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Beats me. Maybe queens of slay. Like all such popular slogans expressing the feminist ideal of limitless empowerment, I find it ridiculous, a facet of a promise that is unwarrantable at scale, and inevitably leads to disillusionment and personal failure.
I love the indignation here. Indeed, who am I to dare think... think what? It's very quickly traced from the underdefined abstract claim («women should accept responsibility for the reproduction of the group») to the specific attack on personal agency, indeed an assault: that @gemmaem should be forced to bear a baby. (Probably my baby? Some incel's baby? Yuck!) @FarNearEverywhere, to whom I was responding, offers another charming strawman:
What to do! When one side has a game-breaking move «act as if you are afraid of rape», burned into the brainstem and summoned frivolously – no discourse is possible.
My intuitive ideal is maximum agency and optionality for every individual that the society can sustain, in terms of actual material opportunities and not bickering over spoils in a zero-sum squabble. Honestly, if it were possible, I'd have relieved you, and everyone else, of the necessity to gestate an entire baby (or part of a baby, I guess). But surprisingly, women aren't too enthusiastic about artificial womb research either, despite attempts to frame it as an empowering development. Imagine if I suggested that, say, @2rafa's list, admittedly uncomfortably hardcore even for me, is augmented as follows: childless people who are otherwise subject to those career-damaging sanctions and prohibitive taxes can instead 1) postpone their reproduction, 2) pay directly to the «national ectogenesis fund» and 3) commit to have a child once the technology is ready. Men and women alike.
Do you think this would've been politically feasible?
And thanks for another illustration.
Well, since you can't even explain what power it is that women have that you're complaining about, I suppose there is no substance here for me to argue with. You've made one vague gesture towards @2rafa's list of admirably gender-neutral constraints while simultaneously declaring it, understandably, "too hardcore."
You can't even really articulate the premise on which your misogyny rests, let alone substantiate it.
I think I explain it well enough. I can try to explain again from first principles. Power is asymmetry of control between agents. Power of women specifically is the power to tank any political project they don't like (say, one increasing men's rights) and shut down a discussion they don't favor (say, one casting women in unflattering light) with a gratuitous refusal to compromise or engage in good faith; the essence of this is captured in twitter catchphrases like «this makes me feel unsafe», or in your behavior toward me here. It is power because it reliably, irrespective of merits of each case, extracts sympathy out of women and out of men, producing a predictable asymmetry and skewing outcomes. This power is an active application of the well-known "women are wonderful" effect, which is in turn explained by evolutionary dynamics created by parental investment inequality, which you have already alluded to (but which, in modern society, doesn't necessarily hold outside of the context of gestation).
The premise of my «misogyny», or actually my argument about there being no realistic solution to undesirable societal effects of feminism, is that women (except members of retrograde religious societies), with you being an apt example, feel entitled to behave this way toward interlocutors, for good reason, namely that «the society» simultaneously encourages this self-serving mean-girl behavior and pretends it's compatible with the authority of an adult.
I will opt out of substantiating the link between feminism and adverse effects discussed (disproportionate, growing inability of young men to form relationships, high divorce rate, low TFR, etc.) because, again, I think the effortpost by @gorge, linked above, suffices as an introduction.
If I were to propose anything like a plan to «impose responsibility» on women in the intended sense, it'd be not so much about me being in control of your womb, «sex for meat» and other blatantly hostile potshots you ladies have come up with, as about nationalism and extended families, in following with the only example of a large, prosperous secular society without those issues that I know. Naturally I also know this cannot be engineered. 2rafa's plan, on top of being hardcore, is also unworkable, at least not in a democratic society.
Still a bit light on the details. Are you too afraid of my mean-girl power to explain which men's rights women are taking away, or would you be willing to elaborate?
As for "casting women in an unflattering light," well, your premise that women are too mean and irrational to be allowed to participate in politics certainly does that! And I suppose you will claim that any counterargument that I make is merely an appeal to "women are wonderful." But I think my conduct speaks for itself, to any reasonable observer. Your accusation of habitual bad-faith argumentation on my part is unfounded.
Not ilforte and not a direct example, but even if no rights are directly being taken away you can still have a subset of the population being reduced to second class status, see Jim Crow laws in the US and "separate but equal" wherein black people were normally given access to inferior versions of the things white people got, even though on paper they both got access to the same things (e.g. the black waiting room at a train station was worse than the white one, even though on paper both blacks and whites got a waiting room at the train station). And while on its own having a worse train station waiting room is a very minor inconvenience, multiply this by 100x with variants of this happening all over society and you suddenly have a very real issue on your hands.
Same thing with men/women in modern society, it is currently structured in such a way that even though on paper everyone is equal, men by and large get the short end of the stick even for things that hurt them more (e.g. more targeted help for female homeless, even though there are far more male homeless than female homeless) where if the genders were inverted would be considered a huge issue needing national attention (see how at the moment in the US the college enrolment gender imbalance is more lopsided in female favour than it was in male favour when Title IX was introduced as a remedy to the issue). Now you can (and people do) always make arguments about why we shouldn't interfere in the current situation, but those arguments also mostly applied when women were getting the short end of the stick, and they weren't considered good enough excuses then, but by and large are considered so now (well, except in those STEM subjects which still have more men than women).
Well, I would certainly be in favour of also having homeless programs that target men. I agree that there is a fair bit of momentum behind addressing inequities faced by women, and less momentum behind addressing inequities faced by men, and I am definitely open to arguments about which such inequities are particularly important (successful suicide attempts would be another obvious urgent one).
So I agree that there are issues that need addressing, here, but I don't think denying women the vote is likely to be an important step towards that. And although some feminists are threatened by the notion that men might also face inequities, I think the broader public, including women, is generally not inclined to view such things with outrage or bad faith argumentation, so much as an unwarranted level of neglect which we can work to overcome.
I don't think your local interlocutors have advocated for stripping women of the right to vote (though maybe someone has elsewhere in the thread). I've read them more as hoping for a shift in power at the level of culture and norms, but basically disparaging that this is possible.
Personally, I'm somewhat optimistic that we will find a better balance in the long term, but believe the short term will be bumpy. We've only had gender equality in the west for maybe half a century, and that equality is not perfect because some aspects of patriarchy have inertia and most feminine privilege remains unexamined due to the nature of the feminist movement. I think feminism is mostly downstream of the industrial revolution, but cultural evolution can take awhile and I think we still have a ways to go before we have adjusted to the economic substraight of the information economy.
I have, indeed, been strictly informed that it is not that women ought to be stripped of the right to vote but that it should not have been given to them in the first place in the way that it was. Reluctant pragmatic acceptance of my rights is obviously not as reassuring as actual support for them would be, but that is where that conversation stands.
Yeah, I saw that after I posted that response.
I think the impulse to say that the female franchise was a bad idea comes from the observation that women tend to be more prone to certain behaviors which lead to a toxic politics (women are generally the front-line enforcers of orthodoxy), which I think is actually true, but conveniently ignores the fact that men have their own set of such behaviors that are arguably worse (our violence at the personal level extends to supporting more state violence and jingoism). I think that mixed gender friend groups are generally healthier than single gender, and I tend to think that the same is true for the political realm as well as each gender provides some balance for the other.
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