Posted by Ammonite, Sunday, 3 July 2011

Everyone of us, on this forum have unique life experiences.

Now I'll see if I can make this clear.

Often siblings when discussing their parents, will find even though they had the same genetic parents, they often have totally different experiences and perspective of these people.

'It's almost like we had different parents' I have heard said.

It would be wrong of me to extrapolate that just because of my life experiences, that this applied to everyone else.

However there are some or maybe many who do try to extrapolate their perspective and life experiences as to applying to everyone else, as does the author of this article.

I try hard to provide alternative arguements, which annoys more than a few people.

Ammonite, <Being told I am "sitting on a fortune" has never made me feel particularly powerful.>

Took me a while to figure out what you were saying, afterall I am a bloke. But then that is something I could never say to a woman, even drunk.

But I also think it might be a classic example of how the sender of the message, may have meant it to be complimentary, and the reciever interprets it as being a put down or insult.

Even the simple words of "Give me a call sometime" has if I remember correctly about 125 different meanings.

Some people are lucky and manage to navigate through the minefield, and others have it blow up in their faces.

http://www.theabsolute.net/misogyny/vilar.html

<"If a young man gets married, starts a family, and spends the rest of his life working at a soul-destroying job, he is held up as an example of virtue and responsibility. The other type of man, living only for himself, working only for himself, doing first one thing and then..." >

<"If praise is applied in the correct dosage a woman will never need to scold. Any man who is accustomed to a regular and conditional dosage of praise will interpret its absence as displeasure." >

"Over twenty-five years have passed since the publication of my book The Manipulated Man - a pamphlet written in great anger against the women's movement's worldwide monopoly of opinion. The determination with which those women portrayed us as victims of men not only seemed humiliating but also unrealistic."

Esther Vilar.

Sadly, it appears we may be in danger of losing yet another facet of our "humanity". (If not already lost.) Whether occasioned by an engineered capitalist consumerist "drive", or as the author contends by the availability of contraceptives substantially corroding a female's foundation for saying no, it appears, from the article and from posts on this thread, that male/female relations, in our western societal context, are in dire straits. I guess "freedom" has a price.

Is our ability to "sell" ourselves, through construction of a "false" image, now viewed as the pinnacle of personal development? I wonder where industry, honesty, faithfulness and loyalty fell by the wayside.

Perhaps it only appears to me that much appears to have been lost with the advent of sexual freedom. Certainly, females no longer are held in the high esteem I once held, and I am probably viewed the lesser for it.

I am certain there are females worthy of high regard, as individuals, and not be virtue of their career or professional achievement - by which I mean, as women. I think it a pity that such women are so tarnished by the general portrayal of females in our media, and particularly by the behaviour of those who go overboard in exercising their freedom of expression.

There is supposed to be morality in law and in business, so why is there such a lack of morality in advertising, in media generally, and in socially acceptable behaviour?

We have lost something important by our own actions and acceptance, and our current society is exemplifying the impact of this loss.

vanna: http://melbourneinstitute.com/hilda/

Impressive link, vanna. Makes interesting reading, particularly the change in Australia's gini coefficient recently.

vanna: However, very few academics seem to refer to what is the biggest social science survey ever undertaken in Australia. Instead, they will so often quote Germain Greer, the feminist queen of nothing of any creditability.

Yes. Well what the word "science" is doing in "social science" is sometimes a little hard to understand. It should be called "social studies", which matches "feminist studies". The tactics in both often seem to be the same. Get a group of like minded people to publishing opinions in friendly journals, referencing each other. Once you've done it for a few decades you can claim the majority of experts in the field all agree with you.

The great thing about this is you have to worry about being contradicted by figures from the field, or other people try to replicate your results, and any of those other irritating self correcting facets of the scientific method. But you get all the tinsel that make you look like a genuine scientist - like journals, peer reviews, university tenure, and titles. Awesome!

rstuart,
I would agree that there is minimal scientific method attached to most of what is being called social science.

Creditable and reliable research means that it has to be carried out in such a way, and documented in such a way, that another researcher can carry out the same research, and achieve exactly the same results.

When it comes to the male gender, there has been almost no research carried out in Australia on the male gender, and only recently has it become partly known what is occurring within households within the country.

So, instead of reliable and creditable research, we have academics quoting people such as Germaine Greer.

No wonder the UK government withdrew funding for humanities courses at UK universities, when those same universities employ people such as Germaine Greer, and pay her with taxpayer funding.

Vanna I would disgree that there is almost no research on the male gender conducted in australia.

The research is conducted by asking women to interpret male behaviour, beliefs etc.

I was once rung and asked to partake in a survey on community violence, it became extremely clear during the questioning, that it had nothing to do with community violence, and was more about DV.

And the questions were loaded, and purely from the perspective of men as the perptrators and women the victims. I refused to continue on the grounds that it was biased.

You, however are correct in that there is very little research being conducted that actually asks men about their experiences. Mainly because I think they do not want to hear what men actually have to say.

Toby Green in her column wrote about how women are generally much more verbally articulate than men and that many men have a hard time finding the words to express how they feel or what their thoughts are.

I would also add to that, what women say gets validated, and what men try to say gets invalidated, as evident on this forum from time to time.

Certain members accuse the male posters of being misogynistic, when all that is trying to be achieved to explore thoughts, ideas and sometimes feelings. I struggle sometimes to find the right phrases and words, but then regardless of how careful I am, people will use various tactics to try and shut me down.

typically as in Toby's article where a husband was stating the fact that in arguements with his wife, he always lost and felt unfairly that he copped the blame for things that were not his fault.

I know where he is coming from, because that has also happened to me.