Trade -

I haven't said anything before because I kept waiting to see what the catch was. Now it appears there isn't one.

O.K. Spikey may have considered you to be rude but, compared to the way you used to post, your posts have been an absolute model of forebearance. You used to reduce me to tears regularly - and once even more than just tears.

Hey, I don't wan't to pry into your personal space, man, but it's like some huge Damascan Road-type Event happened!

So really, all I wanted to say was that I at least appreciate it. You haven't changed your personality I'm sure, but the way you express it now is so different.

Would it seem condescending if I said Good on yer? Not meant to be: merely an acknowledgement and appreciation.

trade215,

you trade in pomposity while all the time pretending to be ego busting.

Worse, you make the mistake of conflating ignorant opinion with informed opinion. In the real world informed (i.e. evidence-based) opinion is infinitely superior to opinion which make no pretension to have a foundation in facts.

"Anyway, OLO is an opinion forum and in the world of opinion, everyone is their own authority. Independent thinking of a rational kind will enable everyone to figure it out, without dressing things up in appeals to things like external authority."

In your case, you could benefit from time to time with a glancing acquaintance with 'external authority' in the form of evidence. And that's my opinion!

Pynchme,, "What particular aspect of the article did you expect a comment about? That the fellow feels victimized because everybody didn’t rave about his anti-feminist tome?" Maybe another read of the piece this time with a little more compassion. His complaint is not that "everybody didn’t rave about his anti-feminist tome", rather how effectively his career has been shut down as a result of his writing on that topic.

I don't know if the claims he makes are true. I can see that they appear to be at least partly backed up by the other comment I referenced. I've seen similar claims of widespread attacks on their professional and personal lives from other writers and researchers who have published material on gender issues. If there is any thruth to the claims then they should be of concern to those who support feminism but don't support oppressive tactics.

Sometimes one of the better tests of a belief system/movement which claims high ideals is how it treats it's critics.

R0bert

R0bert (Romany, Spikey, Pynchme etc)

'If there is any thruth to the claims then they should be of concern to those who support feminism but don't support oppressive tactics.'

Why should they? Any self-respecting feminist treats these 'feminists made my life hell' stories with the contempt they deserve.

As for what ‘truth’ there is to the claims – if you live by the sword you die by the sword. If you earn a living from attacking feminism, you will cop a lot of flack from feminists. Duh!

The anti-feminism genre comprises a multi-million dollar worldwide industry (although I notice it’s now definitely in decline) that has made a number of writers very rich and earned a nice little living for others. Having worked in publishing for over 20 years, I found that from the early 90s, publishers couldn’t get enough of the what-went-wrong-with-feminism/resurgent manhoood genre – so much so, that I often encountered publishers and literary agents actually commissioning writers to produce these kinds of manuscripts.

The only moral criteria was sales – NOT gender insight or understanding. Once the feminism genre waned towards the end of the 80s – as all genres do – publishers and writers followed their well-honed publishing instincts and rode the new backlash genre for all it was worth. It wasn’t at all hard for writers who had once written favourably on feminism when it was all the rage to simply shift gears to write about what was bad about it.

There is another side to this argument as well. It’s well documented that the key writers and figureheads of feminism have been the targets of hate attacks all their lives – including, and especially, threats, intimidation, ridicule and slander. (I don’t need to provide links – just a retrospective of OLO gender posts would suffice.)

Rather than running off to write their 'Mum, he hit me!' books, they mostly just got on with the job of getting justice for women.

Romany, Pynchme, Spikey (and anyone else interested)

Just getting back to this wot's-in-a-names business - before it got hijacked by the usual 100 or so posts about how horrible feminists are - here's a hypothetical...

What if all women simply kept their surname on marriage ... and all daughters took their mother's surname and all sons took their father's surname.

Is there any practical or symbolic reason why this couldn't exist as a viable social convention?

SJF, Good suggestion but it wouldn't please abalone divers who tend to have more daughters than sons. Must have something to do with pressure on the gonads or something like that.