[massinstall]

Why is this saying misogynistic?

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 possibly 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 to a punishment system for the “non-labelers”.

[lo_zamoyski]

It is currently culturally fashionable to construe things in this manner, so unsurprising. It is humorless and lacks common sense. Reasonably intelligent people understand context. They do not flatten all of reality and reduce everything to their favorite pet paradigm, projecting uncharitably all sorts of weird baggage onto the most innocuous of statements.

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.

[emadabdulrahim]

Common sense is dead. Certain groups of people lack self and/or social awareness to notice that they've replaced religion with ideology. For example, we criticize religion for shaming many parts of our sexuality "Welcome to church, you're a sexual being and you should be ashamed". Now that's been replaced with "You're a man, you should feel guilty because you're from the oppressor group." etc.

Welcome to Western society, you're privileged and you should be guilty and ashamed.

How did we get here?

[krageon]

Black and white thinking is not correlated with intelligence, just with being human (and perhaps breadth of experience).

[schrodinger]

There's a slight implication because it only covers men that women are the source of unhappiness (e.g. the nagging wife trope), but I agree it's trivial and likely unintentional. Agree with sibling, just as applicable as "happy married people are happy partners, unhappily married people are great philosophers".

[Aeolun]

I mean, I’ve never heard of any woman being unhappy because of a nagging husband.

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.

[alexvoda]

I see there are many people commenting on the ethical value of that saying.

To understand it better it is worth noting that it is a bastardization of this misquote 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.

Edit: looking into this a little deeper, Spencer McDaniel, the one who wrote the Quora answer linked above, has an entire blog about ancient times and expands on the issue of misquotes: http://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2019/07/16/fake-and-misattr...

[ttyprintk]

It’s only misogynistic if the husband:

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.

[conductr]

There’s a lot of things like this that I blame mostly on the growth of what we’re doing here. We’re communicating in a low fidelity text only fashion and doing it without any knowledge of who each other are and how our word choices will be received. We definitely don’t know who is lurking or reading or may take offense once I hit the reply button on this form.

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.

[the-printer]

There has to be some sort of “Streisand Effect” phenomenon that can be applied to interpersonal communications, where by mentioning a thing in conversation that you hope not to entertain, it gets entertained as a consequence of it being mentioned.

> 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.

[kraig911]

To me it's misogynistic because when I heard it first it's implied that my happiness is tied to a woman. Since I'm happily married and very much in love I know that without her I'd probably end up being a philosopher pondering problems without answers to run away from the trauma of losing her. I've been through it before :)

[Idk__Throwaway]

And how is implying your happiness is tied to a woman misogynistic?

[peoplefromibiza]

> To me it's misogynistic because when I heard it first it's implied that my happiness is tied to a woman.

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.

[Aeolun]

I think there is a strong punishment system for the non-labelers. People that feel strongly about this stuff are really rabid, and seem to spend all their time calling people out on perceived slights.

[gsk22]

There are plenty of layers at which it's misogynistic, but the most obvious one perhaps is that it wholly centers around the man in the relationship. Why must the wife be the source of the husband's unhappiness ("nagging wife" trope)? Why does he get to be the great philosopher if they're both unhappy?

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.

[deadpannini]

The standard you've laid out proposes that any statement about a man's experience in a relationship is by definition misogynistic, because it's centers the man (and, of course, erases women). Do you stand by that?

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.

[concordDance]

In an unhappy marriage the other person is normally the source of unhappiness. Not always of course (I knew a guy who got divorced because he felt he'd missed out on having more relationships).

[lelanthran]

> Why is this saying misogynistic?

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.

[antonfire]

> It appears this world has become manically trigger-happy to label something as -ist or -istic

Also to label something as maniacal, perhaps.