Response to feminist fallacies Part 1.

My last two "Feminist Fallacies" posts garnered a fair number of comments, ranging from the relatively reasoned to the spectacularly stupid. Rather than addressing each commenter directly, I will list the areas of disagreement, as well as the representative comments, and address those.

"How I look shouldn't validate/invalidate what I say"

The best of the comments made on this particular topic was by "varient" who said

1. While it's true that a person's appearance can affect their opinion, it's fallacious to say that a person's opinion can be validated or invalidated on the basis of their looks. If their ideas are wrong, it's because of their thinking, not their appearance. Someones appearance may be responsible for their feelings about comic book costumes, but their appearance has no role in determining whether their thinking is correct or incorrect. Think about this: are Jessica Simpson's ideas automatically better than an average looking woman's simply because of her looks? Jessica's looks may inform her opinion, but they have no bearing on the validity of her arguments on any issue.


Now whats interesting is I never actually said someones comments should be wholly ignored or discounted on the basis of their looks. However I do believe that the comments of those to whom jealousy can be reasonably attributed must not be taken at face value. Like it or not, if your fat or ugly, then your comments on the depiction of superheroines in comic books does not carry as much weight. Nor should it.

2. Its sexist that as a woman my ability to do a job, think clearly, react rationally etc is sometimes questioned due to what time of the month it is yet no one ever question a man because of the calender.

As expected this one touched off a mini shit storm. Naturally the posts made where either irrelevant to the point being made, or completely non sensical, but the semi-reasoned objections seemed to break down into the following categories.

a)Denying that women become less rational, more irritable, more emotional, and think less clearly when PMSing.
b) Pointing out that some men are more irrational than some women while PMSing.

Neither of which does anything to refute my argument.I'm not even going to waste the time necessary to come up with a rational rebuttal to response one as there would be no point.
The second argument however might sound reasonable until you realise its irrelevant. You see it doesn't matter if a woman that is PMSing is more rational during that period than some other person, what matters is whether she is less rational and efficient than herself when not PMSing. When someone, either man or woman, is hired to do a job, they are expected to meet a minimum level of proficiency. If a woman's performance is brought below that minimum level on a monthly basis, she is not qualified for the job overall even though she may be qualified the other 90% of the month. If you have two employees in front of you both applying for a promotion, who both have equivalent skills, experience, and education, and only one of them is known to become a madwoman once a month, who do you hire? It doesn't matter whether your still more rational than Bob the Janitor while your PMSing what matters is whether or not you are still as rational as the woman I hired to do the job.



3. "pressuring" a woman to have sex is the same as rape."

This one got a fair number of responses as well. And yes most are inane and idiotic. Some tried to end the discussion early by calling this a "strawman". Anyone who has been forced to sit through a "date rape awareness" seminar knows better.
Others attempted to point out that, legally, anyone who is either drunk or high is considered unable to give consent. While accurate it also shows how badly our legal system has been twisted by feminist ideology. 99% of all "hook ups" involve one or both of the persons being drunk or stoned. I would wager that at least 99.9999999% of all those of you reading this have had sex with a drunken partner. Are we all rapists? And in cases where both parties are drunk can both be charged with rape? One poster even attempted to insert "emotional impairment" as a "rape" criterion. Think about this. According to these fembots, any time you have slept with a woman who was drunk, stoned, getting over a bad break up, mourning a dead relative,or even "having a bad hair day" it was rape. Does that sound reasonable to you?


4. "Abortion is a woman's issue"


Predictably, the intelligence level of the posts dropped way down in the responses to this. Many attempted to dispute that "life begins at conception" which only an idiot would attempt to argue. Anyone who thinks this isn't true should open up a 4'th grade health book. You want to argue when personhood should be granted, or when an organism should get constitutional rights as a citizen, that's fine. When you try to argue that a living, rapidly developing organism isn't alive, you just show your own idiocy. Trying to argue that a zygote or embryo isn't human is just as idiotic. The simple biological truth is that from the moment of fertilisation we are both human, and alive. This is neither debatable nor an opinion. It is in fact exactly that, a fact.
Then there were those who attempted to argue that consent to sex shouldn't be considered consent to pregnancy. I agree, it should be considered "consent to accept risk of pregnancy". Like it or not, no matter how "safe" you may be, all penile/vaginal heterosexual sex acts have a risk of pregnancy. Period. You can use all the condoms, creams, pills, diaphragms, jellies, and sponges you want and it still carries a risk of pregnancy. By engaging in the activity you are giving tacit consent to accept the consequences of that risk being realised. If you play the stock market are consenting to accept the risk of losing money, if you play the meatmarket you are consenting to accept the risk of getting pregnant. Period. To say you want to be able to have sex but don't want to have to live with the consequences in inane.
Then there were those who essentially said "shut up, this is a woman's issue and dirty men don't get anything to say" oh well


5. Women earn X% less than men, which is proof of sexism.
This one stirred up some ire as well, and as usual it wasn't very well researched. One poster even brought up the 77% trope, apparently unaware its been debunked for quite some time now.
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:sBQ_Xmmd_mQJ:www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba392/ba392.pdf+%22wage+gap%22+myth&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us

Another tried to cite a European study, which, although it controlled for industry, didn't control for age, career level, experience, or education, meaning it was comparing the wages of 20 year old entry level women with men who have been doing their job for 20 years. Obviously such a methodology will cause wide divergences.


Others tried to blame "society" for the choices women make, stating that as an example, those women who choose to leave their careers early to raise children (thus skewing the figures) are in fact "proof" of sexism as they only made that choice due to societal pressure. Another tried to use the lack of women at the highest levels of corporateAmerica or in politics as "proof" of sexism. The problem there is the evidence bears out the idea that women are less likely to go into high stress positions such as, for example, management, therefore there are less women who can potentially become middle and later upper managementThe knock on effect is obvious. If less women than men apply for entry level executive jobs, and more of those who do leave work early to concentrate on family, then naturally the pool of available women for upper level executive position is going to be smaller. IF we assume that the ability of applicants to perform the job is relatively uniform, then we would expect a higher number of men to get the job since theres a larger pool of male applicants. Same goes with politics, less women register to run for lower offices than do men. Therefore the pool of women with the connections and experience to run for higher office will be smaller than the pool of male applicants. Either way, the reason fewer women are positioned to take high level jobs at the end or middle of their careers, is because so few make the foundational choices necessary to do so at the beginning of their career.

Bottom line, not one of those posting comments looked beyond their reflexive biases or even attempted to think about this issues under discussion. Why am I not surprised?