The Empowered Nerd.

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
So men do most of the murdering, practically all the raping.

Women don't tend to do these things quite so much and you have to ask why really.

Its a patriarchal arrangement. The fact that men kill each other doesnt change the gender hierarchy.

Yes of course. I'm not quibbling that. I very much doubt there has ever been a society in which men are not more prone to violence than women, even if the exact ratio varies from culture to culture. This is seen in any number of animal species. It's not an unfathomable mystery.

But we're talking about (dis)advantage and (dis)privilege here. Belonging to the gender that commits the great majority of murders hardly constitutes a privilege, does it? I mean, it's certainly a glaring asymmetry but it's not like a "yay, +1 for the guys!" kind of statistic.

Edit: luka may well be right that murder is so far outside any kind of social norm that it's not a useful thing to talk about in this context. Of course rape is far more common and much more likely to go unpunished, which remains a huge problem, but I hope I'm not being too starry-eyed in thinking society is, gradually, making some moves in the right direction on this count.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Well the perhaps was cos that's not right at the beginning, almost but not quite

Well yeah, before you get to that bit you've got God creating Adam as the star of the whole show and then making Eve as an afterthought to keep Adam company, have sex with him and darn his socks. Abrahamic religion has a very, very great deal to answer for. Not that patriarchy didn't independently arise in any number of other cultures, of course, but the kind that took root in the Near/Middle East during the bronze age has had a particularly pernicious influence on the state of the world today.

Edit: shame nomad ain't around, she'd have enjoyed this.
 
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Benny B

Well-known member
Not just privilege but power, force, possession.

If we take the example of rape, which is committed almost entirely by men, then there is an eroticisation of power and inequality.

A bit of fear helps to keep the hierarchy in place. Obviously there is a lot more to patriarchy than that, but male violence definitely has a big part to play.
 

Benny B

Well-known member
Womens lives are most in danger in abusive intimate partner relationships when she decides to leave him.

This feeling of entitlement to possess and control women is very patriarchal.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
As I said when I began this essay, because I work in comics, video games, and animation, I’ve watched 4chan grow from a group of people who could fit inside a single room to a worldwide collective.

But I should also note there’s another reason I was there from the beginning. It’s because, like so many young writers, journalists, and artists that are now despised by 4chan, I’m an inch away from their demographic.

When my father died after I left college in 2004, the last of my family’s wealth evaporated. And ever since then, I have lived well below the poverty line. (Even now, though I work as a Professor, this is true). But I had the benefit of an education.

It was not too difficult for me to imagine an alternate version of myself that didn’t happen to have that. Like the men in those studies, I drifted unemployed and unemployable for many years in my 20s. Often when I did have a job, I quit, realizing that, in fact, laboring behind the counter in the service economy for minimum wage paid less than sitting at home idle in front of my PC, waiting for a gig in the gig economy, posting and selling comics, or trading virtual items in online games.

And I knew, I was on balance, luckier than most. My private school and private college education was the deviation from the norm. My chances were better than the majority of people my age. Yet here I was stone broke. All I owned (and still own) is my college debt. So it wasn’t a surprise there were a teeming mass of people out there who knew with fatalistic certainty that there was no way out. Why not then retreat into your parents’ basements? And instead of despairing over trying and failing, celebrate not-trying? Celebrate retreating into the fantasy worlds of the computer. Steer into the skid — Pepe style. Own it. And why wouldn’t they retreat to a place like 4chan? To let their resentment and failures curdle into something solid?

 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Probably the fundamental way to distinguish Luke's view of life and my own is by comparing our favorite films.

The Matrix vs Ghostbusters

I forgot about this. Is this why you hate Bill Murray, luka, or is it the other way around?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Also like a frame from an Oglaf strip done in a different style.

It's very Oglaf, isn't it? I'm now expecting a punchline about a bi-curious dragon or a potion that makes your penis invisible or something like that.
 
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