If you’re writing a PR statement, sure make something dry and non offensive, if you’re writing for entertainment then lean into society’s stereotypes.
Don’t bend to people’s demands you change your writing, that just means your words have successfully produced a reaction!
That is wildly untrue. The research on whether men or women are more satisfied in their marriages shows that they have about the same levels of satisfaction.
For example: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jomf.12077
Not really sure why the demographics of philosophers effects the impact of the statement. Most philosophers are white, would it have been more impactful if the statement had brought race into it?
But there are less aggressive ways to say it.
If we are counting only heterosexual and 2 people marriages, wouldn't the number of people stuck in unhappy marriages be exactly 50% men and 50% women?
At any rate, it reminds me of the classic physics joke:
> An experimental physicist comes running excitedly to a theorist's office, waving a graph taken off his latest experiment. "Hmmm", says the theorist, "that's exactly where you'd expect to see that peak. Here is the reason." A long logical explanation follows. In the middle of it, the experimentalist says "Wait a minute", studies the chart for a second and says "Oops, this is upside down." He fixes it. "Hmmm," says the theorist, "you'd expect to see a dip in exactly that position. Here is the reason..."
I would assume that the overwhelming majority of unhappy marriages are symmetrically unhappy. Though maybe it's just a failure of imagination on my part because I can't see how I could be happy about my marriage if my partner were unhappy.
I could believe that your statement is true only as a derivative of "most people in marriages are men," which is plausible since some studies have found a higher occurrence of homosexuality in men than in women.
"Those happily married make great partners, while those unhappily married make great philosophers!"
is any less colorful than the original.
The original statement will be read by men and some men will connect to it right away, because rather than envision some abstract person, they are made to immediately picture a man, and in that image they may recognize themselves, like looking at a mirror.
Sorry, are you saying that the audience of the statement is on purpose only men? If so, how could you possibly support any claim that it's not misogynistic?
In isolation, it is innocuous, and has the caveat emptor. Though, if you get slapped with, you can't be a great philosopher (for what are happily or unhappily married women other than just spouses), you can't be police, fire fighter, coder, CEO.. it's just another slap in a series if many that occur daily. So, the idea is stop with the isolated examples, and perhaps the bombardment will lessen
Isn't it?
Wasn't Socrates replying to a question from a young man when he (allegedly) said that?
Since the origin of that quote is directly in response to a man, isn't it aimed at ... men?
[1] https://www.quora.com/Did-Socrates-really-say-if-you-get-a-b...
I don't "tones" have anything to do with it; in the 80s, Law, Accounting and Medicine[1] was absolutely dominated by men. If you think that introverted nerds are sexist, they have nothing on how doctors, lawyers and accountants were, nor how sexist the purchasers of those services were (often assuming that the men would be more competent).
And yet, today those professions have as many (if not more) females than males.
It's a stretch to think that general tone of an industry was responsible for females leaving the profession filled with introverted IT nerds and moving to high-powered and high-status executive professions.
[1] Other than nurses, in which men are still only a rounding error.
The industry has plenty of attractive qualities for any sex: Good money, good jobs. These far outweigh the occasional toxic male who is easily put down these days. If women aren’t signing up, then maybe they just don’t care about computers as badly as people want them to.
But sure, if the metric you're optimizing is raw views and smiles and laughs, then yeah, probably the way to go is leaning into that stuff. But there's a reason those views and smiles and laughs are called "cheap".
Where does it says that those men are married to women?
edit: it's not about men, it's about what people do when they are stuck in something that makes them unhappy. And on the observation that many great philosophers where not married and/or not happy.
focusing on the word "men" misses the point entirely. moreover because in many languages other than English, that "men" could be translated literally and it would also mean "people" and it would also be a completely correct interpretation.
edit 2: apparently nobody has ever read the great philosophers.
Since love is a deception practiced by nature, marriage is the attrition of love and must be disillusioning. Only a philosopher can be happy in marriage and philosophers do not marry.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
--
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
— Friedrich Nietzsche (he was a philosopher and apparently had no friends, because he never married)
--
But most of all, dear friends
A man married to the right woman will be happy. A man married to the wrong woman will be a philosopher
— Aristotle
that quote is 2,300 years old!
Was Aristotle misogynistic?
That's the wrong question, it's like asking it T-Rex ate cruelty free meat.
But if you read carefully using your brain to interpret that sentence, instead of your prejudices, what it actually says is that if you make the right choices in life you will be happy, if not, you will be a philosopher, because it was believed that a philosopher had to go through suffering to understand the true meaning of life, in other words you will not be happy.
Triggers are in the eyes of the beholder.
It's just like changing our default branches from master to main, honestly probably not a huge deal to any rationale person, but the cost is negligible so why not?
It's possible to be empathetic and considerate, making minor adjustments (and also not judging those who innocently don't) without being the "woke" police!
It is totally not.
As Ricky Gervais put it beautifully, like it or not, if you categorize the people of the past with the standards of today, you are preparing the people of the (near) future to categorize you about what you say today.
Now imagine that people think of Aristotle as a misogynist, like if it is actually important, he died 2,300 years ago after all and nobody studies Aristotle because "and now let's read about that guy who hated women, because it's something important to learn: women are trash", but
By the 1930s, a new kind of human zoo appeared in America, nude shows masquerading as education. These included the Zoro Garden Nudist Colony at the Pacific International Exposition in San Diego, California (1935–36) and the Sally Rand Nude Ranch at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco (1939). The former was supposedly a real nudist colony, which used hired performers instead of actual nudists. The latter featured nude women performing in western attire. The Golden Gate fair also featured a "Greenwich Village" show, described in the Official Guide Book as "Model artists' colony and revue theatre."
Or this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_zoo#/media/File:African_...
Sorry if I stand with Aristotle, despite him being a man of his times, and not with 20th century human zoo.
edit: to put it simply, should we talk to German people or everytime they try to say something we should shut them up reminding them that they did the holocaust?
When I disagree with someone from the US, can I use "you are the only people in history to have dropped two atomic bombs on civilians, you are wrong by design!"?
Why Aristotle is problematic, but nobody says "he was a Trump but a lot more intelligent than Trump and actually, now that I think about it, he never said <<grab them by the pussy>>, so Aristotle was less misogynist than Trump"?
Aristotle has never been POTUS.
I understand pushing society forward, so why blame people who have died thousands of years ago for things they are not responsible of today?
Does someone really think that quoting that sentence from Aristotle will plant the seed of misogyny in people's mind?
Is this really the kind of trust we have in each other's intelligence?
I believe people can read the context loud and clear.
Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle%27s_views_on_women
> Among women's differences from men were that they were, in his view, more impulsive, more compassionate, more complaining, and more deceptive. He gave the same weight to women's happiness as to men's, and in his Rhetoric stated that society could not be happy unless women were happy too.
And the modern psychology:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161011-do-men-and-women...
I think you’re really stretching the word “misogyny” when you’re using it for people who accurately describe reality and view male and female well-being as equally important for society.
> Aristotle saw women as subject to men, but as higher than slaves, and lacking authority; he believed the husband should exert political rule over the wife.
Your post is more misleading than mine: you’re hanging your entire opinion on a de-contextualized cherry-picked line and using that to ignore other parts of the philosopher’s work.
Go on, scream about how everyone who disagrees with you is an istaphobe — nobody cares.
Nobody takes what Aristotle thought about women as a profound insight on the nature of life on Earth.
Because not everything he said and thought is of value of course for Christ sake I can't believe I have to explain it to adult functioning people
Think about this: USA saved a lot of nazis and brought them to America to work for them.
One even sent the Apollo on the Moon and was acclaimed as an American hero.
Should we disregard everything the US does? (we probably should, I agree)
I mean, 2,300 years ago all of us would have thought that women were not as useful as men, given that they couldn't do most of the things that kept the people alive, in the society and cities they had built. Of course women were a fundamental part of the life of humans before stratified societies and armies to rule them were invented, but we don't know what the cave men thought of women, we only know they really digged those bulls of theirs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Altamira#/media/File:9...
It's the same think of believing that lions are misogynist, it's simply stupid.
I don't think you really are stupid, so why you act like one?
I did not make the rules.
Yep
> In his work Politics (1254b13–14), Aristotle states "as regards the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject".
> While Aristotle reduced women's roles in society, and promoted the idea that women should receive less food and nourishment than males, he also criticised the results: a woman, he thought, was then more compassionate, more opinionated, more apt to scold and to strike. He stated that women are more prone to despondency, more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more deceptive, and of having a better memory.
_________
> apparently nobody has ever read the great philosophers.
Yep
You are too, for the standards of 2,300 years in the future, don't worry.
Reducing Aristotle to "that misogynist guy" is exactly what proves that people have become so stupid that cannot go beyond their small minds.
> as regards the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject
at his times this was technically true. (edit: it reflected the scientific beliefs of the time, same way we thought until not long ago that Neanderthal were inferior to Sapiens)
Reminder: Christ had not been invented yet.
Second reminder: the bible says the same things, but the USA president swears on the bible...
I mean, I can understand Aristotle not knowing about civil rights in 300 B.C., what's the excuse for the US?
> He stated that women are more prone to despondency, more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more deceptive, and of having a better memory.
Again, he knew stories about the Minoan society who gave woman a lot of power, worshipped Snake goddesses and it brought their society to ruins (as far as he knew, I don't think he knew about volcanology).
Can you blame the guy?
Like we don't blame Americans for thinking they are better than anybody else and that women should not have the right to abortion and that you should have automatic rifles to defend yourself from government and taxes are theft in 2023.
We know they are centuries behind the rest of the civilized World.
At least Aristotle was a thinker...
I can tell, because I've made posts like this before, and I always regretted it later. Have your angry argument in a journal or text file (Lately I've really liked Markdown with source control). Then revisit it later, and add in the side you're arguing against. Then revise it so that you're actually making a clear point, and remove all the personal insults. Then post it here, because I want to read it. But until then, I have no idea WTF you're on about or why you're so defensive of a very-long-dead philosopher.
edit: welp it's flagged now but they straight up called another poster "stupid."
The source of unhappiness for women seems to be the reverse. A husband that’s not doing all the things she nags about automatically.
I think priorities are just fundamentally different somehow.
Yes it does.
Did it do it right?
doesnt sound like any -ism to me
Nowhere it is implied that an unhappy marriage for a men is due to women in the marriage, if I had to guess, unhappiness in marriage for men is tied to having kids.
Anyway, focusing on the fact that it says "men" instead of focusing on the fact that it says "unhappiness" says a lot about the priorities people have nowadays.
It's like reading "The Fox and the Grapes" and focusing on the fact that there's a talking fox trying to eat grapes.
Had that been said in person, even with someone we only recently met, we’d have “known” what it was meant to mean and that it was just a figure of speech to support their main point. Online, people will read every word selected and choose to vilify you for using a pronoun or some other random extreme literal take on your word choices without really considering what your intent or meaning or that you is (often there’s not much, it just happens to be the choice of words they made while typing on a tiny device and trying to be concise). It’s also not considered that online we’re intermixing generationally, culturally, economically, and so many ways. When a 50 year old person says something like the word “retarded” it may feel normal and they are ignorant of the fact that anyone under ~30 knows not to even say that word, it’s the “r” word. Then you have the other “n” word that everyone knows is unspoken except it’s found and heard everywhere because some people can and do say it steadily.
As an example, I frequent a local subreddit for my city. Something that regularly comes up is crime and homeless and such. If you have anything to post there. Someone else will invariably reply with yes but redlining, Jim Crowe, disenfranchised citizens, etc. Those are all base general knowledge and historical facts for sure. I think everyone is well aware of them. But, it’s difficult to have any discourse when the audience expects a full historical account of why the situation exists before solutions can be discussed. It’s pretty tiring and I’ve basically stopped chiming in on those kinds of things.
TLDR: communication is hard and text only is really hard.
Also to label something as maniacal, perhaps.
So now you can't make a quip about wives unless you also make a quip about husbands (or else generalize it to "persons") though even these are now too restrictive for some. Heaven help you if you dare observe that there are differences between men and women, complementary differences no less, that lead to humorous tensions between them and peculiarities particular to each that surface within their shared lives.
Shall we raise a toast to ourselves, savaged men (and women!)? Humor is dead. And we have killed it.
Welcome to Western society, you're privileged and you should be guilty and ashamed.
How did we get here?
The expression "privilege" itself makes people feel attacked and get defensive. If you say the same exact sentence replacing "privilege" for the definition and it greatly changes how people react to what you say
I think there is probably a happy medium of wokeness that can be reached via measured discussion between respectful adults. I think in real life (at least in my experience) people are willing to have those discussions, and are much less polarized and divisive than the internet/cancel culture might have you believe.
> It would be curious to examine in a psychological study if this reinforced behavior has developed more due to a subtle social reward system for the “labelers”, or due to a punishment system for the “non-labelers”.
This is intriguing by the way.
It's not; it's the result of a vocal and aggressive mob - people are taking care to not draw the attention of the mob.
You can say "it's just a saying, it would be equally true with the roles reversed" -- but then, why aren't they?
Sure, on the misogyny scale, it's pretty mild, but sayings like this that implicitly reinforce the male-centered world we live in are in some ways the most insidious.
The mature way to approach the problem is to work together to resolve the issues -- or if that isn't possible, terminate the relationship. You can't just make yourself the victim and say it's all the other's fault.
Additionally, consider that you are the one bringing the nagging wife trope into this: it's merely one of many possibile explanations and unhappy marriage.
Saying "I was in an unhappy marriage and it made me a great philosopher" would be fine. It's the generalization which is an issue here.
1. Can only be married to a woman, sometimes a pre-arranged woman
2. Has religious or cultural norms keeping it that way
3. Improving the marriage is the woman’s territory
This is probably a realistic aphorism for a larger group of people than those who can call it misogynistic.
To understand it better it is worth noting that it is a bastardization of this quote commonly attributed to Socrates: “By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.”
As detailed in this ( https://qr.ae/pvP31C ) answer on Quora, Socrates never said (or was never recorded to say it, he didn't write down his philosophy) this exact thing. But there is a recorded dialogue that is plausible as the source of the simplified quote.
While less clear from what kraig911 said or from the original dialogue, the commonly spread (meme) version of the quote, which I pasted above, makes the misogynism clear. I hope further explaining that is not necessary.
It is important to note that Ancient Grece was very gender unequal, so a misogynistic quote in that social context is not something surprising, even for one of the brightest minds. That is just how society was in those times, and those philosophers did not get the benefit of hindsight we have today.
Besides, as stated above, Socrates didn't actually say that misquote. He was commenting about the challenges of his relationship with his wife. From that dialogue, it is even implied it was a conscious decision he made.
The misquote is especially dreadful because it is a generalization over the entire feminine gender. I am now quite curious when exactly in history did the misquote take its commonly known form.
I am quite surprised that of all the people commenting, no one attempted to go to the source of that meme. Instead, everyone just espoused their viewpoint. I wish HN to be a place of knowledge seeking, not a place of culture war.
Because it’s a statement about men or because of the implied possibility they could be unhappy in their marriage?
Also, why is it horrible?
It appears this world has become manically trigger-happy to label something as -ist or -istic, when it contains even only a hint of something someone could understand understand the wrong way.
It would be curious to examine in a psychological study if this reinforced behavior has developed more due to a subtle social reward system for the “labelers”, or due a punishment system for the “non-labelers”.