money
neccesarily implies it leads to more happiness. What Erin Knotted
Logic, Gordian is saying here is that women unfortunately are too
stupid to make the right, money-making course choices and so end up
miserable because they lack the power money brings.
But do they lack the power money brings? Money is not powerful in
the earning but the spending. As David Thomas pointed out in "Not
guilty the case in defence of men" women make or influence much
even most of the major spending decisions. In fact he lists 10 areas
of financials services and all but 2 or 3 the woman clearly wears the
pants regarding them. So how does the fact that women don't even have
to earn the money they spend men it's tougher for them?
Then she talks about how 2/3s of the world's illiterates are female.
This is a bit of a switcheroo because up until this point she was
talking about the experience of women and men in the USA. All the
facts related to the USA and similar western cultures, there was no
indication that the world she considered stretched to Kabul or
Karachi or indeed beyond Rio Grande. Her original article also
didn't seem to address anything but the Western experience. In the
3rd world certainly it's rough beting a chick. In fact it's so rough
that some feminists have said women were the primary victims of, for
instance, the war in Afghanistan. Why? Because it often left them
without husbands or sons. But none of this has anything to do with
the original article, unless Erin is totally ignorant of why people
in other cultures prefer sons. The original article was all about
her own culture, nothing about others. Don't worry she'll turn back
to being totally US-centric when she compares rates of violent
victimisation, because she certainly won't be making the case on that
with figures from down south of the border.
Now we come to a bad word "slut". Well some people use it
as a bad word, others use it as a fun word, even a compliment, but
she's got a point, calling people slut is not nice. Neither is
calling someone "coward". The difference is that nobody
ever fought a useless war to stop someone calling them a slut. If
the worst you have to worry about is being called a slut you've got a
pretty good life.
From slut we transition straight to honour killings and "purity
balls" as though giving a girl a celebration for a choice you
approve of and killing her for one you do not are the same class of
phenomena. Some people think that "saving yourself for
marriage" is a good idea. Plenty of those people think the
males should do it too. How this makes the world tougher for females
(other than that some people Erin doesn't like anyway won't like
them) is beyond me. Honour killings are of course horrific, but is
there a country in the world where they outnumber infanticides? Let
alone killing of men for absurd reasons? Note that her case was that
the world is tougher for women than men, not that it is tough for
women.
She then goes on to the discrepancy between male and female criminal
vicitimisation rates. Well she pretends to. She presents a graph
that appears to show the discrepancy is being radically reduced. The
thing is that violent crime is often underreported, particularly if
the victim feels they are unlikely to get justice or may suffer
retaliation. Male vicitims of domestic violence, who are just as
common as female victims, are one such group. Females have been
reporting domestic violence more often, males, not so much. Male
victims of prison rape* are another. Assaults on females are taken
much more seriously and everyone knows this (and most would be upset
if it weren't so) so naturally males are less likely to believe it's
worth making a complaint. One way to eliminate reporting errors is
to look at homicide, which is not greatly underreported for obvious
reasons. Luckily the page she sent us to is part of a site that has
such information. Find a year where men weren't murdered at twice
the rate women were. Go ahead, find it. Now look at that realise
this is actually pretty good for men. In the Mexican border areas
(where feminists worried that there was an epidemic of woman murder)
the ratio is more like 10-1. If anyone knows of a country that has
more females murdered than males please tell me. Well maybe India
with the infanticides, which are of course almost never carried out
by males.
Speaking of perpetrators she then mentions that 90% of perpetrators
are male. Of course this depends on official statistics which almost
certainly underreport assaults by females, particularly domestic
abuse. But let's a ssume she's right. How does that show that women
have it tougher? Does she assume that the life of a violent offender
is a happy one? A stress-free one? Sure these guys have to take
resonsibility for their actions, but somewhere there is a woman who's
job it was to raise them to be healthy and happy, he is pretty
clearly not.
The question isn't, why is a woman not afraid or raising a female
victimiser, but why isn't she more afraid of raising a male vicitim
than a female one, given that they probably outnumber them 3-2 at
least? The answer is because like Erin they don't really love any
male. They think it's fine to ignore their pain, denigrate and
insult them openly, clearly state, to their faces that they are by
nature stupid, uncultured, insensitive, cruel and violent and arrange
everything in society to someone else's benefit with their money.
Then the cruelest trick in the female arsenal, telling them that this
is love. Telling them that the warped twisted relationship where the
male can be barely tolerated in return for being useful is the
wonder, joyous, mutual, respectful, kind and enlightening thing we
call love. Then they wonder why we like hookers and porn.
She claims that men being called "girls" or "pussies"
proves that women are considered the lesser sex. Hmm.. let's see,
what would you rather have, your gender being used as an insult or
spending on the health of your gender being several times lower?
Having your genitals being a term of abuse or losing your children in
custody battles pretty much every time? Dying on the job or being
whistled at in public? Where is this woman's self-respect? What
happened to her that she can advance such baloney without drinking
herself into a stupor to cope with what she does for a living? I
don't know and I don't care, I'm just glad I'm not her.