This reminds me of the gender-based discrimination in Banks’ Culture novel The Player of Games.
It’s still astounding to me to see a country keep half of its population in effective slavery.
It’s still astounding to me to see a country keep half of its population in effective slavery.
It's an underdeveloped culture, women don't have equal rights by any means, but it's not slavery. Continuously reaching for superlatives just makes the terms useless.
Especially when limts are enforced by police prisons and both state and private violence.
It is hard to distinguish from ownership.
I'm not arguing for Saudi Arabia here, I find most things I know about their culture and traditions to be disgusting (though they appear to be making progress, no doubt thanks to international pressure and the oil money drying up). But I'm strongly against this trend of constantly reaching for the most extreme words for dramatic effect.
Saudi Arabia does have slaves, actual real slaves. But they're not Saudi women (they're often women, but they're from e.g. Malaysia or the Philippines and are forced to serve these Saudi women you call slaves). If you call the Saudi women slaves, what word would you use for their slaves? Slaves' slaves? Super slaves? Real slaves? Why not just call them slaves, and call the Saudi women something else, describe their situation with different words. Something like saying they're not given anywhere close to the same rights as Saudi men of equal standing, are not given the freedom that we consider a basic human right, and are forced to live in an underdeveloped society. That's bad enough, and I hope their situation improves, but it's not slavery.
> they're treated as property by the legal system and by the culture
They're not. The culture is stupid, don't get me wrong, but it's not about property but about some paternalistic form of guardianship, i.e. it's based on the belief that they couldn't decide for themselves or couldn't be trusted to make the right decision or are in some form of danger. It's ridiculous, I know, but it's not about them being property. Property can be sold and traded, and you can't sell your wife in Saudi Arabia, because the relationship isn't like property, it's more like parental custody of children. That's still crazy, but throwing a false framing on it doesn't help.
The male female relationship in saudi also do not ressemble parental relationships. It is really softening what is going on.
Look at infractions and jail times. Look at violence. Plus, look at female right advocates treatment - jail and torture.
No, it wasn't. Actual slavery was always very obvious in the property, trading and exploitation system. You bought slaves, you sold them, your children inherited them, and you financially profited from owning them because they worked for you. Nobody claimed that they'd buy slaves and made them do hard labor in the plantations for the slaves' benefits.
> The male female relationship in saudi also do not ressemble parental relationships. It is really softening what is going on.
That's not what I said. The legal relationship is close to that of custody/guardianship, not the emotional one.
I don't get why you're so set on re-framing them as slaves. They have slaves. Slaves don't have slaves. You can find the Saudi system despicable without grossly misrepresenting it.
> Nobody claimed that they'd buy slaves and made them do hard labor in the plantations for the slaves' benefits.
here's a counterexample (prolix, but presumably it's easier to get slaves to do one's fieldwork than to edit one's rants):
https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/hundley/hundley.html#hund2...
> "For, although we might compare the present condition of the Southern slaves with the condition of other laborers elsewhere, we yet fancy such would hardly be the proper method by which to arrive at any just knowledge of the benefits or evils resulting from African servitude. Certainly we believe the comparison, if made, would show that the negroes of the South are happier as a class than the peasants of other countries. We know from actual observation that they fare better than the poor of any of our cities--are more warmly clad, work less, and are a thousand-fold more cheerful and contented. We know, too, that they are infinitely better off than the peons of Mexico, who are bought by the year for any nominal sum which they are presumed to owe the purchaser, and are liable in their old age to be turned adrift without a home, and with not a living soul to take an interest in their welfare. We also believe, and so must every thoughtful honest man, that their lot is even enviable compared to that of the poor Coolies and other free apprentices, those new-fangled slaves whom Cant and Hypocrisy are engaged in selling for a term of years to our tropical neighbors. But we repeat, there is no necessity to make the comparison. To arrive at any rational conclusion as to what has been the result of African slavery in the United States, we must consider what was the character of the negroes when first landed on our shores, and what is their character now. Have they improved in speech, in morals, in personal appearance, and in usefulness; or have the "degrading effects" of a century of slavery rendered them more savage than they were when they wandered about in the jungles of Congo and Guinea, feasting on human flesh, and worshipping dogs and monkeys, stocks and stones? or have they cursed the soil by their presence, rendering it as barren and unfruitful as their original desert wastes, whereon their kindred still roam, rejoicing in the rude comforts of an untutored barbarism, and in all the wealth and simplicity of Adam's fig-leaf? This is the question, and the only question."
They really did, I literally learned that from history books. I just googled "civilizing aspects of slavery" and found this https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/27530631.pdf But really, any detailed book on American slavery will have those arguments in it.
I think that one massive thing to learn from history is that it is not really new to frame oppression as guardianship.
> That's not what I said. The legal relationship is close to that of custody/guardianship, not the emotional one.
It is really not. As I told, the jail and torture if she crosses the line makes the difference. It is even less guardianship then slavery - the guardianship framing makes it sound nicer and more palatable then what it really is. The protection thing is not going on, the ownership thing is going on.
> Saudi Arabia does have slaves, actual real slaves. But they're not Saudi women (they're often women, but they're from e.g. Malaysia or the Philippines and are forced to serve these Saudi women you call slaves). If you call the Saudi women slaves, what word would you use for their slaves?
You do here exactly the slavery as metaphor thing too. They actually dont have actual slaves per law, that was abolished long time ago. The abused domestic workers are formally not slaves and are not traded in slave market either. Their children are not sold as slaves either.
Btw, slaves did oversees other slaves. Roman slaves could become valued friends of household owner - while still being at his mercy. That would not be possible in American chattel slavery.
> The abused domestic workers are formally not slaves and are not traded in slave market either.
They literally are, and when they bring them outside of Saudi Arabia, it's not rare for Saudis to be convicted of human trafficking and enslavement - if it becomes known to authorities. The Saudi state regularly posts bail in these cases.
> Btw, slaves did oversees other slaves.
Yes, but they didn't have slaves. It's the difference between being the shift foreman in a factory and owning the factory.
If a Saudi woman divorces her husband, does she have durable ownership over those slaves, or are they her husband's slaves in her husband's household; which she enjoys a temporary privilege to command?
We have traditions like a man asking her father for her hand in marriage. We change her last name to signify she has transferred identity from her father's clan to her husband's. We treat marriage as very much a financial contract and divorce tends to hurt women financially much more than it does men.
Etc.
I don't have a simple solution for that one. I don't think it's inherently bad that women typically change their last name. But the reason it is done is because the way women get treated the world over has some things in common.
The level of freedom is debatable for Western women. But I already said Westerners don't like to hear that and it got downvoted and dismissed out of hand. So I'm not really up for trying to argue it, given the climate.
Comparing women being imprisoned and tortured right now because they did not followed the rules to name changed in western countries smells bad faith, honestly. Hence, some of downvotes.
So maybe just leave me alone. The men here are brutal enough without women here "eating their own."
I do tend to comment more when I disagree which is fairly normal here and pretty much everywhere.
Yes, your overall pattern of behavior boils down to "women eating their own." I have damn little support here from the men. Most women that I can readily ID as female are openly antagonistic, as if they are jealous of my status, which is a typical female social dynamic.
I've studied this stuff in depth. I discuss it regularly with my sons who are also quite knowledgeable.
The best way to destroy someone is to do it politely and all this shit, completely within the fucking rules so it looks like they are entirely in the wrong.
This gets done daily around the world to women and other marginalized peoples. And having not eaten and yadda today because eleven years here and being the top ranked woman isn't sufficient to get me connections adequate to establish a middle class income, I'm a tad frayed around the edges. So I'm having a little trouble politely going along with this BS today.
Also, I dont know why you think I should consider you higher status or even be aware of your nick when i am responding.
In that, you are literally trying to use sexist stereotype to make me do what you want. The sexist stereotype that invalidates what i wrote and my opinions, using imaginary status instead. That is tripple hard no for me, I refuse to play this game.
And so am I. That includes letting you know that I don't like the way you treat me and wish you would leave me alone.
So far, I haven't asked the mods to intercede. But with you doubling down on asserting your right to harass me, that is likely to be my next step.
Please, kindly, leave me the hell alone. Justifying downvotes is a violation of the guidelines. If you just followed them, we wouldn't be having this argument.
I have a male friend who took his wife's last name, actually (his reason was that his surname is basically the most common in the country, which made his full name highly non-unique)!
I never understood why modern women still tend to change their name. It's definitely not something anyone expects, in my experience at least.
I took my husband's name largely because it was a cheap, easy and very private means to stop having the same last name as someone who molested and raped me. I kept my married name when I divorced on the socially acceptable reason that it's the same name as my children. It's a valid reason, but the firmer reason was that my ex's last name is less objectionable than my rapist's last name as a moniker for myself.
Should I ever remarry, I am highly likely to again take my new husband's last name to try one last time to wash off the shit of my past.
Child molestation or other abuse by relatives is sadly all too common. I doubt anyone has formally studied it, but I would be shocked if it turned out I was the only woman who chose to change my last name for that kind of reason.
If we want real equality, we will also need to stamp out the gendered trends in sexual assault. It is typically a male assaulting a female and this can have lifelong negative impact when she is assaulted at a young age.
I don't know a nice, neat simple solution for this issue. There are some good points to "me, my spouse and kids all have a family name together and it's reasonably short." We also tend to trace inheritance via the father's family line.
Some women trade their middle name for the maiden name and take their husband's last name as a solution, like Hillary Rodham Clinton. That seems to be a mostly upper class tradition for women with more of a public life where they have a real need to have some kind of continuity with their past identity in their own right.
Trying to bring women out of the shadows of the very private lives as only full-time wives and moms and into the public sphere -- which is de facto the trend here as women live longer, have fewer kids and need to occupy themselves somehow other than just cooking and cleaning -- is complicated.
When I don't completely hate my life and wish I had never been born, I occasionally think it's a great experiment in how to resolve some of these questions. There are no easy or simple answers for how to move an entire world rapidly and well from one system to another, which is more or less what the entire world is in the process of doing.
How we used to handle it made logical sense for the social fabric of that era. And our social fabric is changing and what worked at one time is now seen as all wrong and bad and I worry that we are throwing the baby out of with the bathwater here.
I guess literally, because trying to give women some kind of rights and just handing them a male model is clearly shafting mothers and children. And I think we need to do better than that. I think we urgently need to do better than that.
My American friend was uncomfortable with the situation and said something about it to someone to the effect that "It's cool now, but when she is home and caring for triplets alone, this will be a terrible burden." The person looked at her like she had completely lost her mind and told her "She is never going to have to care for triplets alone."
I was a full-time wife and mom for a lot of years. I supported my husband's military career and raised and homeschooled our special-needs sons. And since the divorce, life has been extremely hard.
My stats tend to be out of date, but I spent a lot of time reading a lot of stuff to try to sort out how and why my life went so very wrong. I was one of the top students in my graduating high school class and won a National Merit Scholarship, etc.
The last time I looked at stats, women who were childless and unmarried made about 97 percent of what men made with similar education and experience. The minute she had either a husband or child, the average dropped to two-thirds what men make -- the same the Bible quotes a woman as making 2000 years ago.
These are American stats and European women tend to fare somewhat better. It's also less bad these days, from what I gather, then it was 30 years ago.
But I continue to be stymied in my efforts to establish an adequate income for myself and my sons. And I'm quite clear my gender is a very large part of that.
I do not self-identify as a feminist. I was a homemaker for a lot of years and most self-proclaimed feminists I meet are openly hostile towards me, a la that scene in "Mona Lisa Smile."
Women still are heavily burdened by the issue of childbearing and childrearing. And in the US you mostly have some kind of "equality" with men if you choose to not have children. And if you do have kids, your life can be completely flushed down the toilet over it and other people will shrug and say "Well, you shouldn't have had kids if you couldn't afford them."
It's also not a policy that is sustainable. If we actively and successfully encourage all women to stop having kids, this is the last generation of humans.
We have to find some means to give all people, regardless of gender or age, some kind of decent quality of life. We shaft far too many of our people and then wonder why there are headlines on Hacker News about the social fabric coming unraveled.
They are only "far apart" if you have a narrow view of quality of life. I don't and my life experience tells me it is far more complex than most Westerners want to believe who like to claim we are the height of civilized achievement for all of human history and don't make us uncomfortable with niggling details about how mothers get shafted or something.
Everything I read about this, including anecdotal evidence points to the opposite, where men are routinely taken to the cleaners by the family court. Could you point to some resources that suggest otherwise? I'm trying to see the full picture here.
I appear to be the highest ranked woman on Hacker News. It has failed to get me significant career contacts or substantial income. I have not eaten today. I have 50 cents to my name. I was homeless for nearly six years.
I am shitposting on HN because I am too hungry, tired and out of sorts to do anything better and I am sick to death of trying to point out the obvious to people who absolutely do not want to hear it.
Anecdotally: I was a homemaker for years. I have six years of college and lots of evidence that I'm competent. I cannot turn it into a "career" or adequate income.
My ex got to take his lovely resume and keep working and he bought a house and remarried and yadda. Because the years he spent working at his career while I cooked his meals and raised our kids is something he can bank on and I can't.
I see, basically a stay at home wife/mother is not adequately compensated for her time spent at home maintaining it and taking care of the children.
In the west, this is still a choice though, right? These days I don't think anyone can "bank" on their spouse staying at home while they work. In those years, you had the choice of going to work. For better or worse (I personally think children need at least one parent in early development years), you stayed at home and took care of them.
Knowing him was a huge, huge personal growth experience and helped me figure out how to stand up for myself and insist men not shit all over me every single step of the way in life. Which is probably one of the reasons I appear to be the highest ranked woman on Hacker News.
So I do have some insights into how women get treated in the Middle East. And before anyone jumps up to tell me my last boyfriend must have been some kind of statistical outlier, that's the same BS excuse people are making in this same discussion for American women who get treated like property in some parts of the US.
It amounts to "La la la not listening. Don't confuse me with the facts."
Certainly, there are differences. But as someone who is still suffering terribly the consequences of having been born female, I find it personally galling for people to act like I'm some kind of loon for pointing out the differences aren't as dramatic as we want to imagine.
The economic power of women is largely non-mothers and married mothers' husbands.
A homemaking mother with 10+ years experience has severely degraded economic value in the job market.
There is only child support and division of assets acquired during marriage - typically half/half.
The cleaners sentiment comes from men thinking the common property is all/most theirs.
720 million women living today married as children, many of them have had several children themselves with an immature body before they became adults. None of these women live in Western societies!
https://www.girlsnotbrides.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/GN...
But at least it is very clear that we could only find a rare example against systematic rape of under aged girls in other societies.
15 million girls a year marry before the age of 18.
https://www.visapourlimage.com/en/festival/exhibitions/ces-p...
I cannot reply directly but I'm fairly certain you do not have daughters if you say the experiences are equal in those marriages we are comparing.
Let's agree to disagree.
If a husband tries to prevent her from that, she can get aid from friends and the state to resist.
Are 1 and 100 both numbers? Test. But they aren't close.
The key difference here is that if an evangelical wife doesn't like her husband's views on life, she can just go to the court house and divorce him and move wherever the heck she wants, and do whatever she wants to do. I don't think that same freedom exists in Saudi Arabia.
I am getting downvotes because anytime a woman tells Western men they don't treat their women as wonderfully as they like to imagine, they kick the living crap out of her and let her know she needs to SFTU because women have it so very good here. It's par for the course.
I think you're confusing the West with countries like Saudi Arabia.
Similarly: it's tradition to say "until death do us part" in marriage vows, but essentially nobody means it, divorce is common.
"There are crazy drops in a sea of sane people" != "There's a sea of crazy people, but I've seen a sane drop or two".
I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of HN. I spent nearly six years homeless while a member here. I remain dirt poor.
Meanwhile, some of the men on the leaderboard are millionaires who made their millions in part by networking via HN.
The figures for women in leadership positions at Fortune 500 companies is something like 6 percent female CEOs and 17 percent overall. There appears to be one and only one woman on HN to have ever graced the leaderboard, a list of 100 names that has changed over time. So my brief appearance there puts me in a league of my own and well under one percent of those names is someone who posts as openly female.
Yet all most men here want to know if they email me is if I will sleep with them. So HN has been a huge networking fail for me and I remain dirt poor.
Since that poverty means I can't afford to eat today, I'm a hair crankier than usual about the whole thing.
Sexism is alive and well in the West and the gains we've made fall very far short of anything resembling equality.
I think I'm done here for now. My story is not remotely a secret. It's galling how I get treated here and then told to quit my whining about my poverty.
In discussions of gender equality, so it's on topic. It's just not welcome and this is a silencing tactic that helps ensure I can never get any kind of remedy.
That being said, a couple things you’ve mentioned that I wanted to talk about: one is that you’re one of the only women, or poor people on this site (I noticed you’ve qualified it with “leaderboard”, but I suspect you know as well as I do that this is highly correlated to “how much do you use the site”). I won’t claim in any way that this group forms a majority of course, but I have run women who qualify themselves as being a woman in pretty much every thread where it would make sense to do so. I see people who are poor, perhaps living in countries where wages are an order of magnitude lower than they are in say the US, some that don’t have a roof over their heads or have been skipping meals. So these people are here, and I am glad to hear from them just as I am glad to hear from you as well.
In addition, you’re not really being fair to Hacker News with your claim that men here would only email you to see if you would be interested in them. Some might, of course–as you mention, sexism is a real thing, it exists everywhere including in what we would call “western countries”. But it’s something that Hacker News is not about, nor is it acceptable behavior; the majority of men are not how you’re describing them to be. You mention that you haven’t been able to network effectively, but of course Hacker News skews heavily into recruiting people with college degrees in computer science, maybe multiple programming languages under their belt, maybe a fresh graduate or someone with experience at another software engineering company. We can talk all about whether this is what Hacker News should be about, and perhaps if it should branch out into being more welcoming to people of your background, but I just wanted to point out that I don’t think that you can necessarily correlate your experience with “nobody wants to network with me because I talk about being a woman and also being poor”.
To be clear: we’re not saying there isn’t a problem in the US with sexist, or trying to downplay your hardships both in life and on Hacker News in particular. But on a topic of “is life worse for women in Saudi Arabia or the United States” your personal experience with sexism is anecdotal and answers the question “is there still sexism in the United States”.
But this christianity is not forced by law and leaving the group is legally and practically possible.
Moreover, these groups represent significant minority of populace.
Reproductive choice is a glaring counterexample to this. Even women's employers get a say, there.
No, they don't. They can neither force nor stop a woman from getting pregnant. "But she might not get the CEO job when she's having young children" isn't "giving them a say".
If them not paying means they make the decision, then the government is deciding whether people get to fly to the moon. That's technically correct under those premises, but I believe we agree that it's a silly statement.
Let's not let facts get in the way here.
The facts of the matter are that empirically women in SA are not even on the same plane of existence as women in the US, regardless of the fact that true gender equality doesn't exactly exist in the US. Evidence of such is in the article for this HN post, which is "women are allowed to play video games now"
No, I want you to follow the guidelines for HN of being respectful. Or do you think that somehow doesn't apply to me for some reason?
"We" as in certain barbaric anglo countries ;)
These things have long been abandoned in many (most?) other countries (Italy, France, etc).
> We treat marriage as very much a financial contract
Not really. Although community of wealth is the traditional European stance, in a lot of countries you can now keep things separate simply by ticking a box when registering the marriage.
> divorce tends to hurt women financially much more than it does men
That's a complicate issue, tied to the loss of income due to career interruption for pregnancy and child-rearing, as well as the fact that women simply earn less on average. But divorce is now basically a bureaucratic procedure pretty much anywhere in Western and Northern Europe, which can be accomplished without any assistance from the other side.
Obviously old traditions are not that different - we all come from rural societies. However, Western Europe and similar contries have seen massive progress in the XX century on this topic. I think it's fair to call out the countries who don't seem particularly willing to follow along.
In this way, Banks managed to present an extremely unequal society and its ills without having to refute any of the unfair critiques either a patriarchy or matriarchy would have prompted.