I Debate Feminist Rebecca Traister in Atlanta Life Magazine
June 11th, 2007 by Glenn Sacks, MA for Fathers & Families
Feminist writer Rebecca Traister and I debated the question "Is America Bashing Its Men?" in the June issue of Atlanta Life Magazine (pictured). Traister is a staff writer at Salon.com who has written for the New York Times, New York Magazine, and others.
Traister and I didn't agree on much of anything. We were asked the following three questions:
1) Why are men’s issues in the areas of divorce, child custody and support, false accusations of rape, and discrimination in the workplace and in society almost never covered by the mainstream news media?
2) It seems atypical to see men in commercial advertisements represented as hard-working, competent individuals who are respected authority figures in the family. Why do you think this is?
3) What do you think accounts for the fact that girls are enrolling and graduating from college at a much higher rate than boys? Does this fact highlight other educational disparities between boys and girls?
In response to question 1, Traister asserted that men's and fathers' issues plenty of media attention, citing the Duke rape controversy and coverage of the Alec Baldwin and Anna Nicole Smith cases as evidence. My answer to the question was as follows:
"One, men don’t tend to complain, and most people don’t like to hear men complain. A woman who complains is a victim; a man who complains is a whiner.
"Two, the women’s groups are well-organized, have a long history, and a large influence on the mainstream media.
"Three, many of the injustices men face are in areas which can’t easily be made into short sound bites. The media doesn’t like to get into divorce/child custody because when you do, you’re immediately in the realm of he said/she said. Whatever you’re discussing is intensely personal and private, which invites legal problems.
"Four, media people are college educated, so they’ve been influenced by the anti-male feminism from their colleges’ Women’s Studies departments. They graduate saddled with misinformation about gender issues, and this makes them less likely to pay attention to men’s concerns.
"Five, while feminists would have us believe that men are complicit in a patriarchy designed to make themselves privileged, in reality most men care far more about women’s feelings and hurts than they do about men’s. When confronted with a problem facing women or a problem facing men, most men will address the former long before the latter."
The debate is available on line--click here and go to pages 12 through 15.
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June 11th, 2007 at 3:19 am
It's always the same with feminists ... find a way to look at the problem so that it is not a male-problem. I do not understand their hate, I just do not get it.
June 11th, 2007 at 5:57 am
...many of the injustices men face are in areas which can’t easily be made into short sound bites.
A lie can traverse the world before the truth can get it's boots on.
jw said...
It's always the same with feminists ... find a way to look at the problem so that it is not a male-problem. I do not understand their hate, I just do not get it.
I've frequently tried to raise the issue of youth suicide and the over representation of boys. The reaction is almost always to divert it to attempted suicides by girls. In Australia the issue has been invisible until a recent suicide pact by two girls in Western Aus. There is still no examination of the situation for boys. Warren Farrell and Glenn have been onto it for a while. Unless one can demonstrate that women are adversly affected it is impossible to gain traction on any issue. Meanwhile feminists have the gall to claim we still live in a mysoginist culture.
Feminism morphed from a pro women movement(womens' lib) to an anti men movement in the early eighties. So much had been achieved in a short time that the groundswell support lost much of it's passion leaving the haters as the only ones with the energy to keep pushing. I've come to view feminism as the love child of the womens lib movement and the chivalry soaked "patriarchy"(more correctly the "establishment"). One group seeking vengeance for imagined wrongs. The other easily swayed, or even shamed, by appeals to the same chivalry that feminists claim to despise. It's been history's longest running bait and switch game.
June 11th, 2007 at 7:22 am
Regarding the three questions...
1. Traister is wrong about the mainstream media's coverage of the Duke situation. Almost without fail the MSM rushed to judgement and had declared the lacrosse team guilty even before any indictments. It was only the constant vigilance of a few internet bloggers(notably KC Johnson) that ultimately foiled the frame up.
Compare the Don Imus situation with this from Australia recently. Imagine a university professor being quoted in the media saying something like "all teenage girls are sluts" based on the way some dress. Imagine the uproar. Imagine the immediate sacking of said professor and probably several media employees. No need to fantasise. Think back to Imus or Harvard's Summers.
We have reached a point where anything goes where men are concerned. You can say whatever you want about men without any repercussions.
"Have you considered castration"?
2. I'm Australian. Traister is obviously watching different media to me. Personally I'm most concerned about violence against men being depicted as comedy. In Aus we have the government paying multi millions for a TV ad campaign titled "Australia Says No to Violence Against Women" which conforms to the man/villain woman/victim mantra we are all familiar with. This even though the government's own statistics bureau has reported that men are victims at least a third of the time.
Common ad break on Australian TV:-
- Cussons ad. Woman belts man over head with tyre iron hard enough to kill some people. Three stooges type sound effects to enhance the blow.
- Violence against women ad
- Ad for any one of three different products/companies depicting man hit in testicles and being laughed at by all and sundry whilst writhing in agony.
I've seen this mix countless times over the past couple of years. Complaints to our Advertising Standards Tribunal elicit the standard "its a joke" response. I am not aware of a single advertisement depicting any violence against any woman let alone treating it as humour.
An image of an attractive woman in a bikini is grounds for litigation. An image of a man in agony is grounds for comedy.
3. Traister has resorted to the normal feminist technique of trying to attach a different issue. It's diversionary. She also needs to broaden her view beyond the US. We have exactly the same problems with boys in Australia without the racial divides. It crosses over all classes and occurs in all regions.
June 11th, 2007 at 9:25 am
3) What do you think accounts for the fact that girls are enrolling and graduating from college at a much higher rate than boys? Does this fact highlight other educational disparities between boys and girls?
Girls of highschool and college age are, on average, better suited than are boys at those ages (on average) to undertake the "good doobie" tasks needed to make it into and through college. I say "good doobie", not intellectually rigorous. It is an important distinction because in fact, highschool and college have become so watered down in the U.S. that most are tests of good doobie-ness, not of academic talent.
Thus the high rate of "success" of women in college is misleading to society because of what "college" really is in the U.S., and even moreso because of what happens later.
As for the smalle percentage of college students who undertake truly rigorous programs, and ultimately deliver serious results from their educations, guess what? These are overwhelmingly male populations.
So what we have is a watered down "show college", which delivers a low-rigor, fake education to the vast majority of attendees, and within that system, exists the high-calibre real college, where the rigors are bone-crushing and women are largely absent.
Don't believe it?
Ask some high-tech company CEOs -- whose businesses live and die based on the quality of the RIGOROUSLY trained graduates they hire -- what they experience. What you'll find is the mission critical jobs are overwhelmingly being done by men, while lots of nice, cushy jobs in "marketing", "customer support", etc., are going to women.
Is this descrimination? Heck no. It's because
#1. women overwhelmingly reject the super-rigorous tracks in college
#2. women don't deliver the goods, on average, as well as men do on the high-performance, intellectually demanding jobs.
Finally, if a woman does take one of these jobs (you know, like designing the control system software for the missile guidance system in our new generation of cruise missiles), the company -- and even THE COUNTRY -- frequently gets screwed when she "opts for the higher calling of family" over the rigors and drudge of work.
Women going in droves into fields which don't require rigor, and even more concerning, the "rigor-hurdles" have been lowered in some colleges and fields in order to get more women into them.
Personally, I don't like the idea of rigor hurdles being lowered in fields like medicine and defense, do you?
Are there women out there who are brilliant in science and engineering. Yes, there are some. But the evidence is overwhelming that women (a) don't like these fields, and (b) don't have the IQ points (on average) to attain society-advancing levels of accomplishment in these fields. The women who do are a rare and welcome exception.
Are women bright enough to manage their study time, get their homework done and organize their own exam preparation time? Sure. But after the watered-down world of American College is behind them, and it's time to deliver results, women are sorely missing from the winners circles in all fields involving academic rigor (and no, I don't consider subjective analysis of "literature", or "women's studies" or least of all "clinical psychology" to be fields qualifying as rigorous).
Face it, fired Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers was correct: women's lack of success in advanced fields of study requiring great rigor like science, math, physics has its roots in neurological (brain) differences between men and women.
I'll put it more bluntly: at the higher end of the human intelligence spectrum (e.g., top 1%ile), men significantly outnumber women.
And among those women who have the natural ability, many simply don't want to do all the work required in those fields, and opt to allow a man to support them, and have families instead.
Non-P.C.? Sure.
But also very true.
June 11th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
P.S. So to bottom line the answer, what accounts for women's relative "success" in college is that:
1. highschool and college have been extremely watered down such that they play to the comparative strengths of women in organizing their time and doing not-overly-mentally-challenging, detail-intensive tasks, while
2. the truly hard core, rigorous education which college used to be still goes on "under cover" within some colleges, and these fields are being overwhelmingly served in silence by a men who consitute the vast majority of their successful students, and who I would note, get no credit for it whatsoever in the mosaic of feminist lies which America has become.
Get it?
Well, check out which of YOUR college alumni went to work in highly rigorous fields, and which are delivering the goods 5, 10 and 20 years out.
Glass ceiling? Hardly.
And if you add in the elements of
1. female-choice of exiting the workforce to have children, and
2. the much higher prevalence of clinically significant Axis I and Axis II disorders among women,
you can pretty much explain this entire picture. Oh, I left off one other factor:
3. some (if not many) women choose fields where they are likely to meet men who they deem worthy of marrying, which are often high-earners.
(I'll leave the reader to figure out which those fields are, and what positions would give women best access to their target males.)
And thanks to our "family" courts, these latter women now get very handsomely rewarded when they liquidate such a man.
June 11th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
I think he's right that 'men don't like to complain', thi has always been obvious to me, but I only recently realised the problems it caused. It's amazing how many of my friends, male and female, and teachers, have grown up with the idea that women have been constantly oppressed throughout history. For example, my religious studies teacher, in a revision book, said that Jesus healing the woman with internal bleeding was significant because she was a woman, and that was a sexist society. I agree it was, but sexist gender roles have benefitted women far more than they have disadvantaged them (longer life, more happiness, more free time, more fulfilling work). I mean, did doctors not treat women in those days?? Of course not, but he was looking at the world through feminist-coloured spectacles.
June 11th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
Check this out. As soon as it happens to women, it gets a name and media coverage.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19092063
To be fair, it's probably a case of "dog bites man" isn't news, but "man bites dog" is. if stay-at-home dads become more common, the novelty will wear off. It's also true that men accept the situation when it happens to them, because it's never occurred to many of them that things could be any different; it's just the natural order of things.
June 13th, 2007 at 10:14 am
I am disappointed in some of the men on here. I occasionally read the articles Glenn Sacks writes and sometimes read the comments.
I am disturbed that so many of you are anti-female under the guise of pro-male or should I say justice for both sex.
I am sure many of you on here have daughters, nieces, sisters, a wife or a girlfriend. Would you if your daughter comes home saying Daddy I got into Havard, Stanford or any other prestige college.........Are you going to smugly say......'Congratulations'....and secretly think to yourself......well they really lowered the bar for you to get in......
Many here criticize feminism.....which has not only helped women but men to......even if indirectly.
Does your mother vote? Does your wife or girlfriend allowed to make choices regarding career or family? I mean some of you Dad's would not even have the opportunity to entertain the thought of being a stay at home dad if it was not for many women and men who fought for women's rights.
The studies in those "women studies" that so many think are stupid........have looked at gender ......and have studied and stated that men can be quality parents.....providing not just finances but support, guidance, nurture and caregiving. Yes I read that during my college years in a gender studies class.
am sure most of you are thinking well you only got in because they lowered the bar. I think that is a sad future for your relatives, spouses or lovers who are women because when intillegent men think this way they make it harder for the women in their lives.
I really wonder if any of you have taken a gender studies course or read an entire book on gender...before throwing it in the trash...to make some of your anti-female and anti-feminist comments.
June 13th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
hope4future:
You're right, it is disappointing to see so much negativity here where women are concerned.
I hope you express the same egalitarian concerns on the many, many anti-male, pro-feminist sites in the internet. Do you?
June 14th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
To address Hope4--- comments: Glenn posted them! I have applied to join Liz Richard's little discussion, but must pass a acreening! Men's groups do not exclude feminists from commenting, at least not in my experience. The same cannot be said for the radical feminists. Be very suspicious of ANY group which limits freedom of expression within its forums, such as PETA, the animal rights nuts! I don't believe that women are either more or less intelligent than men, but I do know that education has been unbelievably dumbed down since WWII. You can see evidence of it all over the internet!
When we are talking of feminism now, we are not speaking of equal rights, like those feminists of 1970 and before. We are speaking of female dominance, as codified in Title IV-D of the Social Security Code, the basis for the most aggrievous persecution of men under family law! It would be surprising if some of us did not get a bit unreasonable, even irrational at times. Have patience with us, and thanks for your thoughtfulness.
September 6th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
I know this is way late but here goes:
Nothing will change unless there many energized and focused individuals working towards fair treatment for both genders under the law. This sort of sustained effort will require passion. Unfortunately, this passion will come from people who's lives have been damaged or destroyed by the inequalities in the system that we are working against. This was the source of power for the early women's movement and it will be the same for us.