#I'd be pretty disturbed if what the article claimed is true

[sweetie147]

Do people like... check where their information online is coming from? Oh wait why would they it's the gd internet 😐

Just saw someone with a post that claimed a hospital in Canada was unveiling plans to allow minors (so under 18 years of age) with terminal illnesses to consent to medically assisted death (allegedly) with the caption: very evil-hearted.

This is already setting off massive alarm bells just from the wording alone, so I do some minor digging, and what do I find? They ID as a born-again Christian.

Now look. I have nothing against religious people in general, and not all religious people are socially conservative, but like...

You do realize they're probably just stirring the pot with ragebait, right?

Especially considering the OG article was a poor-quality screenshot AND there were no links to said article in the OG post.

Most posts about controversial topics that I've seen making legitimate points on Tumblr always have a link to the article, clear and good quality screenshots of pertinent points in the article, and a long caption that explains the article more in-depth.

This had none of the above. And oh boy, does it smell fishy 🤔

[liskantope]

Okay sure, I probably shouldn't be so flippant in the way I talk about men and women being equal under the law (modulo reproductive rights stuff, arguably), because there are quite probably some things on the book in "regulations" and other arenas that are still discriminatory and not particularly visible to the public nor are in any of my areas of knowledge. I wonder also whether and where higher collision insurance rates for young men (on the rationale that men drive more recklessly than women; I haven't looked up anything recent but definitely remember being aware of this when I was a late-teens/early-20's man) fits into these categories of discrimination. It at least seems quite compatible with basing regulations on an assumption that only men drive their way into car accidents, which certainly leads to forms of gender discrimination without needing to be explained away as "Society just likes men more than women!".

The drugs regulation you mention strikes me as odder in terms of rationale, and I would want to find a full explanation (not just in terms of what it says on its face but an honest dive into what made drug company procedures this way and how they justify staying this way). I'm disturbed and/but intrigued and/but somewhat skeptical of the longstanding claim that the prevailing explanatory mindset in medicine is that women's medical problems just don't matter as much as men's. I'd like to see this unpacked sometime because I have a hard time figuring how it fits in with my model of patriarchy (I've done some unpacking of the almost-certainly-partly-valid claim that women's claims of pain and discomfort are taken less seriously but haven't written it down and at the moment don't really want to take time to veer into this). I have learned to lean on the skeptical side when claims are made about medical regulations being discriminatory against women: I recall the "tampon tax" claim seeming to be debunked pretty convincingly as a complete myth; and I recall a few years ago that there were memes/articles passed around complaining that a male birth control product was taken off the market for being dangerous while it's always been treated as fine for female birth control medication to be dangerous, and both Scott Alexander and one of my more progressive feminist friends actually posting a rebuttal that exposed it as highly distorted. Some similar claims may well be true, but there always seem to be answers to them amid levels of complication that are moderately difficult to access and apparently harder for anyone to talk about objectively.

(The motto for my blog should really be "at least thinks he's quite good at dissecting social beliefs/mindsets/phenomena and intellectual fallacies but epistemically helpless/lazy/unconfident at investigating the actual facts of any matter that isn't related to linguistics, pure mathematics, or a few other really narrow things. Sigh.)

I want to add that one of the reasons I've rarely heard mention of the above type of issue which you brought up is that it seems to take up almost none of the oxygen in the room of gender-inequality discourse (even when feminist issues were much more in vogue 5-10 years ago; nowadays feminist discourse itself takes up a rather small portion of social justice activism rhetoric): most of everything seems to be about purely social issues with some concern about women's reproductive rights getting some space.

A lot of other regulatory/legal-type inequalities between genders/sexes, I think, come down to biologically female bodies being quite different from biologically male ones, in ways that generally advantage the male ones, and laws regulating things that generally can only be done with female bodies even when there are analogues for male bodies. Abortion regulations would fall under this category in an extreme sense, and the reason I've said "arguably" when I've brought it up above is that it's debatable whether this could be called legal discrimination against any gender. But they certainly provide an extremely important woman's issue and I tend to be strongly against regulations even for reasons beyond them hurting women harder and more directly than other people.

Oh wait, same sender again...

I just remembered another psych-out that I've become over-familiar with:

"When we finally over-throw the patriarchy, then women can be happy and live freely!"

Nevermind that free is often a state of mind. A person can be free in body, but shackled in spirit and mind. A person can also be shackled in the flesh, but free-spirited.

I feel like this particular psych-out actually contributes to the transtrender psych-out. People get so tired of 'waiting for the patriarchy to crumble'.... that they just try to deal with this truly-fucking-imaginary obstacle in a different way.

Don't get me wrong... sometimes women get shit for stupid fucking reasons, but at least in America... women are free in the law. (Other than the dumb fuckin recent overturn, but I don't recognize that.) I just really feel like the way that a lot of feminist bloggers on tumblr express themselves... is with a lot of despair and cynicism. The problem is not with the act of sharing the statistics of violence and discrimination.

The thing I have a problem with is how they 'frame' it. I remember that it used to be common tell little girls that they were strong, and capable of handling anything that life throws at them if they believe in themselves and work hard. At least, that it's better than doing nothing and falling into atrophy.

I think actually, you wrote about this sort of stuff, and I really, really enjoyed that.

If I looked at those statistics alone, I would see a challenge.

But looking at it with added tumblr-feminist commentary is like..... I think they are trying to prove 'how bad they have it' to men (or conservatives). They're not thinking about the effect their words might have on other women (or women of different dispositions). I just don't like all this 'despairing in attempt to be taken seriously'.

When I think about that behaviour, it makes me want to tell someone who is doing that: "Hey, if someone isn't going to take you seriously the first few times, they aren't worth groveling for. Stop asking them to care about you, and just live your own life! It's yours! No one else can make you live it a certain way! You have to choose to comply!"

I don't know, I feel disconnected from this strain of 'underground women's culture'. It's something from the past, from when women were considered unequal to men. I can put forth my own opinions like a big boy. I don't know, I feel like, in the women's world... I'm living in 3000 AD, and these types of women are still living in 1805 AD. It's probably a cultural thing, because most of these women were probably raised in religious families (which tend to have stronger gendered expectations). I just feel like they'd resent me for not having to go through the pain that they did... which is tragic, because feminism is supposed to be uplifting women. Instead, these types of people use it to tear other people down. Then at least.. we're all living in shitty ruins. Ha ha!

I find it kind of depressing how many times I've seen this type of feminist get this critique, and they turn around and accuse the critic of either being A MAN (thus unable to COMPREHEND the intricate inner-workings of a woman's mind. [HOW.... OLD-FASHIONED!]), or of just not reading enough of their literature, or not being exposed to the right stuff.... or not 'having the spirit of women's liberation'. "Hey! Maybe I don't need to tear myself down like you, to build myself back up. Maybe I can just keep building, and building, and building...

Maybe more girls should keep building, instead of focusing on other people's opinions of them. Maybe what other people say shouldn't be important to your sense of self!"

I don't know, damn... shit's depressing. One day, you care about feminism... next day, someone's telling you, "YOU'LL NEVER BE HAPPY BECAUSE YOU WERE BORN A GIRL, AND WE LIVE IN A MAN'S MAN'S MAN'S WORLD! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" I guess it's also funny that if you pay attention to feminist blog circles, you can see the trends of them despairing... but then you can also see other feminists denying that any feminist would ever wallow in despair. It's like, "you don't speak for every other feminist out there. Feminists are individual human beings, and thus subject to human faults. Feminism does not make someone freaking immortal or faultless. It's not a fairy-tale. It's real life." Idk, idk. I feel like they deal in symbolism... rather than reality.

This is another one (from the same asker as previous) that I feel I have to post because it makes good points -- many of which I've tried to make over the years -- in a fresh way. (Actually, ironically, even after so many very lengthy asks regarding gender stuff, I'm unclear on your gender, and it's okay if you don't feel comfortable sharing, but if I had to make a guess it would be that I'm hearing from a woman's perspective here?) I wouldn't put everything the way you do: I'm not at all sure of the connection you suggest between frustration that the patriarchy isn't crumbling and eagerness to affirm a different gender identity, although it's an interesting suggestion. And I do think there are plenty of problems that even Western women face that should be treated as important (even though a lot of feminists appear to come from a West-centric mindset that lacks the perspective that some far more severe forms of oppression are happening in other parts of the world), and there are forms of sexism still embedded in our culture that hurt men as well as women, so I'm perfectly on board with We Still Need Feminism. But yes, under the law (arguably apart from restrictions on reproductive rights, of course, as you say), the right for equality has pretty much been won for a while, it seems.

Which I think has a lot to do with the evolution of feminism and other forms of (lowercase-s-and-j) social justice movements over the decades from a high-agency-ist mindset ("since group X is unequal under the law and the rationale is that they need to be treated like children, we need to show that they have agency") to a low-agency-ist mindset ("since what we now have to focus on for group X is ways that they're still oppressed which are invisible to some outsiders, we need to show ways in which their capacity to do certain things is limited"). It stretches to a ton of areas other than feminism, of course. It's been a recurring theme in my writing since 2016-2017. But the only time I recall making a full-blown effortpost focusing only on how this can be applied to feminism is in late 2018 with "'Can' vs. 'can't' feminism" which may be my previous discussion of the topic that you said you enjoyed (and here's a briefer follow-up on the same theme). I'm kind of proud of the just-linked effortpost because I think it was well liked, although that may just mostly be because "women-can feminism" vs. "women-can't feminism" seem to go down well as conceptual handles as opposed to the very closely related "high-agency-ism" vs. "low-agency-ism" which I always perceive to instigate subtle eye-rolls.

I feel like they deal in symbolism… rather than reality.

Well, yes. That sums up a lot of my beef with a whole ton of activist rhetoric in general.