Feminism general thread

[Duckay]

This comic is an interesting counterpoint to some of our previous discussions on identifying as "not a feminist" means.

[AdmiralMemo]

Submitted for comment: The Top 5 Feminist Myths That Won't Die

[Elomin Sha]

When I was reading that I thought it sounded like it was coming from The Factual Feminist, Christina Hoff Sommers.

[JustAName]

That article is infuriating in many ways.

[Elomin Sha]

Please could you elaborate?

[JustAName]

I'm at work and a lot of people in this thread are usually more eloquent than I am, but two things immediately spring out - victims of assault are not more likely to respond to surveys, I think they might be less likely, and I think the 20% statistic is too low. It certainly is among the people I know.

Separately, to say that women in the US are completely free to choose their career paths is laughably untrue and, frankly, insulting. Aside from parental pressures, societal pressures, and a fear of the dudebro culture that pervades most higher-paying careers... she's completely ignoring the roles classism and racism play in all of this. To imagine for a second that a Latina woman has anywhere near the career options of a white male in today's society is plain stupid.

This whole article reeks of the upper middle class white woman who says, "Well, I got what I perceive as equality, so everyone else must have, too."

[Tycherin]

The article is a mixed bag, I agree.

MYTH 1: Women are half the world’s population, working two-thirds of the world’s working hours, receiving 10% of the world’s income, owning less than 1% of the world’s property.

Yeah, those numbers seem like an exaggeration. There's definitely inequality going on there, but those discrepancies border on the absurd.

MYTH 2: Between 100,000 and 300,000 girls are pressed into sexual slavery each year in the United States.

I haven't actually heard this one before. Again, that seems overinflated, and makes sense to have those numbers as at risk for that rather than actually actively being enslaved.

MYTH 3: In the United States, 22%–35% of women who visit hospital emergency rooms do so because of domestic violence.

Ahahahahah okay, this is total bullshit. Emergency room visits are a terrible metric for measuring DV because victims of DV are much less likely to seek official help than victims of "normal" injuries. The article claims the actual number is 1%, and I don't even care if that's right or not, it's totally misleading.

MYTH 4: One in five in college women will be sexually assaulted.

Pretty much what Fayili said. These numbers are really hard to take at face value because of the immense social pressure to not report incidents like these - including, I might add, articles like these that dismiss things like “attempted forced kissing” as not being "real" assault.

MYTH 5: Women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns—for doing the same work.

The real problem is that the wage gap is like the Bechdel test: it isn't intended to be used as an exact measure, but rather to indicate an overall trend in society at large. The "fact" is that men as a group earn more than women do, and therefore have more power and influence. You can nitpick why that is until you're blue in the face (like this article does), but the fundamental discrepancy remains.

[Lord Chrusher]

I think Myth 1 is less of an exaggeration that you would think world wide. There are a lot of societies where property rights have been and continue to be weaker than they are in the west today.

I don't have any data to back this up but I would suspect wage and wealth inequality is worse in say India than in North America. Even industrialised countries such Japan and South Korea have much higher rates of wage inequality than countries in Europe or North America.

[Avistew]

I pretty much agree with Tycherin and Fayili. Some of the article is right, some of it seems to be well-intended but coming from a background of privilege. I too believe the 20% figure of sexual assault in college is too low, not too high. As for career choices being completely free, that seems like such a ridiculous claim I'm actually pretty speechless.

Hell, just last month, at a reunion for female programmers (so, women who are in a male-dominated position, who were able to freely make that choice, and therefore who seem to be proving the point in the article) one of the main discussions involved how the women told their daughters, when they said "I want to program too" that it was a terrible idea, and tried to convince them not to "make that same mistake" because being a woman in that industry was hell and they had never experienced that much sexism before, both from some individuals (although most were not sexist) and for simply the way things were meant.

I don't work in that industry and I got depressed by that discussion fairly soon so I don't remember all the examples they kept sharing. But the fact that the few women who did make it to a male-dominated, extremely well-paying job wanted to make sure the females they loved in their lives did NOT do the same thing should show how difficult it is for women not to make those choices (studying programming is possible) but to follow through in day-to-day life as someone who has made those choices.

[JustAName]

I should get some stories from my mom about how people in the tech world (where she works, and is very good at her job) treated her before and after her transition.

[Duckay]

It's difficult to discuss for me, but the "attempted forced kissing" bit really bothers me. That's the same reason why I've gone off the deep end fighting with people online before, because they made the same claim, that including "attempted forced kissing" is an exaggeration.

I know it's tempting for most of us to say that nothing is like rape except rape. But the fact is that it's not as easy to say as all that. The "forced kisses aren't sexual assault" brigade are probably picturing "someone kisses you without explicitly asking first". But personally, I believe very strongly that if someone (for example) pins you in position and holds your head in place so you can't get away while kissing you*... that bears a much stronger resemblance to sexual assault than "I wanted to kiss them but they didn't explicitly ask for permission first".

* Not a random exaggeration made to make kissing sound as much like rape as possible... I am referencing something specific.

[AdmiralMemo]

Depending on culture, "attempted forced kissing" might not be sexual assault, as kissing is not universally sexual or romantic. However, I'm heavily assuming this article is based on US culture.

The "forced" aspect would still make it assault though, anywhere.

[Deedles]

I think attempted forced kissing will be considered sexual assault in most of the cases, because while a kiss isn't universally sexual or romantic, it BECOMES sexual when it's someone forcefully kissing someone else.

[viscomica]

It'd be interesting to know if there's any judiciary precedent in "forced kissing"

[AdmiralMemo]

It'd be interesting to know if there's any judiciary precedent in "forced kissing"

Well, if anyone here would know, it'd probably be Duckay, based upon her last post.

[Duckay]

Sorry, I actually have no idea. The thing I was referencing never went to court, and I don't know if anything similar ever has.

Basically I just know I get irrationally upset when people try to claim, as this article does, that forced kissing isn't sexual assault. I guess to me the key word is "forced" - I don't know how you can imagine someone "forced" into an act, however minor, and think it "doesn't count".

(Of course, if your beef is with the "attempted", as in they tried and were unsuccessful, I guess it depends on how you define "attempted" in this and other contexts).

[Master Gunner]

My reading of Canadian law is that it could definitely be charged as sexual assault, though I'm not about to try and find precedent for such a ruling at work (as in my posts on the previous page, the specifics of what is sexual assault are determined by the judiciary on a case-by-case basis based on precedent - the law itself is rather vague and sweeping in nature).

[Arclight_Dynamo]

In Canada, at least, the law is clear: it is sexual assault, full stop.

The way the law works here is that there are degrees of seriousness for criminal assault. In increasing order of severity:

- Any application of force (or threat thereof), if non-consensual, is simple assault.

- Any assault committed with a weapon or causing harm is assault with a weapon or causing bodily harm.

- Any assault that wounds, maims, disfigures, or threatens the life of a person is aggravated assault.

Now, I say this because sexual assault offences are closely linked to assault offences in Canada. Since (I think) 1992, there has been no free-standing, specific crime of rape in the Criminal Code of Canada; instead, the law says that sexual assault is any assault that has a sexual component to it. Which means that the three types of assault I laid out above are exactly the same for sexual assault, except that sexual assault will have a sexual component to it (so, for example, slapping a person's face is assault, whereas slapping a person's genitals is sexual assault).

The reason the law was changed was to 1) remove archaic definitions (such as requiring penetration, or requiring the victim be female) for rape, 2) to emphasize the violent rather than the sexual nature of sexual assaults, and 3) to broaden the category of criminal acts caught by the offence provisions in the Criminal Code.

All of that to say, yes, "forced kissing" is absolutely, utterly, categorically sexual assault in Canada. Likely simple sexual assault, in fact, but depending on the circumstances of the offence, it may fall under one of the more severe sexual assault categories.

Source: My Canadian law degree.

[Master Gunner]

Ah, law degree is far better than just reading part of the legal code with no sense of context or judicial application.

[Arclight_Dynamo]

(Thinking on it, the law may have been changed in 1983... it's been a while since that criminal law class.)

[viscomica]

Thanks! It obviously varies from country to country but I was just curious.
Personally, in my country I don't think it could be passed as sexual assault since it really doesn't fit the legal type at all (we have a continental kind of law) and depending on the intensity or violence it could be an assault. We have no precedents either.
Maybe it's all very hypothetical.

[Duckay]

In many cases it seems like it would be a part of a larger assault of some form (e.g. I presume that grabbing and holding a person against their will is a crime of some sort).

[Arclight_Dynamo]

Under Canadian law, yes, grabbing and holding is assault (and perhaps forcible confinement, but that generally requires a longer confinement - being locked up in a room, for example). But as soon as the forced kiss (or another act with a sexual component) happens, the simple assault (i.e. the grabbing) is transformed into sexual assault, since they are both part of the same, ongoing criminal act. It's one offence.

Assault and sexual assault are exactly the same thing in Canada, except the latter has a sexual component to it.

[viscomica]

Under Canadian law, yes, grabbing and holding is assault (and perhaps forcible confinement, but that generally requires a longer confinement - being locked up in a room, for example). But as soon as the forced kiss (or another act with a sexual component) happens, the simple assault (i.e. the grabbing) is transformed into sexual assault, since they are both part of the same, ongoing criminal act. It's one offence.

Assault and sexual assault are exactly the same thing in Canada, except the latter has a sexual component to it.

Interesting. In my country we have a distinction. There can be an assault without it being sexual. Well, it'd be an aggression of sorts. And for it to be sexual assault it has to be very specific.
I'm not especialized in that area but I remember that if any act isn't exactly what's described in the legal type you really can't label it as such. It's so complicated.

[Arclight_Dynamo]

Yes, that's the way the law is in a lot of places. It's how it used to be here, too. That's why they changed it. There were a bunch of cases that didn't meet the exact, specific definition of rape, despite very clearly being some form of sexual assault in the eyes of everyone concerned, and there was an uproar in the legal community. The laws had to be changed.

We still do have certain very specific sexual offences (invitation to sexual touching, sexual interference with a minor, statutory sexual assault, etc.), but those are meant to fill in gaps and edge cases that the sexual assault provisions may otherwise miss or under-serve.

Frankly, sexual assault laws in Canada are very different from sexual assault laws elsewhere, and are actually, in my opinion, extremely progressive. We don't get complaints about them in the same way that Americans get complaints about their rape laws, for example.

But that's the law itself... its actual application by police and the courts... well. There are still huge issues surrounding that, no question. But the laws themselves are excellent.