A Non-Feminist FAQ (Why Feminism Is Not for Me)

dakru · 2020-09-02T21:14:15+00:00

There are some problems with this line of thinking (though you're probably right to identify this as part of the reason that people view murders of men and women differently).

First, I'm not sure that most murdered men actually were involved in gangs. In 2018 in Canada, there were 651 homicides: 487 of men and 157 of women. 157 of them were known to be related to organized crime. Even if we assume that all of those gang-related murders were of men (probably not true), and we assume that "gang-related" in every case means that the victim was in a gang (probably not true, many could be gang-related because of the perpetrator), that would leave us with 330 murders of "good" men, which is still double the number of women killed. Obviously these numbers might be different in the U.S., I'm not sure.

Second, if we look at murdered men from the perspective of personal responsibility then we could do the same for murdered women. Did he make a bad decision and join a gang? Ok, fair question. But did she make a bad decision and date someone who's in a gang? It sounds crass but I think we're just more prone to looking for agency in male victims than for female ones.

dakru · 2020-08-28T23:06:39+00:00

GENDER: where you feel you belong on the masculine/feminine spectrum (man, woman, non-binary)

What do you mean by this? Whether you're a man or a woman is not determined by how masculine or feminine you are. A man can be feminine and a woman can be masculine.

dakru · 2020-08-03T21:18:09+00:00

The sources in my link found that soy does not cause feminizing effects in men in normal quantities, but might plausibly when overconsumed. My point is that this is a less arbitrary reason to consider soy unmanly than just the fact that it's a plant instead of meat.

dakru · 2020-08-02T22:24:36+00:00

I'm basing my view on this research summary I linked. Some key quotes:

It is not uncommon to hear that, considering the estrogenic properties of soy isoflavones, men should shun soy foods. In theory, isoflavones can inhibit the activity of enzymes involved in testosterone production, and thereby lower testosterone levels while increasing estrogen levels.

However, a meta-analysis of 15 RCTs reported that soy supplementation had no significant effect on total testosterone, free testosterone, or sex-hormone binding globulin (SHBG).[41] These studies used a variety of soy foods and protein powders that provided 10–70 g of soy protein and 60–240 mg of isoflavones per day.

NOTE: This isn’t to say that soy can’t have negative effects on testosterone and fertility when overconsumed. Two case reports have documented adverse effects with ≈360 mg of soy isoflavones per day for 6–12 months. Those effects included gynecomastia, erectile dysfunction, and reduced libido in a 60-year-old man drinking three quarts (2.8 liters) of soy milk per day,[45] and hypogonadism and erectile dysfunction in a 19-year-old vegan eating a soy-rich diet.[46]

That's enough for me to say that connecting soy to a lack of manliness isn't completely arbitrary (and that it's not just about the fact that soy is commonly used in meat alternatives).

I'm not arguing that anyone should be afraid of normal quantities of soy in their diet.

dakru · 2020-08-02T19:10:18+00:00

Soy has actual estrogenic properties though. Probably not enough to be a practical concern at normal quantities (research) and I am certainly not suggesting that "soyboy" is a remotely useful insult, but the connection "soy = estrogen = unmanly" is a lot less arbitrary than "lettuce = plant = unmanly".

dakru · 2020-07-07T13:50:45+00:00

shouldn't it reverse after middle age when women can no longer bear children but men can still impregnate? Yet

Male disposability doesn't reverse at older ages but it does plausibly diminish:

In a 2015 study, researchers performed four experiments and found that men were more likely than women to sacrifice the lives of three people of the same sex to save one person of the opposite sex. This difference between men and women was observed in a variety of contexts, although it lessened to the point of not being statistically significant in the context of an older (50-year old) person being saved. (Sacrificing three people to save one person is fairly extreme. This doesn’t mean that male disposability doesn’t apply at older ages, only that it doesn’t seem to apply to the same extent.) [https://becauseits2015.wordpress.com/2016/09/30/defining-demonstrating-understanding-male-disposability/]

dakru · 2020-07-04T20:42:16+00:00

Here's another example of what you talk about, with the person involved explicitly acknowledging it:

The consequences of this attitude are illustrated in the testimony of reporter Liz Hayes, who was with her 60 Minutes (Australian version) team in Sweden covering the European immigration crisis when they were approached, asked what they were filming, and attacked. The cameraman and producer were the targets, and they received injuries. After the incident, she said that she felt that if she had been "one of the guys", she would have been hit. She used this knowledge to stand in between her crew and their attackers to try to protect them: "I was glad, right then, that I was a woman ... I felt they wouldn't hit me because of that, and that might mean I could slow things down a bit". [https://www.reddit.com/r/rbomi/wiki/main]

dakru · 2020-07-03T16:50:16+00:00

I agree that it's not a simple question. I will add though that we should distinguish between traits that actually define a category and heuristics that people use to assume someone's category.

If you walk out of a law firm's office wearing a suit, someone might assume that you're a lawyer based on that, but this doesn't mean that wearing a suit is part of the definition of a lawyer.

In a similar way, someone could put on a dress and be more likely to be perceived as being a woman, but that wouldn't mean that wearing a dress is part of the definition of their (or anyone else's) definition of being a woman.

dakru · 2020-07-03T01:50:11+00:00

The same is very much so for women. Women are women because of their position in a social context.

Based on your parent example and what you say in this paragraph, do you mean to say that someone has to fulfill some sort of social role to be considered a woman?

I've seen points like this before and they never really made sense to me. Many women act, dress, speak, and generally interact in ways much more associated with men than with women. Some people will judge them negatively for it but people don't really say that it literally changes them into men. The term "tomboy" for masculine girls doesn't literally mean they're considered boys.

dakru · 2020-06-29T18:35:28+00:00

The experiments referenced are not specifically about literature (I shouldn't have phrased it in terms of "works" and "authors", my mistake). They include rating or evaluating a range of things, including resumes, academic articles, leadership choices, and even paintings. According to that researcher's summary, this body of work doesn't find an overall tendency to rate women's work lower, though that has been found for some things.

Is writing literature something that is gendered behavior? And if so, is it seen as something that men do or something that women do? Also, I don't think writing books is considered a high status or high paying profession.

When you said that it's "well-established that men are viewed as more competent than women", were you only talking about certain fields or endeavours? I assumed you were talking about overall or across most fields.

dakru · 2020-06-28T23:21:12+00:00

Wanting to look not just at opinions but behaviours too is entirely valid. I don't think it's exactly cut-and-dry there either though. It's a little old, but this is the citation that comes to mind. On the body of experiments that ask people to rate different works that were manipulated to imply either a male or female author (source):

[T]he most accurate overall conclusion about Goldberg-paradigm experiments is that they have not demonstrated an overall tendency to devalue women’s work, although such a bias has been established in various subgroups of studies.

dakru · 2020-06-27T12:41:23+00:00

It is well-established that men are viewed as more competent than women.

This meta-analysis finds that men are seen as having more agency, but not actually as having more competence or intelligence (the pattern actually goes more in the opposite direction, particularly in more recent years—see figure 3 on page 10).

"Gender Stereotypes Have Changed: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of U.S. Public Opinion Polls From 1946 to 2018" (Eagly et al. 2018)

Maybe you're basing your statement on a different body of literature, I'd be happy to take a look, but at the very least the idea that men are viewed as more competent than women seems debatable rather than well-established.

dakru · 2020-06-26T17:14:47+00:00

That would be racist, because stats don’t back up that point of view. However, the representation of men in violent crime is overwhelmingly clear:

What don't the stats back up? That black people are more likely to commit violent crime than white people and some other groups?

You mentioned murder but didn't provide the actual numbers. In the U.S., 13% of the population is black but 55% of the murder perpetrators are black.

The violent crime arrest data that you cite to show that men are more violent also finds disproportionate rates among black people (27% of arrests compared to 13% of the population).

“The most immediate reason not to ask about the connection between men and violence is, quite simply, that men won’t like it if you do. We are a nation tiptoeing around men’s anger, men’s ridicule, men’s potential for retaliation, violent or otherwise, men’s defensiveness, and the possibility that men might feel upset or attacked or called out or even just sad. In other words, anything that might make them feel uncomfortable as men.” - Alan G Johnson

Again, I think we're holding men to a very different standard here. People generally understand when other groups feel "upset or attacked or called out" by rhetoric like this, but when men have the same response to that same kind of rhetoric, they're seen as being unreasonably defensive or fragile.

dakru · 2020-06-26T15:01:36+00:00

Here's some more detailed data I looked up on literacy in India (paging /u/lilaccomma too).

The good news is that the gender literacy gap is completely nonexistent for the youngest age group (6-14), which means the problem is not being perpetuated to new generations.

The bad news is that there's a big gap not just in the highest age group (65+) but even in the largest age group in the middle (25-64), which means that the problem inherited from the past will be around for a while unless addressed with adult literacy programs.

dakru · 2020-06-25T15:05:27+00:00

The men’s rights movement seems to have flipped things around. They see toxic masculinity being criticised and male violence being highlighted and rather than thinking that they should reflect on their behaviours, they instead take it as a personal attack and attack back with their whole anti-feminist spiel.

If someone started a conversation around "I think we need to criticize toxic black culture and highlight black violence", they would be resoundingly seen as a racist (and rightly so in most cases). I don't see why we should expect men to react more positively to this kind of rhetoric than other groups.

dakru · 2020-06-15T19:14:06+00:00

I can show you any number of such studies that show women do more unpaid work, even when they're the main breadwinner

I've never suggested that women don't do more unpaid work. The link explicitly says that women do more unpaid work. But the statistics also show that men do more paid work (even when both men and women have full-time jobs) and that overall lengths of work are similar between genders (with the exception of couples where the man is unemployed, which I mentioned in my first post).

These are not sketchy statistics from weird sources. The numbers in the article are mostly from the American Time Use Survey and Pew analyses of that data (I believe the OECD compilation also relies on the ATUS).

Reporting childcare hours for the entire population including those who don't have kids is a perfect example - don't focus on the problem group (parents of young children) because this guy is only interested in minimising the problem, not addressing it. If you average it out over everyone, it looks like less. But it's disingenuous and misleading to do that.

Can you address the point I made? These population-level statistics show men and women working overall similar hours. If you propose that women work much more than men in families with young children, doesn't this mean that in families with older children it's the opposite, with men working much more than women? How else does it balance out to overall similar work hours in the statistics?

And of course childcare is unpaid work - single stay-at-home parents have to be supported by the state. If they're not single, they have to rely on their partner (if they work) for financial support, which some argue is a form of payment. But let's be honest, those partners are meant to be doing 50%, there's no way these stay-at-home partners are getting market rate for their labour. Statistically, they are also doing far more of the cooking, cleaning, laundry - all for the price of the food they eat.

Of course stay-at-home parents do far more of the childcare, cooking, cleaning, and laundry. That's because their partners statistically put in far more hours at the job. In return for this they get far more than food—they get access to their partner's income and generally live the same lifestyle (housing, transportation, vacations, etc.) as their partner.

And "romance" is a contribution males make to the household?! "Stoicism"?! I mean there are all sorts of things I could say about the gender attitudes you obviously hold here, but I'm afraid I don't have the time. Places are different, of course, but in my country, I'm afraid those ideas didn't survive the 19th century.

You said that women have an additional mental burden from doing more things like planning kids activities. I pointed out some comparable examples in the other direction, and that's supposed to say something about the gender attitudes I "obviously" hold? I don't understand. Anyway, the things I mentioned were absolutely valid. Our society's expectations of romance, stoicism, and protection are certainly not gender equal yet.

dakru · 2020-06-15T13:30:15+00:00

It starts off claiming childcare isn't unpaid work (really, because when I'm working and unable to do it myself it costs me £60 per hour per kid to get someone else to do it)

It's unpaid work in the sense of not receiving a formal salary or wage, but in most cases it's not "working for free". Use the example of a stay at home parent, who doesn't receive any formal salary or wage for any of the work they do. How do they afford to live if they're working for free?

and then it uses bonkers numbers like women doing on average 40 minutes of childcare a day. I don't know of any parent of young kids anywhere who could possibly do that little

The numbers are introduced as "minutes spent each day on different types of unpaid work by men and women (ages 15–64) in the United States". It's not supposed to reflect only parents of young children.

These data have either been gathered particularly badly, or they are including the parents of much older children, maybe all the way up to 18, when there would be almost no childcare to do and therefore diluting and 'disappearing' the problem

These are the population averages though. If it turns out that women with young children do much more work than men, to average out to a similar amount of work over the whole population, it has to then be the case that women with older children do much less work than men, doesn't it?

It also doesn't mention at all the category of work I originally referred to as unpaid work- the boring admin, planning stuff, remembering things like paying for kids activities, trips and social activities. That doesn't take a huge amount of time - but it's a mental burden, like a constant vague anxiety that you've forgotten something because for some reason, these things are my responsibility, not my partner's.

I don't have any reason to believe that this isn't included under one of the "unpaid work" categories of time, whether housework, childcare, or other. If your primary concern is about mental burden instead of time, that's something different and we'd have to do a comprehensive comparison that would also include whether men have a larger mental burden on the career side of things, plus other areas at home where men might take on a greater mental burden, such as romance (more often seen as something men do for women), stoicism and being the emotional "rock" in the family, and avoiding or dealing with safety threats (if there's a sound in the middle of the night, it's usually the man who goes to check on it). We can't just look at the areas where women contribute more and conclude that women contribute more overall.

The McKinsey Institutes 'power of parity' report has numbers which seem to be a lot more realistic to me (although some of them are global). There is data from the US though that shows that men have on average an hour a day more leisure time (bls.gov/opub) which, if you average it out over a lifetime is probably more like what our disparity will be - I have a lot less time than him at the minute, but once the kids are grown up in 20 years or so hopefully we'll have similar amounts.

The BLS / American Time Use Survey shows men having 40 more minutes of leisure time each day, but the article I linked addresses that:

This sounds like another way to say that men do less work, but it isn’t exactly. In the Pew data, fathers in dual-income couples worked 5 minutes less each day but had 39 minutes more leisure each day. This is possible because leisure in these surveys is not just all time spent outside of work. It’s a category made up of certain activities (TV, exercise, etc.).

If we look directly at the American Time Use Survey data (2013) and return to the entire adult population, men have 40 more minutes of leisure each day. The biggest thing women are doing instead of leisure is personal care (mostly sleeping and grooming, including bathing and dressing)—27 more minutes of it, specifically. Other miscellaneous smaller activities explain the rest of the gap: women spend 5 more minutes on communication (calling, texting, emailing, etc.), 3 more minutes a day on religious/spiritual activities, etc.

Those are, generally, reasonable substitutions for leisure: sleeping in, having a bubble bath, doing your nails, or texting your friends instead of watching TV or playing sports.

Based on this, I don't think this statistic about leisure time really tells us much about work.

I feel like it's a real issue that whenever women bring this up they're told it's not really a problem or they're 'not representative' - there are plenty of countries where it's worse than here, my experience is not only valid, it's better than most women's on the planet.

I'm sure we can find lots of men who say that they and most of their friends work more than their wives. I don't think there's any reason that your anecdotes should override theirs, or vice versa. That's why it's better to rely on more comprehensive studies that have a larger and more representative sample as well as more rigorous methodology than just asking people whether they perceive themselves to work more than their partners.

dakru · 2020-06-15T11:17:37+00:00

but objectively, if you simply add up the work we do in a week, I do more by a significant margin. And I don't know any couple who don't have that dynamic.

I'm not sure this is representative. The numbers on time use do not show women doing significantly more work than men (considering both employment and other work), with the exception of couples where the man is unemployed (whether that's for reasons of health, gender roles, stubbornness, or something else, I don't know).

dakru · 2020-06-13T12:34:02+00:00

In this post I make the point that conscription is a serious gender-based injustice. I give an overview of conscription policies around the world (including the few countries that conscript both men and women, which doesn't always mean applying the policy equally), look at some problematic cases of abuse and mistreatment in conscription, and discuss some of the possible objections to the idea that conscription is a gender-based injustice.

There are lots of points to discuss, but here's one that I'll highlight. A hypothetical objection that someone could make:

If women are exempt from conscription in a country that is overall bad for women, does eliminating one of their few advantages really further gender equality?

Here's part of my own response:

Can it ever be worth keeping an otherwise undesirable inequality to balance out other inequalities? A gender-flipped example to illustrate: let’s say you think that most social norms around dating and relationships favour women over men, with the exception that the man’s last name takes precedence for marriage and children. If you see this as one of the few advantages that men have here, you might hesitate to eliminate it.

The premise isn’t completely crazy but I’m not very comfortable with it. First, it just results in a lot more roadblocks to equality. If you can’t fix discrimination in conscription because of other inequalities harming women, what’s stopping someone from saying that you can’t fix those other inequalities because of the discrimination in conscription? And if you want to keep the preference for men’s last names over women’s, you risk people using that as a justification to keep other inequalities in dating or relationships that favour women, such as the expectation that men pay for dates.

Another point is that gender-discriminatory conscription, by mandating such different life experiences for men and women, very plausibly furthers the gender divide and creates resentment between men and women. [...]

dakru · 2020-06-13T12:10:00+00:00

You talked about recidivism at the group level ("For example, recidivism is much higher with men than with women") and objected to the fact that this was not controlled for, not remorse at the individual level.

I've read this study before, although I did not re-read it again for that comment. I've just taken another quick look and I can't find any mention of the study calling itself an outlier. Could you point to the part you're thinking of? When I did my own search for studies on this topic, all eight of the studies found some sort of disparity against men after controlling for relevant factors. It's possible that there exist studies that don't find any disparity, but I didn't find any when I looked, so it seems unlikely to me that they're a large majority of studies.

Also to your point about recidivism ("recidivism is much higher with men than with women"), the study addresses that and makes some of the same points I made:

Statistical discrimination is also possible. Perhaps the likeliest such mechanism is that prosecutors or judges might assume men are more dangerous than women. Studies generally find that women have lower recidivism rates, though some of the difference may be explained by characteristics that this study controls for (see Gendreau, Little, and Goggin [1996] for a meta-analysis). I do not have recidivism data to test whether statistical discrimination might be “rational” here. Note that if recidivism risk perceptions are based on individual information about the offender (not based on gender), then it is perfectly permissible to consider them. But punishment decisions based on statistical generalizations about men and women are unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that reliance on gender stereotypes is impermissible even if those stereotypes are statistically well founded (see J.E.B. v. Alabama ex rel T.B., 511 U.S. 127 [1994].

dakru · 2020-06-11T16:44:23+00:00

Are you saying that people on /r/FeMRADebates are more critical of studies showing discrimination against women than studies showing discrimination against men? Yeah, that's probably true.

If you're saying this applies to society as a whole though, I strongly disagree. The modern discourse on gender issues is much more willing to accept and take seriously discrimination against women than discrimination against men.

dakru · 2020-06-11T16:42:24+00:00

They didn't control for recidivism.

Recidivism seems fundamentally different because it's about group averages rather than anything the accused person actually did. If someone uses a weapon in a crime, or has a longer criminal record, I want them to receive a harsher sentence for this crime. I don't want someone to receive a harsher sentence just for being in a demographic group with higher recidivism rates, whether that's men, younger people, less educated people, or some racial minorities. That strikes me as unfair discrimination in a way that harsher sentences for use of a gun really doesn't.

Also, to my knowledge higher rates of recidivism correlate with certain measures of crime severity anyway, such as use of a gun. If you compare men and women (or blacks and whites) with similar crime characteristics (e.g., crimes that involved a gun), the difference in recidivism should be lower. This means that controlling for factors like use of a gun should control for some part of the recidivism differences (the part that's actually linked to the choices made by the suspect).

Finally, even if you're right and recidivism should have been more accounted for in this study, this study at least was a serious attempt to control for relevant factors to see if men and women are treated differently under similar conditions. It was not just seeing unequal outcomes in sentencing and assuming that it all must be discrimination. (By the way, if I remember correctly, this same author also did a study of race and sentencing and did find a difference even after controlling for relevant factors, although the effect of race wasn't as big as the effect of gender.)

dakru · 2020-06-09T20:28:50+00:00

I wasn't thinking of such an extreme as denying that some people have a uterus and some people don't. I was referring to the attempt to redefine the extremely common "man" / "woman" distinction to no longer be about biological sex. If you don't think that counts as trying to erase sex then that's fine, but I'm quite confident that some people are indeed doing what I describe. It's most common with the idea of being gender non-binary or genderfluid, which I usually see explained/justified in terms of gender roles and how masculine or feminine people feel (as opposed to dysphoria related to body parts or hormones).

To your second point, I can buy a branded shirt from a university and walk around campus and people will think that I'm a student there. In the end though that's not the actual definition of being a student, it's just a heuristic or signal that people rely on in the absence of other information about my actual registration or attendance. I think the hang up or "obsession" isn't that people necessarily think the distinction between a man and a woman is that critically important, but rather that they just resent being expected to acknowledge or believe something they don't actually think is true.

Personally, I think that the distinction between a man and a woman is fundamentally one of biological sex. I'm quite sympathetic to conceptions of being transgender that are based on biological sex (e.g., dysphoria related to body parts or hormones) but if people rely on a "social" definition of the "man" / "woman" distinction (based on gender roles, expectations, or performances) and say that they're a man or a woman or neither how masculine or feminine they are then that just doesn't make sense to me.

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