Empathy Gap, Male Disposability & Reproductive Utility

[cybercoma]

I wish there was a better copy to access, but regardless, the leaked Status of Women Report that the Harper Gov. was trying to keep a lid on....or flush down the toilet...who knows, but among its dismal findings for Canadian women are that 68% of police-reported domestic violence victims of all ages are women....so much for whatever bullshit your MRA sources pull up:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/status-of-women-internal-report-1.3214751

It shouldn't be rocket science! Men are on average larger and have greater upperbody mass than women. Add that to higher testosterone levels, and it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that women are going to be at much greater risk of violence than men are in these domestic violence cases.

Not to mention that within that 68% figure there are many cases where couples get into a fight with each other and the police arrest both parties. Charges are later dropped when prosecutors unravel the situation and figure out the instigator. Also, violence against women is often more physically damaging for the reasons you use for men being more likely to lash out.

[cybercoma]

Yes, but some of the culture theorists in the US are trying to turn intersectionality into some sort of scientific formula. It works as a general rule, that someone who's part of several oppressed groups...say a black lesbian woman is going to have to deal with discrimination and abuse on many fronts. But, the intersection police do not generally include economic class in the intersection...and it needs to be there....because someone like Oprah Winfrey is not an oppressed minority considering all the money she has to throw around.

Class should definitely be there. I haven't seen people avoiding it like you say, but I'll take your word for it. The reason they try to turn it into a scientific rules is that intersectionality can be shown to have a multiplicative effect on individuals' experiences, rather than additive. It's not black plus female plus lesbian, but black times female times lesbian. Oprah shows that the exceptions will always prove the rule. Nevertheless, even in Oprah's case, she can speak to the racism that she experienced growing up and also stories of her cousin raping her growing up, something that is disproportionately experienced by women. The effects are compounded. And that's the point of intersectionality.

[cybercoma]

Oooh I'm, so close to MRA Bingo!

"White Knights" THERE IT IS THAT'S BINGO!

"NAMALT" and "White Knights" in the same post. Good show!

[WIP]

I'm probably not going to be able to even look up other threads, cause it looks like I'll be spending most of the time this afternoon fighting the fires of bullshit that have sprung up today. And since I was too tired to review the entire previous post before posting, I'm picking up here where I left off.

Looking it over, and going back to the opener, it seems I have to re-emphasize that when you and the MRA's that influence your thinking, talk of a gender gap, it is not the same gender gap I am talking about. Your side is claiming through careful cherrypicking of pop cultural info that women are favoured and receiving care at the expense of men. I haven't even bothered much trying to address the point, because modern culture is so complicated, so materialistic, so much bullshit, that any argument can be made for just about any topic! But the circumstantial evidence (as noted by cybercoma) clearly demonstrates that in every nation you want to examine, the effects of violence disproportionately land on women as the severity intensifies....especially when we get to murder.

The gender gap that interests me is the difference in thinking and responding to stress between men and women. And, again I'll emphasize....since you are again framing your arguments against women around your own personal situation, that regardless of whatever exceptions you want to find, in general - women have a greater capacity for empathy and caring for others, and are less inclined to aggression and hostile behaviour. This is not something I take from feminist literature....I don't really read much of what most feminists write, because a lot of them....especially from my generation, formed complete sociological theories decades ago that are immune to new information! Many feminist theorists deny basic fundamental differences between men and women and treat the whole subject as one of imposed cultural oppression of women. Moving on...............

From psychology and anthropology studies, we are beginning to get to the fundamentals of what we have and don't have in common. I'll start with this published study commented on here that actually confirms the folk wisdom that men turn inward in response to stress, while women turn to their friends and family for support Stress Increases Empathy in Women, Decreases It in Men:

In times of stress, women turn to their friends, while men turn inward. A cliché? Perhaps, but newly published research finds it’s absolutely true.

A research team led by University of Vienna psychologist Claus Lamm reports males and female respond to stressful situations in virtually opposite ways. Men become more egocentric, while women heighten their ability to understand the perspective of others.

“Social interaction skills improve in women under stress,” the researchers write in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology. They specifically found stress spurred women to override normal levels of self-centeredness and respond to others with heightened empathy. The opposite appears to be true of men.

Men respond to stress in a fight-or-flight manner, conserving their energy for the confrontation they fear is coming by turning inward. Women, on the other hand, take a "tend-and-befriend" approach.

As the researchers note, there are two basic responses to taxing situations. Stressed individuals may default to a self-centered state; being less demanding than taking into account the thoughts and emotions of others—this conserves mental and emotional resources. Alternatively, they might be motivated to turn open-heartedly to others, “using social support as a stress-coping strategy.”

A point that comes to mind is how a male shift inward and to hostile aggression may be a big part of the answer to the higher rates of suicides among men than women.....which you MRA's blame on women I might add!

I don't think that very old women, obese women and infant girls are at great risk of sexual attacks. But if you want to go down that route then all males of all ages are at risk of sexual attacks by others.

That's a particularly stupid and egregious comment, considering the numbers of girls and women even of advanced age who are raped or sexually assaulted! Sexual attacks are not caused by sexual arousal...they are deliberately carried out to inflict pain and suffering on the victim. I've mentioned a couple of times before that when I was 17 and sneeking into strip clubs with my friends, they had full nudity/ but strict "no touch" policies enforced by....whichever biker gang owned the clubs. I had no problems keeping my hands off....neither did my friends...or older guys in the bar....just the drunks who lost sight of where they were and what the consequences would be if they grabbed a girl....until they were hauled out a side door and had the boots put to them. I would like to believe I am like most men, and would never consider committing a sexual assault under any circumstances. If there is an increase in rape and sexual assaults against women...as we are told in the media of both reported and unreported incidents, it is a sign that modern day porn has become so extremely degrading that it has completely dulled a lot of the sense that young men should have today!

Speak for yourself. I'm certainly worried about going out at night, especially since I was violently assaulted and suffered brain damage.

And was your violent assault at the hands of a girl gang? Actually, it shouldn't matter one way or another, since....like I said at the opening...we are generalizing with broad swipes whenever any positive or negative aspect is attributed to men or women. So, we're talking broad, sweeping strokes here and yet you are trying to blame all women for whatever happened in your past....and even worse in my estimation, you have no sympathy for what may still be a majority of women have to go through in their lives.

I could act the same way about blacks, after being attacked by an approx. teenage tall, gangly black youth with a knife in Niagara Falls NY 20 years ago, after I stopped in to a gas station during the overnight hours. I took a few cuts, but refused to surrender my wallet....something I would never advise others to do...it's just that rational thought flies out the window when you're caught in that sort of situation, especially if you have a wife and young children at home, like I did at the time! Nevertheless, after I calmed down and thought about the incident for a few days, I wasn't going to excuse all of the abuses and deprivations that black people endure, because of my incident.

What? You mean marriage and the move towards more monogamous societies? That is arguably due to the fact that monogamous relationships generally result in more resources being used to raise children and takes advantage of the biological incentive to make sure one's offspring are successful. Over millions of years, humans have developed larger brains, delayed puberty and longer childhoods, which means that they benefit greatly from having parents support them for years. This is why humans are more monogamous than chimpanzees.

Monogamy has never been as important historically as it is in modern culture! In paleo-hunter/gatherer societies, it's not at all clear whether or not men and women even paired up for other things besides sex...if we're judging by how brief and unimportant male/female bonding have been treated in the vanishing numbers of hunter/gatherer groups that survived into modern times. As psychologist - Christopher Ryan (a researcher who spent most of 20 years evaluating and designing research for anthropologists in the Amazon Vally) notes in his popular and entertaining look at human sexuality: Sex At Dawn, most Yanomamo groups in southern Venezuela thought the english or spanish term "marriage" referred to when a man and a woman string their hammocks together. When they decide to untie their hammocks and move on...that would apparently be divorce. And for more than 100 years, anthropologists...even the ones who respected native peoples, were trying to impute their modern values and standards on the 'primitives'.

I don't know how often Ryan has been married and divorced during his life, but the only point of departure I had with his views, is his very dismal view of modern monogamous marriage. Ryan is overall a cynic about marriage, even though he notes within the book that the breakdown of extended families and their replacement with relationships that are primarily based on capitalistic principles of trade, all leave marriage and nuclear family as the only institution in modern culture that we can depend on because it doesn't come with a price tag!

I don't think you should generalize MRAs like this. There are obviously traditionalist and misogynist MRAs, but not all are like this (and I don't think the majority are like this).

One thing I can generalize about regarding MRA's: whether they are sincere or just sick misogynists, they don't acknowledge that modern societies are still patriarchal...some more intensely patriarchal than others; but still patriarchal nevertheless. And when men suffer violence...including sexual violence, they get more sympathy from women and feminists than they receive from the so called 'masculists' that want the kind of patriarchy they still practice in Saudi Arabia!

Edited September 14, 2015 by WIP

[WIP]

Class should definitely be there. I haven't seen people avoiding it like you say, but I'll take your word for it. The reason they try to turn it into a scientific rules is that intersectionality can be shown to have a multiplicative effect on individuals' experiences, rather than additive. It's not black plus female plus lesbian, but black times female times lesbian. Oprah shows that the exceptions will always prove the rule. Nevertheless, even in Oprah's case, she can speak to the racism that she experienced growing up and also stories of her cousin raping her growing up, something that is disproportionately experienced by women. The effects are compounded. And that's the point of intersectionality.

My beef with Oprah is that...as a black capitalist, she and other black billionaires and multimillionaires were responsible for getting a blank slate named Barack Obama into the White House. And once in there, Obama barely mentioned the problems black communities were suffering during his term after the recession.....his primary concerns were doing what Wall Street wanted, and getting a watered down health insurance "reform" bill through that will only do for drug companies and hospital and insurance corporations, what he has done for Wall Street. So when he started working go force through TPP and the other two disguised trade pacts...FINALLY there was a push back from the left, and even among everyday blacks whose lives have not been improved by having a black face in the White House! And that's why grassroots movements like Black Lives Matter scare the crap out of Oprah and her friends even more than it scares Republican billionaires!

Oprah's PR doing whatever for the poor is just for show and even for economic opportunity...same with the Democratic Party funding billionaires like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and George Soros etc.. They are ultimately interested in their own advantage. The problem Oprah, and the other wealthy blacks have is they have to appear to know where they came from, regardless of whether they are interested anymore!

Edited September 14, 2015 by WIP

[WIP]

"White Knights" THERE IT IS THAT'S BINGO!

Not much knew or noteworthy in your MRA crap, except that "male feminists" are usually called "Manginas" in the horseshit you consume online! Every creep on the right trying to rally white men around the flag, has to come up with durogatory terms to use against men who are not following the plan.

BTW, all this shit sure as hell explains why female participation in this forum is so low!

[cybercoma]

And when men suffer violence...including sexual violence, they get more sympathy from women and feminists than they receive from the so called 'masculists'

And this point has been repeated by Black Dog and me for as long as Euler has been on his MRA kick. The 'masculinists' aims have more to do with attacking feminism and undoing advances for women, then it has in addressing actual problems for men. Feminists accomplished things for women. They got suffrage, fought for birth control, fought for and continue to fight for an equal place in the workplace, etc. What have the MRAs accomplished? What are they trying to accomplish? The most vocal of them spend more time criticizing women than improving things for men.

[cybercoma]

My beef with Oprah is that...as a black capitalist, she and other black billionaires and multimillionaires were responsible for getting a blank slate named Barack Obama into the White House. And once in there, Obama barely mentioned the problems black communities were suffering during his term after the recession.....his primary concerns were doing what Wall Street wanted, and getting a watered down health insurance "reform" bill through that will only do for drug companies and hospital and insurance corporations, what he has done for Wall Street. So when he started working go force through TPP and the other two disguised trade pacts...FINALLY there was a push back from the left, and even among everyday blacks whose lives have not been improved by having a black face in the White House! And that's why grassroots movements like Black Lives Matter scare the crap out of Oprah and her friends even more than it scares Republican billionaires!

Oprah's PR doing whatever for the poor is just for show and even for economic opportunity...same with the Democratic Party funding billionaires like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and George Soros etc.. They are ultimately interested in their own advantage. The problem Oprah, and the other wealthy blacks have is they have to appear to know where they came from, regardless of whether they are interested anymore!

Well said. I don't have much to add to that because I agree with all of it. You have to remember though, that when she steps into a room with her economic "peers," she still won't be seen as their equal, even if she does very little to help the grassroots.

[bush_cheney2004]

Oprah's doing just fine...far more impact compared to a bunch of wannabe liberals "north of the border".

[-1=e^ipi]

So claims about men and women being equally violent ring false

Good thing I never made such claims.

Edited September 15, 2015 by -1=e^ipi

[Black Dog]

Good think I never made such claims.

Nah you're just parroting the creepos from CAFE.

[-1=e^ipi]

women are favoured and receiving care at the expense of men.

Gender issues are not a zero-sum game.

especially when we get to murder.

Men are over twice as likely to get murdered in Canada.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/2011001/article/11561-eng.htm

women have a greater capacity for empathy and caring for others

From psychology and anthropology studies, we are beginning to get to the fundamentals of what we have and don't have in common. I'll start with this published study commented on here that actually confirms the folk wisdom that men turn inward in response to stress, while women turn to their friends and family for support Stress Increases Empathy in Women, Decreases It in Men:

If this is the case, it is in large part arguably due to gender roles. If men and boys are conditioned from a very young age that their feelings and concerns do not matter at much, they need to quit complaining, 'man up', 'grow balls', etc. then one of the coping mechanisms is to bury one's emotions and become emotionally numb. Gender conditioning starts very young. Studies have been done where people are put in a room with a crying infant. If the infant is a girl, individuals are more likely to respond to the crying. I'll see if I can find a link.

A point that comes to mind is how a male shift inward and to hostile aggression may be a big part of the answer to the higher rates of suicides among men than women.....which you MRA's blame on women I might add!

1. I don't self identify as an MRA.

2. You are generalizing MRAs if you think they all blame exclusively women for the higher suicide rate. Many blame gender roles and social conditioning (which arguably is the result actions by both men and women).

I've mentioned a couple of times before that when I was 17 and sneeking into strip clubs with my friends

I have never done this. Heck, I have never intentionally looked at porn. Please don't generalize males based on your personal experiences.

it is a sign that modern day porn has become so extremely degrading that it has completely dulled a lot of the sense that young men should have today!

As prevalence of porn has increased, rape, murder and assault rates have decreased. If anything, the evidence suggests that access to porn reduces violence. Heck, some former members of Jihadi groups have admitted that one of their motivations for joining was the promise of sex and 72 virgins (and these individuals were generally culturally conditioned not to look at porn, have sex outside of marriage, etc.).

And was your violent assault at the hands of a girl gang?

Nope. 3 males.

yet you are trying to blame all women for whatever happened in your past

... except I'm not doing this.

you have no sympathy for what may still be a majority of women have to go through in their lives.

Thinking that both women's issues and men's issues should be addressed by society (as well as the issues of non-binary people) is having 'no sympathy' for women? That makes no sense.

Monogamy has never been as important historically as it is in modern culture!

I agree. My point was that humans have been on an evolutionary trend towards monogamy due to the increase in brain size, which requires more years of nurturing and education to take advantage of. So while humans are more monogamous than chimpanzees, humans are less monogamous than swans.

the breakdown of extended families and their replacement with relationships that are primarily based on capitalistic principles of trade, all leave marriage and nuclear family as the only institution in modern culture that we can depend on because it doesn't come with a price tag!

Yep. I think this is why you see that individuals that have stronger family bonds / support tend to be more conservative in their views on a social safety net and support for the poor. Our inadequate social safety net means that people that don't have a supporting family for whatever reason fall through the cracks.

they don't acknowledge that modern societies are still patriarchal

Some do, most don't. I would argue that places like Canada and Sweden aren't. See my thread on the patriarchy being an unfalsifiable flying spaghetti monster.

[Freddy]

Good think I never made such claims.

So the question is.

If we are to rise above this instinctive behaviour, of valuing women's lives more then men's. And treating men as disposable.

What direction do we collectively decide to take?

We need to all agree on the directional path our superior intellectual capacity should be able to help us direct in.

I say as it is the women who mostly want to behave more like men. We should treat women as disposably as we do men.

That way we don't end up with a bunch of cry baby's in the science lab each time things get a little difficult.

You want the privilege of living the high risk lives us males have had the last thousands of years, taking risks and discovering new ideas and inventions . Then suck it up buttercup. Taking risks means you run the chance at difficulties and pain.

Or are you of the opinion we should treat everyone like a little princess?

Edited September 15, 2015 by Freddy

[Peter F]

That way we don't end up with a bunch of cry baby's in the science lab each time things get a little difficult.

By disposing of them?

[Black Dog]

So the question is.

---SNIP---

Or are you of the opinion we should treat everyone like a little princess?

So, basically, we need to all become feminists?

Edited September 15, 2015 by Charles Anthony
---SNIP---

[WIP]

And this point has been repeated by Black Dog and me for as long as Euler has been on his MRA kick. The 'masculinists' aims have more to do with attacking feminism and undoing advances for women, then it has in addressing actual problems for men. Feminists accomplished things for women. They got suffrage, fought for birth control, fought for and continue to fight for an equal place in the workplace, etc. What have the MRAs accomplished? What are they trying to accomplish? The most vocal of them spend more time criticizing women than improving things for men.

I noticed that too when I've read or heard some of them speak. It reminds me of the just throw crap at the wall strategy that the climate change-deniers use.

[WIP]

Well said. I don't have much to add to that because I agree with all of it. You have to remember though, that when she steps into a room with her economic "peers," she still won't be seen as their equal, even if she does very little to help the grassroots.

I don't want to put Oprah in the same box as deliberately pernicious billionaires....like Fred and David, or the clueless, arrogant trustfund babies like Trump. I believe she does have some social conscience, the problem is that it is the same conscience that has been part of Hollywood liberals for decades...one that is salved by some dogooder acts to throw money around and do some benefit concert etc. or vote for a candidate that says the right homilies.

I've heard a few marginalized radical left black voices over the years like Glen Ford, refer to the Congressional Black Caucus and the majority of black city officials across America as "The black misleadership class." And it seems that the message is getting across to others in black communities that putting black faces in charge of city councils in cities like Philadelphia or Baltimore has just enabled the powers-behind-the scene to carry out objectives they would never accept from a white politician.

[bush_cheney2004]

Sometimes I wonder if black Canadians sit and wonder about the economic, social, and political challenges facing "white" Americans.

[Freddy]

So, basically, we need to all become feminists?

No. For equality of sexes we have to ether treat everyone as disposable or treat everyone like they are a princess.

Edited September 15, 2015 by Freddy

[Black Dog]

No. For equality of sexes we have to ether treat everyone as disposable or treat everyone like they are a princess.

If you read your actual post, you're saying you want women to be given all the same opportunities as men. That's a remarkably feminist thing to say for someone who, by all indications, is a complete knuckle-dragger.

Edited September 15, 2015 by Black Dog

[Freddy]

If you read your actual post, you're saying you want women to be given all the same opportunities as men. That's a remarkably feminist thing to say for someone who, by all indications, is a complete knuckle-dragger.

That's because your initial assessments of who and what I am were wrong. I just didn't want to waste my time trying to explain that to you.

Based on my assessment of you it was likely going to be a big time sink explaining it to you, and amount to nothing. You know you'r very stubborn, don't you? I hoped that in time you would figure it out for yourself.

Maybe your finally starting to see the light.i still remain very sceptical.

Edited September 16, 2015 by Freddy