mohandasgandhi:

TheAmazingAtheist is absolutely terrible. I can’t stand the guy. Since bbcity and others already did a fantastic job going over the more theoretical aspects of this guy’s blatant sexism and his misunderstandings of the most basic concepts of feminist equality, I thought it might be a good idea to address some factual inaccuracies:

“Domestic violence against men is nearly as common as domestic violence against women”

Wrong. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, domestic violence against women occurs far more frequently and is far more severe. Furthermore, more than 1 in 4 women have reported they’ve been physically assaulted by an intimate partner during some point in their lifetime and women are the victims of intimate partner violence homicides in over 75% of the cases.

“Men are treated unfairly when it comes to child support”

Men typically pay more in child support than women do primarily because women are the care providers and raise the children. After a divorce, men are significantly advantaged when it comes to finances and suffer a far lesser decline in standard of living than women do. Furthermore, the income of women is significantly less than it is of men. Many courts, the majority of which are dominated by males, balance the lesser care men contribute to their children with financial support.

“Men are treated unfairly when it comes to reproductive rights”

Men should not have any reproductive rights when it comes to the decision to have an abortion. It’s not their body. They will never have a uterus or be pregnant. It’s time to move on. Come on.

“It’s only men who have to sign up for the selective service.”

This is not an issue of sexism against men but against women. The U.S. Supreme Court in Rostker v. Goldberg (1981), which considered the issue of the eligibility of women for the draft, ruled that since women are ineligible for combat, they are ineligible for the draft as well. The reasoning behind women being ineligible for combat rests in sexist generalizations about women’s bodies and their physical capacities, namely, that since most women are not as physically strong as men and are built smaller, they shouldn’t be eligible for combat at all. Instead of setting physical requirements for women which would put them on par with men, even those who are as physically strong or stronger than most men, are not allowed to serve. Read the language used. It’s beyond sexist.

“Women are sentenced to 40% less prison time than men”

This is actually pretty exaggerated. For juveniles, girls receive harsher legal treatment than boys for status offenses but somewhat more lenient treatment for more serious offenses. For adults, women appear to be treated more leniently than men at the sentencing stage only. “Overall, they are 10-25% less likely than men convicted of similar crimes to be sent to prison or jail, although the two sexes receive similar terms of incarceration once the decision is made to put them behind bars.” (Barkan, Steven E., Law and Society (2009), pg. 233)

“Men don’t sit around all day looking for ways to discriminate against women”

This guy is missing the point entirely. Sexism and patriarchy are engrained into our very system. In addition to what others have already written, capitalist patriarchy plays a significant role in fundamentally setting up social systems such that women are inherently placed at a disadvantage. From Eitzen, Zinn, and Smith’s Social Problems (2009), to put it in simple to understand terms:

[Marx and Engels] wrote that industrialism and the shift to a capitalist economy widened the gap between the power and value of men and women. As production moved out of the home, the gendered division of labor left men with the greater share of economic and other forms of power.

Macro-structural theories explain gender inequality as an outcome of how women and men are tied to the economic structure of society. These theories say that women’s economic role in society is a primary determinant of their overall status. The division between domestic and public spheres of activity gives men and women different positions of advantage and disadvantage. Their roles in the labor force and in the family are independent. Whether or not they work outside of the home, women do the vast majority of child care and household labor. Men are freed from these responsibilities. Women’s responsibilities for domestic labor limit their association with the resources that are highly valued. Men’s economic obligations in the public sphere assume them control of highly valued resources and give rise to male privilege.

In capitalist societies, the domestic-public split is even more significant because highly valued goods and services are exchanged in the public, not the domestic, sphere. Women’s domestic labor, although important for survival, ranks low in prestige and power because it does not produce exchangeable commodities. Because of the connections between the class relations of production (capitalism) and the hierarchical gender relations of its society (patriarchy), the United States is a capitalist patriarchy where male supremacy keeps women in subordinate roles at work and in the home.

You need to understand the very basics of capitalist patriarchy before you can even begin to understand the rest of gender discrimination because it lays the very foundations for such. This guy says that men have always historically done the vast majority of the work, they’ve been the “bread winners.” The position women were put into was to maintain the home and raise the children. This is labor. This is work, as Marx perfectly described. In actuality, women perform 66% of the world’s work, but receive only 11% of the world’s income, and own only 1% of the world’s land. Furthermore, men may do the killing in war but 90% of all war causalities are civilians and over 75% of such are women and children.

Men really have it tough. Everyone else who contributed to this discussion nailed it.

(Source: sinidentidades)