President Donald Trump

Plato in particular is an odd one to single out. He was one of very few classical guys who called for women's education and for women to participate in sports and government. There's also good evidence that he had female students.

OTOH his writing is full of casual misogyny and completely batshit ideas about communal living. Plus you get the impression that he mostly was a deadbeat who left his wife taking care of the kids while he went out flirting with young men.

One of the most patriarchal workplaces. I worked for a car manufacturer for many years, and a PM confided in me that the (all male) directors he got to know through presenting projects to them used to refer to a female PM as "Bud", short for Blow Up Doll, because of the shape of her mouth.

mongi being found "not guilty" by their HR would mean very little.

I am ok with ignoring most everything written by men, why stop at 1960 even?

Anyway, Plato’s communism of wives and property (bc those two things are the same lol) isn’t something I made up in my girl brain. He explicitly intended for those women to bear children for the state, produced through state-sanctioned temporary unions that would create the fittest offspring. Plato did the eugenics too.

I will give him small credit for proposing these unions begin at age 20 for girls. At least he wasn’t a raging pedo like some of the others.

If the standard I described were the correct standard, then I think you would have to ignore most of what was written by women before 1960 as well.

Crossnerd if she meets Plato in the afterlife:

This doesn't have anything to do with girl brains. We are both just working from memory. I just refreshed my memory.

In The Republic, Plato discusses the abolition of traditional family life for all adults in a "guardian" class, not just women. In other words, he was contemplating a class populated by both men and women in which there would be no husbands or wives, children would be raised communially, and both men and women would be expected to procreate for the purpose of sustaining the class.

This concept obviously is super problematic by modern standards, and I don't even know that Plato was actually advocating for the concept, but it wasn't a concept in which women were just supposed to exist for the purpose of serving the interests of men.

Here is an abstract of an article that discusses the issue:

https://academic.oup.com/book/34802/chap...

Oh no, he was def into the teenage boys. Dude would not shut up about how beautiful they are.

Probably. There’s never been a shortage of obsequious little trad wives all too eager to kneel at the right hand of patriarchy.

I do not support all women.

How is this at odds with what you originally quoted me saying? He was one of the first bros to suggest communal ownership of women and children and state-arranged sex contracts. That’s why it’s called the communism of wives, not the communism of husbands. Because traditionally women as wives were property and this was just a newer snazzier way of dividing it.

It really feels like you’re arguing a non-point with me. What’s the actual issue? That I’m being flippant and glib? Yes. Sometimes I do that. But historically you’ve always seemed to gauge well how serious I’m being.

I know you are being glib. My point was that it would be more accurate to describe it as a communism of adults than a communism of wives, but whatever.

Ideas about what constituted an adult were different back then, but I obviously agree that stuff about older men and "beautiful" teenage boys is all over the Platonic dialogues. It's a huge focus of the Symposium. Socrates's relationship with Alcibiades when the latter was a teenager arguably was the main reason Socrates was accused of corrupting Athenian youth.

I was genuinely surprised by how much of The Dialogues is just Plato --speaking through Socrates-- going on about how hot Alcibades is. Like get to the point, my guy.

Then I don’t agree with your point, because it minimizes and presumes that women and men occupy similar space in society, share the same rights, and would suffer the same or similar effects and consequences, which I do not believe to be true for that period of history. (Or any period of history for that matter.)

You can call it a communism of adults if you’d like to whitewash it, but half of the adults in this plan are having a hell of a worse time than the other half. I don’t imagine many women opting in. But that’s the whole point, isn’t it. Just don’t give them the option.

This is an odd complaint, since it's not clear how women would be more enslaved in his goofy-ass commune then they would be normally.

From Ancient Greece to modern Peterson bros, men are still itching to figure out a way to force women to be incubators for the state. Give up already, losers!

I agree with you about the actual experience of women at the time, but I don't think there is anything in the text to suggest that the idea he was proposing was just a pretext for the further subjugation of women, especially when you consider that the very idea of giving women more or less full status in the guardian class would have seemed highly transgressive to his historical audience.

This was essentially a thought experiment. I suspect that very few Athenian men or women would have wanted to be a part of what Plato was describing.

How do you imagine gestation works? If you’re conscripted to create children for the state for twenty years, I’d call that a significant period of enslavement.

No, I don’t think it was a plan to further the subjugation of women; I think the subjugation of women was a foregone conclusion that required zero second thought in that age. I think he accepted it as the natural order of things and didn’t investigate those ideas whatsoever.

I think Plato Republic is one the great works but I read it as about mind far more than about city. A (maybe 'the') key work on morality.

Not very well. Whole process seems miserable.

Sure, but they'd be just as enslaved in normal Greek society.

This seems largely accurate.

You must be really mad about Pericles. He explicitly told grieving mothers who had lost children in war to quit crying and go have more kids to glorify the state.

Get somebody to make a false claim about you.

I was shocked to find out how many false accusations there are. It's quite terrifying. I will be video recording all interactions going forward. I asked if I could wear a chest cam at work but they said no.

Wait a minute, chez. You think The Republic was about more than just a plan for a city? Are you sure about that? I also just assumed that it was some boring city planning document that miraculously survived through the centuries.