Male bashing in the media

Discussion Open Forum
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He was so “out of touch with reality” that he had to change the name of the villain in Burmese Days because the publisher was afraid of a libel suit. And obviously there aren’t talking pigs leading revolutions in England (or are there?), but basically everything that happens in Animal Farm was inspired by real events in one country or another, except for the ending (which turned out to be what some people call a completely accurate prediction).

Nineteen Eighty-Four was also informed by real life experience during and after war (scarcity and rationing continued for years in the UK after WWII) and tendencies that he observed in governments and people.

Atwood’s book is in the same tradition but from a female perspective.

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My proposition wasn’t, of course, that patriarchal dictatorship, sexual slavery and female repression have never happened anywhere on earth.

A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent’s argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be “attacking a straw man”.

The typical straw man argument creates the illusion of having completely refuted or defeated an opponent’s proposition through the covert replacement of it with a different proposition (i.e., “stand up a straw man”) and the subsequent refutation of that false argument (“knock down a straw man”) instead of the opponent’s proposition.

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I myself am somehow feeling I’m not arguing on your points directly. I apology it. But I also feel the points I want to say might not be understood. (The problem is not your comprehension but my writing.)

I’ve never doubted it.

completely agree. There are issues of one side doesn’t mean we can ignore issues of the other side. Both should be addressed. To address each issue, there is no need to degrade other issues.

when I say there are social pressure or discrimination on gender at least in my country, I’m not demonizing one side, it’s a flaw of our society made composed of men and women of my country.

I think some of men’s issues and women’s issues are two sides of the same coin.

As for @Icon’s post, I think taiwanese laws or their practice are not equal against foreign spouses, but not purely gender issue. It affects to Western men/women and Chinese spouses too, though SEA women are more vulnerable because they often don’t have enough Mandarin skills nor job skills to live here by themselves, when their husbands abuse them. The direct abusers are individual spouses, but I think Taiwan needs to do something here as a society. The government changed the law for naturalization to avoid foreign spouses become stateless, so that the spouses who are divorced before they get citizenship can go back to their original countries, or taiwan can send them back to their original countries. There also exist laws to give some aid to foreign spouses in this situation and support groups including government agencies, but I guess many of them may not use those resources.

Of course, I don’t think all of the divorces are flaw of taiwanese spouses, and it’s not just a gender issue. I guess more women are suffered from this issue, but foreign husbands should be included in this issue too.

As for wage gaps, unequality of choices among two genders, which causes the wage gaps, is not a problem if it’s due to genuine tendencies of genders. But, at least in my country, kids are continuously imprinted gender roles at everywhere and the social pressure may be much stronger than it is in taiwan, though laws are equal. It affects a lot to their choices when they grow up. When capable enough girls or boys give up to choose something, I don’t say it’s just a lack of dedication. Not many boys who want to do girls things, though. I also think values of some jobs which are traditionally done by women at home, such as nursery/kindergarten teachers, are underestimated, but this may be different issue.

I cannot say much on Taiwan’s situation, because I don’t know really how it is. At least, it seems boys and girls are treated equally at elementary school.

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Why is it funny? I never asserted that ‘honor’ is some sort of multilateral treaty between armies. You can only control what you do.

If your front line forces are composed purely of single mothers, the other guy might have no compunction about mowing them down, and the war proceeds with the routine business of people killing each other until they get sick of it.

A big problem arises if the enemy perceives such a strategy as dishonorable: he will despise you for it, and the chance of a ceasefire and peace treaty becomes more remote and unlikely that it otherwise would have been. He will be committed to destroying you instead of coming to a compromise position. This is pretty much how Western vs. Muslim violence has turned into a war of attrition.

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Have the decency to clarify your position.

The stuff Orwell & Atwood write about has already happened, but it’s out of touch with reality to suppose it could ever happen again. Is that it?

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Except in the case of Nadia Juan (阮玫芬), a Taiwanese who lived in the US and gave birth to a US citizen child. US courts had granted custody to the father . Let’s just say Ms. Juan’s lifestyle was a little too unorthodox for the court see her fit to raise a child. Ms. Juan then proceeded to abduct the child from the US, show up in Taiwan, and Taiwan courts disregarded jurisdiction and international private law entirely, granting custody to Ms. Juan. She remains on the FBI most wanted list to this day.

So here you have it: local courts rule in favor of locals. That is just how it works in Taiwan. Call it racism or tribalism. But it does not have to do with gender per se.

The Nationality Act has already been changed. Foreign spouses need to provide evidence of loss of their original nationality AFTER naturalization.

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yes, I think that is what I said.

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Ah, so it was before the Civil Rights Act but about 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation supposedly fixed the legal inequality problem.

Not true in Canada and I suspect elsewhere. “Oh, this male nurse assaulted a helpless patient repeatedly? Well, he’s the sole breadwinner for his family, so we need to go easy on him!” :bread: :rainbow:

More thoughts on the earlier discussion:

  1. Dinosaurs

This is not just about gender issues and not just in Taiwan. A few years ago the Guardian published an amusing rant about elderly British judges who were clueless about social media and modern slang because they had no direct experience with either. Considering the speed and depth of social and technological changes, including changes in perceptions of gender roles, within the last few decades, this is cause for concern.

  1. Gender Equality Committees

As you said, @Andrew0409, you want to see where the law treats men and women differently so that you can fight to change it, but as I pointed out, the Act of Gender Equality in Employment requires the GEC’s to be over 50% female, so in theory you should be fighting to change that.

At one level, it’s obviously discriminatory. Yet at another, it’s a kind of correction. The committees shouldn’t be necessary at all, but the consensus (at least among legislators) was that they were and are necessary. Hopefully one day they can be abolished because they won’t be needed.

I reckon if there were more female judges, the situation would be different, yet using affirmative action for judges would be sexist and lead to suspicions of underqualification, yet people decided something had to change, so here we are with legally mandated unequal equality committees.

  1. Solutions?

Knowing the law inside out is useless if it can’t be applied in a way that meets society’s needs, e.g. if a judge knows the legal concept, legislation and case law of libel better than anyone else but fails to understand the nuances of modern slang in a libel case. How can this be fixed? Compulsory training programs for judges who may not want to pay attention (“young people today with their phones, ugh”)? Expert witnesses? Incentives for early retirement?

When it comes to gender, sensitivity training (like what some Canadians think will prevent a repeat of the Robin Camp “keep your knees together” scandal) may be useful, but there is still cause for concern.

Let’s take Rocko’s Senate Health Committee again. For argument’s sake, we’ll put aside questions like is contraception good or bad, is free contraception good or bad, is abortion good or bad, should employers be forced to pay for things they don’t believe in and so on.

Let’s just suppose that a hypothetical state decides it’s going to provide free contraception to men and women. If the state wants to implement this policy in a fair and effective manner, how should it proceed? They appoint a committee to decide.

Option 1: medication for women and… medication for men :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

This is reportedly not very popular among men. It’s popular among some women for reasons other than contraception, because apparently it can be used to avoid menstrual problems – something men will never fully understand.

Option 2: operations for men and… operations for women :thinking:

Again, we’re going for equality, right? But the implications and complications of these operations would not be the same for men and women, so that’s a problem.

Option 3: condoms for men and… condoms for women. :ponder:

That’s fair in theory. But are male and female condoms really equal to each other, in practical terms? I don’t know. I suppose the only way to find out is to try both kinds, before and after a very realistic sex change. :eek:

As for male condoms, you might hear some people saying “one size fits all” and even trying to prove it with stunts like this.

super stretch -- if he says he's too big

The women in the room might buy it because it seems logical, but the men in the room (or some of them anyway) would shake their heads and say that’s just not how it works! :noway: :wall:

But wait – are there any men in the room? If we take Rocko’s suggestion and make the committee 100% female, perhaps the result will be (male) condoms that only fit a small percentage of the population, so the aim of fair and effective implementation would not be met.

Does that mean a 50-50 split would make everything perfect? Of course not, but I reckon the closer you get to 100% on either side, the greater the danger of one side’s concerns not being taken seriously because the other side doesn’t understand.

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Forget it, mate. We have different senses of humor.

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Uhhh, I think you got a maljunction in your Quote function there, brother.
@rocket got no pig in this fight…

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Uh, what was the subject again?

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There is very little that can be done when the kidnapping is across borders, unless the receiving country`s authorities cooperate. To this day, Taiwanese still growl about the Elias case but the one with the woman is not nor the ehem details are public knowledge or even acknowledged.

I was refering within the country. Under standard circunstances, joint custody and regular visits are the norm, no biggie. I do not think they have the concept of joint custody in the law of ROC. - not to talk about enforcement-. Too mafan to have joint custody/regular visits, I have been told.

I have told the foreign guys married here that they are the woman in the marriage. They cannot have their business on their name so they put it under their spouse…and lose everything in the divorce. The local holds kid ransom. Last one of my pals who divorced had to give two apartments, the business and all his bank accounts so at least he can see his daughter on weekends…

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A woman I know had an affair with one of my mates. Her husband found out and was suspiciously calm about the whole thing. He promised his wife that if she finished things with my mate and never saw him again they would remain in a sham marriage and she could keep in contact with her sons. If she left him for my mate he would go nuclear on restricting her access - taking the legal route about the affair. She agreed to this and unwillingly dumped my mate.

A few months later he ended the marriage. Net result was he won custody of both their sons, kept their apartment (which I believe was worth around 20 million), and somehow managed to also get away with stealing 2 million NTD of insurance she had put aside. She literally ended up with nothing and is now renting a small flat. My mate had already left the country pretty much heart-broken.

Now I’m not saying she wasn’t morally in the wrong, but, in her case at least, the legal system appeared to have been weighted massively against her. It seems to me that the legal system provides someone who has been emotionally hurt with the legal backing to exact cold revenge.

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Okay. Got your bib on?

The themes and messages of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” most definitely resonate throughout our documentary. The novel’s premise of a right-wing fundamentalist takeover of the United States is frightfully analogous to what we see happening in Washington, D.C., and across the country. And as Donald Trump panders to the religious right with repeated proclamations about a return to faith and God, there indeed are echoes of a totalitarian theocracy based on a foundation of Puritan roots in which women are subjugated and turned into breeders. . . .

What we are seeing across America are legislatures and courts determining whether, when and how women will give birth. When women who attempt to self-abort are arrested, when woman who are miscarrying or carrying non-viable fetuses are refused necessary medical care, when the state jails pregnant women and orders what they can and cannot do, then the comparison to “The Handmaid’s Tale” becomes all too realistic.

https://www.salon.com/2017/07/15/birthright-documentary-movie-handmaids-tale-civia-tamarkin/

If you need more input I’m sure Icon would be happy to confirm that a dystopian patriarchal dictatorship is right around the corner in America, if not already arrived.

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Time to join us. Once you witness the Glory of the Godemperor and you experience the warmth of His light, there’s no going back.

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Saying it’s happening right now or just around the corner is not at the same level as “it could happen in the future”.

People have been talking the same way about 1984 being “just around the corner” for decades. The problem is it’s not so much a corner as a curve.

If you don’t care for Atwood’s dystopian side, perhaps you would prefer Alias Grace. It’s a sort of 19th century Rashomon and was also recently adapted for television.

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Just responding to multiple posts in one post. :slight_smile:

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The woman in the marriage? Your uneducated, misinformed, and hysterical attempt to perpetuate outdated and incorrect gender myths is amusing. A study from 2001 - that is almost 17 years ago - found that since the late 1990s women have been granted custody in the majority of Taiwan divorce cases:

Moreover, this study finds that since 1996, custody has been overwhelmingly awarded to mothers, whereas before 1996 fathers were favoured by the courts.

Liu, H. (2001). Mother or Father: Who Received Custody? The Best Interests of the Child Standard and Judges’ Custody Decisions in Taiwan. International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family, 15(2), 185-225. doi:10.1093/lawfam/15.2.185

By the way, it’s a myth that foreigners cannot have businesses (or real estate, or cars) in their own names. Many foreign men still fall for this or give in to their wives’ demands, but that doesn’t make it any less of a myth. I have increasingly less sympathy for these chaps though, as the correct information is widely available online.

Your friend was more than just morally in the wrong. Adultery is quite simply a criminal offence under Taiwan’s Criminal Code. The legal system was massively weighted against your friend in the way the legal systems is weighted against offenders. Simple as that.

What would have been the alternative: sit in jail for a year or so (or pay 1,000 NT$ per day instead to commute the sentence, i.e. 365,000 NT$) and go into divorce proceedings with a criminal record for adultery? I am not sure that would have helped.

The real lesson here is not to see other people while still being married. By the way, you might be surprised to know that it is Taiwanese women’s rights associations who have successfully campaigned against the legalization of adultery.

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Hsinhai I would love to be proven wrong. Maybe my classmates, in spite of their wealth and education were unlucky. Maybe as a majority of the women I know are foreigners that is the problem. Maybe because most of the foreign guys I know are not Mandarin speakers they may not have access to the information available - most government’s websites information in English is obsolete, ininteligible and useless.

If you could point us towards a solution to this “disinformation” chain that has people losing kids and wealth, like affordable legal advice, I’d be much obliged.

Edit:
Let me tell you a little story I have told before. Once upon a time a Taiwanese guy dumped the foreign Latina wife he had here for a Mainland lover, including the good ol kick wife 1 out of the country as it was in the old days. He got custody of the little boy, who loved his Mom so dearly one day he tried to escape …jumping from the 6th floor. Latina wife came back with new gringo husband, put a legal fight…and since the toy was now broken, she was able to take kid to best therapists and he is doing fine now. So that is one of the examples of woman getting custody.

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I have provided you with a study on custody outcomes in Taiwan published in a leading, peer-reviewed family law journal. What more can I do? Your experiences are not invalid, but surely not representative. The main issue appears to be foreign nationality or inability to communicate in Chinese. That is something I would definitely agree with - not with gender as a factor however!

One way to start is using the search function of Forumosa or Google.A few simple queries for “foreigners open company Taiwan” or “foreigners real estate Taiwan” already produces some good results.

As for affordable legal advice, lawyers are equally expensive for foreigners and locals. The Legal Aid Foundation, several county and city offices, as well as a number of legislators and city councilors offer free legal advice. The Legal Aid Foundation also offers free court representation in many cases, usually requiring a low-income household certificate obtainable from the local Household Registration Office. Foreigners can also procure this document.

Obviously it all comes down to Chinese ability. I can sympathize with someone who has just arrived or stayed for just some years. But I cannot feel bad for someone who has resided in Taiwan for 5, 10, or even 20 years and cannot get himself (or herself) to a level of Chinese proficiency to manage such affairs. Particularly when we are talking about people on APRC or those who even demand dual nationality.

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