ObjectivityIncarnate

the multimillionaires

Why would any of them do this instead of charity donation that they can deduct from their taxable income?

You can address the issues of B without blaming it on feminism.

I wouldn’t ‘blame it on feminism’, but the ideology being the motivator for the behavior is why it makes sense to me that refraining from it would ‘qualify’ as ‘dialing down the feminism’.

Does that make sense?

If you take two people who are vegan. A will sit down and talk to you about the reasons behind their choice to be vegan, and try to convince you to give veganism a try or even just reduce your meat consumption and supplement it with vegan meals. And B will get in your face and yell at you about what a horrible monster you are for eating animal products. I wouldn’t say that B is “more vegan” than A. And I wouldn’t say that the problem with B is that they’re too vegan.

But if someone (call them C lol) told B to ‘dial down the veganism’ in response to that behavior, I think the average/typical person within earshot of the exchange would obviously understand what’s being communicated, and I don’t think they’d be thinking C is blaming veganism itself, just criticizing B’s behavior in the name of that ideology.

There is no actual sentiment in the image, lol. On its face, it’s just stating two facts, not explicitly criticizing anything.

One could feasibly spread the exact same image as a positive thing, just depends on the audience.

$74,250 per employee

Hm, is this low for this line of work? Genuinely asking.

If all things are equal between two people other than that behavior, then B would undoubtedly be closer to ‘raging feminist’ than A.

The point is that ‘emphaticness’/disruptiveness is not necessarily correlated with being productive to one’s cause. That friend of a friend I mentioned before accomplished nothing but annoying everyone with her out-of-nowhere rant. She didn’t put herself any further from ‘complicit in her own dehumanization’ than someone else in the exact same position who doesn’t do that.

Your apparently believe that disruptive behavior in the name of a cause has inherent merit. I gave a simple example of how that is absolutely not automatically true. One can be extremely disruptive in the name of a cause, absolutely merited, and one can be disruptive in the name of a cause in a way that’s completely pointless and counter-productive. In the same way, because the latter category of ‘disruptiveness’ exists, it is plainly stated that one engaging in that kind of disruption can, by refraining from it, be less disruptive without being any less of an advocate for their cause.

Women can protest their subjugation as long as they aren’t insufferable about it.

They can regardless, but the fact is that being irritating for no reason is objectively counter-productive toward the cause. Also, there is a distinction to be made between being disruptive, and being insufferable; I use the latter word only to describe counter-productive disruption/aggression.

As an example, let’s take two hypothetical feminists, A and B.

They both actively campaign and gather support toward ending sex discrimination in hiring practices, with equivalent effort, as part of the same organization. But only B randomly accosts male strangers on the street, interrogating them about the sex ratio at their workplace, and chastising them if it isn’t at least 50% female, regardless of what line of work he is in, and without consideration for whether the person actually has any hiring power.

Is B doing a better job overall of furthering the cause than A, in your opinion?

One could consider workers conducting a sit-in at a workplace treating them unfairly, for example, to be very disruptive. But they’re not being insufferable, because they’re being disruptive where, and to whom, it matters, re serving their cause.

I’m sure you’re fully prepared to interpret this comment as negatively as you can muster, but for others reading this, I hope this makes it very clear exactly what I’m saying, which is obviously not the sentiment Velma is characterizing me as having.

As an example, let’s take two hypothetical feminists, A and B.

They both actively campaign and gather support toward ending sex discrimination in hiring practices, as part of the same organization. But only B randomly accosts male strangers on the street, interrogating them about the sex ratio at their workplace, and chastising them if it isn’t at least 50% female, regardless of what line of work he is in, and without consideration for whether the person actually has any hiring power.

Would you say A is more “complicit in her dehumanization” than B because she doesn’t do that? And do you think B advances the organization’s cause more effectively than A, by doing what she does?

It was definitely malicious as his hand found its way onto my thigh during that bus ride as well.

As I suspected.

How does one not realize they’re pressing their leg into someone that is scrunched up and trying to get away from them? You think men are just dumb and oblivious to everything besides themselves? That’s not a very charitable view of men in general tbh.

Well, considering that’s not how I described men in general at all, that isn’t really relevant.

All I said is that the ‘wider stance’ is how male bodies naturally ‘lie’. The average man will definitely ‘tighten up’ when they realize they are encroaching on another’s space, and that’s regardless of the sex of the other person. I just explained that it does take a deliberate/willful act to do that, because, like holding your hand in a fist, that’s just not how male legs ‘want’ to be by default.

The “manspread” phenomenon is absolutely gendered behavior

Yes, but notice how I deliberately spoke about the actual fundamental misbehavior, which is ‘taking up more than your fair share of space when in a crowded public place’, instead of the narrow subcategory ‘manspreading’ that conveniently can only be ‘committed’ by males. There’s no reason to consider, as an example, a woman who refuses to put her purse on the floor or in her lap, instead of on the seat next to her, depriving another person of a seat, as any different than a man who refuses to close his legs when it becomes clear someone wants to sit in the adjacent seat that they’re partially taking up.

The level of inconsideration, and fault, of the individual are identical in both scenarios.

If you purport to actually care about the root act of inconsideration, there is no justification to focus solely on one specific variant of it. Similar to how “mansplaining” became a viral term, even though ‘condescension as a result of assuming one’s ignorance of a subject for a reason that has no actual relationship with knowledge of the subject’ is something both sexes do to both sexes, and that the aforementioned reason can be many things other than sex (e.g. assuming an old person isn’t tech-savvy), “manspreading” being seen as the end-all-be-all of this behavior is ironically misandrist, letting all non-males off the hook even when they misbehave in an equivalent way.

You misunderstood it. It’s a dial with infinite positions in between the two positions. All the way to the left is being “complicit in her dehumanization” so moving the dial at all would be inching closer and closer to her dehumanization.

But as my anecdote exemplifies, it is absolutely possible to move away from ‘raging feminist’ without moving one iota closer to ‘complicit in dehumanization’. Those two things are absolutely not at opposite ends of a spectrum, objectively.

It’s a brilliant piece.

Can’t agree, but you’re welcome to your opinion.

Your entire first comment boils down to “women should protest their inequalities in quieter ways”, so yeah.

You’ve completely fabricated that motive/intent, so yeah. Do you not know what “emphatically” means? I made it very clear that ‘insufferability’ has nothing to do with the ‘loudness’/‘disruptiveness’ of the actions.

Why does it matter whether it’s recent or not?

Well for me, it mattered because at first glance, I thought I was having deja vu, because it looked familiar, and then I looked it up and realized that I saw it when it first went viral. That’s the main reason I mentioned the year, after I realized.

But since you’ve apparently already decided I’m a sexist boogeyman, I doubt you’ll accept the mundane reality of the situation, and will continue to convince yourself that I just Hate Women.

Now I’m almost certain that anecdote made you feel called out.

what’s the point in saying what year this piece of art was produced?

“for anyone who thinks it’s a recent happening.”

Also, to be exact, I was referring to the Twitter post, not the artwork the post is talking about. One could assume so, but there’s no actual indication that the post is describing something that had just happened.

Regardless, I edited that bit to make it extra crystal clear.

Are you trying to imply that feminism is no longer needed in 2026?

The fact that you jumped to this ridiculous conclusion out of nowhere, honestly leads me to suspect that the anecdote in my comment may have struck a nerve with you.

Considering the art teacher appreciated and liked her submission, maybe assuming the teacher’s intent is misguided.

I didn’t assume the teacher’s intent at all. I speculated on what the comment was made in response to, based on the reaction of the person who ‘received’ said comment.

I mean, how likely do you think it is that an art teacher said “dial down the feminism” in response to a one-off reasonable comment about sex equality? I think there’s a very good reason she didn’t give more backstory, and started her anecdote at his comment, lol.

There is certainly plenty of times that men sit with legs more spread due to comfort, for sure.

I’d say it’s pretty near to 100% of the time. As a male, sitting with my legs parallel feels ‘unnatural’ in the same way holding your hand in a fist is: I can certainly do it, but I have to deliberately do it for it to happen, that position will never happen spontaneously—it’s just not the default/‘neutral’ position of those body parts.

There are also times that men choose to be oblivious to the comfort of those around them in certain situations ie: on public transportation, sports games, and the like where one may be close in proximity to another’s body.

This is not really gendered behavior, though, so I feel it’s disingenuous to frame it as a ‘men thing’. While it may not be caused by how far apart their knees are, it’s arguably just as common for women to take up extra space on buses etc., by taking up either or both of the seats adjacent to them with belongings like a purse, as one example. I see no need at all to put a sex/gender filter on ‘lack of consideration for the space you are taking up in a crowded location’. Deficiencies of empathy are easy to find in both sexes.

So to take a single conversation and boil it down to only 1 reason why men sit that way is pretty disingenuous.

But that is the reason the default position is different between the sexes. This:

I’ve personally had men use this “manspread” in order to press their thigh against mine in a very uncomfortable way.

assuming it was a deliberate act on his part, which you didn’t state outright but implied, is in a completely different ballpark from the simple fact that men naturally sit with their knees further apart than women, pretty much without exception. And the vast majority of men who, when they notice, or it’s brought to their attention, that they happen to be spread out enough that it’s taking up another seat, will readily adjust themselves to accommodate the other person, because they’re obviously not acting maliciously.

Surely she could have thought of a third position between those two so that a dial actually makes sense, over a switch.

Charitably-interpreted, it could be an impressively self-aware piece on the binary thinking of ideologues, to genuinely feel there is literally zero middle ground between those two extremes. But she probably actually feels that way.

It is possible to support a cause, even emphatically, without being insufferable. I’m reminded of an occasion a number of years back, when a friend of a friend tagging along with our group for the first time who, just after we all (group of 8-9) sat down to order dinner, ranted for minutes, completely unprompted, about how chairs are shaped in a misogynistic way, which led into the nonsensical claim that the only reason males tend to sit with their knees further apart than females, is as a deliberate act of patriarchal intimidation, not simply because the difference in pelvis shape makes those positions more comfortable/default for those bodies. There was no consideration of the fact that this difference exists just as much in men and women sitting alone at home, as it does in crowded public spaces.

This is all to say I have a feeling, especially based on her reaction to it, that the teacher’s comment was in response to something closer to the above, than to something like ‘a job shouldn’t pay someone less just because she’s a woman’.

P.S. This post is from 2018, for anyone who thinks it’s a recent happening, or anyone else who saw this and thought it looked familiar.

Hunter/gatherer and early farming societies typically had a lot more leisure time than we do today. Some researchers estimated they only ‘worked’ 15-30 hours a week

That figure is both not a consensus, and it’s a number of hours that’s referring to time spent on food procurement only, nothing else of what’s needed to live/survive.

I dryly state of couple of plain facts, along with an analogy to clarify why using your own assets as collateral for a loan doesn’t make sense to be interpreted as ‘bypassing income tax’

You accuse me of being a bootlicker and put a ton of words in my mouth, assuming all sorts of nonsense about my values/positions because you apparently can’t handle the actual words you were presented with, and need a straw man to focus on instead

Why pretend you have any interest in genuine discourse when you act like this? It’s extremely obvious you have no desire to actually communicate. Go write a blog somewhere with the comments disabled if you can’t handle contradiction.

The problem lies in the top 1% using their shares of a company as their personal bank account.

There is no problem in someone using their own assets for their own benefit.

They can use these shares as collateral for a loan, bypassing all income tax.

There’s no income tax to “bypass”, because a loan isn’t income. You have to pay it back. Do you consider it “bypassing all income tax” when a homeowner takes out a Home Equity Loan too?

3nd

thicond

But collateral isn’t used as part of a transaction unless the loan is defaulted on.

let “unrealized gains” be taxed if they were ever used as collateral for a loan.

This simply makes no sense as a concept. Collateral is something that you tell the one you’re borrowing from “you can have this if I fail to pay my loan back”. If the loan is repaid, literally nothing happens to the collateral, and it plays zero part in the actual transaction. There is zero non-arbitrary reason to tax an asset just because it was used as collateral.

Also, all home equity loans would fall under this definition, as well.

You’re equivocating “guilt” as in feeling at fault/remorseful about doing something immoral (the definition you used), with “guilt” as in it being proven that she violated a law (the definition @chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world used).