How does MeToo mesh with the legalise prostitution movement?

[AllanO]

In terms of the initial question it seems like a very natural in terms of giving voice to people whose voices are seen as ignored. So a large rational for metoo as I understand it is that such stories etc. are ignored etc. Likewise the arguments for legalization of prostitution I usually hear are about taking the concerns, complaints, etc. of sex workers seriously and responding to them. So in terms of motivations I think there are areas of overlap between the two.

In terms of legal logic, institutions etc., sexual harassment is about several things, but one part is just simple terms of employment, you are hired to do X, not Y (sexual favours etc.) and also issues of labour law, workplace conditions (not being in a hostile environment) so on. Arguably legalized or even decriminalizing prostitution is consistent and consonant with achieving that by formalizing strict rules about under what circumstances sex and the like occurs, allows people to call out abuse, exploitation etc.

In terms of actually solving problems of human trafficking, abuse, exploitation and so on. I am not so optimistic that legalizing or decriminalizing will fix these things, it seems to me that the drive for opportunistic and anonymous sex, which I take to be a driver of a significant portion of the field, works against efforts to normalize, regulate, make more humane etc. all prostitution. But that does not mean there is much to be said for laws against prostitution as they exist and much of these sorts of issues are a never ending struggle for improvement that never quite ends still any improvement is a move in the right direction...

In terms of having ministers of woman's issues etc. Well if the default perspective directing social or government action is that of some happy mix of men and woman's perspective equally, yeah they are superfluous. The premise as I understand it of such minsters etc. is precisely that say woman's issues have a tendency of all between the cracks, be ignored etc., because our (or at least government) default perspective is still that of men.

Personally, I tend to think it is the case that such a skewed perspective still dominates, because most politicians are still men, men still make most of the money (money makes the world go round after all) etc. This is not the only face of the prejudices, hang ups and so on and those may well disadvantage men as much as woman or more in given cases (and prejudices that work against men reporting sexual harassment etc. would be an obvious example), but that can be consistent with there being a clear trend in the imbalance/distortion of our default perspective...

[Yukaphile]

@Slash Gallagher Because it's TRUE. Training, tools, is nothing. Will is everything. A smart woman could outsmart a stronger man, and if she's had the proper training, with the right tools, she could beat him. It's simply a matter of how you utilize the knowledge you have at hand. Luck is as much a factor, but then, I don't see the size difference between men and women being that huge to think that most men can easily beat on women if the woman isn't going to fight back and isn't determined enough to want to resist.

[Madner Kami]

@Slash Gallagher Because it's TRUE. Training, tools, is nothing. Will is everything. A smart woman could outsmart a stronger man, and if she's had the proper training, with the right tools, she could beat him. It's simply a matter of how you utilize the knowledge you have at hand. Luck is as much a factor, but then, I don't see the size difference between men and women being that huge to think that most men can easily beat on women if the woman isn't going to fight back and isn't determined enough to want to resist.

And if I had a gag and lived next door to you, I would gag you. Can you, for once, not react on someone just pushing your buttons and derail a thread with tangential-at-best argumentations, just because you need to have the last word and need to insert yourself on everything and consequentially loose yourself in silly and completely pointless trains of thought?

[Riedquat]

Exactly what clearspira said. And it's not really about physical power. We do not live in a hunter-gatherer society 10,000 years ago, as SF Debris said. It's about the training and the tools you have. Or as Ra's al Ghul puts it...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRC9XsuqTj8

He said that's not your point, which doesn't leave me much clearer as to what your point is. Sure, there's more than physical strength, and I'm always happy to see some arsehole underestimate someone they pick on and abuse and come out worse off, whether that's due to being outsmarted or by any other means (of which an abusive man is only one possibility amongst many).

In any case like it or not physical power, or at least perceived physical power, plays a part. We might not live in the same society as we did 10000 years ago but we've got the same instincts, which include a instinct to back down to those who look capable of using that strength to their own ends. Society has improved in dealing with people who want to abuse that, both in terms of reprecussion and creating people who aren't inclined to abuse a physically stronger position, but those instincts which kept us alive thousands of years ago are the same ones we've got now and you can't ignore them, and trying to means not properly dealing with them.

[Yukaphile]

@Madner Kami I mean, you blocked me because you dislike me, and I returned it so I wouldn't see your posts, so why is it a problem for you anyway?

[Riedquat]

@Slash Gallagher Because it's TRUE. Training, tools, is nothing. Will is everything. A smart woman could outsmart a stronger man, and if she's had the proper training, with the right tools, she could beat him. It's simply a matter of how you utilize the knowledge you have at hand. Luck is as much a factor, but then, I don't see the size difference between men and women being that huge to think that most men can easily beat on women if the woman isn't going to fight back and isn't determined enough to want to resist.

Will is a part of it. You'll get nowhere without it but willpower alone is not enough. And unfortunately "outsmart" is not always sufficient - sometimes it's the right tool for the job, sometimes it's possible for anyone to find themselves in a situation where being able to run fast out of trouble is. Willpower, intelligence, strength, training, all tools in the same box, and some we're born with, some can be learned, and others are a combination of both. But no single one is sufficient in every situation.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

It wouldn't have a problem meshing at all, but sadly we live in a world with SWERFs.

[Riedquat]

So instead we should be asking, what differences in outcomes do each have, and which is overall better. Would it be best merely to minimize them? Important questions that we aren't asking if we dismiss the entire concept as unattainable due to "human nature".

Human nature is a hard one to deal with, because inevitably going against it means persuading people to behave in a way they don't want to. Chipping away at that is a slow process. Pointing out that you're suggesting something is going against human nature shouldn't be a reason to dismiss a concept but does demonstrate that you're going to have a very hard time making it gain traction, and you'll have to tread very carefully to avoid descending into abuse when a lot of people aren't inclined to go along.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Except conversely I can't really keep blaming him for people getting pissed off about something he said, only for him to clarify it later and we're all back to square 1. You can talk about right-wing internet trolls that he enables with 4 minute sensationalist videos, but I've seen him on several accounts dissociate with them as far as he's selling self-help books.

Not specifically, but of course that's not barred for speculation. I've dug up on it for a bit and can find sense if he's rebutting against Marxist schools of thought that it's a product of westernism, and/or it fitting into a more recent narrative of his that I noticed where he talks about historical tendency for social systems to adopt it prior to advents in technology that help us modernize.

If he's used it as a means of dismissing problematic facets of hierarchies, that's a different thing.

That's sorta what I mean. He keeps his principles vague enough that while he implies many terrible things, if called he can deflect and claim a softer position.
Which goes back to my earlier position that the best approach is to limit discussion to the impact he's had on discourse or people's lives via the actions of his devotees. He can certainly disavow them, and we could argue about his intent, but the followers exist and have concrete outcomes which is easier to focus on.

But if we're able to argue about his intent, then we can't just say that he implies. You can talk about subsequent implications of fact, but those exist aside other implications of the same fact. I understand the gravitas of what we're talking about still makes the former implications a concern, but how much that actually makes him suspect and the degree to which we can shout back at him about what he said, or what he meant to say is on us. I personally think that's an important point. If you disagree with any of that there, that's all good, though I'm fine resting there. It is suitable as a topic of its own.

Although in this instance there is the alternate approach of simply rejecting his foundational premises entirely. So tangenting off into hierarchies, we could go thusly.
They exist. The way they exist, the degree they exist, what they exist between, those can be debated, but they clearly do.
Peterson rather infamously used the example of certain species of lobsters to suggest that hierarchies exist in nature, rather than being the product of human creation (which he'd broadly suggest is a claim shared by most forms of progressive thought.) People get hung up on that, whether that's true or the nuance of the argument that they're manmade, whether the hierarchies of human societies have anything in common, whatever.

But there's an implicit premise in Peterson's argument: that because Hierarchies are found in non-human animals, they are... good? Inevitable? His position is slippery, but the function of his argument is that their existence deflects or negates the arguments for dismantling them.

This does kinda stem from my last paragraph, so I guess I'd proceed to say that that doesn't mean they're good. Nor inevitable; I've seen him explicitly bring up how we've come up with advances in technology and policy to spite injustices out of male hegemony (not to say that we're done). Now in the interview I'm referring to I would say that he got a little sheepish with the role of activism. With woman's right to vote in the United States, he was emphatic about us coming together as a society to weigh on women's autonomy instead of their roles as wives, then conceded that direct activism was a component. Now I agree that the fact that he had to be met halfway to that degree is peculiar, but I wouldn't necessarily be ready to cite him.

But... why should that be so? That is, why should the natural occurrence of a thing have bearing on it's usefulness or desirability to human society? That something happens in nature is cause to examine why that is, how it functions, what outcomes it brings about, that is true. But uh... civilization is built on the foundation "fuck nature". Hunting paths drying up due to too big a family? Raise them yourself! Not getting enough food off these plants you were harvesting? Find teh biggest ones and get better ones next season! In a dick-waving contest with another nation with whom military conflict would be devastating? Fuck gravity, fuck vacuums, fuck the effects of negating both on the human body, we're going to the moon.
Even if humans are naturally prone to tribal behavior or forming hierarchies, we're clever bitches. We can figure this stuff out over time if we're motivated to it.

In a vacuum I'd say I agree with this. Not to appeal to circumstance of his position or anything, just that I agree with what you're saying here. It's true that he posits more conservative values, and he talks about this kind of stuff through dry analytics instead of advocating or condemning.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Apologies. I wasn't sure if you were checking for instance workplace oriented policies, saying that feminism has gone too far in exlusivising women as sufferers of patriarchy.

Still not quite sure what you are aiming at (are you a native english speaker or a learned one, like me; just out of curiousity, because I feel there's a language-disconnect here), but I'll attempt to answer nonetheless:

I don't really think that the rules are set up to exclusively benefit women, nor are they intended to do so. Every such rules I've seen are written in such a way that they apply to everyone (at least in my company and I have to assume that this is true at large). However, societal conditioning leads to an imbalance in reporting and, by extend, a disconnect in societal perception and as far as I can see, that is true for every situation where men and women work or interact together. The consequential statistical bias makes it's way into public perception via news-papers and so on and by consequence, you get head-lines or text-snippets that imply that women are the sole victims and men the sole perpetrators, when in reality, neither part of the population is exclusively victim and exclusively perpertrator. And this statistical and perceptual bias is regularly used as a basis for arguementation, which is my beef with current feminist politics or at least those parts of feminism who are the most vocal. However, I am quite aware that not all "feminists" are made the same and that there are considerably more balanced participants out there.

Did I answer your question sufficently?

Actually yeah. My question was initially about the sensitivity of workplace policy and how the public landscape exacerbates that, but it's kind of the opposite. You're saying that the shaped statistics manipulates the public landscape and perception.