And then we vilify sex work and torture sex workers on the theory that sex in exchange for money is A Bad Thing.
Our logic is idiotic and our world is broken.
This comment kind of seems 40 years out of date? Or maybe it's different in other places?
Maybe future generations will sort this out.
In the mean time, the world is being run by a lot of folks who are my age and older. And I think this general paradigm still is the crux of the issue.
Women still on average make less than men. Multimillionaire women, like Janet Jackson, can still marry up because men in her league are billionaires.
That's true, but as I understand it, it's not because of discrimination but because of different choices.
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Men-Earn-More-Startling/dp/154275...
Historically, teachers made relatively good pay and were respected. That was when it was a mostly male profession. That changed when it became a mostly female profession.
Conversely, programing was originally a more female dominated profession and not well paid nor respected. Now it is a male profession and very well paid.
Humans tend to pay men better for the same work. We come up with myriad explanations for the phenomenon but it's stubbornly persistent.
I think it's more complicated than "Women just entirely voluntarily choose something else."
It's neither. It's a reason, an explanation.
> I think it's more complicated than "Women just entirely voluntarily choose something else."
From what I understand, the research shows that isn't the case. Basically all of the earning gap is explained by choices, not discrimination.
> Historically, teachers made relatively good pay and were respected. That was when it was a mostly male profession. That changed when it became a mostly female profession.
Correlation is not causation though. I know you know that, but just stating it for others that are reading this.
The alternative explanation can be this:
Societal expectations is that the resource provision is core to male value. This can be observed on the disproportionate impact of wealth on relationship attractiveness between the genders [1], men generally benefit more from status than women, and women tend to benefit more from attractiveness than men [2].-
With incentives like this, I find it unsurprising that men are more likely to chase status. It's also a cleaner model, with clearer causal lines than "society is built around paying women less".
Citation needed on this one, particularly on the "same work" section. It's my understanding that studies that followed up on the initial gender wage gap studies found that the intial gap shrinks drastically once the data was controlled for type of work (the same work assumption you made), as well as for the number of hours worked across a given time period.
I generally will end a date if the bill isn't split at least for the first few dates. As a result, I had nothing but trouble to the point of swearing off dating until a chance encounter in the real world introduced me to my current girlfriend.
It is pretty predictable to pay for a date here, go look at toxic relationship comment sections or even Clubhouse and you’ll see many people denigrating men if they are not paying for a date
The cishet male experience requires guessing which framework the woman present at the time is following and never being wrong. Paying for a food item can either be expected or offensive. It’s never benign like when your male colleague or friend drives across town to see you and you pay for the meal because its nice they went out of their way. With many women right now its not factoring in that it isn't a gendered action even if they are claiming that splitting is their form of equality when equality can mean treating the person that went out their way as well.
This is no longer true. Most countries now have no fault divorce laws so withholding sex has no impact on whether or not you can divorce.
Every day there's probably a few thousand morons on the internet clutching their pearls about how you theoretically don't need car insurance in a few states despite the reality that anyone who can afford to opt out is better served by buying insurance and the only people who opt out have very, very, niche use cases. You are using a a similar presentation of the truth but not the whole truth in your comment.
States have widely varying laws. Just because something isn't specifically illegal doesn't mean some existing clause wasn't used to prosecute it. If a state doesn't have a lot of frequency of some event it will likely not develop specific laws, it will just use existing laws and precedents in weird ways. For example CA has all sorts of laws about wells and water in order to mediate disputes. Arkansas for example simply doesn't have those laws because those issues aren't as common and the volume is low enough for those issues to go through different parts of the legal system without causing much problem.
Saying X wasn't illegal in every state until Y year is about as meaningful as saying Z is known to the state of CA to cause cancer for any value of X and Y you could pick.
The person you are replying to is saying marital sexual assault did not have its own laws. Rather, it was prosecuted general sexual assault laws.
You are saying marital sexual assault did not have its own laws and it was NOT prosecuted under general sexual assault laws. For example, because the sexual assault laws had an exception saying the law does not apply if the perpetrator is married to the victim.
So, which one is correct? Did the law before 70's or 90's specifically exclude marital sexual assault? Or was it neutral and used for all sexual assaults, both within and without marriage?
We sometimes see laws covering things that are already covered, not changing things, but merely making them more explicit. In more recent memory, once can remember the debate surrounding Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which essentially aimed to criminalize something that was already criminalized by the existing statutes.
I am saying this because it was a fact in the United States. Laws specifically and unambiguously stated that rape was not a crime if the women was married to the man (and yes, it was gendered in the law). Hence the need for the laws to be changed starting in the late 1970's.
Some background: https://nortontooby.com/node/13251
See, e.g., Black’s Law Dictionary (6th ed.1990) (defining rape as the ‘act of sexual intercourse committed by a man with a woman not his wife and without her consent, committed when the woman’s resistance is overcome by force or fear, or under other prohibitive conditions’).”
Not sure it proves what the GP was saying, though. The second result is similar, and seems to be referencing an actual law.
Marital sexual assault was generally prosecuted under domestic violence laws (which themselves became broader and stricter over time) on an as-needed basis but the required fact pattern for prosecution in 1965 or so was a higher bar in general than the standard set by the laws by 1990 or so. Furthermore, plea bargains rose in popularity over the same time period and DV went from a non-issue misdemeanor to a serious problem on your record over the same time period so examining conviction stats for various crimes is difficult.
That's interesting. I assumed plea bargains were always this popular. Any idea why they rose in popularity during this specific period?
A variety of reasons but mandatory minimums and stiffer sentencing in general (both made popular by the war on drugs) are the bulk of the reason.
When your lawyer could say in confidence that based on the fact pattern you're all but assured sentence on the order of a lesser crime that more correctly fits the fact pattern you're more likely to go to court and try and clear your name. When you're guaranteed a minimum sentence should you lose taking the bargain seems more reasonable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1622921
There are all kinds of diabolical issues with our current laws, etc. related to human sexuality.
https://everythingsweden.com/dating-in-sweden/ - "Coming from the UK, it’s very common that if you take someone to a restaurant, the guy pays for the meal. If the opportunity is there then great, but don’t be offended if your date demands to split the bill 50/50. Sweden is very serious about being gender neutral and this is a good example."
https://www.government.se/4a7738/contentassets/efcc5a15ef154... - "Women and men must have the same opportunities for economic independence. In Sweden, some of the most important reforms concerning gender equality took place in the labour market and in social policy in the 1970s. These reforms pushed gender equality and increased women’s prospects to have the same opportunities as men to enter the labour market, and to remain and develop there." including "Separate income taxation for wife and husband", "Development of public child care", and "First country to introduce gender-neutral paid parental leave benefit".
And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_law_in_Sweden#Grounds_... - "One critical feature that marks Swedish divorce laws is the complete absence of any fault requirement when establishing a case for divorce. Fault is entirely irrelevant and has no legal consequences on the results of the proceedings ... under the Swedish laws, there is no preliminary requirement of a separation period before a divorce case can be established."
And https://e-justice.europa.eu/content_divorce-45-se-maximizeMS... - "There are no rules governing marriage annulment in Swedish law."
In 2019, female workers in Sweden earned on average 25,500 Swedish kronor on a monthly basis, while the average salary for men was in the same class was 29,500 Swedish kronor per month.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/740048/monthly-salary-in...
I doubt it, as I see that the gender wage inequality in The Netherlands is much higher (https://www.statista.com/statistics/537993/average-monthly-w... ) and yet the Netherlands has legalized sex work.
No, of course not. That's not what I'm suggesting.
When I was homeless, men repeatedly offered me money for sex or offered me a place to stay. Meanwhile, I was repeatedly told on HN that my desire to support myself with my writing was ludicrous, that writing dies not pay and I shouldn't expect it to.
And when I say my gender is a barrier to effective networking and a factor in my intractable poverty, I am routinely mocked and dismissed.
I am seriously handicapped, which limits the kind of work I can do. I don't qualify for disability.
I don't need a helluva lot of money. I still can't get what I need. All I get is BS personal attacks, dismissals and contempt.
It's very, very clear in my mind that men are willing to pay me for sex or marry me but far too few people are willing to pay me for other kinds of work and the networking that helps men make money via business is something I'm mostly cut off from.
And it's a tiresome situation because I'm given nothing but crap for trying to solve my problems no matter what I do.
I've been here nearly twelve years. Plenty of men make good money via HN. I don't, though my past front page post had over 15k page views and people thanked me for writing it. But it made not one thing dime.
And if you don't want to support my blog writing, I also do resume work and get too little business that way as well.
What kind of networking is being recommended? I'd like to know so I can do more of it.
All I know is multiple people here have comments in their profile "Don't hesitate to get in touch! I'm happy to hear from you!" And those people have proven to be generally unhelpful.
Saying too much more puts me in danger of getting in trouble for breaking the rules. It's perfectly acceptable for 5 million people to watch me starve and say "Not my problem." It's not perfectly acceptable for me to tell my story here, no matter how careful I am and I'm quite clear that being not careful would be more problematic for me and get me no remedy.
But what are the causes of this inequality? What if it is simply different choices on average rather than discrimination? If it is the choice of free people that produces this inequality, do we force people to pick different jobs, or tax one side more heavily than the other to compensate? What is the proposed solution?
Birth control and other factors have made it possible to live differently than that but we still norm everything around practices that worked to get the least worst result for human kind historically.
The odds are good there will always be some differences between men and women. But those aggregate stats tend to downplay the degree to which women get barred from having a good life on their own efforts and tend to be condemned to poverty and hardship through no fault of their own, no matter how hard they try.
My proposed solution is we need to find ways to let women have enough more consistently without having to sleep with a man to get it. To my mind, one test for that is if I could just make my life work that would be a step forward, a step in the right direction.
I seem unable to adequately explain that to anyone here. I seem unable to adequately get across that there is something fundamentally wrong and gender-based when the highest ranked openly female member here still can't make ends meet and far too few people are at all helpful with that issue.
I remain essentially a charity case though people agree I add value, I'm smart, etc. It still fails to adequately open doors for me and people act like that has no bearing on conversations about gender inequality and dismiss me as just some loser and crybaby, as if I don't have some kind of legitimate point here.
I think I need to walk away from this discussion at this point. It's probably accomplishing nothing, as usual, and I find these kinds of conversations incredibly infuriating.
Where are you from? This is not true everywhere.
> We expect men to be the primary breadwinner in a marriage.
In a mysoginistic vision of marriage in your culture, maybe.
It's fine if you see marriage as a business arrangement (readily available sex for money AKA prostitution). But don't pretend everybody views marriage the exact same way.
"Men expected to work hard and die early to provide for the family, women most affected." /s
Men being expected to provide is not misogynistic. It places a burden on the man.
Yes, if the woman were PREVENTED from working that would be misogynistic, but that's not what the parent comment said. The parent comment merely said that men are expected to pay, not that women are prevented from earning, and these are not the same thing.
There is no misogyny in cracking down on prostitution. The amount of trafficked women forced into prostitution greatly outweighs the amount of willing participants in that "business". Believing the opposite certainly is misogyny.
Ideally a relationship is about getting to know someone, experiencing mutal attraction, forming an emotional connection, and so on. Sex is part of it but it's not all of it and mutual desire is important to most people.
I know nobody outside of 19th century books and Americans online argue these points. I'm not trying to be facetious: do people currently alive actually think these things?
People no longer default to assuming that women should be full-time wives and moms. Women in the US no longer need their husband's permission to seek employment. Etc.
But the general pattern still shapes a great many social phenomenon and I think it is a serious ongoing problem, yes.
Annulment isn't a "thought." It's a legal reality. You don't typically seal contracts with "and then we have sex and the contract is null and void if that doesn't happen at least once."
I do see now that some countries achieved the latter by importing some church laws into their legal system, so I suppose that's how in some western countries annulment is indeed still a reality. Amazing!