Feminism and the Birkenhead rule

[Colonello Buendia]

As we all know, the objective of feminism is to break down the gender roles of all people in society. i.e. women are the home makers and men the breadwinners.
One of the best known male gender roles is that of protector and defender of the allegedly physically weaker women and any children involved.

I'm also sure that if not the name, you know of the Birkenhead rule, i.e. when a ship is sinking then the first people to be evacuated are women and children. The name stems from the HMS Birkenhead, a royal navy vessel that sank in the 1800's the Captain ordered that women and children were evacuated first, and many of the male crew subsequently went down with the vessel.

My question is this, in a society in which gender roles are non existent then would the Birkenhead rule be discontinued as it may be seen as a perpetuation of the male protector role. would evacuation protocol then depend on say the family unit or whoever got to the life boat/helicopter/rescue robot(for technocrats) first?

[al8]

Well, children and and women (the fertile ones in particular) are more important in regards to the perpetuation of life. It's just a fact of life, a fact of our spiecies. It makes sense that the survival of women be of a higher priority because this imperative makes for better collective survival of the species or group, since men can't get pregnant and bear offspring.
It has nothing to do with houshold chores or level of physical strength. This would hold even if women were on average decisively stronger and muscular than men.

[Il Medico]

Well I think it would come down to ethics. Who is most likely to survive? Who do you give a chance to live? In situations like a sinking ship, surviving the actually sinking is only the first step. The trying to stay alive in either a boat or in water is still ahead. If yo have a situation were you have 10 people and only enough room on the life boat for 6. The youngest (infants to toddlers) and the oldest should be the ones to stay. Now, this may seem cruel, but when you think about it there was a much higher chance of an infant dying waiting for rescue than say an 18 year old. If the 18 year had stayed and the infant got on the life boat, then both could have died, a worse out come.

[Colonello Buendia]

since men can't get pregnant and bear offspring.


True but men account for fifty percent of the fertilization, for the survival of humanity you need both

[al8]

True but men account for fifty percent of the fertilization, for the survival of humanity you need both

Off course, but you can make do with fewer men more easily than you can with fewer women.

[Kamerat]

Off course, but you can make do with fewer men more easily than you can with fewer women.
Women are not birth machines.:rolleyes:

I would say children first, then the first ones to get there or throw a coin/rock-paper-scissors.

[Revy]

Actually, it has nothing to do with reproduction or the "perpetuation of the species".

From wiki:


An alternate explanation is that men have a better chance of surviving in poor conditions compared to women and children. Saving the individuals that are more likely to die first increases the likelihood that more people will survive overall. This argument explains why post-reproductive women are saved and why male children would be saved.

[Robocommie]

The correct answer is that I myself am the first person on the lifeboat.

[the last donut of the night]

Wouldn´t a sinking boat in a communist society have adequate technology and number of boats to accomodate all?

[TC]

Well, children and and women (the fertile ones in particular) are more important in regards to the perpetuation of life. It's just a fact of life, a fact of our spiecies. It makes sense that the survival of women be of a higher priority because this imperative makes for better collective survival of the species or group, since men can't get pregnant and bear offspring.
It has nothing to do with houshold chores or level of physical strength. This would hold even if women were on average decisively stronger and muscular than men.

Right,what feminists make of this is that women shouldn't be reduced to walking baby-machines.

There is no group hive mind, society is only an aggregate of individuals and when you reduce women to their physical parts you treat them as implements for other's (or social) use and not people onto themselves.

[Hit The North]

Unless the ship housed the entire remains of humanity, then the biological imperative would not be relevant. What is relevant is the particular social convention people are operating under and the level of repression they can muster against their survival instinct in order to observe that convention.


Originally posted by The Doctor
Now, this may seem cruel, but when you think about it there was a much higher chance of an infant dying waiting for rescue than say an 18 year old.

How old are you, I wonder?

[Hit The North]

Wouldn´t a sinking boat in a communist society have adequate technology and number of boats to accomodate all?

:lol:

There will be no sinking boats under communism. There you go, we have a policy!

[Luís Henrique]

We hold an assembly to decide who's saved first.

This way everybody dies and nobody is discriminated against.

Darnit, what is the problem with the "rule" of ladies and children first?

Luís Henrique

[the last donut of the night]

:lol:

There will be no sinking boats under communism. There you go, we have a policy!


Sorry if I haven´t joined the the Ruling Masters of The Left Club. You may know that I haven´t even written 150 on this posts and am a beginner. And the Learning Forum says no question is stupid. :thumbdown:

[Jazzratt]

Everyone should simply form an orderly queue. Or perhaps they could be given a numbered ticket upon boarding the vessel.

I can understand having children go first, but after that any priority given will be entirely arbitrary. Any way of deciding will ultimately be just as fair as "children and the first ones to the lifeboats first". I'm all for "tall people and children first", myself.

[Luís Henrique]

I can understand having children go first, but after that any priority given will be entirely arbitrary.

If you can understand having children going first, then you perhaps can understand "people who care for those children" (regardless of being male or female) immediately after?

Luís Henrique

[Jazzratt]

If you can understand having children going first, then you perhaps can understand "people who care for those children" (regardless of being male or female) immediately after?

Luís Henrique

Yes, I suppose that's somewhat fair. Still puts me nearer the bottom of the list, best avoid ships.

[Killfacer]

Who travels in ships these days except pleasure cruises?*:D The question seems a bit outdated.

*If people actually use ships to travel on oceans these days on a mass scale, then I'd be interested which countries they're from?

I've got the ferry from dover to calais many a time. It's alot cheaper than flying and you don't have to rent a car on arrival.

[TC]

There is of course a more obvious explanation for the birkenhead rule: on the HMS Birkenhead, the men were soldiers and the women and children civilians.

The implication when repeated elsewhere (i.e. the Titanic) is not that the women and children's lives are more valuable then those of the male civilians, but that the men were braver and could better face death then cowardly women and children. In pre-revolutionary France, when nobles were executed by beheading, the traditional rule was female condemned nobles before male condemned nobles because they figured the wussy female nobles would freak out too much otherwise (and the whole point of beheading them rather than hanging them like commoners was to preserve their dignity, relatively speaking; twisted logic).

Theres also you know, an additional possible explanation: if you get the kids into the life rafts first with comparatively small-bodied caretakers, then the remaining people still have a chance of getting off, and if they don't, they can tread water and survive on the hull longer. On the other hand, if the kids are left on board, they aren't getting to safety unaided. In this case the rule is more like "secure your oxgyn mask before helping others; because if the adult passes out while securing a mask on a kid, the kid is less likely to secure the mask on the adult, so they'll suffocate, but if the adult secures their own mask first, the kid might pass out for an instant, but they'll recover with assistance.


In any case I think the most reasonable explanation is that it is simply sexist machismo: they think men are tougher braver stronger etc and so should forgo their safety for the human-objects they look after..

[yuon]

I had a thought yesterday regarding this thread and the Titanic. What were the death rates for first class passengers compared to third class?

Today, I go to the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Titanic#Survivors.2C_victims_and_statistics) on the subject.

Category Number aboard Number of survivors Percentage survived Number lost Percentage lost
First class 329 199 60.5 % 130 39.5 %
Second class 285 119 41.7 % 166 58.3 %
Third class 710 174 24.5 % 536 75.5 %
Crew 899 214 23.8 % 685 76.2 %
Total 2,223 706 31.8 % 1,517 68.2 %

(I can't work out how to format a table, so I'll just leave that like that. See the article linked above for a nicely formatted table.)
So, what do we see from that? 75.5% of the third class passengers did not survive, while only 39.5 of the first class passengers didn't.

Something else from the article:

6 of the 7 children in first class and all of the children in second class survived, whereas only 34 percent were saved in third class. 4 first class women died and 86 percent women survived in second class and less than half survived in third class. Overall, only 20 percent of the men survived, compared to nearly 75 percent of the women. First-class men were four times as likely to survive as second-class men, and twice as likely to survive as third class men.

So, it's interesting that in one of the more famous examples of this "women and children first", it's still the case that it's the richer women and children first, rather than the poor slobs in the lower decks.

Oh, and of course, and grouping of women and children together is more than likely sexist. I think TC said it in another thread, grouping women with children is effectively treating women as children.


@Luís Henrique the problem then with "women and children first" is that it's sexist. Pretty obvious if you think about it.

Of course, saying "children and those who care for them first" is, in today's society, going to mean that more women get "saved" than men.

[ls]

Everyone should sink, only then can we ensure every comrade is an equally dead comrade.

But infants first, then everyone else should work together to save as many others as poss.

[Luís Henrique]

@Luís Henrique the problem then with "women and children first" is that it's sexist. Pretty obvious if you think about it.

So what is sexist is not the social mores in which women are considered primarily caretakers, but a rule that they should be saved first in case of a disaster?

This is of course ridiculous. If you have a society in which women are deemed useful only, or mainly, as childbearers, you cannot have any other rational rule except this. Having them subjected to such discrimination and then allowing for a sauve qui peut rule in case of disaster - that would be doubly sexist.


Of course, saying "children and those who care for them first" is, in today's society, going to mean that more women get "saved" than men.

Evidently. Do you have a problem with this? Do you propose to further screw them?

*******************

I really have some trouble fathoming why does this even matters. I can't imagine any real situation in which the left having a position about this can be relevant. My impression is that some comrades feel that we aren't weak enough, isolated enough, slandered enough, and then start speculating about completely idle subjects, in order to see if we can find some stupid, ridiculous things that we can say that will make even more people - even more working class people - believe that we are in fact a bunch of nutcases or evil perverts.

This should be pretty obvious if you think about it.

We don't know how people in a communist society will deal with the need of raising children. I suppose it is going to be a social concern rather than an individual (or familial) one. But, I don't know; this is not the reason I am a socialist; and if I were to discover (magically, I suppose; I can't see any other way to do it) that the opposite is true, I wouldn't be shocked or surprised, nor I would have any problem in continuing to be a socialist: I am a socialist because I believe the property of means of production should be social, not private. Women and children not being means of production, I have no blueprints for their issues.

This also should be pretty obvious if you think about it.

Some leftists...

Luís Henrique