Only Children

[grizzleb]

Nope, look again, 50% by single mums. There will be plenty of two parent households where this is going on, so technically more women. Again, you jump to point out that men are the baddies. When I basically said all those things you did about women (though not in as many words).

I don't think this is going anywhere, you're missing my point too. I agree with:

NOOO. You still don't get it. I'm really beginning to think is a futile discussion. I NEVER said patriarchy was "engineered" by men. As with any longstanding cultural tradition, patriarchy is something that largely came into being as a product of a bunch of accidents--cultural, social, economic, agricultural, evolutionary, biological, historical, military, etc--

It's this bit
which added up over time and coalesced into one significant factor unto itself.

How can it actually become something which seperates from all the accidents? I don't agree with this monolithic thing you call patriarchy. That's basically it.

It's like Capitalism for Marxists. Yes you 'want to fight Capitalism', but what do you actually want? You want fairer wages for workers, you want less bonuses for bankers, etc. Well say that! Because ideological language does nothing to help your cause. Anyway, you don't agree so whatever.

 

[grizzleb]

Research has concluded that there IS something wrong with some men's brains, and with some women's brains (but far, far fewer of them), when it comes to violence and psychopathy. It has also concluded, in the case of men, but not in the case of women (though there is some evidence that female criminals also have higher levels of testosterone than average), that male criminals--but not ALL men--probably have something wrong or abnormal going on within their endocrine system.

Get your facts straight. Nobody is saying that all men are bad because some men have pituitary problems, for fuck's sake.

Get your facts straight.

I didn't dispute any of that from a factual point of view. It's the context with which it's put that I have issue with.

 

[nomadthethird]

Nope, look again, 50% by single mums. There will be plenty of two parent households where this is going on, so technically more women. Again, you jump to point out that men are the baddies. When I basically said all those things you did about women (though not in as many words).

I don't think this is going anywhere, you're missing my point too. I agree with:

NOOO. You still don't get it. I'm really beginning to think is a futile discussion. I NEVER said patriarchy was "engineered" by men. As with any longstanding cultural tradition, patriarchy is something that largely came into being as a product of a bunch of accidents--cultural, social, economic, agricultural, evolutionary, biological, historical, military, etc--

It's this bit
which added up over time and coalesced into one significant factor unto itself.

How can it actually become something which seperates from all the accidents? I don't agree with this monolithic thing you call patriarchy. That's basically it.

It's like Capitalism for Marxists. Yes you 'want to fight Capitalism', but what do you actually want? You want fairer wages for workers, you want less bonuses for bankers, etc. Well say that! Because ideological language does nothing to help your cause. Anyway, you don't agree so whatever.

What on earth does "50% by single mums" mean?

That is not even a statistically possible measurement.

Can I have some sort of link to your sources, btw? Where are you getting this information?

There won't be "technically more women" doing anything, unless you can prove there are with some kind of verifiable, accurate, and trustworthy statistical data.

Get a clue, Grizzle. Men do statistically commit the vast majority of violent crime on earth. If that makes them "the baddies", then so be it. It's not my damn fault.

Patriarchy IS NOT "MONOLITHIC". It's a widely used, broadly applicable, not even slightly contested term from anthropology. Beyond that, I've given you ample detailed and specific examples of what I mean by it, and what needs changing in our culture. Please tell me this is a joke and you're not serious right now...

 

[nomadthethird]

I didn't dispute any of that from a factual point of view. It's the context with which it's put that I have issue with.

What "issue"??? How can you possibly have an issue with facts simply because you don't like how they sound? I'm sorry this conflicts with your mental image of how the world is, but men with higher testosterone levels are more likely to commit crimes. Criminals, on average, have much higher testosterone levels than men who are not criminals, who have testosterone levels nearer the 50th percentile.

There is no issue to take with this information. Unless you have some sort of data or you've found some sort of methodological problems within the research (I dare you...)

 

[grizzleb]

http://divorcesupport.about.com/od/equalparenting/f/equalparenting1.htm

Yo I read it on dis yall. I couldn't find the original source but whatever.

I don't have a problem with these facts - the question is why are you presenting those bits of information at all? In what way are they relevant?

Fuck it, you're not even remotely interested in listening to what I'm saying.

 

[nomadthethird]

I'm presenting them because they are relevant and important.

Oh good lord, what a load of shit that is...a bunch of info about "fatherless homes" from studies that don't control for class and economic factors...brilliant!

Edit: By the way, that "statistic" about single mothers being 50% of the abusers was from a study done in one county in one state in the midwest. Hardly something you could generalize to the national level, and honestly the source was biased as hell to begin with...of the "poor women who don't get married to teh mens before they have sex are teh EVIL and TEH BADDDNESSs!!!" variety.

 

[grizzleb]

61% of all child abuse is committed by biological mothers
25% of all child abuse is committed by natural fathers
Statistical Source: Current DHHS report on nationwide Child Abuse

 

[nomadthethird]

Link please.

Here's some interesting info. (Gleaned from here.)

Regardless, we could spend all night finding conflicting data, but there's no point. Of course women abuse their kids. I've never said they didn't. I even said up there that women make up about 50% of all child molestors.

So what's your point? Annnddd??

You make no sense, Grizzle. You really have no coherent argument to make.

 

[grizzleb]

My point wasn't that women abuse more kids or they're bad. I'd attribute any difference down to purely social factors, economic or chance. You want to report the facts (which I don't dispute) that men are perpetrators of more violent crime and you don't seem to say that social factors are more than likely causes. It's guys and their fucked up testosterone. What relevance does it have to the conversation about male power structures anyway? Surely men being not in control of their own violent impulses totally negates the argument that there are deep rooted 'thingies' called patriarchy which are the real causes of rape. The links I posted about pre-frontal cortex damage were accurate but it doesn't really have any sway over what was being discussed.

 

[nomadthethird]

Yes it does hold sway. Biology is always with us, Grizzle, whether you like it or not.

I know that is not a fashionable thing to say. I know it's not going to win me any friends in the lit crit theeree community. And I don't particularly care.

 

[nomadthethird]

Anyway, nobody said that because testosterone is implicated in violent crime that criminals have "no control" over their actions.

You're making quite a leap there.

 

[grizzleb]

It's a thoroughly determinist way of looking at things. Surely you would admit that

 

[nomadthethird]

No it isn't. There are many factors that 'determine' our behavior, biology being only one---but a powerfully, extremely significant one. One that we can't escape, no matter how hard we try. One that, even if we modify it, we can never entirely circumvent.

It's no more "deterministic" to say that biological factors are part of what determines or affects human behavior than it is to say that social factors do.

 

[grizzleb]

Can you point me in the direction of some information about patriarchy as an anthropological term?

The wiki page concentrates on the feminist theory aspect.

 

[nomadthethird]

Why don't you try google?

"patriarchy" "anthropology"

Try google books even. You'll find plenty.

 

[grizzleb]

Cheers. This article seems to marry with what I've been saying

I want to argue something completely different. I want to reject the concept of patriarchy as at best a muddled term simply mean women’s oppression (in which case it cannot explain this oppression), and at worst a completely idealist notion which has no basis in material reality. I want to show that it is not men who “benefit” from the oppression of women but capital. I want to look at the way in which the family has changed, and how as it has changed women’s conception of themselves has also changed. Hopefully that will demonstrate that women’s continued oppression is not the result of male conspiracy (or an alliance between male workers and the capitalist class), but of the continuation of class society in every part of the world. It follows that I shall argue the “socialist” countries have no more in common with socialism than they have with women’s liberation.

http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=240

 

[nomadthethird]

That article is pretty lame, I'm sorry. It posits an even vaguer notion of "Capital" in place of a widely observed anthropological FACT called patriarchy. And it doesn't "marry" with anything you've said; it directly contradicts a lot of it, actually.

You STILL can't get what the meaning of a basic term is, and how it applies to the world, without adding a whole bunch of baggage about how you're personally getting "blamed" for things.

For the last time, nobody, but nobody, said patriarchy was "a male conspiracy."

Frankly, this shit is remedial.

 

[poetix]

"Patriarchy" is not only male dominance, but male dominance according to a particular distribution of power among the dominant/dominated. Not all males are dominant under patriarchy, but masculinity (a specific coding of maleness particular to patriarchy) is the medium through which dominance is transmitted from the top of the power hierarchy to the bottom; those who are in dominant positions within the overall power structure tend very strongly to be male (and, when not male, to reproduce masculine patterns of power ownership and use). Alongside this comes the coding of femininity as a set of attitudes, relational patterns etc. deemed appropriate for the dominated. (This is why "feminisation" is a considered bad thing to happen to a male person under patriarchy; to be in default of masculinity is to risk significant loss of status relative to the hierarchy).

The word "coding" is important in the above paragraph, which isn't a set of assertions about what men and women are really like: instead, it's a set of assertions about a set of assertions (more strongly, performatives) about what men and women are really like. Patriarchal codings of masculinity and femininity define stereotyped patterns of power relationship: force versus cunning (Henry Rollins's "All women are evil, all men are morons"), predation versus manipulation and so on. These stereotypes are writ large, in bold colours, in cultural representations of masculinity and femininity, but the representations are a sort of kids' Sunday cartoon supplement version of the actual dynamics. Real men and women behave in all kinds of interesting ways. But patriarchy persists as a social form by imposing a set of norms relative to which the behaviour of real men and women is judged, deviations noted and disciplined and so on.

Patriarchy has an interesting and slightly strange relationship to capitalism, since the latter doesn't actually require strongly hierarchical power relationships in order to function, and is at best parasitic on existing gender roles, divisions of labour etc. - increasingly, the behaviours, attitudes and coping strategies of the dominated (traits of the patriarchal stereotype "femininity") are being urged on the male workforce, for example.

 

[nomadthethird]

But Poetix, you just called all men baddies! How dare you?

Grizzle, next time you might want to read the studies you post before you post them. Here are the "conclusions" from the pubmed study you posted:

Clinically significant focal frontal lobe dysfunction is associated with aggressive dyscontrol, but the increased risk of violence seems less than is widely presumed. Evidence is strongest for an association between focal prefrontal damage and an impulsive subtype of aggressive behaviour.

That's an important part of the study, you know. The results.

 

[nomadthethird]

And just so you know, the reason all of the information about brain damage and aggression online will tend to be close to a decade old is because that hypothesis has mostly been picked apart at this point.

Sure, global, traumatic brain injury can drastically change a person's personality. But there's little evidence that the "aggression" evident in an adult's behavior is the result of a single focal brain injury. If this were the case (if damage to certain parts of the brain could cause otherwise good people to become violent and aggressive), you'd expect to see a huge discrepancy in the levels of violence among epileptics versus the general population, since epileptics tend to have all kinds of damage to the corpus collosum, often from an early age, and often extremely severe in nature. But you don't observe this. Epileptics, if anything, are somewhat less violent than average.

It's actually been suggested that brain injuries are likely to be noted in aggressive or violent men (more typically than 'violent' women, who exist in far lower numbers) because aggressive, violent men are more likely to do rash, impulsive things that cause them to injure themselves--for example, get in bar brawls, or fights, or fall of a building while drunk, or get in a drunk driving accident, or an accident while speeding, etc.