Men's Rights

[TimG]

First of all, social conditioning doesn't just affect the choices an individual may make, but also how society may treat an individual based upon the choices they make.

Humans are obsessed with status. No matter what you do some occupations will have higher social status than others. This will affect the choices you make and affect the perception of people who make those choices. You can work to change the social status associated with a particular occupation but there is only so much that can be done. The dot-com boom that turned many geeky high school students into millionaires did more to enhance the status of STEM fields than any government driven social engineering effort could accomplish.

From a psychological heath standpoint, gendered social conditioning can reduce a societies psychological health either by putting societal pressure on a person to perform actions they would not otherwise perform or by reducing the social safety net for persons in distress.

Women are physically smaller and weaker than men. That will ensure that some jobs will be dominated by men and will be perceived as male occupations. This is a biological fact. What we should care about is that the small number of women who are able to compete physically with men in these jobs have a fair chance and are not denied the opportunity to do the jobs. Equality of genders across all occupations is an inefficient deployment of resources.

If you have societal social conditioning where society treats computer programming as a 'male profession' and discourages females from being computer programmers because it does not fit their gender role, then you will discourage a large portion of those potential female computer programmers from considering computer programming as a career option

In your example twice as many men are capable as women so you are saying computer programming is primarily a male profession. Yet you seem to think that concocting a feel good fantasy that dismisses reality would lead to greater efficiency. I don't think so because you ignore comparative advantage. What other jobs are do those women end up doing that would have to be filled by men if they became computer programmers? Men that might do the job less efficiently than the women directed into computer programming which would cancel any benefit of getting the women in into programming. Efficiency is measured by looking at the aggregate social output. Not on a per occupation basis.

You can counter social conditioning in 'organic' ways such as awareness campaigns.

And when they fail we are back to where we start: accept reality and stop worrying about impossible-to-achieve gender parity and focus on ensuring people can make the choices that they want. Edited April 4, 2015 by TimG

[-1=e^ipi]

TimG, I think you are completely misunderstanding my position. I'm not pretending biological factors don't affect gender outcomes, nor am I suggesting that gender equality of outcome in everything is optimal.

[Smallc]

Equality of opportunity is optimal. Equality of outcome is manufactured.

[TimG]

TimG, I think you are completely misunderstanding my position. I'm not pretending biological factors don't affect gender outcomes, nor am I suggesting that gender equality of outcome in everything is optimal.

The problem is we have, in the last 50 years, moved from a society were many occupations were simply prohibited for people of the wrong gender to one where people are more or less free to choose whatever occupation they want. The problem for some people is why single gender dominated professions still exist. While biological factors explain differences in few cases the main reason for the difference today appears to come from perceptions of jobs that depend on the gender. The question is whether anything needs to be done about these different perceptions. I say no because it is impossible to overcome the natural tendency to attach status to different occupations and attempting to raise the status of one occupation will simply lower the status of another. Edited April 4, 2015 by TimG

[eyeball]

Equality of opportunity is optimal. Equality of outcome is manufactured.

You've got to be kidding...is this something you read off the bumper of a Rolls Royce or Lear jet or something?

[Smallc]

You've got to be kidding...is this something you read off the bumper of a Rolls Royce or Lear jet or something?

It's something I thought of when I sent my quarterly instalment to the CRA. Everyone should have the same opportunities. They should be treated equally. Not everyone will make it to the same place, and that's just reality.

[eyeball]

Why should everyone have the same opportunities? Why can't people simply lobby the economy's mangers to tilt things their way?

[-1=e^ipi]

I say no because it is impossible to overcome the natural tendency to attach status to different occupations and attempting to raise the status of one occupation will simply lower the status of another.

One can attach status to an occupation without attaching genders to occupations.

[TimG]

One can attach status to an occupation without attaching genders to occupations.

"attaching status" means "branding" or "marketing" and every add exec knows that there are no guarantees. often the effects of an advertising campaign create short lived interest but don't result in a sustained culture shift. if you press really hard on one issue you might be able to sustain a culture shift but that will be at the cost of other issues that were neglected while one was focused on the primary target.

for example, the campaign to push to make schools better environments for girls has harmed boys and we are now seeing that show up in the statistics. at some point you have to ask yourself whether we really should care that some occupations are dominated by one gender as long as the people of he opposite face no barriers to participating if they do choose that occupation.

[WIP]

The point you are missing is the failure of the support payer to live up to the obligations easy to track (was the money paid or not). It is much tougher to determine when a hostile ex-spouse is resorting to dirty tricks to poison the relationship with a non-custodial parent. That puts the non-custodial parent at a significant disadvantage and since we are mostly talking about men, it is a men's issue.

Yes, I have heard about the 'dirty tricks' you mention - the kids are sick today, come back next weekend etc., and once again, it's another one of those splitting-the-baby dilemmas that I don't think can possibly satisfy both sides in a bitter divorce. Should the Court rule that the ex-wife has to allow the disneyland dad come up to her home after violence and abuse became serious enough to require a court restraining order against him on prior judgments? It can go in that direction also.

It also has to be noted that the courts don't always award primary custody to the mother, even in cases where the children are young, especially if the mother has had a history of alcohol or substance abuse.....like my late sister-in-law. In her case, both her and her ex were heavy drinkers, but she had a DUI in her record, so he eventually got primary custody along with his new common-law spouse, and when they decided to pack up and move half-way across the country to New Brunswick....the Court ruled that custody should remain with him and she had to make support payments for children she could only afford to see once or twice a year. Point being, the horror stories....which likely played a role in her early untimely death before age 40, don't always happen to men in a divorce! Often, the ex-wife receives a worse deal in such cases, especially because she is less likely to be able to afford the kind of legal representation her ex-husband has, or afford a laughable judgment that she still has weekend privileges after she is separated by almost 1000 miles from her children!

How about common sense? If women splits from a step-dad and goes back to the bio-dad the step-dad should not be expected to pay support. In general, people entering into 2nd marriages should be entitled to explicitly define the relationship expectations in a contract and these terms should not be changed later just because kids are involved.

Not being a math guy, this is where I start getting dizzy, and just advise make sure you are mature enough before you take on a commitment like marriage, and if a split is inevitable, try to make it as amicable as possible. Where kids are involved, it's impossible to have a written contract of any kind that could foresee all possible future complications.

You illustrate the problem. With any crime there is a spectrum and the degree of guilt often depends on knowing the mind of the perpetrator. i.e. some gets into a bar fight and breaks someone's arm has a different level of culpability than someone who breaks someone's arm while mugging them. If you push the onus too far in one direction you end up convicting people who never deserved the punishment they are given.

Let's recall the context here! I was responding to the placing of onus for sexual consent on the man, because...obviously, it's the male who still has to play the active role in any sexual relationship. And if she's drunk, I don't care if he's drunk too, it should be in the back of his mind while he was downing shots, that if she was drunk and horny, he didn't have legal consent for sex, and that could come back and bite him in the ass at some later date.

So, I'm looking back to the time before the shift in responsibility was made, and guys would openly discuss strategies of how to get her drunk, not what to do afterwards. It was all a game, and it wasn't cool for anyone like me, who didn't feel comfortable with this kind of deceit or the pattern we call "practicing the 4 F's" to say anything against it to others. Any guy with a conscience in the old days, who thought relationships with women might be better if we tried to learn about and understand more about the female perspective, were just not seen as cool, and had to keep our mouths shut about it....especially about ratting out friends! I know, I'm told elsewhere that even "nice guys" end up getting divorced or getting entrapped, but I still go with the presumption that if you are open and honest about your intentions and goals, things will go better for you.

[Argus]

Let's recall the context here! I was responding to the placing of onus for sexual consent on the man, because...obviously, it's the male who still has to play the active role in any sexual relationship. And if she's drunk, I don't care if he's drunk too, it should be in the back of his mind while he was downing shots, that if she was drunk and horny, he didn't have legal consent for sex, and that could come back and bite him in the ass at some later date.

That's paternalistic nonsense. You completely excuse the female from downing those shots without a care in the world as to what that's going to do to her decision making abilities while insisting that a guy never get drunk, because once he does his decision making abilities will be greatly diminished.

How is a woman who willingly downs shot after shot any less responsible for getting drunk than a man? And if we determine that a drunk woman's decision to engage in sex is lacking any meaningful consent because she's drunk, how can we not make some allowances for a man's poor decision making when he is drunk? This is especially bizarre given we DO take such things into consideration in all other crimes.

[-1=e^ipi]

often the effects of an advertising campaign create short lived interest but don't result in a sustained culture shift. if you press really hard on one issue you might be able to sustain a culture shift but that will be at the cost of other issues that were neglected while one was focused on the primary target.

So are you saying that no awareness campaigns on issues such as acceptance of homosexuals has had any longterm effect on society?

The primary purpose of an awareness campaign would be to provide people with more information. If more people are aware that male suicides outnumber female suicides by a ratio of 4 to 1 for example, then people in society are more likely to take actions to prevent male suicides.

for example, the campaign to push to make schools better environments for girls has harmed boys

That's not so much an awareness campaign as it is the complete infiltration of social justice warriors into our education system.

and we are now seeing that show up in the statistics.

So, create an awareness campaign so that more people realize that boys are falling behind girls in terms of education.

at some point you have to ask yourself whether we really should care that some occupations are dominated by one gender as long as the people of he opposite face no barriers to participating if they do choose that occupation.

I really think that you misunderstand what social conditioning is. Having an occupation dominated by one gender is not social conditioning. Having a person constantly discouraged from entering a profession by society from a young age because that profession does not agree with the gender role that society implies they should have is.

[WIP]

I think you read too much into my phrase 'intrinsic differences'. I did not mean it to imply that women were not capable of those careers. I meant only to imply that when women are freely given the choice of any career they want they choose STEM careers at a rate less than men. Part of the reason are social factors such as the lower social status given to people in STEM careers in NA. However, as long as a women who decides that she wants a STEM career faces no barriers preventing her from acquiring the qualifications, finding work and succeeding then there is no problem that needs fixing.

I just want to say that I get nauseated by all of the focus on "STEM" careers, and I don't give a rat's ass whether it's coming from the modern day feminist perspective of achievement-oriented women trying to climb their way higher on our already overly hierarchical class system, or the men who are trying to protect their positions from a raft of female applicants for their jobs. These are already jobs that will always make up a minority of the total workforce, so what about the rest of us? What about those of us in manufacturing/including skilled trades, where what once was a blue collar path to a respectable middle class income comparable to many entering white collar professions, is now subject to closing and vanishing industries, with jobs available subject to newer, non-unionized shops that are even allowed to bypass the provincial standards for accreditation in the apprenticeships programs.

I'm just fortunate enough to be at an age where it was still possible to make a good living with your hands without working 12 or 16 hour days for barely above minimum wage! That's the new reality for the vast majority of us non-STEM people, and those born without the privileges of accumulated wealth to set us on a track of private school education and Ivy League college educations afterwards...and on to the positions of privilege in the business world that come with attending the right university, being a member of the right fraternity, and having established family connections.

For most of us, here in Canada, the U.S., Europe, and especially the nations of the world locked in to the new neocolonialism of selling off resources and setting up slave-level sweatshops to pay growing debts to the IMF or World Bank, the vast majority of people in the world....male and female, are getting poorer, while a smaller and smaller minority of privileged elites and their army of functionaries - those with the STEM educations, live better and better lives! This is where social issues like women's rights and men's grievances either intersect with the broader social conditions of increasingly aggressive and rapacious capitalism, or they are just the parlor issues of the privileged classes!

[WIP]

You're saying Christina Hoff-Sommers invented these ideas, which are held by and supported by only her and her adherents?

What ideas, by the way? Do you believe boys and girls learn in exactly the same way, thrive in exactly the same environments, and that their behaviour patterns are exactly the same?

No, and I was going to get to your point, but I can add it in here. The problem for boys in the standard classroom education system is also a problem for girls....it's just that the majority of females, being less aggressive than males by nature, are more compliant than boys, and more able and willing to put up with crap such as sitting in a chair for six hours and listening to a teacher drone on and on. My beef with Hoff-Sommers is that she presents an issue...which as you mentioned, had already been noted by other sociologists and related observers, in a frame of a female-friendly/anti-male society favouring girls over boys in the education system.

Let's be real about this: our modern public education classroom system was set up, not for the primary purpose of teaching the three R's, but getting children of lower classes used to the drudgery they would face after they turned 14 or 16, and took the jobs assigned to them by class in the mines, the mills and the factories of England, then the rest of Europe and America. The schoolmasters in the old system didn't make allowance for boys being more aggressive than girls and less inclined to pay attention...they just beat them into submission for any misbehaviours! The thinking was that public education was a worthwhile investment to train them while they were young, so they would be less inclined to be disruptive afterwards when they spent the next 20 or 30 years working until death.

And just because the girls were more compliant in class, and more inclined to follow lessons, no doubt led to factory and mill operators favouring young women as sewers and other extremely monotonous line work that required sitting in place and doing repetitive movements for 12 hours....which they are still doing today....except it's been shipped overseas for lower wage workers. Presenting this standard as something that was created to benefit women over men is a joke! The actual facts are that much of the 'men's work has been made obsolete by automation and later by outsourcing most of the primary production. A quick check of wealth and earnings reveals that all of these young women graduating from medical, engineering and other advanced programs (which leads some young men to massacre them in their classrooms!) does not help them very much as they negotiate their way up the career ladder, and face the same old boys network of favoured sons standing in their way.

What Hoff-Sommers and other not-so-subtle libertarian capitalists are trying to create, is a new narrative where classrooms are resegregated by gender, and the divisions between men and women are intensified....just as they were in the old days, and still are in the madrassahs of much of the world today. By their libertarian reckoning, women are already over-privileged, and therefore the government programs and benefits that they collect from in greater number, need to be abolished to level the playing field between men and women...and this is where libertarian strategizing all boils down to the money, and how to get more of it, after the ideological setups are dispensed with.

[Big Guy]

The average life expectancy for Canadians is increasing every year but female Canadians live 4 years longer than male Canadians - that is fact. Yet they both pay the same into the CPP with females receiving monies for 4 more years than men. Should they not be paying more into the plan?

[Guest]

No. I'm going to spend all my wife's pension on beer anyway, and there's nothing she can do about it.

[WIP]

That's paternalistic nonsense. You completely excuse the female from downing those shots without a care in the world as to what that's going to do to her decision making abilities while insisting that a guy never get drunk, because once he does his decision making abilities will be greatly diminished.

How is a woman who willingly downs shot after shot any less responsible for getting drunk than a man? And if we determine that a drunk woman's decision to engage in sex is lacking any meaningful consent because she's drunk, how can we not make some allowances for a man's poor decision making when he is drunk? This is especially bizarre given we DO take such things into consideration in all other crimes.

Put yourself in the place of that guy who's with this girl who's freely downing shots. Should he just sit back and keep pouring her more drinks, or go along with her desire to get drunk? And after a half hour or so, if she says:"let's f***" or f*** me, should he go along with it? If she said "let me drive home," would he assume she's capable of doing that also? If he's with her for the first time, should he even be allowing himself to get drunk also, to begin with?

If there's a court case, a lot's going to depend on whether or not they had a relationship going....whether they've already had sex in the past; if this was a first time, I would say NO, if she had AIDS or some STD, he wouldn't have a qualms about saying no, so why can't he have the presence of mind to refuse in a situation where she's intoxicated?

Edited April 5, 2015 by WIP

[Guest]

Put yourself in the place of that guy who's with this girl who's freely downing shots. Should he just sit back and keep pouring her more drinks, or go along with her desire to get drunk? And after a half hour or so, if she says:"let's f***" or f*** me, should he go along with it? If she said "let me drive home," would he assume she's capable of doing that also? If he's with her for the first time, should he even be allowing himself to get drunk also, to begin with?

If there's a court case, a lot's going to depend on whether or not they had a relationship going....whether they've already had sex in the past; if this was a first time, I would say NO, if she had AIDS or some STD, he wouldn't have a qualms about saying no, so why can't he have the presence of mind to refuse in a situation where she's intoxicated?

If she drives home the law would make her take responsibility for her decision.

The idea that sex while drunk can be the result of a bad decision ought to apply to both sexes evenly.

Edited April 5, 2015 by bcsapper

[WIP]

If she drives home the law would make her take responsibility for her decision.

And, if he knew she was drunk and still allowed her to drive home, he is also legally responsible for the consequences!

The idea that sex while drunk can be the result of a bad decision ought to apply to both sexes evenly.

It already is; and it should be obvious without need of explanation, that by our very physical natures, sex is more serious and carries greater risks than it does for men. We don't have to worry about getting pregnant or what to do afterwards, and women are more prone to contract STD's than men are.

But, when it comes to the issue of consent, I still hold that we are where we are today with placing a greater burden of proof on the man/rather than the woman, because there was such a problem with guys playing games and bordering on rape...and even crossing that borderline, under the old rules. Even today, if the guy comes in armed with lawyers who want to investigate her and slut-shame her in front of the court and the rest of the world, they may cause her to back off and drop charges.....and that's the way it was done far too often in the old days, and why so many girls were so uptight and suspicious early on in new relationships.

[Guest]

And, if he knew she was drunk and still allowed her to drive home, he is also legally responsible for the consequences!

It already is; and it should be obvious without need of explanation, that by our very physical natures, sex is more serious and carries greater risks than it does for men. We don't have to worry about getting pregnant or what to do afterwards, and women are more prone to contract STD's than men are.

But, when it comes to the issue of consent, I still hold that we are where we are today with placing a greater burden of proof on the man/rather than the woman, because there was such a problem with guys playing games and bordering on rape...and even crossing that borderline, under the old rules. Even today, if the guy comes in armed with lawyers who want to investigate her and slut-shame her in front of the court and the rest of the world, they may cause her to back off and drop charges.....and that's the way it was done far too often in the old days, and why so many girls were so uptight and suspicious early on in new relationships.

Well, your first sentence would apply to both sexes equally. I would imagine. The point being that the law expects a drunk to be responsible for their actions in some cases, so why not all?

If a women (or a man) is not responsible enough to consent to sex after drinking, then the man (or the woman) with whom they are having sex has no responsibility for the act either, if they are also drunk. If one is drunk and not the other, then a case might be made for some coercion there, but the sex of the one who is drunk would be irrelevant in my opinion.

Edited April 5, 2015 by bcsapper

[-1=e^ipi]

obviously, it's the male who still has to play the active role in any sexual relationship.

This is sexist. Women can play an active role in a sexual relationship and men can play a passive role.

[-1=e^ipi]

That's the new reality for the vast majority of us non-STEM people, and those born without the privileges of accumulated wealth to set us on a track of private school education and Ivy League college educations afterwards...and on to the positions of privilege in the business world that come with attending the right university, being a member of the right fraternity, and having established family connections.

If you have access to the internet, then you have the ability to learn knowledge that can get you a STEM career if you are willing to put in the effort. Don't make up excuses if you are too lazy to perform tasks that involve math or science.

[-1=e^ipi]

What Hoff-Sommers and other not-so-subtle libertarian capitalists are trying to create, is a new narrative where classrooms are resegregated by gender, and the divisions between men and women are intensified...

No, they are trying to do things like create awareness of the issue, encourage more competition in classrooms, and increase male role models available to boys.

[Big Guy]

The issue of consent for and during sex becomes blurred in same sex relationships. The current assumption that the male in a relationship has the burden of decision making has no application in same sex sexual assault. For that reason I do not feel that the current law is correct and fair.

Bisexual, transgendered, lesbian and gay people experience violence within their intimate relationships at about the same rates as heterosexuals;

http://www.wcsap.org/lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-queer-community

[Remiel]

Without agreeing with any of the points suggested in this thread (other than perhaps family court issues), I have my own slightly ridiculous point to bring up, so...

I am a bit worried that society is becoming way to eager to describe anything with men having close friendships with other men as homo-erotic or a mask for closet homosexuality. In a time when men are presumably already emotionally stunted by the expectations society puts on us it seems that some people are implying that (straight) men are just incapable of deep and lasting friendships. And if my read of the situation is right, that could be an incredibly unjust (and potentially dangerous) idea that is being pushed on us.

I do not say this to mean that actual homosexuality is bad. It is not. But that does not mean that the existence of homosexuality should be some kind of limiter on the spectrum of male social behavior.