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I hate genderwank part I: The "which is badder" wars.
People who try to debate whether [bad thing that happens to one gender] is worse than/not as bad as [only tangentially related bad thing that happens to the other]. Stupid topics of debate include:
"Which is worse, rape or paternity fraud?"
"Which is worse, male circumcision or female circumcision"
"Which is worse, being a single mother, or being a divorced father who is too poor to pay child support?"
"Which is worse, rape/harassment/abuse/being a mime, or false allegations of rape/harrassment/abuse/being a mime"
Really, what useful information does this provide? Do these people think badness comes in easily measurable units? And if so, do you really have to know that, say, [bad thing that happens to women] is bad by 8.6 standard badness units (totally scientifical, gaiz!) and [bad thing that happens to men] is bad by 8.4 standard badness units to make an enlightened moral decision about either?
No. What you have to know about [bad thing that happens to women] to make an enlightened moral decision is this:
IT'S BAD! DON'T DO IT! DON'T SUPPORT IT!
And what you have to know about [bad thing that happens to men] is this:
IT'S BAD! DON'T DO IT! DON'T SUPPORT IT!
Seriously, do these people think they'll ever be in a scenario where they'll have to make a choice between, say, committing rape and committing paternity fraud? And if they really do spend their time thinking about such far-fetched scenarios, they need to get out more. And if the standard for "good person" they set for themself is "slightly better than a genital mutilator/rapist/cheater/perjurer/mime," then they need to raise their standards.
Comments
Because if people are talking about how bad X is, when Y is what you're worried about, you're going to get shirty with the other people for not paying attention to Y instead.
It's retarded.
If other people care about X more than Y, and you care more about Y than X, then who better to rally people against Y then Y-O-U?
Ouch.
But in their minds, they're rallying people to combat Y by saying that Y is a way bigger threat than X, and you'd be a fool to think that X is in any way more dangerous than Y.
Tangentially related, but as a Leftist, my worst enemy is invariably other Leftists.
There's this tendency to try and redefine terms, make observation from ivory towers and do other things that reek of psuedo-intellectual wank rather than trying to make a difference. A former socialist ex-GF of mine was surprised to find that I usually give a couple of dollars on the street to people who ask, and said, "Yeah, I feel sorry for them, too." She was missing the point -- a part of socialism is the redistribution of wealth. I think anyone who calls themselves a socialist should be in the habit of giving a couple of dollars to people who ask on the street, at least when it's reasonable.
See, I just wonder why no socialist organisation has decided to use capitalism against itself using a boring but profitable business for the purpose of redistributing wealth to the ill-fortuned in their state/country/whatever. There's a lot of circlejerking at universities and not a whole lot of reality.
The answer is obvious though!
Being a mime is the worst!
Fuck mimes. When he lived in NYC, my dad got consistently harassed by a single persistent mime.
Because I feel unhelpful today:
Rape, obviously. I mean, okay, conceivably someone could not be affected by a rape and then paternity fraud would be worse by default, but as for their intended effects rape is totally worse.
Not to mention this is not a men versus women thing since both men AND women are raped at alarmingly high rates.
I'm certainly no fan of male circumcision but female circumcision (or at least, most kinds of it) is clearly worse, because they're the equivalent of chopping off the entire glans of the penis.
That said, you could make an argument that male circumcision is so much more common that it's a more pressing moral problem.
Finally there's one which is actually difficult to tell. But this is AGAIN not a men vs. women thing because there are totally single fathers and there are also totally divorced mothers who are too poor to pay child support.
And then also, child support is decided by a court which usually at least tries to scale it to the parents' incomes. Poverty just sucks. But on the other hand single motherhood doesn't ALWAYS imply poverty anyways.
Rape, harassment, abuse, and being a mime are all worse than being falsely accused of such, even formally, as long as there's no conviction (and since being a mime isn't illegal it's always worst to be a mime). With caveat to 1 above: rape is a crime that's meant to traumatize and so it's conceivable that someone could walk away from a rape with little or no emotional damage.
But I should say again that BOTH men and women get raped, and also this time that maliciously false allegations of rape are not a serious problem. False trials and false convictions happen much more often with any crime when the victim legitimately was raped but either (s)he or the police identifies the wrong suspect. It's a much worse problem because maliciously false allegations usually don't even get prosecuted due to lack of evidence; allegations where there's totally enough evidence because a crime did happen are much more dangerous.
I mean, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to your point; regardless of what I just did it IS pointless to argue about these things. It just annoys me when people go further than that and say that not only is it not worth asking, but that there actually is no correct answer to the question. Because there is. Clearly there is.
Bradamante,
The whole "which is badder wars" phenomenon bugs me too and I think it appears in a lot of other contexts, especially online. One variant of it that I find particularly annoying is the "I have it worse than you" response to people complaining about or even just discussing some unfortunate situation that they find themselves in.
I agree with BlackHumor that there are probably answers to those kinds of questions about who has the tougher situation, but just because something is worse does not mean a slightly less bad thing is not bad nor does it actually help anybody in the relatively easier spot. I imagine that once you factor the gender part of it in, those kinds of discussions get even worse.
I do not doubt that there are times when people benefit from putting things in their proper perspective, but putting things in perspective does not really seem to me like a solution as much as a way to discourage excessive hyperbole.
Also, why the hate for mimes?
Tradition.
(Traditiiiion! Tradition. Traditioooon! Tradition.)
Because mimes are fucking awful. They combine two of the most hated things on Earth: clowns and French people.
^ There's also a hefty dose of artistic pretension involved. "Serious" mime tends to be done by the sort of failed actor/dancer who went to clown school instead of taking the hint and just getting a job.
On-topic, one reason people do this is because it's an easy way of getting both half-arsed feminists and insecure, nerdy believers in "men's rights" riled up and ensuring a flamey debate, so it's good for trolling. And there are still people out there who genuinely don't know that gender discussions all tend to head that way.
On the topic of activism vs. academic debate: they're not mutually exclusive. The former is often perceived as symptom treatment, the latter as analyzing the system to see how it works and arguing for alternative modes of viewing(which then again feeds activism: take the Communist Manifesto for the crudest example of such a phenomenon).
For some of those it's easy; the reason many people are against male circumcision is because they don't understand that it's not like FGM at all. For the others, though, people just like propping up arguments that they can shoot down in support of their side easily.
(And if you were wondering, it's rape, female circumcision, poor father, and rape/harassment/abuse/being a mime.)
I should be glad to live in a country where circumcision isn't practiced at all, except among Muslims and Jews, of course. Is it that common in the US?
The latest statistic I can find, as of 2005, is that it's done for 53% of male births here.
@CP: Not to turn this into a circumcision derail but I object to that; chopping off a bit of an infant's penis is wrong before comparing it to anything else.
Also, I just thought of something: The real comparison isn't whether being raped or falsely accused of rape is worse; the real comparision is whether being falsely accused of rape or being falsely accused of falsely accusing someone of rape(ing you) is worse. Because, that's the real comparison the laws need to be balanced on: how many accidental prosecutions of real rape victims are worth successfully preventing one false accusation of rape?