Male-strom in a Teacup
No, not THAT kind of “male study.”
“Men’s Studies” has existed as an academic discipline for several decades now. Not surprisingly, most of those involved in it identify themselves as feminists – as people interested in studying gender tend to do. But not all of them: A couple of years back, a group of mostly anti-feminist academics and popular writers with an interest in gender decided to try to do a sort of end run around the discipline of “Men’s Studies” by conjuring up a whole new, altogether un-feminist discipline called “Male Studies.”
Recently, The University of South Australia announced that it would start offering postgraduate courses in Male Studies sometime in 2014; our old friend Eoghan/Sigil1 brought this earthshattering news to the Men’s Rights subreddit the other day, where it was greeted with … suspicion and hostility.
GotMyFrogHatOn wrote:
Great, now men have the same opportunity as women to waste their time and money on a worthless degree!
Liverotto was even blunter:
YES, because the cure to bullshit is… MORE BULLSHIT! /s
That’s right: Men’s Rights Redditors hate Women’s Studies, and Gender Studies, and apparently every academic discipline with the word “Studies” in it so much that they’ve transferred this hatred to a new academic discipline that could well have been (and sort of was) designed just for them.
But don’t worry, they still hate Women’s Studies the most:
What was I saying the other day about projection?
Posted on May 24, 2012, in antifeminism, crackpottery, evil women, internal debate, irony alert, masculinity, MRA, victimhood. Bookmark the permalink. 495 Comments.
I’m sure Pepsi commercials get up NWO’s nose especially, since he did not get hired there because misandry.
You mean MISANDRY?!
Yes, MISANDRY!!!!11
MISANNDRRRYYYYYYY!!!eleventy-1!!!
@badandfierce,
Regarding homeopathy, maybe you’re thinking of a different sort than that which I’m familiar with, because we don’t demonize doctors and certainly don’t buy into or create those silly internet ads…
You know, that you guys don’t type out all the exclamation points is a prime example of the kind of casual anti-male bigotry that antimanboobz is talking about
Katz: I won’t watch them.
I’m really looking for a more formal anti-male bigotry. I think we misandrists should use complete sentences, and dress up — preferably with top hats and monocles. Something like this.
“only men are talked about because only men contributed to the sciences, as everyone knows.”
Right… No Mme Curie. No Ada Lovelace. No Mary Wortley Montague. No Admiral Grace Hopper. No Rosalyn Yallow. No Caroline Herschel (whom Patrick O’ Brian included in his Aubry/Maturin novels. He didn’t have to. Then again, his women were real people, with minds of their own, and passions, and agency; but I digress). No Mary Anning: who discovered an entire family of prehistoric non-dinosaurs).
No Lise Meitner, who figured out how much energy was released when uranium was split, and coined the term, “nuclear fission”.
No Barbara McClintock (who was the woman who figured out that genes can move from locus to locus on a chromosome) she figured out that corn is a sport of teosinte not a cultivated mutation, though this is still disputed.
No Rosalind Franklin. No Aphra Behn. No Marie Crous, nor Maria Cunitz.
No Maria Aringhelli, nor Anna Atkins, not Sophie Germain (who worked in the theories of elasticty and number) No Marie Paulze Lavoisier.
No Sofia Kovalevskaya, who worked in partial differential equations, Abelian functions and rotating solids). No Johanna Mestorf, nor Vera Popova, nor Mary Jane Rathbun.
No room to list them all.
Because women never did any science.
I was on Ritalin as a child and young adult, and am currently back on it after a few years without it. I’m very pleased with my decision to take it again. But then again, I am a woman, and we’re supposed to be fitted for lives of quiet drudgery, so there’s that.
Fun fact: the elementary school as we know it is a late nineteenth-century development, modeled on the two most visible examples of ways to discipline men in service to the state: the army and the factory. The notion of bodily and intellectual discipline on which these institutions rested was gendered masculine: just like factory work or military service, schooling involved sustained effort, which only men and boys were supposed to be strong enough to undertake. This would help prepare boys for participation in the public sphere, which was dangerous and exhausting–another 19th century male thing.
Tell me again how this feminizes boys?
I am not sure what kind of “homeopathy” you are talking about blothne, but if you’re talking about the kind that says “diluting this substance in water (with magical shaking motions) to the point where statistically speaking none of the molecules are likely to remain in the sample you are currently holding will cure your various ailments” then badnotfierce is totally correct to call it “junk science”. They are also totally right in that homeopaths often make claims about the supposed failure of evidence-based medicine in order to sell their wares, up to the point where they (homeopaths) sometimes claim that the medical mainstream is suppressing evidence that homeopathy works because it would cut into doctors’ or pharmaceutical companies’ profits. Some homeopathic practitioners are so mistrustful of the medical establishment that they convince their patients to stop existing treatments for their illnesses, including cancer. I don’t know about internet ads, but who else would be responsible for homeopathic “treatment” ads but companies that sell said homeopathic products?
“I think we misandrists should use complete sentences, and dress up — preferably with top hats and monocles.”
If teeny tiny top hats and pocket watches count, then I’m way ahead of you on that one. (Note the Misandry! of the conditional statement XD )
“But then again, I am a woman, and we’re supposed to be fitted for lives of quiet drudgery, so there’s that….Tell me again how this feminizes boys?” — you answered your own question VoIP
I don’t do monocles. Top hat, check (well silk opera hat). Tails, check. Cloak, check. Walking stick, check. Gold pocket watch? Check.
I’m all set for a night on the town, being misandrist.
It’s all about how crazy those lesbians are who say they aren’t attracted to men, yet their partners have all these masculine traits! How crazy, right? If you are attracted to people who wear pants and have short hair, why not just be attracted to dudes? Cause we’re in preschool and only men wear pants and only women wear dresses…
That guy must go on a lot of awkward third dates with long-haired men in kilts.
I would love to see MRAs try to pass off their bullshit in an academic setting
“Open your books to page 25. We will now read a quotation from the esteemed scholar ‘Cooter Bee’ about how all women are irrational bitches”
Kladle said:
“Some homeopathic practitioners are so mistrustful of the medical establishment that they convince their patients to stop existing treatments for their illnesses, including cancer. ”
My aunt (who spent fifty five years working at Auckland hospital on their oncology/haemotology wards) came across this a lot. There were (and still are) plenty of alternative therapists and faith healers, of one kind and another, who would take away patients from their treatment rooms and try to cure them with a variety of treatments of their own. According to her not one of the alternative treatments worked and they’d all come back eventually, hoping that conventional medicine could save them but far to late for anything but palliative care. Some of these people would not have survived even if they’d stayed with conventional medicine, but many of them could have had at least a fighting chance. I don’t know if anyone remembers Milan Brych but he was one of the most persistent and dangerous of the alternative therapists and Jean (my aunt) and the other doctors and nurses at Auckland hospital had him disbarred (this was during the 70’s) to practice in NZ and I know she still considers him no better than a murderer. I remember as a teenager listening to her talk about it and I’ve never seen her so angry, even years later she was still spitting chips and I don’t blame her in the slightest.
I’m more than “leary”. That website seems to be a community comprised entirely of wife beaters and date rapists. I’d be scared of someone who believes that shit.
I loled at Varpole calling darksidecat “hysterical.” Protip: “U mad, bro?” only works when somebody actually sounds angry, fool. But I guess it’s only natural for a misogynist to exaggerate the emotionality of someone he thinks is a woman while stroking his own sexism.
Good point. To say that I’m leery of someone who endorses the Manhood Academy is an understatement. I noticed Artistry against Misandry also listed them as a men’s rights group.
That’s what I’m wondering about. How can they make an entire course of study devoted the the theory of women=suck?
There’s a reason Playboy has always been much more popular than Playgirl. Women just aren’t as interested in looking at naked men as men are in looking at naked women. This isn’t body shaming, it’s just the way it is.
@Dracula
And now I willingly eat humble pie, and concede to being shown for an optimistic fool.
@ Pecunium – I know of Aphra Behn as a novelist and play-write, (and, if that wasn’t awesome enough, a spy), I had no idea she was a scientist too. What did she do?
@Ruby
That probably has more to do with the repression of woman’s sexuality, coupled with the fact that, for a long time, women didn’t have the disposable income to purchase playgirl, therefore there wasn’t a market for it.
Not only is this an inherently stupid thing to say, but even if this were true, it would still not validate this: Nudity is not a great look for men. Sorry guys.
A man’s naked body is not there to scintillate women (and vice versa), so whether or not women want to see men naked has no bearing on whether or not men look good naked.
Shadow – Believe me, I’d have much preferred to have been proven wrong on this one.
VoIP wrote: “The notion of bodily and intellectual discipline on which these institutions rested was gendered masculine: just like factory work or military service, schooling involved sustained effort, which only men and boys were supposed to be strong enough to undertake.”
FWIW, my younger sister worked as a newspaper reporter before she went to law school. She did a story where she visited a local elementary school and told me later that it was so different from our school in the 1960s. She talked of how the children were encouraged to speak up, move around, work in groups, etc. We had the same first grade teacher and we were terrified of her. My sister even wet her pants because she was too afraid to raise her hand and ask to go to the restroom.
But somehow MRAs are convinced that boys do worse than girls in schools now because children are expected to sit down and keep quiet, as opposed to the past when, as far as I can tell, schools were more rigid and draconian. Bottom line for them: Girls do worse at school, it’s the girls’ fault; boys do worse at school, it’s the school’s fault.
I’m not opposed to finding more effective ways of teaching all children. I just don’t buy that schools have become more authoritative and that’s why girls are doing better.
There’s also the fact that the pornographic world is mostly controlled by men, so that Playboy is made by men for men and Playgirl is made by men for women. Therefore, while Playboy is basically designed to respond to men’s desires, Playgirl is design to respond to men’s belief of women’s desires.
Similarly, lesbian porn. Lesbian porn is principally oriented around what men want to see women do to each other, not what women want to see women do to each other.
I sometimes wonder if sales of Playgirl would increase or decrease if they featured softcore gay content…
Sounds like GWW has a challenger for World’s Specialest Snowflake
@Ruby
I think you’ll be surprised to find there is a whole lot of porn around the net that women like. none of it quite like play girl seeing as at his point its being made by women from the ideas of what they want. not you know from the idea of what some guy who didn’t ask a woman what she would want to look at.
The fact that men like to look at naked women more than vice versa probably has a lot more to do with women being the fairer sex than sexual repression. I’m not saying men aren’t nice to look at. It’s just that I’d rather view GQ than Playgirl.
But men are hot! I mean, have you seen them?
Ruby, that I said attacking you for your stupid views was a waste of time when you *weren’t* bringing them up does not mean that I will say that when you *are* bringing them up.
There has been a lot of things that were “just the way they are” at the time like slavery and women not being allowed vote. Just because thats how it is now doesn’t mean its natural or “just how things are”.
You are such a dumbass ruby, you buy so into what society tells you about men and women despite supposedly being a feminist. I mean you base the most attractive gender based on what most men find attractive. Will you cut it out with the men=default crap thanks?
You also fail to account that women have a history of being wayy sexually repressed than men. Like back in the day it was literally considered a disease for a woman to exhibit too much sexual attraction. These things still effect us as a culture today, though to a way lesser extent in some places. It takes a long time for such a widely held idea to be utterly demolished and since we don’t live in a perfectly equal society you have to take in account prejudices and how they effect people. For example, trans and gay people have a high rate of suicide. This is not because they naturally have that tendency but because its still not entirely social acceptable to be trans or gay.
Sure, Jumbofish, anyone who doesn’t think like you is a dumbass, right? I admire your tolerance.
If it were so easy to sexually repress people so that they denied their true desires, gay people could learn not to be sexally attracted to people of the same sex. And we all know that’s impossible. Can you sexually repress males so much that they don’t find naked women sexually attractive? Somehow I doubt it.
@Ruby
Really, Ruby? Why don’t you tell that to all the gay people that married women so they wouldn’t be targeted by homophobia? Or the gay people that are sent to camps specifically designed to “cure” them, usually through abusive means? Or how about the gay people that hear that their true desires are sinful so often, that they start to believe it themselves?
You’re very ignorant Ruby, and there’s no excuse to remain so when there are so many resources online.
Sorry, I should have said “gay people that married people of the opposite gender”, seeing as there are gay women that married men for the same reasons.
Because I obviously said that.
Uhhh you do realize that gay people have had to hide their sexuality by pretending to be straight right? Many are repressed but still gay. Repressed does not refer to actually lacking desiring something (or losing desire after a period of time), it refers to desiring something and keeping it in due to social reasons. A woman can feel sexual desire but not be as out about it as men due to the social stigma. a Gay person can be repressed and pretend to be straight but they are not really. Repression doesn’t mean you lose that desire.
super secret: some men don’t find naked women sexually attractive
Can you sexually repress people enough that they don’t go to stores and publicly buy porno mags, even if they’d kind of like to? Fucking DUH.
If you make it clear that for one gender, publicly buying porno mags will be greeted with high-fives, while for the other gender, publicly buying porno mags will make people look at them like they are deranged slutmonsters, is the former gender more likely to go out and buy said magazines than the latter? Again, fucking DUH.
And if the people making those magazines are almost all of one gender, largely trying to appeal to an audience that is of their own gender, are fewer members of the other gender likely to see those magazines as a thing for them? A third time, fucking DUH.
Speaking for myself as a heterosexual woman, hot naked men are hot. You could not reasonably make me stop thinking they are hot inside my head. But I’d feel horrible and dirty and forward and icky and shameful if I went and bought a magazine full of pictures of hot naked men, despite knowing that all of those feelings are dumb, because socialization exists, no matter how many times you try to pull this evopsych nonsense and pretend we’re all just magically born conforming to modern Western societal norms.
Its biology to slutshame women!!
And you’re claiming to be a hetero who is married to a man? This sounds like it has more to do with your own personal repression than with what all women want.
Though honestly if ruby says that…..
Anybody who doesn’t think that (some) women enjoy looking at hot men should totally cruise some of the sites featuring fandom pics (coffcoff at random say Viggo_Daily,Bean_Daily, Wenham_Weekly coff coff) (they don’t even have to be nood, but we love their nood stuff too). (And I am a queer woman, not even straight).
And fan vids.
And fan art.
I am more a text gal myself (writing is TEH BOMB), but I can attest to the attraction of those pictures and the pleasure, and the fact that open female desire for male bodies/celebrities is still not exactly ok (after all, “fans are weird,”), and was, when I was growing up, totally suppressed (didn’t mean we didn’t feel it, just meant we didn’t admit to any but our closest friends that we were drooling over that hot guy walking down the street in jeans, and that lovely butt).
ANybody notice all the lovely butts (male and female) on the Avengers, eh?
Seeing MIBIII tonight WOOT!
@ithiliana: I can’t remember which Youtube video on Greco-Roman wrestling it was, but the reaction of disgust and self-righteous indignation over the realization that some people find two guys pinning each other to the ground to be pretty hot, was hilarious.
Ruby, you really need to get over this belief that you have that you are All Women. You are in fact a woman, apparently one who doesn’t find men very visually stimulating. That’s fine, but it doesn’t mean that women as a group feel the same way.
There are actually a lot of things going on in terms of why women haven’t shown much interest in the porn supposedly for us that we’ve been offered. Part of it is that it’s been made mostly by men, who apparently have no idea what we enjoy looking at. (I think it also has to do with them being a very specific kind of men, too.) A lot of it is that weird resistance many men have to the idea that women really, really care about the prettiness of men’s faces. A lot of it has to do with repression of women’s sexuality and the guilt/shame that goes along with that. And a LOT of it has to do with the way in which sexual material for women is presented as a joke in the mainstream, so all-male strip shows are something women are supposed to go to for a laugh, not to get turned on. Sexuality itself is less easy to shape and change via social control, but the way it’s expressed is very easy indeed to shape via socialization. Look at how much some people freak out over the idea that women even masturbate, compared to the attitude to male masturbation.
(The latter paragraph is aimed more at everyone else/the general discussion, since I know it’s way over Ruby’s head.)
Ruby, I’d just like to take a moment to point that this? This thing you’re accusing jumbofish of doing? Is something you’ve actually done.
Myoo, obviously you didn’t quite get my point. No one can be sexually repressed so much that their desire goes away. Put a gay man through one of those retarded programs to, “cure” him and he will remain a homosexual. Sexual repression isn’t the reason women generally don’t like looking at a penis as much as men like to look at boobs.
Way to contradict a point nobody made.
You need to demonstrate that’s even true before you can start attributing reasons to it. Repression can make uncomfortable looking at or seeking out the object of your desire, even when you still in fact desire it.
No matter how sexually free women get, we will never get as exited over a dick as men get over boobies.
Ruby, your arguments get dumber with every comment. Cock and boobs – not even analogous. Also, either address the other very direct criticisms of your argument, or drop it.
And again, you’re just repeating yourself. I said “demonstrate”, not “assert”.
Also, was the original “duh, women don’t like looking at men naked” comment aimed at the image in David’s post? Because honestly, beauty standards change, as do ideas of what’s sexy, and that image doesn’t even look to have been designed to be porn. Take a bunch of the men considered hottest now and do a series of pics of them making sexy poses naked and you’d get a different response from your average modern women.
(On that note, MIB3? Woot indeed, though I very much doubt that it will top the shower scene in IRobot in an eye-candy sense.)
@Ruby
You said, and I quote:
People can be sexually repressed so that, even if the desire is still there, they deny it. That leads to less expression of said desire. You can have a person who wants to e.g. look at porn but doesn’t, either because they are afraid to get caught and shamed for it, or because the notion that their desire is shameful has been drummed into their heads so much, that they refuse to act it out.
You using gay people to make your point was just an extra layer of your ignorance that you should apologize for, because the situation you describe has happened to gay people historically, and still happens in places.
Good lord, Ruby. Prove to me that I don’t like to look at naked men. I’m fascinated.
You are not women, you fucking twit. You are one woman.
Your original statement was not about how much, or whether or not, women like looking at dicks. You stated, declaratively, that men don’t look good naked. That statement is not provable by the sales of Playboy vs. Playgirl, or your preference for GQ, or any of the other stupid ass shit you’ve been tossing out in these absurd attempts to prove the unprovable.
Your original statement is. not. a. fucking. fact. It cannot be proven. You are free to find naked men unattractive. Other people will disagree. Because beauty and attraction are subjective. For example: I find naked men attractive. So there.
Jesus! Can’t you go find some bullshit site about the fake-ass “mommy-wars” to post-on, or something? That kind of thing seems more your speed. Manboobz is one of my favorite sites; I hardly ever get to participate in comment threads anymore.
And watching your stupid clutter up interesting threads is totally fucking tedious.
I haven’t technically been both a man and a woman (especially not by Evopsych Biotruth standards, which assume chromosomes=gender), so I can’t say for sure what men feel, but I get pretty damn excited over dick.
Promise you.
(Also some men don’t get excited even a little bit by boobies. So maybe we should stop talking like each gender is one person.)
I meant to address this specific point yesterday, but I needed to get some sleep.
Saying “Sorry guys, but your bodies are objectively unattractive!” is body shaming, and it is insulting, and no amount of hiding behind “the way things are” is gonna change that. You really need to stop acting like people somehow aren’t allowed to offended by your claims.
Ruby, you are not royalty. Using the word “we” when you mean “I” is therefore incorrect.
YOU don’t get excited over penises. That’s fine. No one is making you. I get excited over penises, because penises are awesome, and that’s fine, too. My current boyfriend happens to get excited over boobs, and that’s fine. He is totally allowed to be very into boobs. One of my exes did not get excited over boobs; he found boobs comparatively uninteresting and would much prefer to look at female butts. That is also fine. It’s almost like people are individuals or something!
So be an individual. Say, as an individual, “I don’t like looking at naked men!” That is totally fine. No one cares if you look at naked men or not. The problem is that you seem to have an obsessive need to justify everything you do by making it the action of All Women. YOU can be into rich dudes whom you don’t ever have to look at naked, and someone else can be really into starving artists who live in nudist colonies, and both of those things are okay and can exist at the same time.
Ruby, I think a good starting point for all “the difference between men and women” discussions is that the only difference that exists 100% of the time is that the one group is called “men” and the other is called “women.”
Literally everything else is only true sometimes.
I was legit confused about this for a minute because personally, I only look at GQ for the hot guys. This month’s cover even has a huge pic of Michael Fassbender on it. Isn’t there a joke about it being a stealth magazine for gay guys?
Ruby’s still doing her “I am a woman. I think ___. Ergo, all women think ___” logic fail? At least she’s consistent. :-(
Compare back then to now. There was like very few areas for females to create erotica of any kind, now so many woman write fanfics, watch porn ect. It seems like yeah, as women are getting more and more sexually free they are expressing more and more of their desires out loud. I mean back then it would be utterly unheard of for a woman to be looking at any kind of porn, and people said women just didn’t like looking at it because of that. That wasn’t true then so why would it be now?
Also are you gonna deny social influence on how comfortable women feel expressing sexual desire? Again its like gay people, they aren’t naturally in the closet but social influence makes many uncomfortable to come out. You yourself may not find men very attractive and hey maybe you find boobies more nicer to look at which is okay! Please don’t assume that because thats your experience therefore its true for all women.
Also, erections. It’s been my experience that most women who’re attracted to men (and I think men too) are most interested in penises when they’re erect. A flaccid penis is usually visually interpreted as “no sex right now, thanks”, therefore it’s not super surprising that most people who like penises don’t get all that excited over pics of flaccid ones.
Men who like dick seem to like looking at dick quite a lot. They sure as hell aren’t any less enthusiastic than men who like boobies. Does this mess up the calculations?
…Wait, fuck, there are some men who like dick and boobies. It’s almost like this shit is complicated.
I don’t like boobies OR dick. :( Guys, I think my manliness is broken. Can I return it, or is the warranty gone?
@LBT: I don’t like boobs or dick either. So…I guess that would make me a normal girl by Ruby’s standards? Ruby! How do women feel about our breasts? How can I know if you aren’t telling me what I think?!
I like both boobs and cocks, I guess that makes me a bisexual man? I mean, obviously I must not be a woman.
Ruby, do you just come here to display your staggering ignorance? Tell me some more what I like. Bitch, please.
At this point, cannot tell if trolling or just incredibly stupid.
Or both.
RE: Lauralot
I like looking at naked people, though. When I saw the image here, my first thought was, “Oh, those are some AWESOME poses! Maybe I’ll save that for refs later…”