DISCUSSION FORUM:
feminism and its influence on the portrayal of sexual power

This is an archive page for January 2002.

Reader comments that are of special interest or which raise significant points may be published in these dialogue pages. Reader comment excerpts are in black text and thinkbomb replies are in red text.
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From: doug@cablespeed.com
Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002

A lot of what I have read on your site (from women) consists of saying that men rule the world. It doesn't have to be that way. Margaret Thatcher http://www.thatcheronline.co.uk/ ran a country. According to the 2000 United States census there are more women voters in this country than men. If you want a woman President, fucking vote for one.

From: Linds2888@aol.com
Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002

You say that women are given a great deal of esteem in society, hence the old adage "women and children first". No doubt that since all women have been subjugated to that type of treatment, we recognize what it really is- a mockery and downsizing of the abilities of women. Trust me, women are also to blame. Who wouldn't enjoy having their asses wiped for them, just so long as they had no political influence or emotional esteem in the world? Women need to realize that by allowing themselves to be categorized as incompentent and weak, whatever the advantage of being doted upon occasionally, is a cop-out, an exchange of their essential rights as a human being- that to be recognized as being no better, and no worse, than anyone else.

From: derekwsch1@yahoo.com
Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002

Feminism is awful. I mean, who comes up with this? Are women not appreciated? Are women not getting paid enough? Of course not! They say that women not only don't get paid enough, but also don't have good enough jobs and aren't given opportunity. Yeah, right. There are plenty of female doctors, lawyers, accountants, you name it. I suppose there's also the fact that most "second-hand secretaries" are women. So what? Sometimes, it's just part of our culture that, by the way doesn't need to be messed with, makes us do what we do. For example, my brother, is extremely smart; he got a 1580 on the SAT's, is going to an extremely good college, can type extremely fast, and wanted earn some money. So, he tried to get a job as a secretary. He didn't. Some lady with virtually no education did and the company thought he'd do a better job moving boxes.

Another thing that's part of our culture is the word "women." and some feminists just freak out about it, because it has the word men in it. So, they change it to womyn. Well, since that's on the topic of language, did you know that the root words "male" and "man" mean evil and helping-hand and the root word meaning women, is "mater"? So, we could look at the fact that out in our language we're an evil helping hand and women matter. My root word theory is far out, but hey, what's feminism? Far out, extreme, bizarre, and not needed. I say we just get rid of all this sexism and get on with our traditional and normal lives. It will probably work out for the better anyway.

From: "Masculinism" steve@masculinism.net
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002
Why do you never see a female garbage collector?

By Steven Dixon

In the early days of '60s feminist sloganeering, a phrase caught radical women's imagination and entered unchallenged into the sexual politic debate. It goes as follows, 'women need a man like a fish needs a bicycle'. To extend this metaphor and put it into perspective it is rather like saying 'a fish does not need water as it does not own a yacht'.

If the first statement were true and men are of no use to radical feminists then why do you never see a female garbage collector, brick layers, builders laborer mixing concrete and plaster (try it for a couple of hours), steeple-jacking, roof repairers, digging drains, laying highways, welding on the outside of oil rigs on land and at sea, deep sea diving for heavy duty industry, deep sea fishing in the North Atlantic gales, working in iron mills, digging coal underground, lumber jacking, etc, etc.

If women really do not need men then why do they use men's inventions and ingenuity to help them eat, keep warm and sheltered. In short, to survive on what is a hostile planet when the weather turns harsh?

Does the word hypocrit echo somewhere in your head? It does mine.

Why do radical feminists use men's discoveries and inventions, like electricity, gas, drainage, petrol engines, aircraft, communications including computers, mobile telephones, regular telephones, televisions, radios, X-rays, the pill, blood transfusions, penicillin, roads, pavements, glass, iron, steel vessels and utensils, print technology, typewriters, language, architecture, buildings including hospitals, railways stations, subways and roads all designed and built by men, record players, CDs cassettes, cinema, glasses, lenses of all descriptions, weighing machines, scales, windows, books, paper, rubber, oil, petrol, etc, etc, etc. Am I laboring this point? No ,I've actually left out more examples than I've put in.

Put bluntly, if radical women could magically erase men from history and unpick them from the contemporary social fabric, then who would take away their shit, piss and blood and in return give them pure drinking water?

Some one has a firm grasp of the wrong end of the stick and it isn't me. Do they really believe that they are the light at the center of the Universe and everything emanates from them like the rays of the sun. It would be wonderful to believe that the suns shines out of our ass but it doesn't. We are all in this reality together, I didn't asked to be born, didn't ask to be made into a man, but that is how it is.

I am bored with women trying to prove that they are equal to men by merely copying men's example and then joining in, like it was their idea all along.

For example in the 20 Jan, 2002 of the Sunday Times, Style Magazine (UK), page three columnist Maria McErline whines on about the gray cold winter weather in her 'Acting Up' column. Very original topic in January; keep up your cutting edge work McErline.

Better yet she writes: 'I have discovered a marvelous antidote to this (dull winter) seasonal malady: namely, going to football matches'.

Er, yeah right, good discovery Maria well done. Don't suppose footballers or their fans had worked that one out. Presumably, they have been stumbling along in the dark ages all this time, going to football matches out of a sense of duty, not to enjoy, bond and get stress relief by letting off some steam. Well now we all understand why men go to football matches and it is all thanks to the incisive vision of Maria McErlane's incredible discovery. We men can sleep sound at night now we know that one is cleared up.

Where would we men be without quality U.K. newspapers? Let us hope she gets a Noble Prize for Peace and Understanding with that gem. Does McErlane actually get paid for what many would consider drivel.

If women are so smart and independent then what are their great recent post feminist discoveries and why are men not trying to copy their lead.

Steven Dixon created masculinism(tm) while studying for his M.A. in Fine Art at LMU. He also contributed to popular culture via i-D, numerous art books, appearences on Channel 4 and has interviewed heavyweight contempory icons Alexander T Shulgin, Howard Marks and Michael Jackson. Join this century's sexual debate at http://www.masculinism.net/discussion

From: Rob EX msandri1510@hotmail.com
Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2002
Subject: Response to feminist poster - Earlyyearsexcellence@btopenworld.com

I've read your Reader Responses section and felt compelled to reply to one of your posters - Earlyyearsexcellence@btopenworld.com - who posted recently on Circumcision, War in Afghanistan (and women's apparent inherent peace loving nature) and some DV statistics.

I have written a fairly lengthy (but hopefully readable) rebuttal. I was going to reply to her directly, but then I thought that she might construe that as harassment. Would you be prepared to post it in your Discussion Forum? It basically proves that all her supplied statistics are a regurgitation of well known feminist myths. I have supplied all relevant cites and references.

With respect to her claim that her approach is "typical of my (female) gender" when referring to the War in Afghanistan, I can only tell you that it is a starry eyed myth, based on her simplistic premise that women=good, men=evil. A myth quickly deflated after a brief inspection of the biographies of the following notable women: Queen Victoria; Indira Ghandi; Prime Minister Golda Meir; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; and every female member of Congress who voted in favor of Operations Desert Storm or Enduring Freedom and the huge number of opinion polls that showed that female support for the war was only slightly behind that of the males.

As for her DV statistics, they are truly laughable, and typical of the sort of myths propagated by people like herself who only believe one gender is capable of violence..

To start with, she claims that "The American Medical Association reports that every five years family violence kills as many women as the total number of Americans who died in the Vietnam War". This is untrue. She is probably referring to a "factoid" propagated by feminist myth makers which is often attributed to the American Medical Association. This "statistic" was recently posted to a mailing list of teachers and others interested in the subject of gender equity in education. A similar formulation appears on the web site of the Island County Community Health Advisory Board (Coupeville, Washington) , where it is attributed to the American Medical Association. A somewhat less exaggerated version, which puts the number of "women and children killed in their own homes" at 21,000, appears on the web site of the Police Department in Kennebunk, Maine.

It is not true. It is not even remotely close to being true. President Lyndon Johnson sent the first combat troops to Vietnam in 1965. The last were withdrawn in 1973. During that period, there were a total of 27,103 females of all ages murdered in the United States. Not by intimates -- from all causes. This number is taken from Table 3.141 of the Bureau of Justice Statistics publication Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, which is maintained on the World Wide Web by the University of Albany.

Obviously if there were 27,103 females murdered in total, it is impossible that more than 58,000 of them were murdered by spouses or boyfriends. The Sourcebook does not provide victim-offender relationships for murders in that era, but in recent years the proportion of female homicide victims who were killed by intimates has been around 30% of the total. If things were about the same in the 1960's -- and there is no reason to believe otherwise -- then the number of women killed by intimates during the eight years of the Vietnam war was about 8,100. This is only one-seventh the number of men killed in the war. To complete the picture, there were 91,201 males murdered in the U.S. during the Vietnam war, about 3,500 of them by spouses or girlfriends.

She also claims that "In the USA a husband, boyfriend or live-in partner batters a woman every nine seconds". Again this is untrue, simply because no government agency tracks this type of data, nor does research back it up. This factoid often appears and the figure ranges between 5 and 15 seconds. Its source is never referenced. The FBI once did estimate that a woman is beaten every 15 seconds. However, the statement as used by feminist activists is a half-truth, and a very misleading one. First of all, the FBI does not calculate, tabulate, or track data on domestic violence. To make this estimate, the FBI used data from the book Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family by Murray Straus, Richard J. Gelles, and Suzanne K. Steinmetz. The reason the statement as used by activists is a half-truth is that this book states that men and women are equally likely to be violent in relationships. The same data set that supports the claim "a woman is beaten every 15 seconds" also supports the claim that "a man is beaten every 15 seconds". The activists have made half of the data a rallying call for action, while suppressing or denying the other half of the same research.

A blanket refusal to acknowledge the large incidence of female perpetrated DV leaves her credibility in shreds. Furthermore, since DV covers violence towards children, it is particularly ironic she should try and take the moral high ground on this issue. Recent studies show that females account for 66% of all violence against children and are also more likely to kill their children. Furthermore, mothers who kill their children are twice as likely to kill boys rather than girls. Interesting eh? Hatred of boys?

[Sources: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Child Maltreatment 1999: Reports from the States to the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2001) and UK Home Office Data 1998/1999]

Her talk of only hearing about male casualties in war is also ludicrous. Hilary Clinton recently said "The primary victims of war are women". I guess that would be news to the dead men who were conscripted in the male-only draft that every western Country subscribes to. In terms of Afghanistan, in 1978, civil war broke out beginning a long series of human rights abuses that continue to this day. It is clear that men and boys have been the primary victims of many of these civil rights violations. While Afghan women have had their rights to education and employment curtailed and in a number of cases have been killed, it is civilian men who have been selectively targeted for widespread detention, torture, and execution. Again, these civil rights abuses have been extensively documented in reports published in the mass media, as well as in advisories compiled by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International (http://web.amnesty.org/ai.nsf/COUNTRIES/AFGHANISTAN? OpenView&expandall. The same is true in Rwanda, Kosovo, Chechnya and various other places. Have you never noticed the references to massacres which "included women and children" as if somehow a female life is worth more than a males?

Finally, I also read her emotional treatise on Circumcision in another one of her posts. Again, she makes reference to uncited feminist myths about the incidence and propagation of FGM. That aside, she also alludes to Women's health being underfunded. Please provide a single shred of evidence for this? Have you never heard of the health gap? The one where men on average die 5-7years earlier than women, and die in greater numbers from the top 15 Causes of death than females?

It is partly because men's health projects are so vastly under funded in comparison to women's health projects that this gap exists. The reason for the discrepancy is that women have been extremely effective at lobbying against perceived inequalities in health provision, even where there were none. This has led to a perception of women being "shortchanged" in terms of health provision and the subsequent "redressing" of the balance has led to the huge funding disadvantage that men suffer from. The propagation of erroneous survey data greatly helped women in this respect. It is not malicious to suggest that the use of misleading statistics was intentional. Consider this: If you heard that Women-specific diseases in the US attracted 14% of the Health Spending Budget in 1987, how would you feel as a woman? Outraged? Probably. What if you then found out that men got 7% and the rest went on non-gender specific diseases? Don't take my simple word for it though, read these:

http://www.ncpa.org/pi/health/pd032101f.html or
http://www.reason.com/0105/co.cy.false.html or
http://www.shatterdmen.com/NIH%20Retracts%20Claim.htm or
http://www.equityfeminism.com/articles/2001/000044.html

In the UK, Jo Dillon wrote for The Times on the 4th March 2001, that: "The all-party group plans to look at other health inequalities in which men have lost out at the expense of their own well-being. The life expectancy of the average British male is now 74, while for women it is 79, and in poorer people that drops to 71 years for men and 78 for women. Death rates from heart disease are up to five times higher for men than for women, particularly in middle-age. High blood pressure rates in men are double those in womenŠ. There are also inequalities in the amount of money the Government has made available to tackle diseases most commonly suffered by the different sexes. There has been a four-fold increase in public funding for prostate cancer, and that will have risen to £4.2m by 2003-4. But that compares to £37m for breast- screening and £143m for cervical cancer programmes"

It's all very well to write a sneering little jibe about "mommy's hands being full" (tho' I've read that elsewhere before she appropriated the phrase for her own use).. However, when women in the UK use their Doctors 2.3 times as often as men (UK Observer, 28 June 2000), it's probably hard to get through the door of the surgery for all the waiting women.

In Scotland recently, after a Cervical smear mix up in Dundee, 20% of the 20,000 women involved ignored repeated reminders to return for another test. The reason? They feared bad news and "didn't want to tempt fate again". This is perfectly understandable. However, if men act similarly (albeit in greater numbers), they are obviously too macho to visit a doctor? This is her implication.

I believe that lack of education (directly linked to lack of spending on Men's primary health care), fear, awareness, opportunity and availability are actually the key problems. Last Year in the UK, about 180 million pounds (300 million dollars) was spent on Cervical and Breast Cancer research. The figure for Prostate Cancer was 4 million. A staggering discrepancy given the incidence rates of these cancer types. It is hardly surprising that there is a difference in awareness and consequent medical attendance rates. In addition, I'm sure the large number of males who are the "sole breadwinner" feel an additional pressure "not to be ill". I believe that men are reluctant to visit the doctor due to the huge discrepancy in funding, research and subsequent awareness of men's health, and not the oft quoted myth that male ego and machismo are to blame.

So, rant over. Unlike her, I don't believe that my gender is better than hers. I'm well aware that women also face several issues. What stick in my throat is her bitter, sanctimonious rants, based on hearsay, speculation and her own prejudices which are then presented as fact. She truly hates men and I sincerely hope she never has any male children, or has responsibility for any male employees.

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