Fake Charity Nerd Girl

WE USED TO MARRY OFF OUR DAUGHTERS AGAINST THEIR WILL AND THEY SELF-REPORTED HIGHER HAPPINESS LEVELS APPARENTLY

And in the least convenient world where women married off against their will are literally happier and healthier, what do you do? Are you only capable of living in a world that does not offend your sensibilities? Must you live in fantasy, forever denying every fact that opposes your dearly held views? For I cannot see how any humane being can look at the world as it stands and not be horrified to the point of despair. But neither despair nor outrage will make the world better.

First you must know the world as it is, in all its horror. Then you must decide how the world should be, fraught with every peril and self-serving trap such involves. And then you must build a bridge from the former to the latter. Your delusions don’t help the suffering. They may help you, to the degree that they’re politically useful and keep you from being ostracized. But that don’t help you figure out how to make the world a better place. So long as you deny the world as it is, your plans to fix it will keep failing to move the world to where you want it to be.

ah so I have agency and it’s cool if I act against other people’s expressly stated preferences if I know it’s for their own good, that’s reassuring and not terrifyingly exploitable at all.

It’s just a protocol that we’ve adopted to solve a problem forced upon us. I don’t see what the big deal is.

mmm okay I’m done actually.

If arranging marriages makes women happier, tell women, “you can marry as you choose and have freedom, or you can marry your parent’s choice and have happiness”. Some people prefer happiness and some people prefer freedom; let each have the value they prefer.

You know, I have been trying to follow this argument as best I can, and I have no idea what it’s about. Near as I can tell, @lambdaphagy posted a graph purporting to show that despite the victories of femminism since 1970, women in the US have become less happy while men have become more happy. Then @argumate said it was stupid to conclude that freedom is bad if it makes women unhappy. Then @inferentialdistance said hey, if we don’t judge freedom by its consequences, then what do we judge it by? And then everyone had a strong opinion on whether people should be thrown into volcanoes, which was a proxy for various policies about the role of women in society, even though no one expressed support for changing any policies regarding the role of women in society.

Maybe there’s some previous argument in which inferentialdistance staked out a position in favor of restricting freedoms on women, and maybe that’s in part what argumate is reacting to. But I don’t see any of that in this recent exchange.

So, inferentialdistance, are you taking a position against any of the freedoms women have gained since the mid-twentieth century?

And argumate, do you have any reason to believe that inferentialdistance wants to roll back any of the freedoms you’re in favor of?

Or should I just go ahead and throw myself into a volcano for even asking this?

I’d like to hop in briefly to clear my plate of this discourse.  I posted that graphic as a pars pro toto for the various ways in which the much-sought “After The Revolution” has failed to materialize.  In doing so I tied this point to the field of happiness research in general, and to one study in particular.  This was a weak move, and I regret it.  It is apparently disputed whether self-reported subjective well being (SRSWB) is even decreasing (per @somnilikes), and it seems that the most methodologically conservative conclusion to draw would be that feminism has not budged SRSWB much one way or the other.  (I’m confident that this compromise that will please everyone.) 

I don’t think that studying SRSWB is completely worthless, but I do agree with detractors in this thread that it is a rather low-fi (and unfortunately bike-sheddy) construct for the thing we’re trying to get at, so consider the point withdrawn.

Since then the thread has spun off into remarkably ahistorical territory, and I admit I have not much kept up with it.  As for what I actually favor, I endorse this post by @samueldays and, even more so, this one by Sarah.

I’m intrigued that both of your links are about the changes in marriage, while when I think about declining female happiness the first thing I think of is the expectation that women be successful both inside and outside the domestic sphere and the extent to which women end up being both full-time workers and full-time homemakers/mothers.

Obviously my perspective is biased by living in an upper-middle-class trad bubble of low divorce rates and high fertility rates.

But like, I reeeeeeally don’t see the case for marital rape being a good thing.

colleges have the same rate of rape as prisons – about 20%. what kind of horrible, abusive parent would put their daughter through a place where she has a 20% chance of being raped? anyone who tries to send their daughter to college should have all their children taken away. 

and that’s assuming there’s no gay rape. i’m sure it’s just that the new york times isn’t woke enough to tell us about it yet.

College-age women who don’t attend college are 30% more likely to be sexually assaulted than women who are in college.

(I know, the link is to the New York Times. I tried to read the actual journal article but it was paywalled. But like, all they did was run the numbers on NCVS data, plus it fits with my priors anyway.)

Obviously this is as far as possible from evidence of causality. I don’t know of any good studies attempting to do causal inference here; I wouldn’t be surprised if an economist could come up with a clever instrumental variable.

(though that study would by necessity tell us about the effects on people who were marginal to go to college, and I’m not sure how much that would tell me about the effects on e.g. my children)

Anyway I think refusing to pay for your children to go to college is a questionably effective and quite costly intervention–if I were into non-evidence-based ways to reduce my children’s risk of getting raped I would probably go with teaching them to drink responsibly, teaching them about buddy systems, teaching them about consent, etc.

(also I’ll note that college students are adults? if my parents had refused to pay for me to go to college, I would have gone to college anyway. this is dependent on class privilege in many ways but still)

official opinion on “Chariot for Women”, the new Uber competitor that only hires women drivers and only picks up women:

women in Ubers are not at an elevated risk of sexual assault. most people who are sexually assaulted know their attackers. our societal obsession with the scary stranger as the prototypical case of sexual assault to protect ourselves from is deeply unhelpful.

women also commit sexual assault. saying “we’ll only hire female drivers, to keep our women safe” is buying into a narrative about female harmlessness and male predatoriness that helps female abusers and rapists get away with it. 

In general, the fact that women are scared to be out at night and scared to call a cab is a problem. That fear is not remotely warranted by the evidence, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect and limit peoples’ lives. it is part of the same patriarchal “women can’t go out alone; they need protection” mindset that motivates some countries to require women have male chaperones. It is not feminist and feeding the unwarranted flames of this fear in the name of feminism is disgusting. 

There’s this thing that keeps happening where people say “let’s unquestioningly accept the patriarchal narrative that women are pure, virtuous, and need protection. Let’s also unquestioningly accept the narrative that women are safe around other women, and that danger comes from men. Then, let’s come up with a plan for ‘empowering women’ that buys into both of those assumptions completely and in fact reinforces them! Why aren’t women empowered yet?”

On the bright side good on them for having an unequivocal “duh we take trans women, they’re women” policy. I guess if we’re going to all be subject to stupid empowerment-flavored pedestalization it may as well serve a population with a legit non-negligible risk of random strangers assaulting them.

Also this just seems like a bad idea economically. Women are probably like 50% of Uber passengers but only 14% of drivers: it’s hard to imagine demand won’t be way higher than supply. Add in the fact that there’s no surge pricing (*eyeroll*), and it’s hard to imagine cars won’t be really expensive, have really long wait times, or both.

The enthusiasm for an all-female service ranged from “I would be all over it” to “HELL YES” [caps hers]. 

I have to wonder how this enthusiasm will hold up when they see the prices or have to wait half an hour for a car.

Also the fact that articles about this keep talking about the number of sexual assaults in Ubers and linking to “Who’s Driving You?” as a source which is literally a scare campaign funded by the taxi industry.

I’m always surprised at how scared other women seem to be of being assaulted by strangers. When I was talking about this to one of my friends she was like, “well yeah, I wouldn’t take an Uber alone with a male driver.” And I was like “??? I’ve probably done that like 30 times? How do you even get places?” (The worst thing that has ever happened to me while alone in an Uber was my driver telling me that I “look like a nerd.” This was not actually a bad thing and was in fact a great source of amusement.)

The 14% of drivers thing probably has much to do with how much women drivers are harassed by male customers. Plus don’t assume your experience matches what other women experience.

Sorry, definitely didn’t mean to imply all women have the same experiences or that women are never harassed or assaulted in Ubers! Just because I think it’s weird how scared other women are of strangers doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong or irrational. (Also to be clear the correct response to someone who is irrationally scared of something is sympathy, not “haha you’re being silly.” Irrational fear is still unpleasant.)

And I kind of doubt women being harassed by passengers is the main thing driving that 14%? I mean, truck drivers don’t pick up passengers, and only 5% of truck drivers are women. Men drive more than women in general: they’re like 60% of drivers on the road. Maybe men just like driving because operating a steering wheel while looking around for other cars is similar to hunting on the savannah, which requires using weapons with one’s hands while looking for an animal to kill.