May 19 2013

Why aren’t more men insulted by the low standards we set for them?

If he changes a diaper, he’s father of the year.

If he cooks something, anything, he’s a chef.

If he marries, but otherwise continues to live pretty much as he has to that point, he’s suddenly respectable.

If he continues to pay a child’s ball game into adulthood, he gets paid a six figure salary.

If he gets a B.A., he’s an expert in his field.

If he writes a book full of incoherence and grammatical mistakes, he gets (edited and then) published.

 

We don’t expect men to pick up after themselves.

We don’t expect them to be sensitive to other people’s emotions, or even be aware of  their own.

We don’t expect them to be aware of, let alone appreciative of, natural beauty.

We don’t expect them to be interested in children.

We don’t expect them to be in control of their sexual impulses or their aggressive impulses.

 

Additions welcome.

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May 12 2013

Take Her Seriously

I used to think that the problem with rape was that women weren’t being explicit – they weren’t actually saying no, partly because men weren’t actually asking.  Perhaps because there’s (still?) something shameful about sex that makes people reluctant to come right out and talk about it.  Or maybe that would destroy the romance.  Whatever.

I still think Continue reading

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May 12 2013

Child Support Insurance – What an Intriguing Idea!!

“For guys who inexplicably want to do the thing that makes babies without wanting to support the inevitable babies, the obvious solution would be child support insurance — 0 to 18 plus college and professional school to say, age 30. They would have to sit down with their insurance agent and describe their sex lives in detail so that an appropriate premium could be calculated. Women could ask to see guys’ proof of insurance just as if they were Highway Patrol. In case of pregnancy women would receive regular monthly checks, without having to see chumpass motherfucker again.  Letting his insurance company support his child would likely raise a guy’s rates into the stratosphere, however, making future intercourse prohibitively expensive.”

Hector B. May 31, 2010  I Blame the Patriarchy

 

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May 08 2013

War Rape

It’s not just an enthusiastic spillover of violence and aggression.  The act of sexual intercourse is too specific, too far removed from the other acts of wartime violence and aggression.  Shooting a person twenty-five times instead of once or twice would be such a spillover; forcing your penis or something else into a woman’s vagina is not.  Furthermore, war rape is often not a spontaneous, occasional occurrence; apparently it’s quite premeditated and systematic. Continue reading

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May 04 2013

Ethics without Philosophers

Could someone without a business degree become a marketing consultant?  Then how is it that people without philosophy degrees are becoming ethics consultants? [1]  Is it that people don’t know that Ethics is a branch of Philosophy just as Marketing is a branch of Business?  Doubtful.  Is it just the typical male overstatement of one’s expertise? [2]  Perhaps.  Is it that people think they already know right from wrong, they learned it as children, there’s really no need for any formal training in ethics?  Possible.  I have certainly met that attitude in business ethics classes and ethics committees. [3]  Or is it that ethics consultants (advisors, officers, practitioners, and so on) don’t really act as consultants about ethics?  They act as consultants about managing ethical behavior.  No, not even that.  Ethical consultants, practitioners, officers, focus on how to increase the likelihood that employees will follow some specific professional code of ethics or, more likely, the ethical rules the company’s elite want them to follow. [4] [5]

As far as I can see, business ethics taught by business faculty, ethics programs run by managers, and so on  –  any applied ethics taught by non-philosophers  –  is superficial at best.  [6] First, following a code if just an appeal to custom, an appeal to tradition, which philosophers consider a weak basis, even an actual error in reasoning: just because it’s common to do it that way, doesn’t mean it’s right; just because you’ve always done it that way doesn’t mean it’s right. 

Second, legal moralism is prevalent: if it’s legal, it’s right, and if it’s not illegal, it’s not wrong.  Few philosophers (and I daresay few intelligent people) accept this equivalence of moral rightness and legality.  After all, slavery was once legal, and even at that time many considered it wrong and had excellent arguments to support their position (which is, to some extent, why the law changed  –  ethics should determine law, not the other way around).

Third, the so-called ‘media test’ and ‘gut test’ are essentially nothing but appeals to intuition, which is nothing more than childhood conditioning that makes us say X ‘feels’ wrong.  I think it far better to approach ethical issues with thought, to consider the many rational approaches to making decisions about right and wrong, such as an appraisal of values, principles, consequences, and so on. Continue reading

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May 03 2013

Being Josh (Monday Night Basketball)

It’s Monday night basketball, an all-comers pick-up game, supposed to be fun and a good sweat.  But week after week I steel myself against the anger, the frustration of not knowing how to correct the problem, and the despair of not being able to even begin to do just that.  Eventually it happens: this time it’s Josh who yells at me to switch, to guard the new grade niner who’s just come onto the court to sub for the guy who’d been guarding Josh and Josh would guard the guy I’d been guarding.

I am distracted, as always, by the insult, the unwarranted assumption that I’m always the worst player there (even worse than the new grade niners) (although I’m thirty-five and played basketball for all of grade nine, and ten, eleven, twelve, and thirteen), and by the faulty logic that weak offensive players* are weak defensive players and should therefore guard other weak offensive players. Continue reading

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Apr 29 2013

How to End War

At one time, bank tellers and secretaries had a certain prestige – the time when such positions were held by men.  Schoolteachers used to be schoolmasters – before women entered the classroom.  People who boast that many doctors in Russia are women fail to mention that doctoring in Russia, well, someone’s gotta do it.

The thing is this: whenever women enter an occupation, it becomes devalued.  It loses glory.  It loses funding.  It loses media coverage.  It becomes unpopular, even invisible.  So if we were serious, really serious, about ending war, we’d fill the military ranks with women.  When becoming a soldier has about as much appeal as becoming a waitress (another archetype of the service sector industry) –

An added bonus would be that if the enemy army were (still) male, they’d start killing themselves.  Because better that than be killed by a woman.  It would certainly save on ammunition.

On the other hand, if the enemy army were (also) female, well, more often than not, the wars would probably just sort of fizzle out into some sort of stalemate.  We just don’t have the equipment for pissing contests.  But since no one would really care, or even know, because it would be a woman thing, well, that’d be okay.          We could live with that.


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Apr 25 2013

Dr. Frankenstein, meet Dr. Spock

Thanks to genetic research, we may soon see people with the money to do so making sure their kids are born-to-succeed – parents paying to guarantee their kids have the right stuff.  I’m not talking about a straightened spine or a functional optic nerve.  I’m talking about designer kids: those made with healthy bodies, intelligent minds, and perhaps a certain specific ability to boot. Continue reading

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Apr 25 2013

On “hitting on”

I bet a man came up with that term as well.

But what most intrigues me here is how?  I mean, what exactly made the first man to introduce the term think that approaching a woman for, what, a date? sex? was like hitting (on) her???

It does not bode well when the very initiation of a relationship is imbued with violence even in the terminology.

 

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Apr 21 2013

Barbie – great post at gendertrender

Great post here at gendertrender. https://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/life-size-barbie-scary/

Is it wrong for me to love most the line “If Barbie was a real woman, she’d have to walk on all fours”?

 

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