"The Porn Myth" , page 12

Originally posted by sir_chancealot

Let's try and stay in the last two centuries, shall we? I know, since you mention "Leave It To Beaver", let's use that approximate timeline.

Compare all those stats mentioned above from 1950-1959. Now, compare those exact same stats from 1997-2007.

Well, two things. One, it is intellectually lazy not to come up with your own figures in an argument. I am familiar with that particular style, but I dont care to take the bait. If you have a good argument to make, make it. Dont expect me to spend my time hunting down the numbers for you.

Secondly, you are making assumptions that the only driver of economic conditions, crime and general well being in either time frame is the status of women's rights. That assumption strikes me as revealing such a poor understanding of economics, the relations of economics to crimes rates and income, its effect on personal and familial well being, etc., that it would take an entire book to even begin to show someone starting off in your position how flawed it was to isolate a brief period of time, 1997-2007, utterly ignore that is was the culmination of a huge quantity of social and economic conditions, and attempt to pin all of the negatives of that time frame on the womens movement.

Can you really have no understanding at all of how economics works? Or, can you really believe that it is sound analysis to isolate a nine year period on the one hand, and compare it to a ten year period on the other hand, and utterly ignore not only the many other variables at play, (economic policies, what is going on in the rest of the world, etc) but also to isolate those two periods from their historical context?

I happen to be of the personal opinion that because your argument is emotionally based, and many of your statements are logically flawed, there is no real hope of convincing you of anything using logic and data.

Consider your assertion that because SOME woman held that "women need a man like a fish needs a bicycle" ALL women for all time should be held to those terms and conditions and can be factually considered to hold an identical view.

Using that same logic, we can derive that since Hitler was a man, and he held genocidal and anti-semitic views, that ALL men for all time can be considered to be anti-semitic genocidal maniacs.

Or is it only all western males that we must consider this way?

Originally posted by sir_chancealot
Perhaps there's a reason where you had to reach back 200 years or more.

There is a reason. Outlined above. It simply makes no sense to try to analyze the merits of a system by only looking at the parts (or small blocks of time) that please us. One has to look at the entire system.

Originally posted by sir_chancealot
The men in the town gave him a job, NOT TO EXPLOIT HIM, but they knew he needed the work to feed his family. Now, that's not to say exploitation didn't occur, but it's not as black and white as you would have us believe.

Thats a very touching tale. I am glad he was able to go and get a job so that he was able to provide for his family. My foster mother's mother died in the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Indirectly, they lived near the base, and she went into labor and died of complications in the ensuing mess. My foster mother was 16 at the time, and had 5 brothers and sisters. Her father was an alcoholic and abandoned the family after the mother died. My foster mother had to go out and work too, but no one offered her job that paid enough to support her family. She had to struggle with house cleaning and laundry work, and whatever else she could find. She never did get to finish her education, and her only way to support herself and her family ultimately was to marry, some months after her mothers death, because the jobs went to men in those days. So she married first one, then another crappy guys that mistreated her, and her children and her siblings until she finally met my foster father who was a good man. They stayed together til death.

However, in the process of having to be married to whomever she could find just to support her brothers and sisters, she married twice and had 9 children of her own. Each child, (because her patriarchal religion, Catholicism forbade any attempt to control birth) made her circumstances more desperate, and made it even more imperative that she find or keep some man, any man, to support her and her children. She suffered a lot of abuse, as did her children, because she was not given the opportunity to get a real, solid, paying job, but was instead forced to do "womens work" at laughable pay or marry. Her two options.

Obviously, since I am a foster child, she made it part of her lifes work to take care of other children who had for some reason no parents to care for them. She didnt want us to have to make the choices she did, she wanted us to have a better chance at life. She was by no means a feminist, she was far too Catholic for that, but she absolutely embraced the freedom for women to be able to hold a job on their own so that they did not have to sell themselves into an unhappy marriage just to be able to survive.

Originally posted by sir_chancealot
And by the way... if you think the last 50 years has been the only time in history that women have had "sexual freedom", you obviously don't know your history very well. There is a reason societies have rejected "sexual freedom" for women.

Why dont you enlighten all of us? Again, intellectual laziness. Make a claim, refuse to support it with any facts, links, etc., and pretend the claim is solid. Its not an argument. At the very least narrow down what region or country and what general time frame. It is unrealistic to expect that one can completely absorb all of human history searching for some event that may or may not even exist.