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flowersofnight

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Berserk wrote:
EDIT for PE:
I wrote:
I mean, you might argue/debate with your ~~**GIRLFRIENDS**~~ but how often do you wrestle each other?
Unless documentaries have lied to me, that sort of thing happens all the time! You know, all that tension boiling beneath the surface, sometimes... well, Roger Corman said it best.
"CAGED HEAT: It must explode!!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caged_Heat
 

PureElegance

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Berserk wrote:
EDIT for PE:
I wrote:
I mean, you might argue/debate with your ~~**GIRLFRIENDS**~~ but how often do you wrestle each other?
I don't know why that made me laugh so much XDDD

I don't know if you ever saw the show "The Amanda Show," there was a regular segment called "The Girls Room" (the girls bathroom).
"HIII and welcome to... THE GUUURLZ ROOM!" You just reminded me of that XD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEa1HQ-QJYQ
... the things I saw as a child.

I've only seen a few girl fights though, and they were usually pretty bad, like pulling hair and all. I don't see a lot of fights though so.

BY THE WAY, the other day my girl friendz and I were talking. They were saying that there were "big boob guys," "small boob guys," "butt guys," "big butt guys," "big girls guys," etc. I went, "What about PERSONALITY GUYS?"

Gosh ::meev::

(they're conducting a vote of no confidence for my uni's president, jeebus!)
 

flowersofnight

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PureElegance wrote:
"What about PERSONALITY GUYS?"
That can always be fixed later. Controlling precedent is Petruchio v. Katharine (W. Shakespeare, lead attorney)
 

sailorKa

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Berserk wrote:
Alright, alright! Excuse me for not knowing all the proper terminology! It's not like I run into this kind of stuff on a regular basis here in Michigan ::meev::
Dude, I was really polite and not-condescending, there's no need to be dismissive XD I was just correcting your grammar, not talking about ~proper terminology~
Also, why are you italizing MICHIGAN?
As in somehow implying that there's no trans* ppl in Michigan or fewer than in other places?
Cuz I assure you, trans* ppl. exist. eveywhere(even Michigan!). and so does discrimination.
I also assure you that you've crossed paths with plenty of trans* ppl while in Michigan, you just weren't aware of it. :)

As for the adjective thing, I meant that you should never say "He's a transgender." cuz that would be like saying "he's a beautiful." beautiful what, giraffe? person? house?
And again, people don't get ~turned~, so saying "he's transgendered" is not only grammatically incorrect when it comes to trans* ppl, its offensive.
Im just letting you know in case it comes up sometime in your life~ :cool:
Berserk wrote:
sailorKa wrote:
??? I'm sorry to tell you that you've been duped by the mainstream media's idea of a feminism. What is this even from?!
Mostly from the feminists who rant on the Internet and the ones who I know in day-to-day life (I know a girl who refuses to rent an apartment from male landlords).

A lot of women, from college professors to stay-at-home moms, don't understand men and seem to find them vaguely irritating or scary and are eager to complain about them.

But I know that it's a two-way street, and also that there are a lot of good women who do more-or-less understand men (or at least try!)

I also know that the feminist movement is important and relevant today for a lot of reasons, and I agree with it on the big stuff like what PE listed as being her main concerns. It's usually the little stuff, and the bad attitudes I frequently see, that I don't agree with and that I wish would change.
I know you mean well and all but you sorta reminded me of this Malcolm X quote.
Mostly when you said that thing about 'bad attitudes.'
I think there are legitimate concerns one can raise about the mainstream feminist movement, like the fact that they are frequently transphobic and racist(which is why a lot of women of color refer to themselves as womanists). But if your main beef with [some] feminists is "they're not thinking about MY feelings as a man or trying to understand ME enough!" then I think the problem aren't the 'angry feminists.'
This may sound unkind but what part of 'womens liberation'(which I already explain would mean liberation for everyone, regardless of gender) tells you 'women have to try to understand men'???
Thats like a white person crossing their arms at NAACP and saying "I agree with you guys and you should have your rights and everything but why aren't you trying to understand ME/MY feelings? Some of you are really mean!"
Like, they would be puzzled and say "uh, this is not about you thou???"

Doesn't know if y'all are getting his point,
--k
 

Berserk

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@PE: I totally remember The Amanda Show XD

That, "Hi... I'm Debbie... I like eggs" catchphrase was lurking in the depths of my memory for years and watching this YouTube clip just brought it back out. What a weird feeling ::meev::

@SailorKa: I italicized Michigan because we really don't have any metropolitan areas except Detroit, and Detroit is a godforsaken wasteland outside of the Downtown business district. So, since most of the state is pretty rural and suburban, the transgender community doesn't have much visibility here. Actually, there is no transgender community here XD I have run into a handful of transgender women and two transgender men while living here (well, I'm actually not even positive that they identified as men), but those rare occurrences never educated me about the transgender community's lingo.

Thanks for the head's up on the "transgender"/"transgendered" issue, though.
SailorKa wrote:
But if your main beef with [some] feminists is "they're not thinking about MY feelings as a man or trying to understand ME enough!" then I think the problem aren't the 'angry feminists.' This may sound unkind but what part of 'womens liberation'(which I already explain would mean liberation for everyone, regardless of gender) tells you 'women have to try to understand men'???
I think the stance that no one has to understand men or their feelings just because they have historically been the privileged gender is equally sexist. If we're going to be a truly egalitarian culture, we need to understand both genders and consider everyone's feelings. Men today shouldn't be treated worse than women as some sort of retribution for a past that they had no control over.

Sometimes I feel like feminists think men are born with a silver spoon in their mouth and have everything handed to them for free. Men (in the United States) are no longer a privileged group and they are also facing their own problems as a gender. Just look at how many more boys than girls are expelled from school, drop out before graduating, fail to get admitted to college, end up in prison, etc. Men have their own struggles that we should be attentive to.

And yes, their problems matter too.
SailorKa wrote:
Thats like a white person crossing their arms at NAACP and saying "I agree with you guys and you should have your rights and everything but why aren't you trying to understand ME/MY feelings? Some of you are really mean!"
That's not true at all. First of all, women were never enslaved and dehumanized the way black Americans were. They were treated as second-class in terms of their civil rights, but they were still first-class in their civil liberties*. They were given much more freedom, autonomy, protection, and care than the slaves ever were. Second, whites as a group really aren't facing any problems that I know of. Men as a group are facing a laundry list of very serious problems. You're comparing apples to oranges.

Third, just because women were dealt a bad hand by society doesn't mean men weren't dealt a bad hand too! I'm not sure why everyone thinks being able to place your ballot was the most important thing in the world considering that men at the time were drafted into military service and forced to die on the battlefield by the hundreds of thousands. We still have "selective service" for men in 2013. But feminists don't think men should be allowed to speak up about that kind of discrimination? Even though they're supposedly for "equal" rights?

Do you consider conscription to be a "liberty" and a "privilege", or is it a form of discrimination and a violation of human rights?

Gender issues are not as simple or black & white as you and many feminists would like to think.

*Political scientists define "civil liberties" as being legal protections. Women still had freedom of religion, speech, etc., could not be sold as property, could not be beaten or murdered, etc.--all protections that were not granted to black Americans. "Civil rights" are rights such as suffrage or operating a motor vehicle that are granted by the government with certain limitations.
 

PureElegance

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flowers wrote:
That can always be fixed later. Controlling precedent is Petruchio v. Katharine (W. Shakespeare, lead attorney)
I don't know. There's always been discrimination against personality guys. One case I'd cite is Jia Baoyu v. Jia Zheng (1791).

I really need to read The Taming of the Shrew now XD I read a little analysis of Petruchio and I was totally intrigued, but I can't tell if he's a good guy or a bad guy. There was one who totally reviled him as a character, then Sparknotes seems to be really sympathetic to him and saying how he's a good person, how he loves Katharine, or something. I'm confused.

Berserk wrote:
*Political scientists define "civil liberties" as being legal protections. Women still had freedom of religion, speech, etc., could not be sold as property, could not be beaten or murdered, etc.--all protections that were not granted to black Americans.
Wait, WAIT! HOLD IT RIGHT THERE!
I would argue that the same would be true for women but not in that direct African American slavery form. Women had no political say, were not allowed to do anything without their husband's permission, get a divorce, have their own property, women did not have the freedom to go into every establishment they wished to, could not enter into most careers, get into contracts, etc, they didn't have a legal status and were treated like property, they could be raped by their husbands, they COULD be beaten because this was actually a normal thing to do to your wife until recently. I don't think women had a real "freedom of speech" until this century because of how society was. Then you have to think about who was actually protected against murder or not. Maybe a white middle class lady would be murdered and her murderer punished, but if it was a low class woman it wouldn't have been as big of a deal. And murders of prostitutes were even less recognized. Not doing anything about it--like letting women get beaten by husbands-- is the same as condoning it. It's only been recently, in the 1980s, that domestic violence was seen as an actual issue and not something private, normal, as the husband's right, etc. Beating women isn't seen as horrible, as something that stood out in history, because it was entirely normal for society for it to occur until recently. You can even look up the laws for this because it looks like you don't know much about women's history and abuses.

Anyway, just because we all know of one type of slavery doesn't mean there are other types of it or we shouldn't examine other types seriously and dismiss it, like a sexist society keeping women beneath women without letting them have any power of their own. I think there are some similarities, especially when you consider sexual slavery which has been going on for hundreds of years. Maybe women weren't the actual slaves to husbands, they were not called that at all and weren't seen as such, but I think it could be said they were slaves to a more subtle, sexist society that dictated how they were supposed to act and what you could and couldn't do, making them always beneath the men in their lives. For example, it's only been in the last century that women could have more opportunities for employment (although many are still discriminatory against women entering), not get discriminated against, vote, not be legally beaten, could not be raped by their husbands, get divorces, etc.

If we're talking about the entire world, which I haven't even mentioned, the situation is even worse because in many places women are still regarded as property and as having no say of their own. Women are still kept illiterate and uneducated on purpose, beaten with an implicit OK from society, still don't have equal opportunities for employment, are still raped at an alarmingly rate, still married off as young girls, punished for not wanting to get married, etc. Women are still sexually enslaved through sex trafficking and by other means. That's been going on for forever, with women being sold as sexual slaves in the marketplace all over the world. Women in different parts of the world can't even give their consent to have sex, it doesn't matter what they say. Women are also still held to outdated notions of sexuality. For example, you don't want men to rape you or touch you? It was your fault, you should cover your entire body up and be "modest". You need to be proper for your future husband, why don't we stitch up your vagina when you're still a girl to maintain your chastity, that'll make you suitable for him. Your husband is beating you? Put up with it...or it's your problem, not the police's. I haven't even gotten to reproductive rights. I can go on about everything still happening in the US and internationally. I would say all of this is dehumanizing, incredibly awful, and reasons for why women are still not equal.

Maybe it's not legal per se to beat up a woman (only recently did this become illegal), but it doesn't mean that it's not happening every day, every hour, with the implicit thumbs up from society because not much is being done. There's a difference between laws and reality. Just because women were said to have free speech, that doesn't mean they actually had it because they were beneath men and had strict roles and restrictions on their lives. Just because we're all said to be equal doesn't mean we actually are. Slavery PER SE is illegal, but that doesn't mean it's still happening in the US, the world, to different types of people, including women and blacks, in different ways.
 

Berserk

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If we're going to continue this discussion, we should probably start a thread for it XD

PE wrote:
Women had no political say, were not allowed to do anything without their husband's permission, get a divorce, have their own property, women did not have the freedom to go into every establishment they wished to, could not enter into most careers, get into contracts, etc, they didn't have a legal status and were treated like property, they could be raped by their husbands, they COULD be beaten because this was actually a normal thing to do to your wife until recently.
But that's not entirely true. Here are some counterexamples:
Wikipedia wrote:
Abigail Adams was an advocate of married women's property rights and more opportunities for women, particularly in the field of education. Women, she believed, should not submit to laws not made in their interest, nor should they be content with the simple role of being companions to their husbands. They should educate themselves and thus be recognized for their intellectual capabilities, so they could guide and influence the lives of their children and husbands. She is known for her March, 1776 letter to John and the Continental Congress, requesting that they, "...remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation."
Wikipedia wrote:
In the era before the American Civil War, Susan B. Anthony took a prominent role in the New York anti-slavery and temperance movements. In 1837, at age 17, Susan collected petitions opposing slavery as part of an organized response to the gag rule prohibiting anti-slavery petitions in the House of Representatives.[8] In 1849, at age 29, she became secretary for the Daughters of Temperance, which gave her a forum to speak out against alcohol abuse, and served as the beginning of Anthony's movement towards the public limelight.
Wikipedia wrote:
Carrie Amelia Moore Nation (November 25, 1846 – June 9, 1911) was a radical member of the temperance movement, which opposed alcohol in pre-Prohibition America. She is particularly noteworthy for promoting her viewpoint through vandalism. [. . .] In 1865 she met a young physician who had fought for the Union: Dr. Charles Gloyd, by all accounts a severe alcoholic[citation needed]. They were married on November 21, 1867, and separated shortly before the birth of their daughter, Charlien, on September 27, 1868.
Not only did Carrie Nation divorce her husband for being an alcoholic, but my mom's genealogical research has uncovered that a few of my female relatives from the time period successfully divorced their husbands because of physical abuse too.

I'm not saying they their liberties and rights weren't infringed upon at the time, but they still had more rights than many people realize, including to free speech.
PE wrote:
Maybe a white middle class lady would be murdered and her murderer punished, but if it was a low class woman it wouldn't have been as big of a deal.
True, but the same could be said for men XD
PE wrote:
You can even look up the laws for this because it looks like you don't know much about women's history and abuses.
Well actually, I do know. Women were allowed to divorce their husbands for physical abuse, among other things, and like I said above my own relatives did just that. It's true that the law did not consider any sexual coercion on the parts of husbands to be "rape", but other forms of physical abuse were still illegal.
PE wrote:
Maybe it's not legal per se to beat up a woman (only recently did this become illegal)
I would like to see a source for that, because I don't believe it was ever legal to beat up a woman. And even in the most sexist of times, I don't think men ever stood for that.

I agree with everything you've said about women around the world, but I think our discussion has been primarily focused on the U.S. Women's rights elsewhere is another subject for discussion.
 

PureElegance

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http://www.cumbeecenter.org/domestic_vi ... istory.php
http://suite101.com/article/a-history-o ... on-a401353
http://global.britannica.com/EBchecked/ ... c-violence
http://www.ncadv.org/files/DomesticViol ... t(National).pdf
http://www.cobar.org/index.cfm/ID/0/sub ... -Violence/
http://family.findlaw.com/domestic-viol ... round.html
http://www.saintmarthas.org/womens_movement.html
http://www.mincava.umn.edu/documents/ha ... /legal.pdf <-- this one's good

I think this "Domestic Violence and the Criminal Justice System: An Overview" article is really good, but it's long.
And UNICEF's excellent report on "Domestic Violence Against Women and Girls"

So there you go.

UNICEF wrote:
This Digest focuses specifically on domestic violence – the most prevalent yet relatively hidden and ignored form of violence against women and girls.
yup.

Man, that UNICEF one was great to read! I love how detailed it is and how much it covers! It was such a pleasure to go through it. I want to print it out next time I have the chance, just like I did with the history of women's discrimination one I have. ^^

I like this quote too:

Not until 1871 did a court in this country rescind the legal right of men to beat their wives.

"The privilege, ancient though it be, to beat [one's wife] with a stick, to pull her hair, choke her, spit in her face or kick her about the floor, or to inflict upon her like indignities, is not now acknowledged by our law.... n person, the wife is entitled to the same protection of the law that the husband can invoke for himself.... All stand upon the same footing before the law "as citizens of Alabama, possessing equal civil and political rights and public privileges." Fulgham v. State, 46 Ala. 146-47 (1871) (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1982)

But it took another 100 years until the laws actually worked to help women.

If you could only read the US Commission on Civil Rights' report "Under the Rule of Thumb: Battered Women and the Administration of Justice" because that was really good!
http://www.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/u ... 2w8410.pdf
Here it is! :D It's really exciting since it was during this time in the early 1980s that domestic violence was truly taken seriously and they started studying it.

Beating as cruel and inhumane treatment, becomes grounds for divorce in New York, but the plaintiff must establish that a sufficient number of beatings have taken place. (1966)
Yeah, I remember reading about that in class. Wow, so I can get a divorce, but he has to beat me a sufficient number of times! XD YAHOO! I remember when sexual harassment laws were like that too in the 1970s, you had to be sexually harassed a few times before you had a case. Don't even get me started on how much evidence you need.

"I don't think men ever stood for that" -- good one XD I still would say that their free speech was curtailed by the patriarchal society though since women were/are considered less. Those are three women out of the United States, how about the rest of them? How about if one of them wasn't in the great position of being the president's wife? Examples of women like these are rare, especially considering the history of the world. That's why it's always a big deal when they do speak out or rise to a position of prominence. That's why we celebrate them. I hate using the word "patriarchy" though, I feel like it's a corny word.

Like I said, you need to read up on domestic violence in general because you don't know the history or then you'd know about all the laws like I do (... since I've been tested on them 100 times). It's not even a question that violence against women has been sanctioned until recently. It's not as if things are great now either.
Here's a good, although very simple/empty, outline though that's handy!
 

Berserk

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I think the credibility of that source is suspect considering that the idea of the "rule of thumb" referring to a law that designated how wide a switch could be to lawfully beat one's wife is a myth. But I suppose that can be forgiven, since that misconception actually started around 200 years ago as evidenced by this cartoon which is clearly lambasting the notion.

Wikipedia cites criminal law writings from the 17th Century that expressly state the "moderate correction" clause never included beating.
Wikipedia wrote:
British common law before the reign of Charles II permitted a man to give his wife "moderate correction", but no "rule of thumb" (whether called by this name or not) has ever been the law in England.[8][9] Such "moderate correction" specifically excluded beatings, allowing the husband only to confine a wife to the household.[10]

[...]

The Body of Liberties adopted in 1641 by the Massachusetts Bay colonists states, “Every married woman shall be free from bodily correction or stripes by her husband, unless it be in his own defense from her assault.”[12] In the United States, legal decisions in Mississippi (1824) and North Carolina (1868 and 1874) make reference to—and reject—an unnamed "old doctrine" or "ancient law" by which a man was allowed to beat his wife with a stick no wider than his thumb.[7] For example, the 1874 case State v. Oliver (North Carolina Reports, Vol. 70, Sec. 60, p. 44) states: "We assume that the old doctrine that a husband had the right to whip his wife, provided that he used a switch no larger than his thumb, is not the law in North Carolina."
So in reality, it wasn't the case that "until 1871 the law allowed men to beat their wives"--there never was such a law to begin with, even though people at the time may have commonly thought there was. And clearly there were laws that expressly prohibited beating women at least as early as the 1640's.

To put that in perspective, it was illegal for men to beat their wives more than 130 years before the Revolutionary War. Now, I'm sure that didn't stop many men from beating their wives anyway. But had they been taken to court, they would have been found guilty of breaking the law, even in an age before the invention of bifocals.

This notion that our culture condoned the brutalization of women until very recently is false. I wonder if it's been influenced by our exposure to certain Muslim societies (like that of Afghanistan) in which that actually is the case. People often look at those societies and think they're "backwards" and therefore conclude that all societies "back in the day" must have been exactly the same--when in reality, the Taliban's ideas are far more degenerate and intellectually deficient than the Western world's were even in the 17th century.

And the idea that beatings didn't become grounds for divorce until 1966 is absolute BULLSHIT. Like I quoted above, Carrie Nation divorced her husband in 1868 and I have several relatives who divorced their abusive husbands in the 1800's too. That PDF is just completely wrong about that.

Maybe in 1966 a law was passed in New York that included that language, but I'm sure women in New York were allowed to divorce their abusive husbands long, long before then.
PE wrote:
"I don't think men ever stood for that" -- good one XD
Well, the evidence is on my side. American laws dating back to the 17th century prohibited spousal abuse. Your statement that "it's not even a question that violence against women has been sanctioned until recently" is a total lie. If that's what Women's Studies courses are teaching students, they should have their accreditation revoked.
 

flowersofnight

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Berserk wrote:
If that's what Women's Studies courses are teaching students, they should have their accreditation revoked.
Who do you think runs the accreditation boards? XD

I've been kind of leaving this open since there was a discussion going (as always seems to happen on page 100 XD) but I might as well cycle up a new random thread and leave the old one here so people can read the last few pages.
 
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