MRA: Women Couldn’t Vote.That Was “Oppression?”
Women campaigning for suffrage for no real reason, because not voting was just what women did back then.
I swear, sometimes I wonder if the entire Men’s Rights Movement is an elaborate hoax. Our old friend Fidelbogen weighs in today with a typically pompous post on the cutting-edge issue of women’s suffrage, posted with the almost-too-good-to-be-true headline: Women Couldn’t Vote.That Was “Oppression?” If I didn’t know better, I’d be tempted to dismiss it as half-baked satire – except that FB is serious, deadly serious. (And deadly dull, too, most of the time, but I’ll try to keep this snappy.)
Fidelbogen’s thesis:
It annoys me to hear the feminists say that women were “oppressed” because they didn’t have the voting franchise in olden days. Excuse me. . . oppressed? I would take exception to the semantics in this case, for is not a bit clear to me that what was happening ought to be called by such a heinous name.
While most people are either for or against women having the right to vote – though I’ve never met any of the latter group outside of MRA blogs – FB bravely declares himself “a third way thinker upon this subject.”
Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen, because Fidelbogen is going to get all philosophical on us:
I would submit that women’s historical lack of voting rights was neither a good thing nor a bad thing. Rather, it was a morally indifferent state of affairs, based on a cultural consensus that was shared by men and women alike in the past.
Hey, it was the olden days. People wore silly hats and watched silent movies and no one had iPhones.
Our ancestors lived in a very, very different world than we do, and their cultural norms were very, very different from ours, yet undoubtedly befitting to their world — a world mysterious and unknown to us nowadays. Who are we to judge?
I mean, really, how dare we offer any sort of moral judgment of anything that happened in the past. The Holocaust? Stalin’s purges? Hey, it was the mid-twentieth century – people were just into that shit back then.
Well, FB doesn’t mention either Hitler or Stalin, but he definitely considers women’s former lack of voting rights to be just one of those things that, hey, people were into back then:
[W]as it really, inherently, such a horrible thing after all, that women could not vote? … Why should it even matter? Did the average woman in those days honestly feel that voting was “all that”? Seriously. . . who are we to judge the men and women of past times for their very different way of life which we can no longer entirely fathom?
And besides, most men had been denied the vote earlier, so even if it matters and it totally doesn’t, what’s the big deal if the dudes in charge decided to deny the vote to the ladies for a while longer? As FB puts it:
[W]as it really such an unspeakable crime that the female population couldn’t always go to the polls during that comparatively trifling span of years?
Or is that entire concept nothing but feminist historiography, meant to wring pathos out of history for present-day political purposes by the device of retrojection? That would certainly conform to standard feminist tricknology, wouldn’t it?
Seriously. Those feminologicalnists are totally retrojecting the fuck out of the pastological period using their standard sneakyfulogicalnistic tricknology.
And besides, even though we’re not supposed to judge the past, and even thought that whole denying-the-ladies-the-vote thing was totally a “morally indifferent thing which ought to concern us very little,” FB thinks that maybe it was actually sort of, you know, cool.
I believe a case might be constructed that it was a positive good in the context of those times.
FB decides to leave that case unmade, and returns to the whole “who the fuck cares” argument.
Once upon a time, women didn’t have the voting franchise because societal norms found nothing amiss about such an arrangement. Then times changed, norms changed, and women were admitted to the franchise. That’s all. And women were never, at any point along that general story-line, “oppressed.”
Besides, the whole idea of “rights” is, well, just like, an opinion, man.
Furthermore, women were never at any time deprived of any rights. You see, women’s “right” to vote simply did not exist in the first place — or not during the period when the so-called deprivation occurred. I mean that “rights” are only a figment. Only a mentation. Only a notion. Only a construct. Rights do not exist in their own right. They are not some mystical pure essence which hangs in the air all by itself — they must be conjured into existence by a strictly human will-to-power, and fixed by law or custom.
And so, if the dudes of the world denied the ladies these “rights,” well, uh, it was “morally indifferent” yet also probably good for some reason.
In conclusion, shut your pie holes, ladies:
So in conclusion, I wish that second and third-wave feminists would shut the hell up with their dishonest, self-laudatory rhetoric about “the vote”. They need to quit tooting on that rusty old horn. It is getting really, really old.
Well, unless they’re this lady. She’s actually pretty good at tooting a horn.
Posted on October 18, 2011, in antifeminism, misogyny, MRA, oppressed men, reactionary bullshit, woman's suffrage. Bookmark the permalink. 388 Comments.
Things would be much easier if there was only one super misogynist.
I’m going to go ahead and venture a guess that the answers to Toysoldier’s “how many feminists would NOT” questions are all about 99%.
Over 9000.
500? As if, Ami! NWO is a total caveman. Throughout history, he has hunted the mammoth for women who did not respond with the desired level of wanting to bone him in return. All of civilization’s anti-male oppression HAPPENED TO HIM!
He was there when a caveguy first decided that he wanted to woo a cavegal rather than abduct her. OPPRESSION!
He was there when a cavegirl he wanted badly insisted on taking a neanderthal as her mate instead of him. The guy was freakishly tall, had an annoying voice, smelled different, and was a total THUG too, but he figured that must be what women want. OPPRESSION!
He was there when agriculture led to the development of beer. In fact, he was the first person in history to wake up the next morning next to someone he found tremendously unappealing. OPPRESSION!
He was there when society became organized and food plentiful enough for a handful of men to seize power and authority over thousands in order to treat themselves to lives of opulence and near-constant copulation with multiple ladies meeting their society’s highest standards of beauty. And none of those powerful new kings was NWO. OPPRESSION!
He was there when Jesus said to turn the other cheek and that those who were wealthy should give to the poor. A man who has two robes should give to he who has none. Don’t worry about being wealthy and awesome, look at the flowers, they just live to the best of their abilities, and are more beautiful than any wealthy person’s designer couture. Oh, and treat women, prostitutes, foreigners, and men who prefer to hang around lots of other men with respect. NWO of course found this all nauseating, but kept his opinions to himself because there were lots of people around who would disagree with him, and he was a coward. OPPRESSION!
He was there when Siddhartha Gautama first gained enlightenment and became the Buddha, proclaiming to the world that desire is the source of all pain, and letting go of desire the cure. NWO was so shocked he fell into a wandering fugue until the Hoover administration. OPPRESSION!
NWO was there, dude. HE KNOWWWS
…just not how to find happiness..
Well, he could find happiness if only society would allow him to abduct and have sex with 14 year old girls. Alas and alack, his one chance at happiness has been denied, and it’s all feminism’s fault.
500? As if, Ami! NWO is a total caveman. Throughout history, he has hunted the mammoth for women who did not respond with the desired level of wanting to bone him in return. All of civilization’s anti-male oppression HAPPENED TO HIM!
So NWO is 5000 years old xD
That’s how he knows the theory of evolution is wrong. He was there. xD
Behold, we have found the missing link.
If only women had the entrepenurial spirit to do that on their own back in the ancient days. No one helped individual men, they did it on their own back then.
Example please? :3
So wait, NWO is Vandal Savage?
For the Big Book of Larnin': The only kind of oppression that exists is oppression by law. Also, “If men and women each had their own crosses to carry, than no one was oppressed.”
Slavey:
You guys, he has many leather-bound books!
Cassandra:
Unless David’s sitting on stuff, his flounce was his first comment in this thread.
Toysoldier:
…
…
…
He could be! :D
Except with his amazing logic skills, he wouldn’t even be able to get his plans halfway off the ground like Savage xD
And if he does, then Miss Martian (me :D ) will stop him! :D (I’m also sometimes Supergirl :D)
I know my history very well. Do you? I have pre-1900s history books and quite a few volume XI and pre volume XI brittianica’s?
I thought you had no money? o_O
The really old history books are the ones in which it’s taken for granted that slavery is OK and where women hadn’t even asked for the vote yet, right? I can see why Slavey would prefer those.
Give ‘im hell, Ami. :)
haha exactly Ami. I have heard about radical feminists in the past trying to suppress female on male violence. It really pissed me off when I heard about it and I hate that radicals put a dent in the feminist movement. I really don’t believe most modern feminists would be against male shelters though. The problem though is that MRAs just want to shut down women’s shelters and deny the severity of male of female violence, rather than ask for donations and lobby the goverment for money to build shelters for men. It’s like saying, well if we have to suffer, so do you! that’s just not the way to go about things. If MRAs make it clear that their interest is getting support for male victims and not at the expense of female victims, I don’t see modern feminists having a problem with that.
And fuck, for a society that hates men so much, how come its nothing but slut, whore, bitch make me a sammich, wimminz is dumb comments all over the interwebz? just sayin’…
Btw Ami your Safe Space Project is awesome, I will keep it in mind if ever someone I know is in need of an agency :D
Oh, look, it is the ignorant Toysoldier, returning again to regale us with false historical anecdotes and bad logic.
I think Toy Soldier needs his own version of the Book of Larnin.
@Quackers thank you! :D Also if you know nebody who can contribute :)
The problem though is that MRAs just want to shut down women’s shelters and deny the severity of male of female violence, rather than ask for donations and lobby the goverment for money to build shelters for men. It’s like saying, well if we have to suffer, so do you!
That seems to be a LOT of stuff I see from some MRAs… and I’m always confused…
cuz for example, the recent thing where the McDonalds employee viciously beat 2 women with a metal bar who slapped him… and I see a lot of “YOU KNOW IF IT WAS A WOMAN SHE WOULD BE PRAISED AS A HERO AND LET GO”… and I don’t know what that means… do they mean that the woman is treated correctly, and therefore the man should be praised as a hero and released? (i.e. disproportionate violent responses should be legal) or do they think that the woman should be charged… in which case… then what’s happening w/ the man is correct, and their problem is that in a theoretical situation they believe there might be injustice… o_O
Obviously, not extending the right to vote to women was a form of oppression.
What is a fair point though is that most *men* were not allowed to vote until the mid 19th century or even the early 20th century depending on which country you lived in.
Firstly, democracy is a fairly recent development. Secondly, in most anglosphere countries you had to have a certain amount of land, a certain amount of income and have white skin to vote. Not sure of the exact number, but I think I read that over 80% of Canadian men were excluded by these rules up until around 1900. Canadian women got the vote in 1924.
I would say that all disenfranchised people were oppressed (both men and women).
Often you will hear people say that the fact that women couldn’t vote for “thousands of years” is evidence of a conspiracy of all men to keep all women down. In reality, it was a conspiracy of a small elite who kept the majority of men and women oppressed.
Why does this matter? Because people today will often argue that women should be given special privileges to make up for “centuries of oppression”. I consider this to be an invalid reason, since we are all descended from many male and many female ancestors who were oppressed.
To be honest, I’m okay with a certain amount of social engineering to level the playing field based on what is happening now. So for example, I’m okay with female-only scholarships in engineering where women are currently underrepresented. But if someone argued that female-only scholarships in psychology are acceptable because women have traditionally been oppressed, I would find that objectionable. Most psych students are female now, and as I said before I reject the traditional oppression argument.
From way back in NWO’s first missive…
I’ve never voted. What’s the point?
My day suddenly and unexpectedly got a little brighter.
Folks, I appreciate all the suggestions, but please remember that the Book of Learnin’ is strictly a compendium of FACTS. As fascinating as NWO’s opinions, speculations, and one-act plays where imaginary historical women nag their husbands for pretty dresses may be, entries for the Book should be only factual statements explaining how NWO’s home universe operates. Out of this thead, I will be adding his definition of “zero-sum game” to the Mathematics category, and possibly his description of the plot of the Iliad to Literature. This is serious scholarship, people.
I think the Book of Learnin’ should be prefaced by his statement: “Women were never oppressed.” To him it is the most important fact of all.
It might also be worth compiling his version of the Art of War. If ever a woman thinks she is oppressed, she is blaming all men and only men for her oppression. Therefore her evil deeds must be met with logical fallacies, because the ultimate argument is the one you learn in Kindergarten.
Ami, I will keep other people in mind who might be able to contribute :)
Also in terms of the McD’s incident, I think what they mean to say is that there’s a double standard. That if a woman were to beat a man with a metal pipe because he slapped her and tried to attack her, society would praise her actions as heroic. I can kinda see where they’re coming from, but the attack would still be excessive, because like in the actual McDonald’s case it goes beyond self defense. Also they compared it with battered wife defense, which is usually brought up after years of abuse, not just one isolated incident.
Prehistoric men hunted down some mammoths, cured the mammoth hides, made those hides into bootstraps, and then pulled themselves the fuck up with those bootstraps. Prehistoric women just spent all day lounging on cave-couches eating cave-bonbons, got fat, and thanks to their girly lack of upper body strength could not lift themselves by the bootstraps. Therefore women were too low to the ground to see the ballot, and thus naturally could not vote. History, bitches! Also evolution; that’s how evolution went too. Yes.
But…but women then DID think it was big deal! And more than that, in the Western states, a lot of them COULD and DID vote, for decades before the Constitutional Amendment. And it wasn’t a “trifling” period of time women were denied the right to representation in Western or even American history–it was CENTURIES.
Just… such a weak grasp of fucking history itself, man.
I got one of those women only awards…in a field that is 90% male. In school, vicious sexism and sexual harassment kept women quiet, kept us from participating, and kept our numbers low. Having one moment where women’s achievements were recognized was very welcome, since every other day, we were very much marginalized.
Re-posting my comment here as well, because I honestly don’t believe it will be allowed.
Sorry if I crtash the Owly-smash party, but it’s everyday of the week when Owly shows his complete lack of understanding of things like hsitory, so… :)
P.S. I adore how the world is in only bipolar (is this the right word?) in his view… with good/bad men/women and nothing in between. Short and simple…
_______
However, my response as follows:
This post is a mess.
1. If we assume that things just are, why do you think that your complaints matter at all, since “it’s just the way it is”?
It seems like you suggest that nobody cared that women couldn’t vote, because it just was, than suddenly, out of the blue, they started to care and granted women the right to vote without any delay or fuss… and then the eevil feminists came along and said their was opression. It completely erases EIGHTY YEARS of movement and political activism and the fact that women’s rights were something FOR which feminists were fighting for and because of their actions women were granted rights and then the movement evolved to be a lot more.
It sounds horribly dishonest to devalue the work of all these people, the social changes that have happened and somehow present the past as something that has happened in an alternative reality to which we have only tangential access and knowledge of.
There are literaty hundreds of thousands of books on the topic, written by both feminists and people who opposed the idea of women getting the right to vote. There have been riots, protests… it sure as hell didn’t happen overnight. So we dfinitely can read them up, think about them, check some history books as well and think for ourselves. The past can be known and understood. Also, different times – yes, different people… not so much. Though society changes rapidly, some things haven’t changed that much and the main point is – people want to control their lives and when they can’t, they don’t like it.
Next… even we assume that you are right and whatever is the status quo is morally ambiguous and everyone is fine with iot and it’s just how it is… why do you complain in that case from specific issues concerning men? The argument being: if society says it’s right, then… you compaint doesn’t matter because the reality is what it is and that’s it.
Last, but not least… yes, rights are a fictional notion we have come up with. We are complicated beings, having compliated societies, having complicated relationships. We create such notions, so we can function and the fact that something is a construct, does not mean it has no influence for the people. Even if I don’t believe in good and evil, our soeciety does and if I kill someone for the kicks of it, I will be in jail, because what I did is perceived as wrong by our society and we have laws for it despite what I believe in, personally. When many people gather with different set of notions… a novel idea, things change.
I would like to point out almost every frigging country that has had a revolution which outs “it is what it is and that’s it” notion a mighty kick and shows how untrue it is.
Maybe you argue that construct notions can’t be positive or negative but as a person with German background… I assure you, you are gravely mistaken.
@gjdj “What is a fair point though is that most *men* were not allowed to vote until the mid 19th century or even the early 20th century depending on which country you lived in.”
No, that’s not a fair point. Many groups of people werer oppressed, obvioulsy. But for a same social level, same color of skin, same nationality as a man, a woman was still more opressed and had less righth. You can argue wether it was worst to be a black man or a white woman back then, but that doesn’t change the facts: sexism existed and still exist.
“In reality, it was a conspiracy of a small elite who kept the majority of men and women oppressed.”
I don’t believe it was a conspiracy. That would mean secret plans, etc It was – is – more a matter of common interest, which is the same dynamics we see in “class warfare” And we go back to the zero sum game^^, where a group is afraid that letting the other have more freedom will mean less for them.
And poor men were still considered as “owner” of their wife/daugther, so not just a probleme of the elite.
“Why does this matter? Because people today will often argue that women should be given special privileges to make up for “centuries of oppression””.
Really? First time in my life I hear such a thing. Can you quote me a few feminists, or politicians who told this kind of thing?
“But if someone argued that female-only scholarships in psychology are acceptable because women have traditionally been oppressed” Has anyone EVER said that? That’s a huge “if”.
Athens is more than 3 millenia old; Town councils have played an important political role since the medieval period in Europe. I respect that we must keep our eyes on the big picture in examining history, but at what point is the cutoff for ‘recent’, in the context of human history if it is not 1 or even 3 millenia?
Nearly every woman was excluded. Yes, many men were as well. In the US it was the majority for quite some time. That is still not equivalent to the system’s being rigged against women.
You’re kind of slow on the uptake, ain’tcha? You do realize that those elites played divide and conquer, and part of that was on gender, right? It wasn’t a conspiracy; conspiracies are done quietly. It was vocal, vociferous agreement amongst the overwhelming majority of men that kept the system in place.
Agreed, but to different degrees. A poor white man and a black sharecropper in Merika were both denied the vote in 1870, but that poor white man still was oppressed less.
Troll haet Affirmative Action, because he’s ignorant.
There should be steps taken to alleviate ableist discrimination, class discrimination, racial discrimination, gender discrimination, heterosexist discrimination, cissexist discrimination, etc. Some of that is going to be temporary, limited advantages of oppressed peoples. It shouldn’t just be women who are aided; that would be grossly stupid and wrong. Just because you’re an idiot who wants to keep things the same doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t see room for improvement.
How’s that straw man working out for ya?
http://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2011/01/cover-men.aspx
Notice that despite a strong majority of women, which almost certainly hasn’t started overnight, the overwhelming majority of full professors are men, and a small majority of associate professors are. This doesn’t mean women need help at the student level, but AFAIK they’re not *given* any.
Rutee – in ancient Greece access to the “democracy” had only a few.
The “only not-slaves, not-women and non-foreigners and non-poor (that is arguiable moment, I know)” can have a say in the “deomcracy”. I see that you mean that the idea is not novel but actually using it in practice is quite recent.
It is dangerously close to “well, humanism was invented in ancient Greece”. Just… the little details are many, many people who are excluded in both situations (for ancient Greece examples) and I find it important to mention it.
For the rest though I agree with you.
It would be awesome if Futrelle could ever make a rational argument about anything.
Short version: He didn’t say “Universal Suffrage” was a new idea. I’m well aware of the failings of Greece.
All of this arguing over who could vote and when is beside the point. The OP argued that disenfranchisement is NOT oppression. Period! He happened to single out women as a group, however he still left his argument about “rights” so broad that it includes anyone who can’t vote. So when NWO comes in here to argue that men who can’t vote are being oppressed, he has already rejected Fidelbogen’s central argument and has already agreed with the evil feminists who say that voting is an important right. The end. I’ll take no more questions.
I don’t get the whole ‘vote is not important”. It’s truly bizare, especially combined with the Owly comments how men weren’t able not to vote as well (which is stated as a bad thing).
I think that denying people any control ofn their lives or limiting them or putting them on purpose in Cath22 situations is not right at all, yet somehow that dude is actually arguing that the fact that people were denied rights is somehow fine, because that’s changed now and doesn’t matter anymore.
I wonder… does he HONESTLY thin his ass is the center of the universe or he genuinly can’t realise that the world is not US?
Pretty much everything Slavey writes about is the very definition of First World Problems.
Well, First World Delusional Sexist Weirdo problems, but you know.
Hellenic democracy was particularly undemocratic by our standards, though. If you focus narrowly on just the franchise nearly as many men were excluded as women (I’m not going to say that in terms of general societal attitudes men of all social strata didn’t have it far better).
But your historical point still stands. The Icelandic Alþingi allowed “all free men” to attend, according to Wikipedia, though I don’t know how much of a say they had, and again, it excludes slaves as well as women. But unlike Athens, Iceland didn’t classify large swaths of otherwise eligible people as resident aliens or otherwise NOKD — if you were a man and you weren’t a slave, you were in, which was not the case in Athenian democracy a thousand years earlier.
I am beginning to more and more hate this.
Regularly the world which is not USA and UK and a few more is reffered and 2nd world, 3rd worlds… which is insulting as shit. Because in US some issues are resolved fenism should stop? No fucking chance.
Because in US now women have the right to vote so that issue is resolved for everyone and feminism should stop talking about it? No fucking chance in hell.
Because in US awareness towards rape and crime does exist, somehow feminism should stop talking about it and critisising it? Are they insane? Do we stop talking about people’s rights just because some group somewhere has them? What the flying fuck?
Not to mention that somehow huge issues are ignored and turned a blind-eye to, because they don’t concern “first worlders” or don’t concern them personally, like… well the whole MRA movement we are seeing (trough the lenses of Menboobz I have to add, I am sure that are examples which are not the case as what David is criticising).
Honestly, I can see why little pricks like Owly, Brandon and the genious behind the post we are currently writing under exist in the first place.
The self-importance is overwhelming…
This is really an amazing quote from Rutee Katreya. How can a process that takes a million of years produce this end result? An organism which is indispensable for the survival of the species but behaves mostly like this specimen.
Simon, you should read “The Selfish Gene.” It’s a pretty good explanation of why altruism is actually adaptive, and why organisms that behave in a “fuck you, I got mine” way toward other members of their species are far less evolutionarily fit than organisms that are capable of cooperation.
Eneya – agreed. It reminds me of when body image/eating disorders and “date” rape are lamented as “white girl problems”. A) so “white girl” problems don’t count? cause we see people get awfully upset over “white boy” problems ALL THE FUCKING TIME! B) It’s not even true in either case and yeah thats really helpful for men and people of from other races who may have these issues. way to encourage them to go get the help they need.
but yes, agreed. just because i don’t live in a comparatively extremely oppressive country and am allowed to drive and wear what I want but that doesn’t mean i’m gonna shut my mouth when I see things that are very harmful to women everywhere i turn.
Holly, I had a similar thought myself. When I read comments (usually on MRA/PUA blogs) that are just so insistent that men and women are oh so different and equality is not possible and we should not even try to mess with “nature” and change things…..its strikes me as refusing to evolve and change with the times. If I’m not mistaken, we evolve by adapting traits to ensure the survival of our species right? trying to create a more harmonious society by implementing these crazy notions of equality seems like a good start.
Quackers, that’s not really “evolution.” It’s just social progress. I don’t expect the genome to get more feminist, whatever that would even mean.
However, the idea of not messing with “nature” is still ridiculous, because whatever humans do is human nature. We’re social and tool-using animals; humans seeking social progress is as natural as termites building mounds.
Aw I missed all the fun with NWO. You guys made him really mad lol.
@Holly: Social evolution maybe?
I don’t think that explains anything, how do you know that your brand of altruism is adaptive or that it’s adaptive that this altruism encompasses all humanity? Look at ants, they’ll will happily sacrifice themselves for their colony but fight ants of others to death.
Then it’s natural too, when social changes go in the “wrong” direction.
But that’s not a standpoint you want to adapt. You want to say “inequality is really bad” and not just “we see a trend to more equality and that’s a natural phenomenon.”.
I fail to see how this can be done if you are a materialist. Within materialism or physicalism only a purely descriptive approach is possible and the word “ought” has no basis in reality.
Quackers: Men do lobby the government for shelters, but feminists oppose and fight against those efforts. Feminists did not create shelters all on their own. They had the support of men and of the local, state, and federal governments. More so, feminists claim to support all victims, not just female victims, so makes no sense for feminists to cry “Do it yourself!” when abused men turn to them for help. I do not know if it makes you an asshole to refuse to help male victims, but it certainly makes you a hypocrite if you claim to support all victims, and in my book that is far worse. It is also pretty terrible to claim that anyone arguing for men’s shelters want to defund and close women’s shelters. That kind of zero sum scare tactic only serves to delegitimize men’s valid complaints. But since you said you would donate to organizations that help male victims, I will hold you to your word. Here are several organizations at raise awareness about or provide service to male domestic violence victims: Stop Abuse For Everyone, The Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men and Women, The Gay Men’s Domestic Violence Project, and The One in Three Campaign. And please do not just donate to the third one. A lot of heterosexual men are victims too.
Ami Angelwings: Feminists do actually block legislation to aid male victims, but that is all the more reason to fight to help male victims. But just so I understand, you consider yourself an ally to male victims and their advocates, yet here you are mocking them for fighting against discrimination against men. With friends like these indeed…
Amused: I cannot say what you personally do or do not support. However, I can speak to the feminist reaction to efforts to address men’s issues. For example, in 2009 a male student attending the University of Chicago created the Men In Power club to address men’s issues, which promptly received a hostile feminist backlash. As for your question, to my knowledge no one offers scholarships to men specifically for being male, and I think offering that would violate Title IX. I have not seen men’s activists advocating for the elimination of women’s shelters, and it seems odd to only support fathers in meeting a feminist standard rather than simply helping fathers who need assistance.
Hi, all. I work in the history field, elbow deep in the history for at least 40 hours a week.
[I am sorry it's not a very dangerous job, unless a big box of history accidentally falls on someone's head or crushes someone's toe, or if someone accidentally loses a very important piece of paper and then has to deal with the stress of whether or not their boss thinks they are prone to errors like a regular human person or monumentally incompetent. Only normal work dangers here.]
That being said, I feel like I am well-positioned to tell you what history was like. *cracks knuckles*
History was exactly as complicated as modern life. For every issue you had people who were completely for, completely against, uniformed, informed but indifferent, and every shade in between. Just like today.
We have a tendency to want to say, “People in the past thought this way or acted that way.” When it would be more correct to say, “Some people thought this way and some people acted that way.” This tendency is exacerbated by the way secondary sources are written, one must have a topic and disregard everything that doesn’t relate directly to that topic. So a brief history of women’s campaign for the vote might include information about the Anti-Suffrage League, but would not include the many women who just didn’t give a shit or who were too busy trying to survive to be concerned with whether or not voting would make their lives better. Or women who couldn’t read a ballot, or women who were in a place with a strong political machine whose vote only meant a couple of dollars and a ride to the poll and cannot be considered a true representation of what country they wanted to take. On and on forever.
Whether women getting the vote was historically a good thing or a bad thing, the answer has to be, like everything else, it was both. There were bad things that happened which were the direct result of women’s getting the vote, most notably Prohibition, and there were good things, the needs of women being better understood and more directly represented. There were also good things that were lost with women’s suffrage, things we might not be able to draw a clear an understanding of, and bad things whose effects were ameliorated. That’s how these things work, everything decision we make on a societal level has intended and unintended consequences, we just have to do the best we can and be willing to change course when it is required.
If you need me, I’ll be over here scanning photographs from 1944.
Re: toysoldiers.
do you have any evidence of men lobbying for shelters and feminist blocking this? I see your link below and I’m not invalidating it, but how about anything in the US just cause I’m more familiar with our system? The link posted below just seems like a parliament discussion to me. Feminists really don’t have that much political power (yeah yeah go ahead and argue that if you want, that’s how i see it. there is no “feminist party” or anything though so i find it weird when feminists get accused of these things.). Seriously though if you’ve ever spent ANY time around feminists they’re the ones that get upset over men being abused and non-feminists are the ones making jokes. I know this has all been said on here before it’s just mind-boggling how you guys make feminists the enemy. “with friends like these who needs enemies?” yuck yuck except feminists get upset over MRA stuff because they actively bash feminism sooo much and that is much different than bashing patriarchy because patriarchy isn’t something men thought about and fought for
feminists only assist fathers in “meeting a feminist standard”…what does that mean exactly?
Toydolsider, I agree that all victims should be helped and supportd despite gender.
also, i do care very much about all abused people. I do however also gravitate more toward helping women because I think I’ll be more effective helping abused women than I would be helping men because I understand what it is like to be a woman in this world more than I do to be a man. does that mean i hate men and don’t care if they’re abused to you? because i focus more on what i understand better? I do however support all safety for the abused. There’s a center near me that specifically helps transgendered people that have suffered sexual abuse and i think that is an absolutely fantastic thing to have but I wouldn’t be too great helping out there cause I have no idea what it might be like for them. I guess you can accuse feminist of blocking things that help abused men (some evidence of this would sure be nice though) but i know for sure that I personally haven’t done that and many consider me a feminist and I can say the same for every other person who may be considered a feminist that I’ve ever met.
Toysoilder,
Except they do try to defund women’s shelters. National Coalition of Men has sued women’s shelters over supposed discrimination, even when the guy in question suing was offered referrals http://www.feminist.com/news/vaw1.html
And I did a search for this on NCOFM website and I found articles stating that they sue shelters and DV related laws. That really sounds like they care about men. That really sounds like “reaching out” it sounds like revenge, that’s what it sounds like. That sounds like “well if I don’t get service, no one does!”
And yes, I’ve heard calls to defund women’s shelters from MRAs before. So no. I don’t believe MRAs care about establishing “connections” with shelter workers. They simply want to harm services that battered women really need. That’s why I, and I assume other feminists say “do it yourself” not because they don’t care, but because MRAs have made it clear that THEY dont care about female victims.
Feminists did the legwork, feminists did the petitioning, and only after that did men support them. I find it very offensive that MRAs think they can hitch a free ride because of it, all while simultaneously insulting feminism. If it weren’t for feminists, DV would probably be unheard of! I find it especially disgusting that MRAs expect feminists to bend over backwards for them while they insult and belittle feminists and a lot of the time women too. Forgive me for being a bit put off by it. I take offense by angry rants that tell me I’m a slut and a greedy gold digger for being a western woman, and a man hater just because I care about women’s rights. I find it sick and disturbing when I read MRA comments and articles excusing men who kill women in custody battles. I find it offensive and a plain out denial of history and facts when they claim women were never oppressed or had any issues at all.
Do MRAs care about the message behind slut walk? nope. They just laugh at the movement and call the protesters attention whores. And I’m suddenly supposed to care so much about they claim?
I hope my message is clear, but in case it isn’t I’ll lay it out for you. I as a feminist, am not opposed to advocating for male DV victims. I have no reason to try to stop lobbying for male shelters. But when the source of some of the DV studies are from an angry, misogynist website, it makes me very critical of the information and the studies. Especially when there is also counter evidence to those studies. You know what I find really funny? MRAs have no idea how similar their behavior is to the radical feminists they constantly rant about. The generalizing, the smearing of the opposite sex, the alienating angry tone. Like radical feminists, they touch on some important issues, but to get to them you have to wade through a fuck ton of misogyny and zero sum bullshit. MRAs are alienating. They are just as as guilty as radical feminists when they decide to paint an entire gender as bad, and the entire feminist movement as some kind of evil matriarchal agenda. They’re even more off-putting when feminists with an open mind do want to listen to what they say, but are sick of being painted as man hating bitches and all the other shit they say we are as evidenced by this blog.
So once again, I support male DV shelters, and government funding for them. But the moment I hear that MRAs try to sue/defund women’s shelters or simply try to take all that funding to further their own agenda, that I do not condone. Also please keep in mind that even though some studies claim 50/50 DV, women are still more likely to be killed by an intimate partner and more likely to be injured. This is not to discredit male victims, or to claim that men dont need shelters, but it is an important fact to consider. I will check out those links too.
Eneya: The point (I think) Rutee was making is that democracy, eveni in a limited franchise, isn’t “relatively recent”, as was argued. Since it isn’t, and the franchise hasn’t excluded women; always and everywhere, the argument has a flaw.
Since there have been more than a few examples of women holding power, leading “nations” (Boadicea, Elizabeth, Isabella, Some of the Emperors of Byzantium, etc.) it’s not as if people had no examples of women being competent.
Further, there are things such as the Salic Law, which excluded women in Carolingian Francia’ precisely because they hadn’t been excluded in Merovingian Francia.
Bullshit:
The “blocking” that you refer to was an amendment by a female Labour party member that indicates that the majority of domestic violence victims are female. Alex Neil’s motion was passed, and the help line for men was funded. You’re a liar.
What is it with MRA types conflating the expression of contradictory opinions with actual resistance at a legal level that would prevent the MRM from doing something, oh I don’t know, productive? Zarat used to do the same thing – post a link that was supposed to be an example of feminists opposing a men’s studies program as proof that feminism is preventing men’s studies programs. But as soon as you followed the link, it would be something like a feminist blogger mocking some spokesman’s reasons for the Men’s Studies Program.
Keep in mind, the program itself would be: 1) in existence and funded despite the feminist mockery and 2) doing just fine. If you want shelters, charities, scholarships, etc., study the existing laws to ensure you aren’t violating them and do the work to actually fund, build, create these projects! The laziness of the MRM bothers me almost as much as the misogyny. Yes, there will be people who disagree with you. Some of them may even *gasp* have the temerity to do so publically, rudely, and with a tone you don’t really care for. They may express opposition to your ideas.
So you keep at it. You want to be taken seriously as a civil rights movement; study how those who worked for and within those movements actually accomplished their goals. Stop invoking their struggles if you’re unwilling to acknowledge how much they were ridiculed, how much direct opposition they faced and how they succeeded despite these obstacles.
“We can’t create shelters because feminists mock us,” is an excuse made out of laziness. I’ve done development work for all men’s shelters. They do wonderful work. There should be more of them.
Blitzgal’s already covered your other lies, so I’m going to go back to this copyright issue.
“But just so I understand, you consider yourself an ally to male victims and their advocates, yet here you are mocking them for fighting against discrimination against men.”
We mock misogynists, not male victims of discrimination.
Quackers, I’ve known a few radical feminists in my time, and none are as hateful as MRAs. The only women I’ve known who categorically hate men do not identify as feminists. Just my own experience, FWIW.
Quackers – I am amased by your comment.
Just… awesome!
I can agree with that because there is no need to prove or cite traditional oppression to deal with oppression right now. I also reject the traditional subordination argument. This is a common manosphere argument that women were happy being in subordinate positions in society and home for thousands of years, therefor men have a rightful place of authority over women. Men had special privileges then so should still have them now and denying them this is oppression of men.
Toy Soldier, what have MRA’s ever done for female victims of domestic violence? All I’ve seen them do is deny it happens or say that female victims had it coming to them. It’s hard to take the MRM views on domestic violence too seriously when they write blog posts like “How to Slap your way to Slavery” or “Bash a Violent b**** Month”, and then commenters gleefully describe putting women in their place by beating them up. The moderator at men’s rights reddit also posts sick jokes at the beating women reddit. They don’t do much for male victims of domestic violence, but they do a lot to harm female victims.
Glenn Sacks and his supporters called contributors to The Family Place, a domestic violence shelter, to urge them to stop donating money to it. The reason is because he and the FRA’s were angry that The Family Place ran ads on buses which showed a girl as a future victim of domestic violence. I guess they consider it offensive to suggest that some men are capable of beating or killing their wives, even though it happens all too often. How does that help male victims? Their solution for helping male victims is to defund a shelter that actually provides services for all victims, including men.
Now you come here to tell us feminists aren’t doing enough about this problem when many of us help victims of domestic violence in the real world. We don’t deny men can be victims and we want male victims to receive help. We just don’t want support groups that think the best way to help male victims is by defunding services for women and children.
Not being allowed to vote is (apparently) a privilege.
Maybe it is time that society pampered men by taking away THEIR right to vote. Actually, I can see some advantages, given the number of men with wing-nuts in their skulls.
Hey Simon, I have A Modest Proposal for you… Read up a bit about Ireland under British rule.
Damn you, Blockquote!
Why are MRA’s such segregationists?
??????
Ants of other species, you ignoramus. And the only way to really demonstrate adaptability in a particular change is a fitness test, which is a fucking monstrous thing to do to humans, not to mention amazingly difficult if not entirely impossible.
No shit, sherlock. It’s an argument against the naturalistic fallacy.
Okay. As a humanist it’s fucking easy, so I fail to see why I should care about your point.
Not generally a thing in Radical Feminism.
I’m not gonna play with Toy Soldier; his solipsism is a huge bother.
… I hate to say this, but NWOSlave was right about something. The Middle Class is dying. However, he’s hilariously wrong about why. According to any evaluation grounded in reality, it has nothing to do with “entitlements” as he means them, or women. It’s because of income inequality and wealth inequality. A tiny fraction of the population (mostly white men, incidentally) control most of the money and assets, and keep them tied up in aristocracy rather than allowing them to circulate and benefit all. What wealth does leave the top 1% simply isn’t enough to sustain the middle or lower classes. This is a prime reason the economy is collapsing, and why raising taxes on the rich to force their wealth back into circulation is a good idea by any reality-based standard.
Incidentally, it’s also why killing the estate tax was one of the stupidest ideas in the history of stupid — it almost solely affects the wealthiest of the wealthy, putting some reins on intergenerational transfer of income. It was one of the only checks on our Aristocratic class. (because that’s what they are, even if we don’t like to say it) Unless you think Aristocrats wielding all the wealth and political power in the US is totally awesome, killing it was a horrifying move, and it would have been far better for the health of our economy and democracy to raise it.
He should ask Ms. Dorothy Cooper if she feels oppressed that she apparently isn’t going to be allowed to vote. (link below) She’s a 95-year-old African-American woman in Tennessee who has no state ID, so she went to the DMV to get one. She had her birth certificate, her voter’s registration card, her lease, and a rent receipt, but because her birth certificate didn’t match her married name (of course) and she couldn’t find her marriage certificate, she was not allowed to get an ID. So, without that, she can’t vote in November.
http://www.projectvote.org/blog/2011/10/elderly-black-woman-denied-voter-id-in-tenn/
I saw an interview with her and what struck me most was that she said that even in the 1950s and 1960s when Southern states were often doing their best to prevent African-Americans from voting, she voted. So, that new photo-ID law has managed to disenfranchise her in 2011.
But I think the Republicans who are voting these laws in know that. It’s a feature, not a bug.
@Rutee:
Athens is more than 3 millenia old; Town councils have played an important political role since the medieval period in Europe. I respect that we must keep our eyes on the big picture in examining history, but at what point is the cutoff for ‘recent’, in the context of human history if it is not 1 or even 3 millenia?
Yes, there are examples of democracy going back several millennia, but at any given point in time a very small minority of people lived in a democratic society. Depending on the definition, the United States has an arguable claim to be the world’s oldest surviving democracy.
You’re kind of slow on the uptake, ain’tcha? You do realize that those elites played divide and conquer, and part of that was on gender, right? It wasn’t a conspiracy; conspiracies are done quietly. It was vocal, vociferous agreement amongst the overwhelming majority of men that kept the system in place.
Conspiracy was perhaps a bad choice of words. I didn’t mean that it was done covertly. But I’m not convinced that an overwhelming number of men kept the system in place. So an overwhelming number of men supported a system in which 80% of men couldn’t vote? Further, since universal suffreage generally followed universal male suffrage by 20 years or so, one could argue that newly enfranchised males must have supported general enfranchisement. Also, I don’t appreciate the insulting words “slow on the uptake” – it’s rude and you’re a hypocrite if you are at all concerned about ableism.
Troll haet Affirmative Action, because he’s ignorant. Wow. Wrongly assumed that I hate affirmative action, and then conclude that I’m ignorant because of said assumption. Classy. So who is the troll and who is ignorant?
There should be steps taken to alleviate ableist discrimination, class discrimination, racial discrimination, gender discrimination, heterosexist discrimination, cissexist discrimination, etc. Some of that is going to be temporary, limited advantages of oppressed peoples. It shouldn’t just be women who are aided; that would be grossly stupid and wrong. Just because you’re an idiot who wants to keep things the same doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t see room for improvement. I fully support most of these steps. I don’t like being called an idiot (ableism again?), nor do I want to keep things the same. I want men and women to have the same opportunities and responsibilities.
My issue is that I feel that women are substantially less oppressed than is generally accepted. Specifically, I feel that women are undervalued for what they do, and men are undervalued for who they are. So men are overvalued in certain workplaces (eg. finance, construction, engineering), as political leaders, as academics. Women, being more valued as people, get better health care, lower criminal sentences for given crimes, live longer, aren’t expected to take risk to protect others, are more valued as friends, and are viewed less suspiciously on the street. Since men and women are advantaged in different areas, efforts to combat sexism should be targeted at areas where there is a legitimate issue. Steps should be taken to value men more as people and value women more for their capabilities. Under my view, if you simply say that men are advantaged in all ways, then you will be exacerbating wrongs if you take steps to reduce female prison sentences, or increase health care spending on women.
@gjdj: I think the evidence you put forward for your “women are more valued as people” argument are perfectly consistent with another explanation, which is “women are more valued *as property* or men reproduction machines”, and that alternative explanation is more in line with other significant pressures in society, such as backlashes against reproductive rights and the fact that women’s sexuality is still, generally, considered to be public property.
Women usually aren’t expected to take risks for others because that would put in danger their patriarchal use as baby making machines.
A few more: After OSHII’s comment, I am now going to refer to NWOSlave as “The MRA From Earth.” *Still wants/needs to watch that movie.*
Does anyone actually know just what The MRA From Earth was claiming a zero sum game is? I could only figure out that bit of incoherence well enough to establish that it wasn’t what a zero sum game actually is.
I am so glad that other people are tackling Toysoldier and Simon. The MRA From Earth’s arguments, despite all their incoherence, occasionally brushed past reality closely enough for me to find a point from which to argue against them. Toysoldier’s and Simon’s are off somewhere in the fifth circle of imaginary space.