United States Ranked 10th Worse Nation For Women

[Hijiri Byakuren]

I am 55. Not sure why you are trying to verbally pat me on the head to tell me I am naive, but whatever.

Because father knows best, and wimminfolk should step back and let the men sort out the big social issues. /s

[Mike Cl]

I am angry that women's rights to our own bodily autonomy are constantly under fire because of the religious groups in this country. Why wouldn't this make me angry?
I don't fit whatever model of feminist you have in your head, I guess. Shrug.

Mermaid, the first person to make me aware of the plight of women was my grandfather.  Both my grandfather and grandmother (mother's side) were immigrants from Sweden.  My grandfather was not an intellectual--he had not even finished grade school--he was a lumberjack.  But he told me that women had it harder than men from the time I can remember.  And he had a huge disdain for clergy--he explained that the local Lutheran church had burned down, and that when it was excavated to rebuild it, dozens of  baby skeletons had  been unearth; that ended his respect for clergy of any kind.  And he lived a respect for my grandmother and his daughters and they for him--that was their normal state--respect.  They passed that ideal down to my mother; my mother and father had their tussles, but  clearly she was not one to let convention guide much of her actions.  She was her own person and my father respected that.  She did not demonstrate nor join any feminist groups, but supported those groups when they popped up locally.  So, that is the type of feminist I am, if you want to label it that, for I do think as my grandfather did; women innately have a more difficult life to live.  And what makes me so, so fucking angry now, is that women's rights to their own bodies are being questioned again (thought that fight was over) and regressive laws are being passed daily.  That makes me angry for the life my daughter and granddaughters will have to live and the continuous battles they will have to fight.  I feel your pain.   

[Shiranu]

"Other people have it worse, so how DARE you complain or want to make yours and other peoples' lives better!"

Nah, fuck that noise.

[Baruch]

Because father knows best, and wimminfolk should step back and let the men sort out the big social issues. /s

There are women who hate men, and men who hate men ... but they aren't misogynists ... we have a different adjective for them ...

Sorry, straight people aren't going to disappear (or gay people) ... and masculine and feminine behavior isn't going to disappear (no matter how variant your body or choice of clothing).

Life is unfair, to everyone.  Get over it.

[Baruch]

This is apparently some sort of insult. Good for you!
I am 55. Not sure why you are trying to verbally pat me on the head to tell me I am naive, but whatever.

First of all, you don't even live in my country.
I am angry that women's rights to our own bodily autonomy are constantly under fire because of the religious groups in this country. Why wouldn't this make me angry?
I don't fit whatever model of feminist you have in your head, I guess. Shrug.

So join the fishwives of Paris, and burn down all the churches, mosques and synagogues already.  The majority will know what to do.  The war against men and against women, will continue, until we are extinct.

[Baruch]

Mermaid, the first person to make me aware of the plight of women was my grandfather.  Both my grandfather and grandmother (mother's side) were immigrants from Sweden.  My grandfather was not an intellectual--he had not even finished grade school--he was a lumberjack.  But he told me that women had it harder than men from the time I can remember.  And he had a huge disdain for clergy--he explained that the local Lutheran church had burned down, and that when it was excavated to rebuild it, dozens of  baby skeletons had  been unearth; that ended his respect for clergy of any kind.  And he lived a respect for my grandmother and his daughters and they for him--that was their normal state--respect.  They passed that ideal down to my mother; my mother and father had their tussles, but  clearly she was not one to let convention guide much of her actions.  She was her own person and my father respected that.  She did not demonstrate nor join any feminist groups, but supported those groups when they popped up locally.  So, that is the type of feminist I am, if you want to label it that, for I do think as my grandfather did; women innately have a more difficult life to live.  And what makes me so, so fucking angry now, is that women's rights to their own bodies are being questioned again (thought that fight was over) and regressive laws are being passed daily.  That makes me angry for the life my daughter and granddaughters will have to live and the continuous battles they will have to fight.  I feel your pain.   

Unless you give birth, you will never feel their pain, or hear the end of it if you ever got a woman pregnant.  From Sweden then?  No wonder you are socialist ;-))

This is why young men today, refuse to date women at all.  Better to be a monk or priest ... than to put up with feminine behavior.  If I had known what was coming, I would have refused too.  But fortunately I didn't know the future like so many prophets here.

[Mermaid]

Jesus. You say the most assholish things.

[Mike Cl]

Unless you give birth, you will never feel their pain,

That is a given.  That's why 'listening' is important.  Women can never experience life as a man and a man cannot experience life as a woman.  We all see and experience life through our own unique lens.  But that does not mean one cannot be supportive to others or try as best one can, understand their viewpoints and experiences.  I can never experience life as a black, Asian, Indian or anything but as a white male.  That does not mean I can't listen to all and keep my eyes open and pay attention to what is going on around me. 

As for being from Sweden I am half Swedish.  The other half is woodshed Texan.  My dad was from a redneck Texas cotton mill town and his father was a drunk (mill worker) and his mother much the same (except she chewed tobacco).  He did not visit nor mention them much.  So, I guess I can lay claim to most ever ethnic group out there.  (Maybe not Chinese since there were not many there)

[Baruch]

That is a given.  That's why 'listening' is important.  Women can never experience life as a man and a man cannot experience life as a woman.  We all see and experience life through our own unique lens.  But that does not mean one cannot be supportive to others or try as best one can, understand their viewpoints and experiences.  I can never experience life as a black, Asian, Indian or anything but as a white male.  That does not mean I can't listen to all and keep my eyes open and pay attention to what is going on around me. 

As for being from Sweden I am half Swedish.  The other half is woodshed Texan.  My dad was from a redneck Texas cotton mill town and his father was a drunk (mill worker) and his mother much the same (except she chewed tobacco).  He did not visit nor mention them much.  So, I guess I can lay claim to most ever ethnic group out there.  (Maybe not Chinese since there were not many there)

Yes, see Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.  Don't know which planet is more inhospitable ;-)

However we share a common humanity ... and in that, we know what other people experience to a degree.  And an imagination helps.  The idea that nothing about a woman is comprehensible to a man, implies she is a uber-frau or an under-frau.  I reject that notion.  It would be like claiming Africans aren't the same species as Europeans (yeah, there are small genetic variations, but that isn't what people mean by that).

[Baruch]

Jesus. You say the most assholish things.

This is deliberate on my part.  Tough love I call it.

[Cavebear]

It's a process for sure. Are things better for us than they were 40 years ago? I'd say so. But right now, at this time of upheaval, there are a lot of angry, marginalized, low-information men like PR (and, sadly, plenty of women) who are getting louder and louder. They vote. The American people have somehow managed to get that pig into the white house. And we have a senate who has stolen a SCOTUS appointee from the last administration and a president who is about to appoint another, and who is not shy about making sure we know he intends to choose one who wants to work to overturn RvW. And we have an fucking uber-Christian, moronic VP who has dedicated his life to subjugating women and taking away our rights to control our own lives and bodies among other putrid agendas.

Abortion and access to reproductive and women's healthcare are no small thing, but they are just one topic that's now up for yet more debate. Why are we even TALKING about this? It's 2018.

Oh do I sound angry? A little. I am fucking angry.

You and I are in total agreement.  I don't need to repeat what you posted because I agree.  But I will add that Trump is a sick, sick person, Pence is a toady underving of the office he holds, and most Republicans are somewhere between crazy, inane, an insane. 

Any group of people who would steal a child being breast-fed from the mother in false statement, use children as pawns for political games, and demand immigrants asking for legal asylum be charged with crimes for doing so, are not the kind of people I will accept running our Government.

My best dream lately is that Trump dies of a heart attack...  And I bet Pence has the same dream often...

[Hakurei Reimu]

I have issues with this poll.

The first issue is this is a poll, when there is a fair amount of hard data that may be brought to bear on each of these issues. For instance, there are various metrics to assess health care for women that do not depend on opinions of anyone â€" like tracking demographic data on mortality/complications of various illnesses, and noting differences based on sex. While they may be hard to interpret, they are based upon real-world results rather than anyone's (or even everyone's) opinion.

The second issue is what makes someone an expert, such that their opinion would be of better quality than a person off the street? "Expert" is a nebulous term. From their website:

Those interviewed included aid and development professionals, academics, health workers, policymakers, non-government organisation workers, journalists, and social commentators.

That's a wide brush to paint with the term "expert" or having expertise in matters of women's issues. Say what you will about brainwashed academics, most of these people should not be considered "experts" on any subject matter with a wide scope. Academics spend their lives poring over the available data and would in principle have a wide scope on the matter. The rest are at best trenches-level; their involvement is immediate and necessarily restricted in scope.

Problem the third. 548 respondents. DAT SMALL SAMPLE SIZE! Gallup et al are known to use limited samples, but they get away with it because they have deeply researched estimates of the biases of their respondents, yet even they don't use sample sizes that small (2000 minimum is the Gallup standard, and that's with bias squeezers). Furthermore, anyone who has been tracking polls in the past few decades would do well to recall that while polls offer a clue about what actual results in elections would be, they are often quite off in the actual results.

Forth problem. The fact that world's worsts are ranked first, rather than given a score on each category to then be aggregated and the ranking based on that. This makes the poll a ranked voting situation, with all the problems therein. No fancy mathematics can fix that problem (which is why it's Arrow's impossibility theorem). This links directly back to point 1; scoring systems have many fewer anomalies than ranked systems. There isn't even an attempt to control for these anomalies.

Fifth problem, related to problem 2 above. Even if we were to accept the above list as experts, their expertise would be only in areas related to their field. In any other field, their opinions would be no better than a non-expert. If we were to assume an even spread of expertise across all fields, this is at minimum a signal-to-noise ratio of 1:5 â€" one really good opinion to five no-better-than-background opinions. That's terrible. In any non-even spread, one of the categories would be secretly weighted, a prospect that sends the statistician in me into conniptions.

Sixth problem. This poll claims to be anonymous with all respondents "unless the Foundation contacted them later to seek an on-the-record comment." I think that detail is rather important. It's not really 'anonymous' is it? After all, the Foundation knew who the experts were; there is no reasonable expectation to anonymity here.

This poll is garbage. It has the seeming of a real study, but none of the substance. As such, the probative value of this poll is quite small. In the top nine assessments, it at least is in line with what we expect out of these countries. The US is the anomaly, but because of what I think are good reasons to not put too much trust in this poll, that's all I see here: an anomaly in a particular poorly-controlled study which really shouldn't change anyone's opinion much.

[Cavebear]

The general professional polls are all in basic agreement.  So I don't care about your objection to a couple.

[Hakurei Reimu]

My beef is only about this particular poll. Don't read too much into it.

[Cavebear]

My beef is only about this particular poll. Don't read too much into it.

Did I misunderstand your post?