ValentineWiggin wrote:
TM wrote:
Joker wrote:
Men do not get objectiied for being a man but women deal with way more issues then just social issues also.
I am a feminst not a sexist or a man hater either.
Instrumentality – if the thing is treated as a tool for one's own purposes;
Denial of autonomy – if the thing is treated as if lacking in agency or self-determination;
Inertness – if the thing is treated as if lacking in agency;
Ownership – if the thing is treated as if owned by another;
Fungibility – if the thing is treated as if interchangeable;
Violability – if the thing is treated as if permissible to damage or destroy;
denial of subjectivity – if the thing is treated as if there is no need to show concern for the 'object's' feelings and experiences.
Those are the criteria for objectification as laid out by Martha Nussbaum. In this case, men are objectified as men called up in the draft are in fact treated as interchangeable and permissible to damage or destroy. The further humorization of violence against men in sitcoms, in societies views on spousal abuse and quite a few other things. Furthermore, when it comes to sexual objectification, women are as guilty of this as men.
Now, if government has mandated equal rights and we have established that both genders and trans-gender people deal with social issues, what issues are left which women deal with Joker? I also wanted to chime in with Ragtime, that you seem to view women as a whole rather than individuals constantly, in your head there seems to be no difference between Angela Merkel or Hilary Clinton and a 14 year old trafficking victim.
But the objectifiers are likewise male, so it's not a distinction based on sex, but on other hierarchies, among men.
The government hasn't "mandated" equal rights- the ERA is screamed down everytime someone
breathes of it.
There's still a fight to get insurance coverage of birth control, for goodness's sake-
the political climate is such that a woman who testifies before Congress about her friend's ovarian cysts gets called a "slut and a prostitute".
That's apart from the general cultural atmosphere, and from-birth indoctrination of children into strict sex-based gender scripts.
A couple last year attempted to raise their child as an individual, without telling others of his/her sex, and the amount of rage-filled vitriol they received for it was frightening.
I guess I'm just wired wrong in that I don't see a difference in an act based on motivation. As I said earlier, gender-motivated violence is BS in the same sense that gay marriage is BS, there is no gender motivated violence just like there is no gay marriage, there is violence and marriage. You seem to draw this line where if a woman beats the crap out of another woman, that's a "better" form of violence than if a woman beats the s**t out of a man or vice versa.
I get why you do it, because if you didn't then your ideology and thus large parts of what makes up your identity would die, just like parts of mine would die in a communistic system. However, legal systems should be based around the act itself, not the motivation for the act. I know you respond to this with sarcasm and ridicule and but one cannot establish that X was motivated by Y as an objective fact because its in essence what Orwell called "thought crime". It's kind of the issue with psychology and sociology, that you can only theorize about what was in a person's head and it cannot be proven true or false. Law needs to be based on objective facts, not on subjective interpretations.
One of my main issues with Ayn Rand is that her ideology compartmentalizes reason and makes it an objective faculty when the truth is that everyone's "reason" is colored by their subjective perception of the world. It reminds me of how a lot of doctors tend to make diagnoses based on their field of expertise. Some people when looking at the Zimmerman-Trayvon case see a racial issue, some see a gun issue, some see a legal issue when it comes to the "stand your ground" type laws, it all comes down to your individual perception.
I suppose it comes down to whether or not you judge an act or the motivation behind the act as the primary "offense", in my case I elect to use the act as that can be objectively established, whereas motivation is always a matter of subjective interpretation. You are more than welcome to argue that "If we do not deal with the motivation behind the act, the act will happen again" which is a kind of "thought police" in that you are telling other people "You are not allowed to even think this subconsciously" whereas I tend to think that its morally reprehensible to tell someone which values they aren't allowed to hold, which thoughts they are not allowed to have or which subconscious influences they may have, but it is permissible to say "You are not allowed to perform these acts".
That's my core problem with large parts of the "left" that they seem to be very "thought-police" oriented and excessively bombastic in telling people what they may or may not think or feel. The "right" is not really better, which is why I tend to be an independent when it comes to politics and vote mainly on economic issues. It's the kind of irony where both sides are quite authoritarian, yet both claim to be promoting freedom. However, I tend to judge the left as "more guilty" in the "thought crime" and "value crime" department in that the right rarely try to dictate what you are allowed to think and what you are not allowed to think.
It's the kind of ironic actions and thought processes that allows a group of people who claim to hold free speech as a major value, yet prevent others from exercising theirs. There is the "if you tolerate intolerance, then you're not a liberal" however, if the liberal him or herself is intolerant of intolerance, then they must be intolerant of themselves. As I've stated before, I'm in favor of everyone having the same human rights and I see no point in separating genders, ethnicity, nationality and so on because the second you do, you imply that there needs to be additional sets of rights beyond those that should be universal to every human. If this is the case, then the concept of human rights need to be voided and one needs to create sets of rights for each group. If there is no universality, then where concede that every group is different and thus unable to be held to a universal standard.
I personally hold that a majority of humans are born with the capabilities to do what they want to do provided they are willing to put in the effort to do so. This is regardless of gender, ethnicity, social background and a lot of other individual factors. Some will face larger challenges in some fields than others. However, in a world where one of the most brilliant mathematicians we know came from a village in the rural parts of India and rose to become one of the greatest mathematicians that have ever lived. In a world where IMF chief is Christine Legarde, where the leader of the biggest economy in Europe is Angela Merkel and where women have lead some of the biggest corporations in human history, it becomes very hard to hold a position that women are held down.
Certain ideologies take away a persons motivation for self-realization through convincing them that they have failed before they've even tried and such ideologies are dangerous because rather than freeing their adherents they shackle them.
I would appreciate if you respond to the entirety of my post rather than criticizing sentences and sometimes part of sentences without regard for the context of the whole.
06 Apr 2012, 2:59 am
