I answered "Maybe".
I don't consider gender roles to be having a significant effect on how I carry myself and act these days, but I know for a fact that they used to.
As for her speech, I wasn't impressed in the least.
Yes, it was emotional, as most speeches about women's rights held by feminists are, her voice all a-quiver throughout it.
Yes, she mentioned a handful of men's issues that definitely need dealing with, and MRAs have been trying to drum up attention for, for a few years now.
But I had my suspicions about the campaign she was promoting as soon as the video started, and those suspicions were all but completely confirmed by the time she said the name of the campaign for the first time.
#HeForShe...
Not #WeForAll, not #WeForWe, not #OneForAll...
#HeForShe...
She said that traditional gender roles are harming men and that men don't have the benefits of equality either, which is probably why she decided to put her face on this campaign that wants to mobilize everybody into equally helping both men AND wom... wait...
http://i.imgur.com/4bAPtLT.png
Huh... well maybe that was just badly worded, I mean, it is a campaign for equality after all, they can't possibly be trying to abolish gender roles for both sexes while calling for one half of the world to be the chivalrous defenders of the other half.
That would just be stup...
http://i.imgur.com/EG2qaSa.png
*sigh*
See... this is why I'm an anti-feminist and have been for a couple of years now.
Even when they propose the most moderate of feminist campaigns they can think up, even when actively trying to get rid of the idea that feminists don't care about and even hate men...
Even then, THIS is what they come up with.
Was I expecting anything better from UN Women?
http://i.imgur.com/6QzcZi8.png
In a word: No.
Because feminists don't care about men, they care about women, they care about what men can do TO women, they care about what men can do FOR women, but they don't. care. about. men.
And that would all be perfectly fine, even with me, if they weren't actively pushing to be the only voice and view on what constitutes equality and either co-opting or destroying every other single human rights group in existence.
I suggest reading about the the suffragists in the UK and their involvement in The White Feather Campaign which was used to shame both men and underage boys into enlisting into the military during World War 1.
Incidentally these suffragists didn?t even try to get the vote for all women (only the rich women like themselves were of any concern) back then, which I suppose is fair enough, since at the time, most men didn?t actually have the vote either.
The suffragists in the U.S. more or less originated from the Women of the KKK, and wanted the vote and other privileges for white women only.
It wasn't until much later that Feminism co-opted the Human Rights Movement to bolster their numbers.
Men were universally given the vote in Britain when the First World War started as a privilege earned through military service, a privilege that would be taken from them if they refused to serve up their lives.
The suffragists on the other hand demanded the vote (for some women) for free, and used vandalism and arson to get their way, the majority of women opposed the suffragists either because they only demanded voting rights for wealthy women or because they were afraid that they too would have to pay for the privilege with military or some other kind of community service.
Soon after the first world war, when the suffragists had finally gained the support of the majority of women, women were given their voting rights for free, just like they wanted, a whole 10 years after men did.
Meanwhile, men?s voting privileges could still be revoked for refusing to serve in the military.
Suggested reading:
"The Suffragette Movement" by Sylvia Pankhurst, especially read up on people like Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst as well as Mary Augusta Ward.
Incidentally, men STILL have to sign up for Selective Service to get their voting privileges, the right to federal financial aid and the right to work in federal offices.
Rights are not rights if they are conditional on your service to the government.
Rights that women have just for being women, thanks to feminists and their fight for ?equality?.
The Tender Years Doctrine which has been abolished, but is still common practice in family courts today all over the western world, was penned by prominent British feminist Caroline Norton and supported by the rest of the British feminist movement.
Some feminist writers like Julia Tolmie, Martha Fineman and Michael Flood have accused the father's rights movement of putting the interests of fathers above the interests of children, for example, by suggesting that it is acceptable for fathers to withdraw child support if they are not given access to their children, or lobbying for changes in family law that would allegedly "heighten children's exposure to abusive fathers.? as well as criticized the movement for allegedly perpetuating negative stereotypes of women as deceptive, vindictive, and irresponsible, as well as the stereotype that women are out to take advantage of men financially.
For more information, read up on: Custody of Infants Act 1839 and Custody of Infants Act 1873.
The doctrine was spread to the rest of the western world through the British Empire (which was still a thing back then), officially mostly abolished by the end of the 20th century, but somehow still in effect in legal practice today.
http://www.separateddads.co.uk/
As for the National Organisation for Women opposing and lobbying against equal parenting?
http://www.nowfoundation.org/issues/family/
"Discrimination against women in family courts." What world do these people even live in?
http://www.nownys.org/archives/leg_memos/oppose_a00330.html
Every single custody arrangement by family courts is already mandated/enforced by law, whether they be 50:50, 70:30, 90:10 or 100:0. Saying that they are against the presumption of 50:50 shared parenting/custody because it would be enforced by law basically just means they are against the presumption of equal shared parenting? period.
It's a good thing their former presidents Warren Farrell and Karen DeCrow cut their losses and bailed out of there in time.
Here's what actual discrimination in the family courts looks like:
http://freekeene.com/2011/06/16/thomas-james-ball-self-immolated-in-protest-of-the-justice-system/
http://www.ibtimes.com/american-father-self-immolates-protest-against-family-courts-291497
And now we get to Mary P. Koss and her cronies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_P._Koss
Here are a few citations from work of her?s that for some reason is not listed on her Wikipedia page.
"Although consideration of male victims is within the scope of the legal statutes, it is important to restrict the term rape to instances where male victims were penetrated by offenders. It is inappropriate to consider as a rape victim a man who engages in unwanted sexual intercourse with a woman. p. 206"
"It would also be desirable to conduct further quantitative inquiry using the revised SES (Koss et al. 2007), which contains items that have been crafted with behavior-specific wording to elicit information on a range of SV experiences. This will make it possible to base men?s rape prevalence estimates with more specificity on acts that involve sustaining forced penetration, leaving less leeway for men?s individual perceptions of what constitutes ?forced sex.?"
"We acknowledge the inappropriateness of female verbal coercion and the legitimacy of male perceptions that they have had unwanted sex. Although men may sometimes sexually penetrate women when ambivalent about their own desires, these acts fail to meet legal definitions of rape that are based on penetration of the body of the victim. Furthermore, the data indicate that men?s experiences of pressured sex are qualitatively different from women?s experiences of rape. Specifically, the acts experienced by men lacked the level of force and psychologically distressing impact that women reported. (Struckman-Johnson, 1988; Struckman-Johnson & Struckman-Johnson, 1994).
We worked diligently to develop item wording that captured men?s sense of pressure to have sex and draw their responses into an appropriate category of coercion instead of to rape items. The revised wording is discussed in more detail later in the article."
This woman has been informing the CDC on issues of sexual violence since 1996 when she was appointed a seat as their "Expert Panel Member, 'Definitions of Sexual Assault,' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.".
Resulting in nationwide studies with gems like this:
http://i.imgur.com/EiRQcj1.png
She also happens to be the one of the authors of the first study to use the oft repeated "1 in 4"-statistic saying that 1 in 4 college women will be raped during their time at college.
This number was reached through fiddling with the qualifiers for what constituted rape to include anyone (oops, any woman... my bad) who answered yes to questions like this: "Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn?t want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?"
Given the frequency of college age women who party and end up having sex with someone and later regretting it, and given the social pressure still on men to provide alcohol and other party materials for women?s pleasure, Koss? question was a set of brass knuckles hidden inside a boxing glove. It got her just the result she was looking for.
Two follow-up statistics demonstrate the point well enough. One, 42% of these "rape victims" went on to later date and have additional sexual relations with their "rapists," and, get this, only 25% of the women surveyed that Koss counted as victims agreed that they had been raped.
At this point an honest scholar would just acknowledge their methodological errors, write off their study and start from scratch again in an attempt to obtain some valid conclusions ? which explains why Koss went full steam ahead with the results.
It did not take long for Koss to come up with a 1 in 4 number like that. In fact, if men were asked the same questions as qualifiers for being a rape victim, the same exact number, 1 in 4, would emerge from the research. With Koss? methodology, twenty?five percent of the men you know, your fathers, brothers, uncles, husbands and sons are rape victims. One fourth of the males in this culture have been egregiously violated in the very worst of ways.
After long discussions and deliberations with as far as I know unnamed political lobbying groups, the FBI changed their definition of rape in January 2012 to this:
"The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim."
In other words, you are only a victim of rape if you are penetrated and only a rapist if you penetrate.
Again, erasing most male rape victims and practically all female rapists, while increasing the prevalence of female victims and male rapists.
Now Miss Koss is an American feminist and meaning she has little to no influence on Rape statistics in the UK, sadly she doesn?t need it.
In Britain the legal definition of rape is the following:
?1-(1) A person (A) commits an offence if?
(a) HE intentionally penetrates the vagina, anus or mouth of another person (B) with HIS PENIS,
(b) B does not consent to the penetration, and
(c) A does not reasonably believe that B consents.
(2) Whether a belief is reasonable is to be determined having regard to all the circumstances, including any steps A has taken to ascertain whether B consents.
(3) Sections 75 and 76 apply to an offence under this section.
(4) A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable, on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for life.?
This is the definition as it stands in the Law, not in a study, or a survey, or opinion poll.
According to british law, only men are capable of perpetrating rape which is counted as a crime separate of sexual assault and of course also means that rape statistics in the UK become skewed to show only men as perpetrators.
The White Ribbon Campaign is a current world-wide feminist campaign saying that non-violent men are to be held responsible for ending violence against women.
This is all despite the fact that men are by far the predominant victims of violence, but are not seen to be as important as women to protect.
Aaaaand we're on to VAWA (and the UK policy of ending violence against women and girls in the UK, the Duluth Model and Predominant Aggressor Policies (which also exist in the UK).
Mandatory arrest policy:
Thanks to the Violence Against Women Act, states are encouraged to enact ?mandatory arrest? policies when it comes to domestic violence. This means that when someone calls the police alleging partner abuse, an arrest has to be made, even if the allegation looks to be false. Mandatory arrest policies completely ignore a Constitutional right known as ?Probable Cause.?
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/02/why-would-anyone-oppose-the-violence-against-women-act/273103/
Arrest the male
Thanks to ?predominant aggressor? (aka arrest the male no matter what) policies, usually stating that no more than 15% of arrests in domestic violence cases may be female arrests, men who call the police on their violent wife are often the ones arrested, or threatened by police with arrest.
Predominant Aggressor policies came into being after mandatory arrest policies were instated, because while the mandatory arrest policies did mean arrest rates of men went up by some 20-30%, they also meant that arrest rates of women went up by about 400%.
According to a study by George and Yarwood (2004), police have threatened 47% of male victims of intimate partner violence with arrest. George and Yarwood also found that the police ignored 35% of male victims and 21% were actually arrested instead of the female perpetrators
http://www.sascv.org/ijcjs/pdfs/carolettaijcjs2010vol5iss1.pdf
Another Study by Linda Kelly found that when abused men call the police to report domestic violence committed against them they are three times more likely to be arrested than the wife that is abusing them.
http://www.law.fsu.edu/Journals/lawreview/downloads/304/kelly.pdf
A good example of this is the case of Pro Footballer Warren Moon. Moon was arrested after he tried to restrain his wife from assaulting him after she threw a candlestick at this head and kneed him in the groin. Police came, arrested moon and he was charged with domestic violence but only acquitted after his wife confessed that she was the violent one. Women?s groups were not happy and wanted Moon to be charged.
The Duluth Model:
http://www.theduluthmodel.org/
http://www.theduluthmodel.org/pdf/PowerandControl.pdf
Notice the assumptions about the gender of the victim? Go ahead and look through the rest of their resources, you'll see the same tendencies in all of them.
On the other hand I have here a collection of 221 empirical studies and 65 reviews/analyses showing gender symmetry in both perpetration and victimization of Domestic Violence:
http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
And yes, VAWA ensures funding for police officers to be trained in the Duluth Model, that's why it's the Violence Against Women Act, and not the Violence Against People Act.
Interesting people of note to read up on would be someone like Erin Pizzey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Pizzey
She was the one to open the first battered women?s refuges in Britain (indeed in all of Europe in fact), but when her work with the women in her shelters taught her that most of the women there, were at least as violent and abusive as the men they had sought shelter from, she decided to publish her findings and work to open a men?s shelter as well.
This earned her repeated death threats to her and her children and grandchildren from fellow British feminist and ended in Erin herself leaving the country and living in the US until the 1990s after her family dog was shot and killed.
Erin Pizzey is now a staunch anti-feminist and a supporter of the Men?s Rights Movement.
And now they're trying to gain control over every bit of informative media available to people, in order to make sure that no matter what kind of media you consume, they agenda will be supported by it.
That's why we have things like Feminist Frequency and Silverstring Media working the gaming industry.
That's why we have Atheism+ trying to police the skeptic community into their ideology.
That's why we have the Women's Media Center working TV, movies and music.
http://www.womensmediacenter.com/
That's why we have dedicated groups of feminist activists editing articles on Wikipedia to conform with feminist thought.
http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=5028
That's why there are groups lobbying for ever more restrictive community guidelines on sites like Facebook and Twitter, disallowing criticism of feminism and women under the guise of labeling it as "hate-speech".
So no... feminism is not, has never been and will never be about equality.
