Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: ShaktiSama
The formative influences that cause misogyny are societal norms which I term "patriarchal". Patriarchal cultures are those which hold women inferior to and naturally subordinate to men: patriarchal ideology is forced upon a population through political, economic, religious, and interpersonal means.
I would agree that such norms have a formative influence that can account for things like the Middle East, and even to some extent our Western societies. But living in a country which has had strong women in positions of power for a long time, I would have to say that I have also seen some cases where it is not the pervasive influence of patriarchial thought that has caused a man to turn out a misogynist. From that, it seems reasonable to attempt to identify those reasons, and to try to address those, as well. And the things AquaticSub commented on (feminist who are not content with the idea of equality, but in fact wish to force women to choose roles that conform to a set doctrine, rather than making their own choices) are among the things that I have seen creating an aversion to feminism that has, in more than a few cases, led to the development of a misogynistic disposition. That is part of the reason that I suggest that it may be that such things are harmful to the agenda agreed on by all subgroups of feminism: gender equality.
As a question I have yet to form a fully developed opinion on, perhaps you would care to speculate as to how this cultural heritage and its transmission ties in with how most pre-women's-suffrage societies appear to have a primarily matrilineal transmission of culture via child rearing?
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Women who behave as if they are not inferior to men in a patriarchal system can be offensive and repulsive to anyone, male or female, whose worldview reflects patriarchal ideology.
No argument there. It is a clearly present problem. My only contention has been, to restate it more clearly and with more detail as to the reasoning, that cognitive science suggests that thought patterns are changed at a certain level of tension. To clarify: if the stimulus is too familiar, no change occurs, while if the stimulus exceeds a certain threshold, the mind rejects it. When this is applied in therapy, it effectively means that one has to move outside the comfort zone to realize improvement, but moving into the aversion zone sets the whole thing back, and the steps back register more strongly than the steps ahead.
If you would be inclined to agree with me that misogyny, and even "mere" patriarchal thought, can be viewed as a pathology, then this argument would appear to make a lot of sense from the purely functional angle of using the state of the art in knowledge of how the human mind works in order to most effectively realize the desired shift in thinking.
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The fact that a woman does not behave the way your mother, sisters, or submissive lovers have conditioned you to believe women ought to behave does not make her categorically evil, nor does it make her philosophy or politics "wrong".
Of course not. I haven't suggested that, either. For that matter, my mother and sister have been anything but submissive. They've both been equal partners in their respective relationships, and are both gainfully employed. And among submissive play partners (I have only had one lover, and we're still together after 10 years), the one that delighted the most in male dominance (not to be confused with the notion of male supremacy, which I find absolutely distasteful as someone wired for dominance; let them be dominants from whatever qualities they possess that inspire submission, rather than inventing some notion of superiority to avoid stepping up to the plate on their own) was actually just back from our equivalent of the USMC (yes, we have women in the military, on the front lines if they wish) when I scened with her, and she was the one who hit on me in the first place. She tried to switch during the scene, and I responded in a manner that I- in retrospect- shouldn't have done from the perspective of common BDSM ethics (that I weren't familiar with at the time; the innocence of youth and all that). Yet, that instinctive response did it for her, more than anything else. Presumably, you've had similar experiences.
In any case the point is simply that I've never related to women as being submissive, but individual submissives.
And most of the women in my life have not been submissive; I'm not all that active in scening, dating, etc.
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And there is no reason to assume that a patriarchal society has any moral right to dictate the terms by which its female members seek or exercise power.
I didn't.
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I would argue, in fact, that people who are slaves to the ideology that creates the problem of inequality in the first place are those least qualified to decide how the problem should be solved. It was not up to the racist whites (nor their collaborators among the African population) of South Africa to decide how Apartheid should be ended.
Quite agreed.
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People must achieve freedom on own terms, not on terms dictated by their oppressors. The latter is not freedom. It is simply condescension.
Absolutely.
And if you disregard the players, that is also a sentiment shared by Goreans. Not to derail anything, but my own initial impression of them was more negative than yours, simply because the players outnumber the rest by orders of magnitude. There is quite a risk of getting an impression that male supremacy, rather than individual excellence, is the idea. But that is little different than how exposure to only countries like Iran and Afghanistan can give an impression of Islam that is rather different than what I imagine those women that willingly joined Muhammed must have seen him preaching; or how exposure only to the stereotypical Catholic doctrine of sin and guilt would give a different impression than a full reading of the original texts, including the apocrypha and the gnostic texts; or how exposure only to fairly privileged women complaining about retailers not subsidizing the costs of pink mobile phones will give an entirely different impresssion than exposure to the women who are risking their lives to educate women in the Middle East in order to help them start a liberation movement of their own.
Probably not terribly interesting to you, but my response to your characterization of that lifestyle elsewhere was somewhat analogous to how you would respond to someone asserting that feminism is about female supremacy and lesbianism. An accusation you've most likely faced at some point, and which is clearly not the case.
Regardless, that's tangential at best; just seemed like communication was flowing well enough to explain a previous miscommunication.
Health,
al-Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: I am a feminist. - 
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