On Liberal Contempt Toward Conservatives

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Tiassa, Dec 17, 2010.

  1. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,829
    What a load of BS.

    This, as far as I know, was NEVER the way it has been.

    There was a time, not that long ago, when the amount of effort it took to cook and clean and take care of the kids and maintain a home was a full time job and so a woman who stayed at home was pretty much constantly at work, just like the man was out in the fields or the factory, but at night, they ate together and talked together and raised their family together.

    Arthur
     
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. Mrs.Lucysnow Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    9,879
    No, not at all. I believe it comes right after 'choice feminism' which was there right alongside third wave feminists and its still an issue for a lot of women. Its the women who like being able to go to school and work but don't like being told that they must work and put their child in day care, and that if they do they are somehow not contributing to society and are unproductive because they choose to be housewives. If you look at Sex in the City as social/cultural barometer what you find are educated women who have dream career money and nice apartments but sit around whining all day because they don't have either a baby, a man or a marriage. They all want to settle down but don't know how and the one woman who wants neither children or marriage is portrayed as a nymphomaniac who cannot deal with the coming of age and menopause.

    Hell you can write three threads on this issue but yeah its been around for a while now.

    The term 'sexual collateral damage' has nothing to do with recognizing that women have boobs and such. It refers to the casualties from the sexual revolution. Its about recognizing that men and women are innately different on a psychologically and emotionally as well as biologically. That they cannot behave like men without suffering negative outcomes or rather that many of them later found themselves very unhappy. They're debunking the idea that the only difference is physical and that if you change social expectations that emotional and psychological needs will follow.
     
    Last edited: Jan 19, 2011
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,884
    The Confidence of Never

    Most recently, we saw this in the "Long Decade", from 1945-1962.

    I recommend Stephanie Coontz's Marriage: A History

    In 1999 the neoconservative William Kristol, who has made a lucrative career out of rehashing nineteenth-century ideas, argued that modern woman must move "beyond women's liberation to grasp the following three points: the necessity of marriage, the importance of good morals, and the necessity of inequality within marriage" .... (187)

    • • •​

    The "protectors" of women's special sphere reacted to these charges with near hysteria. Physicians claimed that bicycle riding was a woman's first step down the road to sexual abandon. In 1890 the British anthropologist James Allen predicted that granting married women the vote would lead to "social revolution, disruption of domestic ties, desecration of marriage, destruction of the household gods, dissolution of the family." In 1895, James Weir warned readers of the American Naturalist that establishment of equal rights would lead directly to "that abyss of immoral horrors so repugnant to our cultivated ethical tastes--the matriarchate" ....

    .... When women finally got the vote in England after World War I, the editor of the Saturday Review called it a form of treason. "While the men of England were abroad dying by the hundreds of thousands for the preservation of England," he charged, Parliament "handed over the government of England to the women ... who were living at home in ease. Surely valour and suffering and death never had a poorer reward." (194-195)

    • • •​

    Fears about women's political and personal emancipation were compounded by the surge in women's employment between 1900 and 1920. William Sumner wrote in the 1924 Yale Review that this had produced "the greatest revolution" in the history of marriage since the invention of the father-headed family many millennia earlier. It gave women "careers and ambitions which have dislodged marriage from its supreme place in their interest and life plan." (201)

    • • •​

    ... the two twentieth-century innovations that most shocked traditional Victorians--the sexual revolution and the attack on separate spheres--did not reflect any widespread rejection of marriage or of women's duty to please men. Indeed, the pressure for couples to put marriage first and foremost in their lives led many women to become more dependent on their relationships with men. Proponents of "modern" sexuality and marriage were deeply suspicious of close ties between women. By the 1920s the profound female friendships that had been such an important part of nineteenth-century female culture were under attack.

    As late as the first decade of the twentieth century, children's books commonly contained love poems from one teenage girl to another. The Story of Mary MacLane by Herself, published in 1902, detailed her love for a former teacher. She described feeling "a convulsion and a melting within" in her loved one's presence and wished she could go off with her friend to "some little out-of-the-world place ... for the rest of my life." The book gives no hint that these feelings should be interpreted as sexually deviant or a sign of lesbianism.

    By the 1920s, however, few self-respecting "modern" women would have admitted to such feelings. By that time intense relationships between women were usually considered childish "crushes" that girls were encouraged to outgrow. At worst, they raised the specter of "abnormal" sexual or emotional development that could make heterosexuality unsatisfactory and marriage unstable.

    By the end of the 1920s American psychoanalysts were warning that one of the most common "perversions of the libido" was the tendency of teenage girls to fix their "affections on members of the same sex." Such perversions, they claimed, were a serious threat to normal development and to marriage. The best way to avoid them was to allow teenage girls to engage in some degree of sexual experimentation with boys. (205-206)

    • • •​

    A wife must "cease to take pride" in "outgrown maidenly reserve," scolded sociologist Ernest Groves. She should accept her husband's sexual initiative and follow his lead, because "his attitude toward sex is less likely to be warped" than hers. Physicians and marriage counselors came to believe, in the words of one contemporary, that women "have to be bluntly reminded that one main source of prostitution is the selfish and unsurrendered wife." Women who failed to find physical satisfaction in such surrender were told that they were not "fully adult" in their sexuality.

    Nor, contrary to the fears of William Sumner, did the greater acceptance of women's work and social activities outside the home after World War I dislodge marriage "from its supreme place" in women's lives. Most people believed that women should retire from work after a few years. And such a course of action became possible for wider segments of the population as men's wages rose in the unprecedented prosperity of the 1920s. It was during this period that for the very first time in U.S. history, a majority of American children lived in families in which the man was the primary wage earner, the wife was not involved in full-time labor outside the home or alongside her husband, and the children were in school instead of in the labor force. (209)

    And from that period, described in the last excerpt, until the end of the Long Decade, is the "traditional marriage" to which the right wing subscribes. It's a June Cleaver, Ozzie and Harriet kind of vision. Perhaps some might look back on the chintzy prudery of John Forsythe and Noreen Corcoran in Bachelor Father (CBS, 1957-62) and chuckle at its obslete outlook, but even that show looked somewhat forward compared to Leave it to Beaver (CBS/ABC, 1957-63) and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (ABC, 1952-66) insofar as it explored the themes of independent masculine parenthood (Bentley Gregg was Kelly's uncole, not father).

    (Incidentally, I've seen the influence of this period, and it is powerful. My father, born in '45, grew up an ardent anti-communist and was a capitalist-conservative at least from Reagan until Bush, Jr.—though it should be noted, for clarity, that Dubya was not the primary reason for his philosophical shift. He is hardly a bleeding-heart liberal these days, but one of his most profound moments that I have witnessed came about during that period when he came face to face with the economic philosophies he advocated, and found them lacking. Still, though, that aspect is beside the point. His disappointment in family life—even though, after five years of separation, it was my mother who eventually had to file for divorce, as he couldn't bring himself to do it despite having moved out and taken up girlfriends—was that we weren't the perfect (quite literally) Ozzie and Harriet family, which was all he ever really wanted in the world after surviving an alcoholic father and incompetent, weak-willed mother. It's one of the few times I choose between genders insofar as I am specifically glad I am a son, and not a daughter.)

    On a side note .... Perhaps, sir, you might be able to advise me regarding a particular phenomenon I witness sometimes, and it always confuses me. In the vernacular of the English language, people are rarely in these sorts of conversations so literal as we demand online. One might say that the exact, literal situation Bells describes never really existed; others would counter that it did, in fact, exist. Regardless, however, as figurative expressions of cultural history go, it's hard to see how she's inaccurate in that paragraph. Regardless of my disagreement with you about the history involved, I cannot figure the failure of communication involved that leads you to the use of the word "never". The nearest I can figure is that a certain confusing phenomenon is in play, but even that doesn't work. I mean, certainly one might protest a sense of exaggeration or overrepresentation, and then attempt to pick apart the general themes with exceptional statistics, anecdotes, and other examples. They might even attempt to define the "real" conditions (I assert none here) that lead to such "exaggerations". But never is an especially confident word, all things considered.

    To the other, if it never existed, someone ought to tell Michael Reagan.

    Either way.
    ____________________

    Notes:

    Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History: from Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Viking, 2005.
     
    Last edited: Jan 19, 2011
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. parmalee peripatetic artisan Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,266
    I see what you're saying here--I guess it just seems dated to me as many (thinkers) have moved on for greener pastures. And to be honest, I've not taken a sufficiently broad survey or kept myself fully abreast of all contemporary scenes (I thought I'd throw in a couple of really bad puns since you read me too literally before (see below)). I'm more into stuff like Julia Kristeve, Helene Cixous (just imagine that I typed the right "special characters" there), and Donna Haraway, and much of their work is rather removed from, well, more practical concerns (and likewise, veers more in a post-humanist direction; in fact, Cixous and Haraway are more apt to be ruminating about (in a roundabout way) dogs--see especially Cixous' masterpiece, "Stigmata: or, Job the Dog").

    C'mon Lucy, I'm not much of one for, uh, communication so I tend to employ shorthand as I figured that you're sufficiently versed to know what I was getting at--I think you're read me a tad too literally here.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  8. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,884
    William R. D. King

    And a vice president.

    I don't know. There are some questions I don't generally ask unless it is immediately relevant. For instance, Buchanan sort of looks like a top. I cannot and do not wish to attempt to imagine him otherwise.

    King County, Washington (Seattle and environs.) used to be named for Vice President William King.

    Ironic, I guess, that should come up this week, since they ditched him for the good Dr. King.
     
  9. Bells Staff Member

    Messages:
    24,270
    Oh, here we go..

    Michael Reagan? Yes, he's full of it.

    Really?

    You have not been around for very long then, have you?

    Care to tell me why Mr Reagan is saying that to fix America, you have to go back to those good old days? Care to tell me why Mr Madanthony came out with this line:

    Male and female roles in human societies have been set for millennia.

    Set to what exactly?

    For example, you are claiming this has never been this way. And yet, it was..

    The term 'seen but not heard' comes from the period where children were seen for a short period of time and not heard. Men never troubled themselves with the lives of children.. That was the domain of the mother.

    Once a child was born in the late 1800s, the role its parents played in its life largely depended on their economic background. Upper-class parents allowed their children to be cared for solely by a nurse or nanny from the moment they were born. The nanny and her charges lived on a separate floor or in a separate wing of the house. Children were expected to follow a strict routine of schoolroom studies and lessons in morality and character. Their routines rarely allowed for more than an hour or two with their parents. Mealtimes were spent in silence in the nursery. Once children turned eight, they were sent to boarding school and parents began to play an even smaller role in their lives.

    Although most middle-class families could not afford a separate staff to tend the children, they did employ two or three servants. In addition to her regular duties, one servant would be expected to mind the children. Children of the middle classes spent more time with their mothers than those of the upper-classes. After attending to her civic and charitable duties, a middle-class mother would take a few hours to teach and socialize with her children. Children of the middle-classes, once old enough to comport themselves properly, would also take their meals with their parents. The standards for middle-class children and the relationship between parent and child was far more relaxed than that of the upper classes.

    Children born to a poor, working class family would spend all of their time with their mother. If the poor mother was fortunate enough to have an unwed sister or spinster aunt living nearby, she may have received some help in caring for her newborns. In most cases, however, the new mother was expected to learn as she went. Starting at an early age, children of poor families were expected to help around the house and to contribute to the household income.

    The roles of the individual parent were quite different in 1899 than they are today. Fathers at the turn of the century remained distant and reserved. They preferred to take a silent, firm role in the family. The father was the breadwinner and the disciplinarian.

    A mother's role in 1899 was to see to the spiritual and moral training of her children. Thus, if a child acted errantly it was naturally the mother's fault for not seeing to her duties properly.

    A child in 1899 was instructed to always "be honest and circumspect with adults. He/she should never speak to an adult unless spoken to first and should always hasten to use the proper forms of address." It was typical for a child of 1899 to address their father as "Mister" or "Sir."


    (Source)

    And you are saying this was never the case?


    Maybe you should stop watching Leave it to Beaver.
     
  10. Mrs.Lucysnow Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    9,879
    Nuances don't always come across on a forum.

    I think its a trajectory, you have the suffrage movement and then when women gain the vote it morphs into the feminist movement which delves deeper into social and cultural myths, expectations and inequities then that splinters into second and third wave which leads to questions of dogma within feminism and ideological constructs. Its all part and parcel to the ultimate aim which is to move beyond all of that. From my experience most women outside of the university setting are not really too concerned with the development of feminist treatise. Most women just take advantage of what society has to offer and get on with it.

    What's wrong with working and taking care of children? Nothing if you can manage it.

    What's wrong with being a housewife? Nothing if you can manage it.

    What's wrong with being unmarried and childless? Nothing if you can manage it.

    The issue always to point is knowing what one can handle and what is personally desirable and not having to be forced or cajoled or pressured to do anything other.

    Look at the debate within feminism on whether a woman can be a sex worker without being a victim. It still rages.
     
  11. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,829
    Give me a break Bells, you go back to the friggin 19th century for your examples?

    You said:
    And I know of NOBODY who was raised in a home like that.

    First of all, back 60 or so years ago the mother (not wifey) did most of the daily work needed to take care of the house and raise the kids, boys included, and it was a full time job and required skill to do it well (particularly since family size was often more than 2 kids).

    I grew up in a lower middle class neighborhood, we had one car for most of the time I was growing up. My father worked for the Post Office and later as a Customs inspector. In my youth, in the 50s & 60s, my mother stayed at home and took care of the house and her 3 children, but we weren't banished when my father came home, indeed we ate nearly every meal together and we did a lot of talking around the dinner table and my father was quite involved in our rearing.
    After our homework, again for which both parents helped, we could watch the one TV together in the family room. On weekends Saturday, after our chores was our time and we would be totally on our own till dinner time. On Sundays we were usually together as a family, having dinner with our relatives and occasional car trips etc.

    While my mom did all the cooking during the week, not so during the weekend when my dad would often be the cook, cooking a meal that took more prep than busy weekdays would normally allow or out on the grill and mom would get a break from that chore (of course she always had other things to do).

    The difference I remember is we never ate at restaurants (and I mean never) and we all had a lot of chores and we all worked hard and we were together much of the time and there is no question that both my parents raised me. My dad taught us about fixing/repairing things, taking care of the yard and my mom taught us all how to cook, and clean and sew, you know skills you would need when you were on your own. Indeed, I recently taught my youngest daughter how to sew.

    My life was very much like the lives of most of my friends and as we got older we got a second car and my mother began working out of the house as a commercial artist and window decorator at a large department store, and we took over a lot of the cooking chores, but otherwise life wasn't that different.

    Arthur
     
  12. occidental Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    46
    Have any references to back up those claims arthur?
     
  13. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,829
    What claims would those be?

    That I know of no families where the "father's came home and saw their children for 2 minutes before they were banished from sight".

    No, just my own personal experience tells me that this was certainly not typical of home life within my lifetime.
    Of we can go back to the many movies and television shows that depict what home life was from say the end of WW2 onward and I can't recall a single one that would portray that as typical.

    What about you, do you think that is an accurate depiction of life back in the mid 20th Century?

    Arthur
     
  14. occidental Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    46
    I didnt realize you wanted to be so obfuscating. Ill be more specific. These claims:
    Theyre youre claims, so prove it. You know, with references and source material. Otherwise your entire argument is nothing more than you saying youre right because you say so.
     
  15. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,884
    Like I said, "never" is a very confident word.

    And in this case, it's wrong. Very wrong.

    And, besides, 1895-1962 was already covered, albeit broadly. The detail Bells provides is interesting to say the least. First Mary Poppins, then Ozzie and Harriet.

    At least the Banks children stood a chance, thanks to their mother and the luxuries of the petit bourgeoisie.
     
  16. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,829
    No it wasn't my claim.

    Bells CLAIMED what the good old days were like.

    I used my experiences and knowledge of others from that time period to say that was NOT what "the good old days" were like from MY perspective.

    I think I made it clear that the claims were based on my own personal knowlege.

    Arthur
     
  17. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,829
    The thread is discussion about modern liberal vs conservatives views and Bells is bringing up Michael Reagan and his version of good old times and he's 65, so that would be the middle of last century or there abouts, not about the 19th friggin century.

    So, in this case, "never" was meant to be limited to the timeframes we are discussing, not any time in the past history of the world.

    Arthur
     
  18. gmilam Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,522
    People laugh at me when I tell them I was raised by Ward & June Clever. But really... When I grew up in the 60's, that is the way it was for me and most of my friends.

    Well, except that my mom never got dressed up to do the housework.
     
  19. birch Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    5,077
    first, the meaning of liberal and conservative needs to be cleared up and defined.

    what most consider the meaning to be for these positions or identifiers is not really what is going on.

    most conservatives identify as such due to political views, misogyny, homophobia and religion. that's the hard right. most liberals identify as such due to concern for people's rights as long as they don't infringe on or hurt others.

    you will hear that conservatives complain that liberals are morally loose and cause the breakdown of society. they tend to blame liberals for what they consider lower morals (promiscuity and homosexuality being the major ones) causing breakdown of family yet conservatives have no problem with these as long as people cover it up and don't let it break apart social stratums or families. they want conformity. for instance, in the mind of a conservative a rape of a female by a male is more or less normal so not as bad as mutual homosexual relationship. a conservative may think single motherhood is unfortunate but think it's better for a couple to remain married even if the husband beats the wife and kids, for example.

    this makes it clear that conservatives are not more ethical than liberals. it just appears to be on the surface. I would say that overall liberals tend to have better sense of ethics whereas conservatives are concerned with dogmatic ethics (which isn't really ethical).

    a good position would be somewhere not extreme on either side. extreme liberalism or conservativism that is devoid of ethical and humane considerations
     
  20. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    9,232
    One of my roles is to teach the preparation of executive summaries for reports and commercial proposals. That's a first rate executive summary. Well done.
     
  21. madanthonywayne Morning in America Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    12,461
    So liberals, defined as people who are concerned with people's rights, tend to have a better sense of ethics than conservatives, defined as dogmatic misogynistic homophobic religious nuts who consider rape a lesser crime than homosexuality?


    \
     
  22. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    Likewise?

    I omitted the question mark, as unnecessary and possibly misleading.

    The reasoning and evidence are of course omitted as well, apparently the normal practice when communicating with executives.

    Which explains a lot, for example the voting patterns of white men between 35 and 60 with above median incomes (IIRC one of the few demographic groups to vote for McCain/Palin over Obama/Biden in '08, continuing a longstanding pattern of feckless obliviousness in the political arena).
     
  23. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,884
    Truth is Negotiable, according to Republicans

    Truth is Negotiable

    Rep. Steve King (R-IA) just appeared on MSNBC's The Last Word. Host Lawrence O'Donnell included in his segment introduction audiotape of a conversation Rep. King had with one of his constituents. As the constituent goes on about President Obama not being American, Rep. King agrees and encourages.

    Called upon to answer for this, Rep. King tried a bit of dodge and weave, tried to explain what President Obama did to deserve this smear campaign, and ultimately, when pressed specfically by O'Donnell on telling the truth, the distinguished gentleman from Iowa said he would think about it if Obama spoke more to conservative satisfaction.

    That is, the price of truth, according to Republican Representative Steve King of Iowa, is that the president give Republicans whatever they want.

    Truth, in the GOP, is negotiable. It is a reward to be honored only upon their satisfaction by others.

    We might recall our conservative neighbors who are, apparently, offended that some disapprove of contemptible behavior.

    Perhaps if conservatives actually stood up and did something about the contemptible behavior, some of that contempt toward conservatives would lighten up. I mean, really ... it's not like people aren't willing to express their reasons for that contempt.

    But, as we see, the real offense is that one might ever find such behavior contemptible.

    Rep. King's standard is thoroughly repugnant. Or maybe not: Who will defend it?

    (Transcript text forthcoming when it posts.)
     

Share This Page