I know why Laci Green is.
As long as I can remember, I’ve been one…even before I knew what it is. I felt it.
My parents married young, immediately had a string of kids, and weren’t highly educated: my father pumped gas for a living and my mother was a homemaker. Do I need to tell you we were poor? That didn’t matter to us: we could see that our parents loved each other very much and also loved us, but to be honest, you’ve got to admit that love doesn’t pay the rent. There were stresses and strains. I know my father was torn up because he was struggling so hard to meet that traditional male role as the breadwinner, and he wasn’t doing so well…and there was also a problem of binge drinking.
And then, my mother got a job to help out. And my parents argued. I knew that wasn’t right; if Dad can work, why can’t Mom? And then one night they fought. My father actually slapped my mother. I didn’t see it, but my sisters did, and they immediately started such wailing and crying and running through the house — that was wrong. Our parents were in love, they never ever hit each other. We were in total shock.
I’ll never forget what my mother did. She left. She took my sisters and moved back to stay with her parents. Our family was torn right in half, and it was probably the most traumatizing, terrible event of my childhood…but I still knew my mother had done the right thing, and that was important. My mother has always been quiet, soft-voiced, the stereotypical sensitive one, but I also knew in that moment that she was also damn strong and righteous. Even if I was crying myself to sleep every night, I was proud that she had stood up for herself.
The good news is that my father was also strong, and strength in this case meant admitting that he was wrong and changing his behavior. I never saw him drunk after that day; I never saw him strike my mother ever again. The usual description would be that he went “crawling back to her”, but that wouldn’t be it at all — it was more that two people who loved each other also realized that respect was part of the equation.
I was eight years old. I learned that forcing people into traditional roles tore them apart, and mutual respect and equality brought them together again. I also learned that women can be strong, and that good men can make mistakes. And years later, when I learned about this feminist thing, my reaction was to think, “But of course…isn’t everyone?”
Excellent breakdown of why feminism is needed, and I’m sure there’ll be screaming howler monkeys in the comments.
For the same reason I’m atheist…it’s rational. Equality is rational.
And, I guess, because I am emotionally secure…I don’t need to feel better about myself by putting others down.
Beautiful post. Thank you.
Yeah, me too. Why? Honestly? At the most basic level, it’s because I’m an idealist who’d like life to be fair. And at the moment it isn’t. And that sucks.
And when I grew up and realised that that basic emotional want happened to be backed up with a lot of logic and fact… well, finding that out was a happy process.
First time i hear about Laci Green, but i already like her. Nice video.
This is exactly how i´ve always felt. The moment i first heard of feminism and gender equality i thought “well, yes, obviously”. My parents, even though they are…ehem….very mature…and come from a generation and a time when things were radically different in Spain and are devout catholics (with a history in the church) and in their old age are leaning towards conservadurism, were always an unusual example of equality between two parterns. While other families in my environment fell into the gender roles bullshit to different degrees I´ve always known my parent´s relationship as a relationship of equals, and not just because they both worked, and they worked as teachers in the same school, but because they trully were, are and will always be equals. They share everything as equals. Growing up with that as my example in a country which was recovering from really quite extreme patriarchy meant that when i saw relationships between men and women (or boys and girls for that matter) which weren´t based on complete equality it always felt extremely unnatural and wrong. Granted, i was the kid who always had female friends and was comfortable with them and uncomfortable among typical males and their bloody soccer fixations….but still, i owe my parents teaching me from the very beginning that the only way to treat others, whatever their gender might be, is as equals….anything else is complete and utter madness…as well as deeply repugnant…
[content warning: youtube comments]
She’s cool! :)
When the usual parent set-up is a man and a woman, sexism and male dominance means the rather important intelligent and totally open conversation and exchange of life thing between the parents, gets repressed, never happens.
(Or happens in some god-awful, subtly screwed-up way, so that everybody can pretend it’s happening properly….)
That is, questions get decided and ideas accepted via power relationships and personal domination, instead by, you know, figuring and feeling and experimenting them out.
I humbly submit that lots of people being raised in this sort of environment is one of the reasons our World continues to be screwed up. In this and other ways, we’re all the victims of sexism. ( It should go without saying, though, it’s women who are in the front line.) So this is another way in which feminism is absolutely vital to figuring our shit out.
“I was eight years old. I learned that forcing people into traditional roles tore them apart”
I find this a very simplistic view of the situation. For the record, your father hitting your mother was wrong, Full stop, end of story, no amount of logic can ever make that action OK. I do wonder however just how well an 8 year old can assess a very complex situation as the one you have described.
Money problems causes a lot of stress. Maybe your father was a chauvinistic pig who didn’t think women should work. I simply cant say. From my reading of your account however let me state another hypothesis.
Your family was struggling financially. Your father was doing everything in his power to raise his children as best he could but through no fault of his own he was failing. The argument to my mind seems more about should both parents work or should one stay at home. Your father already had a job and was unwilling to give this up, your mother got a job and in your fathers eyes abandoned the kids. Your father probably was thinking about the cost of the child care compared to the extra income. Your mother, unwilling to back down was (unintentionally) rubbing your fathers failure in his face. This would have increased the stress of everyone.
Had your mother got a job under different circumstances I would suggest that the outcome would have been different. I fail to see how feminism is equipped to handle this situation
Thank you for sharing your compelling personal story, PZ. Your mom rocks (or did — hope she’s still alive).
As for the video, good overall, but sadly, her congressional data are inaccurate. She claims 17 women in the Senate; this was true in the last Congress, but there are now 20. She claims 76 women in the House; again, this was true for the 112th Congress, if you count three delegates from DC, Guam, and the Virgin Islands, but there are now 79 voting women in the House, plus the same three delegates, for a total of 82. (Whether delegates should be counted is problematic. They don’t vote in the full House, but they do vote in committees. Perhaps we should count each as 3/5 of a person? /sarc)
The current numbers still suck, of course. But using old data was sloppy work and weakens her argument. (Note that she posted the video yesterday. It’s not old.)
Sources:
http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/fast_facts/levels_of_office/Congress-Current.php
http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/fast_facts/levels_of_office/documents/elective12.pdf
konradcurze: You’re an idiot. You’re now reading my dead father’s mind, and trying to blame my mother.
Fuck off.
Well.
I’m glad I refreshed before responding to konradcurze.
PZ’s answer is better than mine was.
Am sorry PZ which bit of hypothesis are you struggling with.
The fact that you think you have anything cogent to add to the discussion. Which means no hypotheticals.
The fact that you are saying things about my parents’ character that are not true, and that you could not possibly know — you being in Scotland, significantly younger than they are, and having had no opportunity to even meet them briefly. That you are making shit up to fit your preferred hypothesis against my personal knowledge. That your entire speculative scenario rests on making my father the good guy and my mother the bad guy, when it was definitely more complex than that. That you’ve never commented here before but are suddenly trying to distort my childhood.
Like I said,
Fuck off.
Stay out of this thread altogether. Your next comment will be your third strike.
konradcurze’s Hypothesis™
“If things had been different, they would have been different.”
I merely suggested an alternative to what was stated. I don’t find the account of an 8 year old to be particularly convincing for the same reason that 8 year olds aren’t allowed to vote. They are morons with no clue what the true situation is.
Have I made the unforgivable mistake of disagreeing Lord Myer? pardon me for being a skeptic and not accepting what I’m told at face value.
Bye, asshole.
Awesome video! Sadly, I have not always been a feminist. The religion I was raised in was staggeringly sexist (and racist, and most every other bigotry you can imagine). Take the worst most patriarchal anti-women sections of the bible and interpret them in the worst possible way, and you’ll get the idea.
When the initial heady glow of atheism started to pass, I realized I had to re-evaluate all of my attitudes and prejudices. And there is no rational, secular reason to maintain that same horrific mindset. I’m not entirely free of the misogyny and racism I was raised in. But I’m working on it. Fortunately, I can count on the Horde to point it out to me when I screw up.
By the way, this is not the account of an 8 year old. It is the account of a 57 year old man who lived with, loved, and knew very well those two people, and was a son to them for many years after the events I described.
konradcurze
uhyup
Ha! 23 mins from first comment to the righteous application of the banhammer. Gotta be some kind of record! Hail the tentacled overlord!
I also have the feeling that I was “always a feminist”, though I don’t think I would have described myself in those terms until fairly recently. I did share the “well, obviously” reaction that others have mentioned when the women’s movement arrived.
But it’s not like nothing has changed over the years. I recently discovered some of my old college essays from the early ’70s. I was surprised and amused to note the gendered language I used, quite consistently throughout. Every mention of an unspecified person was in masculine terms.
So if I say I was “always a feminist”, it doesn’t mean that I always had the same level of feministity I do now.
This tracks with my life experience as well.
My family was much better off (my dad was a lawyer). My mother started off a homemaker, probably because she got pregnant on the honeymoon and there was no financial need for her to work outside the home. A decade into the marriage, my mother decided to go to law school, and when she graduated, they formed a small firm of the two of them.
My father was, to all outside appearances, an absolute stereotype of the “privileged” guy: white, straight, educated, tall, athletic, good-looking. He was in his 20s during the 1950s, and could so easily have been that era’s equivalent of a dudebro–but he wasn’t.
He tucked us into bed most nights. He changed diapers. He cooked meals (he was a bad cook, but Mom wasn’t much better, so). He did the grocery shopping for their entire marriage (after he died I had to explain to Mom how to shop for groceries because she hadn’t done it for 40 years).
And Mom presented the other half of the equation: She did all the fix-it things in the house–I changed many a light switch or fixture with her. She did most of the driving, because she enjoyed it and Dad found it a chore. She entered law school at a time when few women did.
No one would ever say my dad was anything less than manly, nor my makeup-and-nice-purses mother unfeminine. But they both grew up during the Depression and WWII, and didn’t have time or patience for sexist bullshit. They recognized that tasks should be done by the person who was best at them, not according to some bullshit gender roles.
And that’s what their kids think, too.
And konradcurze/Martin Scott is already bragging on twitter to his slymey asshole friends about getting banned.
I notice I’d already had him long blocked on twitter, so he had to make up a pseudonym to sneak on here (and really, Warhammer40K? Is he like 8 years old?).
Twitter is a good place for that sort of thing.
You know what?
Let’s play straw-Vulcan, set all emotions and implications aside somehow, and accept your whole story for the sake of this argument.
His failure was, you wrote, “through no fault of his own”. Why, then, would he care whether he’d be reminded of it?
The only answers I can come up with are patriarchal prejudices.
I think I should switch from straw-Vulcans to the aliens in Plan 9 From Outer Space and berate your stupid mind. Stupid! Stupid!
Oi! Nothing wrong with Warhammer! There is a hell of a lot wrong with konradcurze, no need to resort to belittling a pasttime. I haven´t played in ages, but it was good fun.
This is so good….oh…so good…..You, konradcurze, some arsehole from the internet with no knowledge whatsoever of the specifics of the situation or the people involved are critisizing the value of the account of an individual that lived through it and intimately knows everybody involved. I do see a moron with no clue what the true situation is…i also think you might not necessarily be fit for voting.
Bloody hell…how can these clowns consider themselves to be skeptics…? And 8 year old´s memory and interpretation are suspect, but my totally made up speculation spun out of fucking nothing..oh…that is fucking science!
I was raised Catholic, and I remember around the time of my first communion that I was confused as to why only men could be priests. I never understood it fully, which probably helped lead me to leaving the church later, after meeting a minister from another faith who converted to Catholicism (with his wife) because his original denomination was allowing women to become ordained. I left almost immediately after finding that out, as I was already having a “crisis of faith”.
I can’t say I’ve always been a feminist, but I’ve always believed in a certain equality of the genders. Even rejecting a lot of the sexist bullshit of the Catholic church, I was still sexist in many ways for a long time. For the longest time I used male gendered pronouns because that’s what I was taught is proper, and I got marked off if I mixed or used non-male pronouns.
I see here another great story of recovery from the adverse effects of alcohol abuse /addiction. I have met people with other stories with similar outcomes.
All other stressors of relationships like money or kids, drinking makes coping impossible.
That they could overcome the problem and obviously grow past it is clearly reflected in your life. Thank you for sharing.
Not all relationships or families work out of those kinds of problems. My family did not survive intact from it. I watch my Mom struggle mightily with her own daemons and all the negative effects of the patriarchy and accept less than she was worth. To struggle with being judged a mire women .
It never made any sense to me then and now that I have learned more of the history and heard all the rationals it makes even less sense to me.
uncle frogy
How does the 8 year old know the 57 year old man was telling the truth? They’re very gullible.
And you know who else was a 57 year old man?
Hitler.
TurtleGoodyLo
Yes.
I’m sure PZ lies awake at night regretting that.
In other words, IT’S NOT NECESSARILY SEXISM! It could be Exismsay.
@31
are trying to be funny or are you just fucking stupid?
uncle frogy
#29
Instructions, not points. Category error. Admit your wrong in your own time, I imagine you’re probably busy chewing on wires because you found the electrical hazard signs with their rhetorical capitals letters and pictures of lightning to present inadequately refined arguments.
thanks for clearing up my doubts so completely
your not trying to be funny
uncle frogy
The fifth horseman? You mean Ronnie Soak?
From that idiot’s twitter.
Truly a great loss for the FTB community.
#32
I’m not sure 8 year olds should even be allowed to ride horses.
#34
A little from column A…
Sadly, I can’t say the same. But I got better. :) I spent too many years, being ‘that guy’. In my case, it was the mostly harmless, but enabling of others kind of casual sexism (sexist jokes amongst the dudebros). At least some of us are capable of ethical growth and realizing we were wrong.
Ageism? As a boardgamer (although I don’t partake of W40K), I think this is pretty off. Besides, have you seen how much that shit costs? You need to either have rich parents, or spend ALL your allowance to afford this game.
#36
Let me help you here. Hitler did not live to 57. And it’s “you’re”, as in “you are”.
Can’t we start to punish people who don’t have even the slightest grasp of grammar? It’s the only way they’ll learn.
Marc Abian
Actually on second thoughts, never mind.
♥
Hekuni Cat,
Just glad somebody got the reference. ;-)
“8 year olds are moron and don’t know what’s going on”
Yeah, right. Kids are far more perceptive than people give credit. Ask anyone with a fucked up childhood and I bet they’d nail what was going on with their parental figures and why. Without just being told by adult. Just because they haven’t learned the basics yet doesn’t mean they can’t figure out daddy’s drinking because mommy’s working and he’s not.
Often it’s a survival technique. Picking up on routines, causes, and button subjects is second nature for every kid I’ve ever talked too. Including my own. Remembering how I felt going through struggles as a kid is helpful for making things better for my daughter.
I’m sorry you went through that PZ and I’m really glad things got better.
================================================
29
TurtleGoodyLo
Anyone with any kind of decency would tell them to shove that high horse up their ass.
@Marc Abian – #40
I’m not a fan of shaming people for imperfect grammar or spelling. Not everyone’s first language is English. I’ve been speaking and writing English for over 2 decades and I still mess up plenty of stuff.
Count me as another [male] person who was a “humorless feminist” long before I’d ever heard the word “feminist.” It reminds me of being told about the commutative property of addition — my reaction was, “well, du-u-uh!” All it did was give a name for what I’d known for years.
–
But then, I’ve never thought of feminism as being a political party or a religion or anything you had to agree with[*]. I’ve always thought of it as simply the result of putting 2 and 2 together. That’s why the people who “disagree” with feminism aren’t so much obnoxious (though they are usually that, too) as simply acting stupid, like they were loudly declaiming “2 + 2 is 27, and anyone who disagrees with me is a traitor!”
–
– – –
[*]-Well, there’s one piece of feminism that is based on something that requires “agreeing with”: the principle that women are people, i.e., that they have worth in their own right, rather than simply for what non-female people can use them for. But since by the time I’d heard of feminism, I’d had many years of being treated like I had no worth beyond the fun the Real People could have by picking on me, I tended to identify more with women than with the dudebros who were making my life miserable. “Victims of the Patriarchy, unite” and all that.
The times they have changed, just a little but not nearly enough.
My father had five children and bragged that he never changed a diaper. I had three, and brag that I changed more diapers than my wife did.
I’ve agreed with the goals and principles of feminism for as long as I can remember, but I’m still working at correcting behavior, language, and attitudes that were part of my culture as a child. Fortunately I have a partner who will call me on any patriarchal bullshit that comes out of my mouth, and I appreciate it.
Just yesterday, watching a video, I made fun of Sarah Palin’s nazal voice. Not correct. Make fun of her ideas, but not her style of presentation. Women with opinions are often criticized for their voices. I was told, and I appreciate it.
Don’t let the weirdos get you down, PZ.
Thanks for sharing. I’m glad your father was able to turn around and reunite with your mom. It must have been a very frightening experience.
Ingobay.
I don’t recall when I “became” a feminist. I think I was always one, like Dr. Myers.
I remember one of my best friends in Grade 7 was a girl named Natalie. She was smart, but dumpy. That was around the time some of the boys started to really notice the girls. I was the only boy who wanted to hang around her, and that bewildered me. I guess my hormones hadn’t kicked in yet. She and I spent a lot of time together playing and exploring science-y things.
Even after my hormones did kick in I still loved being around her because we connected. I remember overhearing some of the chatter between the boys, and what they said about her hurt. Me, I was the one feeling the hurt. I was pretty angry as a result.
Without thinking about it, I blurted out: “Hey assholes, she’s a human being. Stop talking about her like that.” I got some stares and mocking laughter, but after saying what I did, I sort of suddenly realized that it was very important to me that people be treated as people. Whether you were a boy, a girl, gay, straight, black, white, brown, purple or whatever, a human being was not to be judged by their physical identities or treated differently because of orientation. It took me many years to work out for myself what I was feeling and thinking, and I didn’t know how to describe it until I came across the labels that I use today.
For the record Natalie became gorgeous in Grade 12, and she went on to medical school. I lost touch with her, and I hope she’s doing really well.
? There can be only four Horsemen. God said it, I believe it, that settles it. :-D
David Marjanović,
Read “Thief of Time” for the real story… Ronnie was robbed.
I’d completely forgotten Ronnie Soak.
I have some re-reading to do.
Bah! True Horsemen nerds know that Pestilence is in fact the fifth. The original four were War, Conquest, Famine, and Death. Then the black plague hit Europe, and people figured that a new contender was vying for a saddle. After a long, drawn out plague, Conquest himself was conquered and Pestilence moved in. Then Death stole Conquest’s old horse (and by some accounts named it Binky), and Pestilence took Death’s old horse. By the terms of the peace treaty, Death is no longer allowed to kill people via pestilence, as he previously did.
(Later, Pestilence himself would be desaddled by Pollution, but that’s another story.)
Ow! I had some rather prolonged dental treatment today, and konradcurze’s bizarre combination of insolence and gormlessness caused my jaw to contact the floor at considerable velocity. I see we have another self-important twerp already leaping into the breach@29.
My own parents’ situation was by no means so difficult as PZ’s, but I have often thought they would have been happier if they could have exchanged roles. My father was a highly conscientious man, who did his civil service job well (as shown by 5 promotions over the course of his career), but I don’t think ever actually enjoyed it, spent a lot of time with us four children, and was much happier after retirement, when he took over most of the cooking (and some, although I must admit considerably less, of the less interesting forms of housework). My mother was a highly talented woman, who certainly loved her children and looked after us well, but had considerable intellectual interests (which my father did not), always regretted she did not get the chance to go to university (as her younger brother did) because her parents never even considered that possibility, and could I think have made a career as a singer, historian – she took a degree in history in her sixties – or schoolteacher. But when they met and married in the early 1950s, such a thing was hardly thinkable, let alone feasible.
As for why I’m a feminist*, it’s an unavoidable concomitant of any sincere commitment to egalitarian justice, but also stems from a recognition that improving the status and education of women and girls is absolutely fundamental to the prospects for a sustainable, free and peaceful world.
*I certainly don’t claim to be devoid of sexist impulses or assumptions, or always to avoid sexist words and actions.
Honestly, when I was a teenager I thought feminism wasn’t really needed anymore, because I didn’t think anyone actually took gender roles seriously anymore. They’re just so obviously silly and stupid.
The only reason my opinion changed was because I was unpleasantly surprised over and over and over again.
Also, I find the idea of “privilege” to be fascinating. It’s like a weird, implicit, unspoken form of inequality, based on assymetric experiences and information. I was able to grasp the concept pretty easily because I did not grow up Christian. But it’s just an interesting concept in of itself that seems to encourage outspokeness and plurality.
When I was in Grade 1 (ca. 1960) we sang this song:
It was a role-playing song.
The day I was told that I couldn’t be the doctor because I was a girl was the start of my feminism.
I too, never “became” a feminist; just always was a “people-ist”; i.e. everyone is a Person, male or female is just a sub-category, the actual category for everyone is Person. I’ve always wondered what the difficulty is that some have over letting women work, or vote, or drive, or whatever. And that leads to my further ramble about “gay” marriage: marriage is for two Persons. Period. Persons. full stop. Fertility is inconsequential to the legality of a marriage. Parenthood should be an additional license: (what’s that about needing a license to drive but none necessary to be a parent?).
“assymetric” —> asymmetric
FTFY ;-) /vocab-police
always amused by the ‘assy metric’ misspelling of ‘asymmetric’.
On the topic of privilege, both ethnic and gender based, this came up on my facebook feed recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CmzT4OV-w0
It’s sort of appalling humor, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry.
A very laye clarification of my number 4… I have always supported equality. I didn’t always get what feminism was or what problems women still face. I’m a much better feminist now than I’ve been before.
Sorry for the shameless plug, but here I explain why I am a feminist:http://freethoughtblogs.com/marginoferr/2014/03/13/why-i-call-myself-a-feminist/
I know the asshole is gone, but:
Right, just can’t trust those little morons to know what’s right in front of their eyes. Perhaps you were a stupid sprog, Konrad (the evidence weights that way, as you’re certainly stupid now), however, most sprogs aren’t stupid, and know quite well what’s going on.
PZ, thank you for sharing that piece of your childhood. Such experiences have great power to reach people.
I started to realize what feminism really was, as opposed to the late 1970’s straw version, right around fifth grade, at the age of 9 or 10. We had a new teacher that year, right out of college, who introduced herself to the class as Ms. W. and had a whole new way of running a classroom that I’d not experienced prior.
One of the things she did was to introduce us to the concept of persuasive debate. Once a month we kids would pick a topic, spend the course of the week forming our opinions on that topic, and then come Friday we’d head to the cafeteria. The kids who were “for” would stand on one side of the room and the kids who were “against” would stand on the other. It was then our duty to attempt to sway each other over to our side, with Ms. W acting as moderator. Quite the fun and heated exercise.
One week the topic selected was the Equal Rights Amendment, as it was coming up for a vote. I did my research, which given my isolated locale was limited to watching tv and speaking with my parents who were adamantly against it. Much to my surprise come that Friday I was one of only a small handful on the side of the room who took the stance against. The other kids were swayed rather quickly, so it was me and one other against the whole class. They absolutely shredded my arguments, but I felt like I couldn’t back off lest I betray my family and church.
It was afterward that really got to me, though, when a boy approached me and said with a wryly disappointed smile that he was surprised to see me on the “against” side of the ERA debate, knowing me the way he did. He didn’t extrapolate. It made me think, though, and think, and think some more. I’d already figured out at that point that my parents and their church were wrong about speaking in tongues, casting out demons, about not associating with the lesbian couple who lived down the way (if it was the right thing to do, why did it make that nice lady so sad?) and about a few other things as well, so it was not too much of a stretch for me to begin to question whether they were wrong about Jesus-prescribed gender roles.
Love the post and love the social justice direction this blog has expanded to in recent years.
Thief Of Time is the best Discworld novel…and if anyone disagrees Lu-tze will kick your arse.
Aside from my parents who taught me that men and women are equal, i also have to give credit to my female friends and even some of my female cousins. I´ve always gravitated towards strong, confident, intelligent, no non-sense women (or girls). They taught me that no no-sense would be tolerated xD and they also taught me that women don´t have to be stereotypes of the “i´m pretty so i don´t need to think” kind to be considered desirable or femenine. Thanks to that i managed to scape most of the cultural sexism which was pervasive (and still is although things have gotten soooo much better), although i also have to confess that i occasionally make mistakes..usually because i´m unfamiliar with prefered terminologies or because spanish is a gendered language and the default is often masculine. I´m also pretty sure that there must be some left-over shit buried somewhere in my brain that i some day hope to identify and get rid of. However, i like to think i continue to learn and improve both thanks to places like this and the wonderful women in my life. I don´t think i´ve had the chance to say it before since i´ve only been participating here for a short time, but before i started i lurked for quite some time and from day one i´ve been learning new stuff, stuff that i like because it consistently keeps making me less of an ignorant arsehole, so thank you all for this wonderful community.
It’s funny; growing up in a family that went deeper and deeper into hyper-conservative Christianity and into all its associated gender role crap during my formative years, I was actually a bit ashamed for a time that my mother, despite paying lip-service to all the misogynistic submission crap in that culture, was/is actually WAY too independent-minded to actually practice it in the barest sense, and that my father was too reserved and introverted to really fight her on it or wrest control like the churches preached he ought to.
It was an annoying hypocrisy at the time, because Mom expected us to follow all the inane subservience required of kids in that culture and refused to actually practice her own assigned role, yet now I’m quite glad of at least some of it. For one, it meant the message of required subservience to a husband was pretty weak going to my sisters.
My sisters were also never discouraged from higher education or occupational independence, never treated as dumber or less important than us boys; their boyfriends got more scrutiny and they had issues with feeling the need to hide their relationships in high school thanks to Mr. Predator, Bill Gothard, but otherwise, things were pretty similar at home for us siblings. My parents managed to be pretty damn good at treating sons and daughters equally despite also trying to buy into the particularly-patriarchal Christian culture.
JAL: Snark, Sarcasm & Bitterness:
I’m sure that some of the hypotheses my eight-year-old self formed about my parents’ behaviour were right, and some were wrong. But here’s the thing: the childishly wrong ones got corrected later, in the light of adult experience. If I, only marginally less of an old geezer than PZ, tell you that my parents did x because y, you can be sure that that’s an idea which I’ve given thought over the years since, and which has stood the test of time.
I remember first turning towards feminism after being prompted to read an edited book on feminism written by the Hunter college faculty called “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Choices”. As an egalitarian, feminism was necessary and positive step in my personal development. To this day, no matter how strong or good a feminist I consider myself, I am always come to the realization that I just don’t FULLY grasp some issues until they’re framed properly (I have learned so much from Amanda Marcotte over the last three years!). I no longer consider myself a feminist: I am a sexist in recovery. And that’s okay.
konradcurze #8
In other words, traditional gender roles caused problems.
See, if we throw the roles out the window, what the problem? The concern about expense of child care vs. extra income would be a strictly mathematical issue that would be settled in two minutes; no reason for a fight. The “failure” of the father would be nothing special, since the father would have no particular responsibility to cover all expenses.
The only reason a problem occurs in that situation is because of certain expectations for what each person should do; the father earns enough money to cover all bills, the mother cares for the children and household all day. Take those expectations out of the equation and there’s no reason for all that drama.
I know the dipshit was kicked, but I just think it’s important to point out how utterly inane the argument was. It basically boils down to just “If we assume that none of the problems were caused by gender roles, then gender roles didn’t cause any problems.”
Haven’t time to read all the comments but want to offer my opinion that Laci Green is a national treasure. Just wish she would speak a little more slowly. Old ears (and old ears need to hear her words) have difficulty understanding rapid fire speech. She enunciates well, but just too speedily.
PZ Myers @ 24;
I resemble that remark!
Like azhael says @ 27, there is no need to belittle harmless pass times in order to make a case against that idiot. I actually find 40K to be good fun, especially the 30K variant set during the Horus Heresy period of the setting. It is also interesting that the arsehat in question chose the username Konrad Curze – that is the name of one of the Primarch characters from the 30K setting who was written as a nihilistic, hateful (and, even more suggestively, deeply self-loathing) psychopath who gloried in pain and degradation. It is perhaps not surprising that a troll would chose it.
If you get the time, I would suggest that you might want to read the Horus Heresy novels by Black Library, starting at the beginning with Horus Rising and continuing through the rest of the initial trilogy with False Gods and Galaxy in Flames. I think you might be pleasantly surprised by what you find.
Back on topic; I was also someone who was, in most regards at least, a feminist before I even knew the term existed. I still have to guard myself to make sure that I don’t thoughtlessly employ toxic elements of the lexicon that I grew up with, but the notion that women are people too has always been so clearly the only ethical way to live to me that I am still somewhat surprised that there are people who don’t identify as feminists, once they grasp the meaning of the term.
I am still undecided whether MRAs and assorted other anti-feminists are deluded, motivated by a truly ugly misogyny rooted in sadistic cruelty toward anyone they think they can grind underfoot due to existing social inequalities, or merely extremely stupid.
`My hubby and I have always considered ourselves to be equal partners in our marriage.
When we were first married over 37 years ago, I heard that people were betting that we wouldn’t last because “She wears the pants in that relationship”. We have always discussed everything, so I told him what I had heard. He reassured me that he had no problem with me doing such things as handling the money or doing the speaking, since he was bad with money, forgetful and bad in social situations.
Over the years, we’ve each done whatever we were best at to support the marriage, each other and the kids. That meant that sometimes I was doing what was needed to support his career, but when I had the chance to return to a teaching career, he was supportive and helpful for me.
When my failing health coincided with his chance to go to another state to study for a PHD, we jumped at that, and I happily returned to supporting his endeavor.
My hubby has often remarked that he wishes that he could have been in on those bets about our relationship, since we would be very rich by now!
twas brillig @ #58
You might need to work on your critical analysis if you think feminism is a question of “letting” women do things. No one “lets” me live the life I’ve chosen. I live it.
I was born a feminist and it has informed everything I’ve done since.
I’m a feminist because I subscribe to the radical notion that women are people. I’m a feminist because the thought of my daughter being a second-class citizen enrages me. I’m a feminist because I am very happily married, my wife is very much my equal, and I can’t conceive of marriage as anything but a partnership on terms of complete equality. I’m a feminist because it’s synonymous with being a decent human being.
sambarge #74
You were fortunate in your time and place of birth.
I’ve acknowledged that I’m a feminist only a couple of years ago. Before that, I was one of those obnoxious “I support equality, but I wouldn’t call myself a feminist” people, because I was completely misunderstanding feminism.
Even before that…. I don’t know, it’s a long series of Hey, that’s not fair! realizations which probably began far earlier than I could consciously decide or explain why some or other gender-based nonsense was, well, nonsense.
I have to be a feminist. The wife would kick my ass if I wasn’t.
Seriously, like many others on this thread, I was a feminist from very early on because I realized that women are people.
Me too. I remember the start of the Women’s Movement. As soon as I learned what the word “feminist” meant–I was about eleven years old–I knew I was one and had been for as long as I could remember. I used my allowance money to buy the first-ever copy of Ms. Magazine.
I noticed the generic “he” in the first grade. It wasn’t just linguistic–why did people always seem to assume animals were “he” until they learned otherwise? I noticed casual contempt directed toward women characters in movies. Angry women were vilified. Men’s anger was respected. I couldn’t articulate these things, but I was aware of them.
Maybe the fact that both my parents worked helped. They certainly weren’t free of sexism, but neither were they strongly wedded to gender roles.
re sambarge:
uhhmm, I was referring to the ANTI-feminists-view; and those who had those problems, and their obsession with “letting” (… those girls do manly things). I still can’t understand their thinking, I can see it, but understanding is beyond me. ;-(
I went on my first ERA march with my mom when I was 8 years old. I am happy I got to grow up with feminism and being a feminist.
I too wondered why, even I, would always assume Dogs were Male; and Cats Female. Unknown dogs were always “He/Him”, and cats were always “She/Her”. My own pets (canine and feline) were of those respective genders, so was it just me; generalizing? Wolfman and Catwoman did not help at all.
Things are getting better. I remember the comments to Laci Green’s first Pharyngula plug were a total fucking shitshow. You’d almost think that was the Slymepit. But now, I have seen nary a mention of that crap and if there was, I’m sure the Kraken would be released. Good on ya Pharyngula!
Long time lurker coming out here to say.
One day, when I was 4, my mom and I were at a bus stop (I don’t really remember this myself, but I’ve heard the story many times). I looked at her and asked her point blank, “Mom, is Fred Flintstone a chauvinist?” I went on to explain that Fred thought Wilma couldn’t do something just because she was a girl, and I didn’t think that was right.
If kids as young as I was can make this connection, why is it so difficult for adults?
It is a great video where Laci Green makes a whole lot of sense. Every point hits home, every argument is both impassioned – as they should be – and entirely rational and supported by overwhelming evidence..
And yet… you just know that the first thing that scores of misogynistic idiots will say will be something along the lines of ‘did you see her hairy armpits? Gross!’
And yet the MRAs and dudebros and women shaming arsehats still wonder why so many people – including penis-havers like your’s truly – despise them so utterly.
Some days I feel like the video, other days I feel like this would be closer to the mark.
I thought it was this book mentioned above http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thief_of_Time
which I have read never read the other one
uncle frogy
Damn, she nailed pretty much every talking point I could think of.
I labelled myself as a feminist before I labelled as an atheist. Sometime around age 10 I stumbled on the word, did a quick search for what it meant, and realized I couldn’t refute the claims. So much of what I saw on TV and my home life lined up with the basic premises that I didn’t see how anyone could ever refuse to support feminism.
Having said that, I won’t dare claim I was a good feminist; I’ll freely admit to going through a nice-guy phase, for instance. Still, chance encounters over time gradually built up what I knew of feminism, to the point where I could enter a women’s studies class and feel perfectly at home from the start.
Amusingly enough, the event that radicalized my feminism was “Elevatorgate.” I’d just started to develop an attachment to the skeptic/atheist community, which reminded me strongly of the feminist community and should have been a natural ally via their willingness to challenge authority and critically think. Instead, to my horror, I discovered a fair number were openly hostile to feminism and blindly repeated the talking points of the religious right.
I realized it wasn’t enough to talk the talk. If I cared for this community, I had to dig into the two prongs of feminism I’d long been neglecting: education and activism.
Why did your mom take your sisters but not you?
rilian:
It’s a huge plot: She just hated men, like all feminists. Which is why everyone should join the men’s rights bellyache-athon.
I heard them.
He said that Amy couldn’t be the Policeman, cause duh: Policeman!
I said nothing, my nine year old voice didn’t dare be heard.
I heard him.
He said that Val couldn’t be in the band, ’cause duh, Chicks can’t rock.
I said nothing, my fourteen year old voice faltered.
I heard him.
He said that Kim couldn’t be manager ’cause duh, women can’t make decisions.
I said nothing, my twenty year old voice feared to speak.
I heard them all, and I said nothing.
I said nothing despite watching my mother do all the things, literally and in essence that they said she couldn’t do. I’m a feminist for that and for all the reasons Laci Green listed.
I’m a FEMINIST! out of shame for the times that strangled silence was my response to the ignorant and the bigots.
Never again.
It’s the damnedest thing. I can remember becoming an atheist, for real – it was when I was 14-15, reading a site run by an ex-Mormon who was writing good critiques of church beliefs and policies. But I can’t remember how or when I became a feminist.
It just sort of . . . grew, over time. I can think of particular things that pushed me forward – a “Gender and Social Change” class that I took for a diversity credit, a deeply insensitive comment I once made about people being upset that a web site was no longer a “safe space” that I now really regret and learned from in the responses, individual books, and so forth. But I didn’t really consider myself a feminist at that time with those.
My mother was one of the editors for a Canadian feminist magazine back in the 70s so I think it’s safe to say I got my attitude about gender equality from her and from my father (he married her, after all, and they’ve been together for 35 years – you don’t have a long and happy marriage like that while disagreeing on whether or not women and men are equal).
So I’ve identified as a feminist for as long as I can remember. Of course, I wasn’t always fully aware of the issues and the jargon. It’s one thing to hold the belief that men and women have equal moral value and that gender-based discrimination is wrong. It’s another thing to understand concepts like privilege, stereotype threat, and rape culture, which I’ve only become familiar with in the last three years or so when this “deep rift” in the atheist/skeptic community started to become really apparent. It’s kind of ironic that the spewings of anti-feminists has made me more interested and invested in feminism.
So, thanks Amazing Atheist! Thanks Richard Dawkins! Thanks Abbie Smith and denizens of the Slymepit! If it hadn’t been for your boorish behaviour, I probably would have remained ignorant about just how fucked up our culture is on issues of gender.
It started when a friend of mine was verbally slapped in the face right in front of me for something we were both doing. Then it was self-learning from there.
BTW… Laci Green is fucking awesome and I’m a little surprised she doesn’t blog here. She should be invited (IMHO)…
I was also one of those obnoxious “I’m for equality but not a feminist” and “any ideology is bad” and “things ending with ‘ism’ are extremes” people.
I noticed the unfairness my whole life and it made me rebellious, but never really seriously questioned it, the roots of it, the reasons for it until I got to my teens/young twenties. (I guess as a child I just accepted it as a fundamental truth that all of life is unfair, and that looking for fairness is like looking for a unicorn and the way girls are treated differently from boys was just one more example).
Gradually, through the internet, I started getting the explanations for the things I could never figure out (why the hell is everyone so obsessed with what rape victims wear? is one of the ones I couldn’t figure out for myself). I got better.
So, here we are, in 2014, and the first thing some atheist dudebro does, while paying some lip service to the idea that hitting people is, of course, wrong, it to tell us how it was all her fault after all. Because obviously she was about to commit a serious crime, abandoning the children! And then she did not submit and made him angry! Like poking a dog with a stick, you know…
It’s also like those dudebros (and a few dudesisters) apparently all had wonderful childhoods and neer ever any form of chrinic, let alone mental illness. Happy them.
+++
Whatever my parents did and are doing wrong, at least they set a mostly* good example in that area. They always both worked, most of the times my mum made more money than my dad everybody was happy because more money = more nice things.
But even as a kid I noticed that there was something off about them. People would remark about fact that my mum always drove the bigger car. Which made sense, since my dad worked in the state capital where parking spaces were scarce and dents were frequent.
*Still my dad thought that housework was somehow not for him. He did other, Important™ Things™. And when he moved a finger he always insisted that his work was to be treated with respect. How do you dare to use the toilet when he just cleaned it?!
+++
And if anything turned me more feministier than ever it was having daughters. To see how they are pushed into narrow gender roles makes me despair. To see that teachers still seem to be unable to divide a class up into teams in any other way than “boys vs. girls”, as if they were fundamentally differnt creatures who always have to FIGHT against each other.
To hear my daughter talk about how she needs to be “pretty”.
To have the little one fling the light blue t-shirt she happily picked herself in the morning into the corner and declare while almost crying that she needs to put on a pink dress because the other kids told her she was a boy with that shirt.
To have my daughter reconcile the cognitive dissonance of “mum doesn’t like pink very much and is the one with the toolbox” by declaring me to be the Exception!™
Yeah, thanks. I wanted to be a role model.
I won’t say I wasn’t one of those “but things are fine here” girls. Because, yeah, toxic sexist shit everywhere. Because the bulk of young women are sheltered for a while from the worst. Those who pay the price are othered. I seriously believed that if I followed the rules, I was safe from rape. If I was smart enough to pick the right guy, domestic violence would not happen to me. Therefore, those who have it bad have themselves to blame, right?
That’s how you get the “feminists are old crones who envy pretty young women”: Lots of shit only kicks in when you really enter that “adult” phase. When you’re having children. When you’re long enough in a job to notice that guys who have been there for shorter than you get the promotion. Before that, you are made to believe that you can have it all.
OT: conflating your and you’Re, they’re and their and there etc are typical native speaker mistakes ;)
Went to your post, NateHevens, and being a klutz failed to comment on it there (I thought FtB is on WordPress so the same log-in would work??? shows what I know), but wanted to say thank you for posting that.
@72:
An interesting question.
I’ve come up with the following hypothesis, with of course the caveat that the thought processes of all MRAs are not all identical. (I am talking specifically about MRAs here, not other varieties of anti-feminists such as PUAs or traditional religiously-motivated anti-feminists.)
The typical MRA is oppressed, not indeed on the basis of sex, but on the basis of class and sometimes race as well; often too he suffers from a neuropathology such as autism or Asperger’s. (And no, if you make classist jokes about MRAs living in their mother’s basement or ablist/lookist jokes about how they can’t get laid you are not helping, KNOCK IT OFF.)
I’m going to diverge from commonly accepted wisdom a bit here and say that many of the problems MRAs cite are, in fact, real, and not mere artifacts of “benevolent sexism”. (Please note this does not mean that I think they are doing anything substantive to combat them, only that the problems exist.) Prison rape? Definite problem. Men being more likely to suffer work-related deaths or injury? Definite problem. Men being more likely to be a victim of a violent (non-sexual) assault? Definite problem. Women being unfairly favored in custody decisions? Definite problem, to the extent that really is the case. More government money being spent on medical research targeting female-specific diseases vs. male ones? Definite problem, to the extent that really is the case.
But what the MRAs are missing is that all of the above are the result not of oppression by sex but by class and race. If you’re a rich, white man, you’ll never be sent to a maximum security prison (that’s assuming you even get a prison sentence at all for your crime), you’ll never have to take a job with health risks, you’ll never have to live, work, or set foot in the bad neighborhoods where violent crime is rampant, you can afford to hire a very good lawyer for your divorce (and in THAT case women don’t have an advantage), and you have access to the very best in health care. In that sense they’re deluded.
As regards the societal sexism which gives poor men advantages over poor women, yes they are determined to hold onto it come hell or high water, just as a starving dog will fight to the death to hold onto a bone even if there is very little meat on it. But the problem for the starving dog is not that there is another starving dog; the problem is their cruel masters, who will do whatever they can do take the focus off of themselves and portray the other starving dogs as the “enemy”. Thus are MRAs duped by their capitalist overlords. Of course, it’s easy to call those who fall victim to propaganda “stupid”, but I do not feel things are helped by ablist insults, so I won’t go there.
That seems like a huge assumption. What evidence do you have of this? On the recent survey that was discussed around FTB, MRAs identified overwhelming as white which contradicts the race claim for one.
Yes, but it’s also important to note that MRAs do absolutely nothing to address these problems. A Voice for Men does not campaign against prison rape of men. It campaigns against feminism.
Why am I a feminist? 50+ reasons:
2 grandmothers
1 mother
1 aunt
1 sister
1 female cousin
1 niece
1 grandniece
1 wife
2 daughters
1 mother-in-law
a variety of other extended family females
close female friends, neighbors and co-workers
none of whom I would relegate to anything less than equality (in all forms) although I’m sure that they still experience it in early 21st century America.
@99:
Ahh, blockquote fail.
@99:
I said it’s a hypothesis based on the fact that the issues MRA cite primarily affect lower-class men. I didn’t say I had data to make it a firm conclusion.
That survey was quite criticized on FTB as likely not representative of the true demographic (highly self-selected sample and spammed by bots). I said “The typical MRA is oppressed, not indeed on the basis of sex, but on the basis of class and sometimes race as well.”; “sometimes” means this would apply to the non-white MRAs which even you admit exist. The survey didn’t ask for socioeconomic status.
Did you even read the next sentence where I said “Please note this does not mean that I think they are doing anything substantive to combat them”?
I do not see why it should be an either or question at all.
It is just possible that these MRA’s are deluded, that they do like to inflict pain and suffering on others and may in fact be bullies and that they are at the same time stupid pretty much like other people who hold irrational prejudicial views, like racists.
They are suffering under a distorted perception of reality and their place in it and there is little being done by the society in general to change that. It seems that the established order likes it this way.
uncle frogy
No. Stop. Right. Fucking. Now.
@103:
This is ableist bullshit. Plenty of highly intelligent people were and are racists, and plenty of not that smart people are not. And absolutely no one is totally free of cognitive biases.
@104:
The world does not so neatly divide into virtuous oppressed and evil oppressors. People oppressed on one axis can sometimes manifest an almost complete lack of empathy for those oppressed on others. There are racist women, sexist black men, and I don’t see why it should come as such a surprise there are also sexist lower-class white men.
I at first thought this was a transcript of the video, not PZ’s own story. Not sure it really matters.
chigau @ 20:
You quoted about five words more than you needed, I think.
Ray @ 51:
I seem to recall Mr. Marjanović having a beef with Pratchett. I may be confusing him with someone else.
Um, no. You’ve said some sensible things too, but this particular suggestion is absolute bollocks.
Ok. So you’re happy to suggest that asshole MRA types are assholes because they’re non neurotypical, with no evidence other than a supposition on your part. That’s nice of you.
No, it was recognised that the survey was skewed but that overall the trends held. Read Stephanie Zvan’s piece on it.
Then why bother mentioning men’s issues in connection with MRAs? They are neither motivated by them nor do anything about them.
I guess I must admit that I have a starting premise and that is that all prejudice is irrational, that makes judgments regardless of any evidence to the contrary. Sexism is but one example of prejudicial thinking. They are all stupid ideas that they only have roots in human emotions and not in any objective criteria what so ever.
No where have I said that all people who are stupid hold these kinds of prejudices. The word stupid which I am using in I think is a colloquial way as I took your use of the expression and not inferring mental retardation or anything similar.
I will say it again I see no reason to take questions of prejudice as either or questions they have many “reasons/ causes” in each individual never just one simple one and they should be resisted whenever and wherever they are encountered.
uncle frogy
That’s German grammar.
In Russian, it’s the other way around; and in French, both dogs and cats are male until proven otherwise.
…Wow. Thanks for the link!!!
That… would… really surprise me. What sense does it make?
Heh – the only beef I have is that I haven’t read anywhere near as much by Pratchett as I’d like to! :-)
Yeah, I’m late here, but still. PZ tells a traumatic story from his childhood, and someone shows up to play Amateur Distance Family Detective fifty years after the fact. Then spends two comments completely failing to see how this might be inappropriate and wrong.
Man, the Skeptic Club really does completely suck, doesn’t it? Burn it down. Or just oust their enablers in the official office positions and then they can just be an internet G.R.O.S.S. treehouse.
Meh… I’ll pass.
Humanism feels less sexist.
Thing is, if you’re combating sexual inequality wherever you see it, if you’re being honest and sincere about this, an objective observer won’t realize you aren’t a feminist unless you tell them.