… a Reflection:
(1st draft Nov. 11) 2016, Davd
As i begin writing this reflection, it is only minutes before a parade will march through the centre of town to the Cenotaph, where hundreds of people will stand in the cold wind to honour soldiers long dead, and perhaps a few surviving and recently dead.
It is less than three days since one President-elect Donald Trump surprised the “mainstream” media, most pollsters, and the veteran politician Hillary Clinton, by defeating her in electoral college delegate count and thus becoming President-elect1. We might be wise to keep in mind, in Canada, the USA, and elsewhere, that Clinton seems to have won a tiny fraction more popular votes than Trump and that neither got a majority of the votes over-all,
Trump won a close contest, and we might be wise to take the comments on the potentially sweeping consequences of his narrow victory, as a reminder that Canada—and the USA—are subject to political instability in the form of dramatic changes in government and policy caused by quite small changes in the vote distribution among parties. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals won a majority government with a decided minority of the votes cast—a smaller minority than Trump’s and the Republican Party’s.
Is this a good way to change government? Not “on the face of it”. Certainly, neither the writers who view Trump and his success with alarm, nor the relatively ordinary Alberta voters who have told me of their anger and disappointment with Justin Trudeau and his Government, are calling it good.
Electoral reform, toward election rules that make the elected more representative of the voters, would be one sensible response to the Trump Republican—and the Trudeau Liberal—victories. Political stability is good. Representative legislatures are good.
Governments send men off to war. That fact, at least, connects the ill feelings about the US Government-elect and the current Canadian government, the ceremonies today, and the falsity of notions that men are privileged. Suffering in combat, dying in combat, are not privileges. They are burdens, and more severe burdens than Canadian or US women suffer today or this century—or suffered in the last—by law or social convention such as sent those men to war.
For dying and risking death in service to King [more recently Queen], and country [earlier, colony], the fallen and the old soldiers are honoured, and far more than 90% of them men. They are honoured for accepting hardship and death in a cause few of them fully understood2, and indeed some of the speeches are almost certain to refer to their “sacrifice”. They were “dutiful,” in doing what their rulers told them to do; and those most explicitly honoured were unlucky, in dying.
In honouring these unlucky, obedient men, we attest, whether we notice it or not, to the falsity of “historic oppression of women.” The World Wars are history; and all their North American (including Canadian) combat soldiers were male. Some women died in them (as non-combat “civilian3 casualties”) Far more men died, and far more men suffered while living as soldiers, than women.
“Historic oppression of women” is a legal fiction. It is deemed to have occurred, but the facts of war we remember today, contract the notion—as do the labouring conditions of ordinary working class men since 1900, or since 1500 or even earlier, for that matter. As do working class folk sayings like “Ain’t Momma happy, ain’t nobody happy” and “Mother is always right.”
Nathanson and Young, (2006, summary review here; cf. Brown, 2004, 2013, Corry and Stockburger, 2013) detail some of the misandric biases in Canadian and US law, and some of the deemings that treat men as privileged when women actually are. The now famous Misandry Bubble blog, almost seven years ago, reminded readers that ordinary men “had had it worse” than ordinary women, for a long time indeed.
The average man was forced to risk death on the battlefield, at sea, or in mines, while most women stayed indoors tending to children and household duties. Male life expectancy was always significantly lower than that of females, and still is. … Most of [the oppression] narrative stems from ‘feminists’ comparing the plight of average women to the topmost men (the monarch and other aristocrats), rather than to the average man. This practice is known as apex fallacy, and whether accidental or deliberate, entirely misrepresents reality.
I’ve written one blog on the Apex Fallacy’s general existence and psychological basis, which might be worth reading if you doubt, or want to understand better, that and how the fallacy exists.
It was men more than women who elected Donald Trump. His campaign style made much of resentment of the elites—and men have more to resent. Military veterans especially have much to resent, according to research from the (US based) Equal Justice Foundation (e.g. Corry and Stockburger, 2013.) The modern war-veteran successors of the men honoured today as surviving World War veterans, have been victims of Feminism, and Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton represented more Feminism, not less, had she been elected.
(The “groping” question [including, it seems, the sexual conduct of former US President William Clinton] should be addressed separately. As a hint of how i might address it in a subsequent blog, let me ask: How many modest women “get groped”? Traditional Roman Catholic nuns’ habits are a fairly extreme example of modest dress. In Central Alberta, many Mennonite and Hutterite women wear long sleeved dresses with long skirts (reaching well below their knees.) Some of those dresses can fairly be called “pretty”; i have not noticed any i would call erotic. Modesty ought to be high in priority among those, including myself, who oppose erotic behaviour directed toward strangers. Indeed, much immodesty is erotic behaviour.)
As the sex (or gender if you prefer that word) from whom those “sacrificed” soldiers we briefly honour today, came;
.. as the sex [or gender] who does the great majority of the dirty jobs, and does them with much less complaint than a similar number of women would make if they had to do them4;
.. as the sex deemed guilty of domestic violence when women are a little more likely to instigate it (Nathanson, and Young, 2006: ch 9, e.g. 239-40, Appendix 3; Brown, 2004);
… men have been second class citizens, as Nathanson and Young, Brown, and many others have documented during the first fifteen years of this young century. If a Trump presidency brings the sexes nearer to equality, that’s good for “America”. If a Trump presidency shrinks the U.S. bureaucracy and makes its demands more consistent and gender equal, that too is good for “America”.
It seems to me, on a few days reflection, that while the status of men was not a visible issue during the Trump, much less the Clinton campaign, it was an issue in the minds of many voters, and millions of American men, plus rather many American women, decided the crudity of some of Trump’s style was the lesser of two evils.
Public scrutiny and public support of what follows, methinks, can refine the crudity, if indeed Trump himself has not done much of that already. Congressional powers can moderate extremes that prove foolish. Already, methinks, androcentric discourse has become more legitimate in the U.S. than it was a year ago, even last winter.
Now how do we import androcentric legitimacy to Canada? and shrink the bureaucracies here?
a few References:
Brown, Grant A. 2004 “Gender as a Factor in the Response of the Law-Enforcement System to Violence Against Partners,” Sexuality and Culture, v. 8, Issues 3 & 4, pp. 3-139.
Brown, Grant A., 2013. Ideology And Dysfunction In Family Law: How Courts Disenfranchise Fathers. Calgary and Winnipeg: Canadian Constitution Foundation and Frontier Centre For Public Policy
Corry, Charles E. and David W. Stockburger, 2013. “Analysis of Veteran Arrests – El Paso County, Colorado“. Colorado Springs, Colorado: Equal Justice Foundation.
Daniels, Anthony M.D., 2014. “The Worldview that Makes the Underclass”. Speech delivered on May 20, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Dearborn, Michigan, and published in Imprimis,
“Futurist”, 2010. The Misandry Bubble . January 1.
Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2006. Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Notes: follow in most html displays
Perhaps a few others than me, will question whether the wars in which those soldiers died, whose battles were horrific in contrast to the peaceful years that began the previous, “Twentieth” Century, were necessary. That, like the “groping question” is worth examining but peripheral to this blog.
1. Canadian and other non-US readers probably do not understood the somewhat complicated fules by which each state is allocated “electors”; i certainly do not understood how votes are translated into elector selection, state by state.
2. The Second World War may have been understood somewhat better by those soldiers who regarded it as a response to aggression by the Hitler Nazi regine, or to ill-treatment of Jews and later Christians by the Nazis. (The Holocaust was not fully recognized by the public until near or after the end of the war.) Ths US entered both wars later than did Canada, in response to aggression {the sinking of ships in the case of the First World War, and the attack on Pearl Harbor in the case of the second.)
3. To forestall quibbling: There were a few Russian combat units including women. There were Canadian and US non-combat military units including women, who suffered much less than the combat soldiers both in risk of death and while living.
4. (One might also ask if most women could do many dirty jobs such as garbage collection, logging, and hauling crab and black cod traps.)
Remembrance Day, Trump’s Election, and the Status of Men
… a Reflection:
(1st draft Nov. 11) 2016, Davd
As i begin writing this reflection, it is only minutes before a parade will march through the centre of town to the Cenotaph, where hundreds of people will stand in the cold wind to honour soldiers long dead, and perhaps a few surviving and recently dead.
It is less than three days since one President-elect Donald Trump surprised the “mainstream” media, most pollsters, and the veteran politician Hillary Clinton, by defeating her in electoral college delegate count and thus becoming President-elect1. We might be wise to keep in mind, in Canada, the USA, and elsewhere, that Clinton seems to have won a tiny fraction more popular votes than Trump and that neither got a majority of the votes over-all,
Trump won a close contest, and we might be wise to take the comments on the potentially sweeping consequences of his narrow victory, as a reminder that Canada—and the USA—are subject to political instability in the form of dramatic changes in government and policy caused by quite small changes in the vote distribution among parties. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals won a majority government with a decided minority of the votes cast—a smaller minority than Trump’s and the Republican Party’s.
Is this a good way to change government? Not “on the face of it”. Certainly, neither the writers who view Trump and his success with alarm, nor the relatively ordinary Alberta voters who have told me of their anger and disappointment with Justin Trudeau and his Government, are calling it good.
Electoral reform, toward election rules that make the elected more representative of the voters, would be one sensible response to the Trump Republican—and the Trudeau Liberal—victories. Political stability is good. Representative legislatures are good.
Governments send men off to war. That fact, at least, connects the ill feelings about the US Government-elect and the current Canadian government, the ceremonies today, and the falsity of notions that men are privileged. Suffering in combat, dying in combat, are not privileges. They are burdens, and more severe burdens than Canadian or US women suffer today or this century—or suffered in the last—by law or social convention such as sent those men to war.
For dying and risking death in service to King [more recently Queen], and country [earlier, colony], the fallen and the old soldiers are honoured, and far more than 90% of them men. They are honoured for accepting hardship and death in a cause few of them fully understood2, and indeed some of the speeches are almost certain to refer to their “sacrifice”. They were “dutiful,” in doing what their rulers told them to do; and those most explicitly honoured were unlucky, in dying.
In honouring these unlucky, obedient men, we attest, whether we notice it or not, to the falsity of “historic oppression of women.” The World Wars are history; and all their North American (including Canadian) combat soldiers were male. Some women died in them (as non-combat “civilian3 casualties”) Far more men died, and far more men suffered while living as soldiers, than women.
“Historic oppression of women” is a legal fiction. It is deemed to have occurred, but the facts of war we remember today, contract the notion—as do the labouring conditions of ordinary working class men since 1900, or since 1500 or even earlier, for that matter. As do working class folk sayings like “Ain’t Momma happy, ain’t nobody happy” and “Mother is always right.”
Nathanson and Young, (2006, summary review here; cf. Brown, 2004, 2013, Corry and Stockburger, 2013) detail some of the misandric biases in Canadian and US law, and some of the deemings that treat men as privileged when women actually are. The now famous Misandry Bubble blog, almost seven years ago, reminded readers that ordinary men “had had it worse” than ordinary women, for a long time indeed.
I’ve written one blog on the Apex Fallacy’s general existence and psychological basis, which might be worth reading if you doubt, or want to understand better, that and how the fallacy exists.
It was men more than women who elected Donald Trump. His campaign style made much of resentment of the elites—and men have more to resent. Military veterans especially have much to resent, according to research from the (US based) Equal Justice Foundation (e.g. Corry and Stockburger, 2013.) The modern war-veteran successors of the men honoured today as surviving World War veterans, have been victims of Feminism, and Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton represented more Feminism, not less, had she been elected.
(The “groping” question [including, it seems, the sexual conduct of former US President William Clinton] should be addressed separately. As a hint of how i might address it in a subsequent blog, let me ask: How many modest women “get groped”? Traditional Roman Catholic nuns’ habits are a fairly extreme example of modest dress. In Central Alberta, many Mennonite and Hutterite women wear long sleeved dresses with long skirts (reaching well below their knees.) Some of those dresses can fairly be called “pretty”; i have not noticed any i would call erotic. Modesty ought to be high in priority among those, including myself, who oppose erotic behaviour directed toward strangers. Indeed, much immodesty is erotic behaviour.)
As the sex (or gender if you prefer that word) from whom those “sacrificed” soldiers we briefly honour today, came;
.. as the sex [or gender] who does the great majority of the dirty jobs, and does them with much less complaint than a similar number of women would make if they had to do them4;
.. as the sex deemed guilty of domestic violence when women are a little more likely to instigate it (Nathanson, and Young, 2006: ch 9, e.g. 239-40, Appendix 3; Brown, 2004);
… men have been second class citizens, as Nathanson and Young, Brown, and many others have documented during the first fifteen years of this young century. If a Trump presidency brings the sexes nearer to equality, that’s good for “America”. If a Trump presidency shrinks the U.S. bureaucracy and makes its demands more consistent and gender equal, that too is good for “America”.
It seems to me, on a few days reflection, that while the status of men was not a visible issue during the Trump, much less the Clinton campaign, it was an issue in the minds of many voters, and millions of American men, plus rather many American women, decided the crudity of some of Trump’s style was the lesser of two evils.
Public scrutiny and public support of what follows, methinks, can refine the crudity, if indeed Trump himself has not done much of that already. Congressional powers can moderate extremes that prove foolish. Already, methinks, androcentric discourse has become more legitimate in the U.S. than it was a year ago, even last winter.
Now how do we import androcentric legitimacy to Canada? and shrink the bureaucracies here?
a few References:
Brown, Grant A. 2004 “Gender as a Factor in the Response of the Law-Enforcement System to Violence Against Partners,” Sexuality and Culture, v. 8, Issues 3 & 4, pp. 3-139.
Brown, Grant A., 2013. Ideology And Dysfunction In Family Law: How Courts Disenfranchise Fathers. Calgary and Winnipeg: Canadian Constitution Foundation and Frontier Centre For Public Policy
Corry, Charles E. and David W. Stockburger, 2013. “Analysis of Veteran Arrests – El Paso County, Colorado“. Colorado Springs, Colorado: Equal Justice Foundation.
Daniels, Anthony M.D., 2014. “The Worldview that Makes the Underclass”. Speech delivered on May 20, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Dearborn, Michigan, and published in Imprimis,
“Futurist”, 2010. The Misandry Bubble . January 1.
Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2006. Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Notes: follow in most html displays
Perhaps a few others than me, will question whether the wars in which those soldiers died, whose battles were horrific in contrast to the peaceful years that began the previous, “Twentieth” Century, were necessary. That, like the “groping question” is worth examining but peripheral to this blog.
1. Canadian and other non-US readers probably do not understood the somewhat complicated fules by which each state is allocated “electors”; i certainly do not understood how votes are translated into elector selection, state by state.
2. The Second World War may have been understood somewhat better by those soldiers who regarded it as a response to aggression by the Hitler Nazi regine, or to ill-treatment of Jews and later Christians by the Nazis. (The Holocaust was not fully recognized by the public until near or after the end of the war.) Ths US entered both wars later than did Canada, in response to aggression {the sinking of ships in the case of the First World War, and the attack on Pearl Harbor in the case of the second.)
3. To forestall quibbling: There were a few Russian combat units including women. There were Canadian and US non-combat military units including women, who suffered much less than the combat soldiers both in risk of death and while living.
4. (One might also ask if most women could do many dirty jobs such as garbage collection, logging, and hauling crab and black cod traps.)
About Davd
Davd (PhD, 1966) has been a professor, a single father keeping a small commercial herb garden so as to have flexible time for his sons, and editor of _Ecoforestry_. He is a practicing Christian, and in particular an advocate of ecoforestry, self-sufficiency horticulture, and men of all faiths living together "in peace and brotherhood" for the fellowship, the efficiency, and the goodwill that sharing work so often brings.