Question Time: Backlash, Frontlash, The End of Men?
It’s Question Time again. I’ve been reading through Susan Faludi’s Backlash and her more recent book on men, Stiffed, as well as some of the discussion surrounding Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men and Kay Hymowitz’ Manning Up. Faludi, writing in 1991, obviously saw the 80s as a time of antifeminist backlash.
My question is how you would characterize the years since she wrote her book. A continuation of that backlash? A time of feminist resurgence, from the Riot Grrls up to Rosin’s predicted End of Men? A mixed period of progress and regression?
I’m wondering both what your general assessment of the situation is, and also what specific evidence you have — either hard data or personal experience — that underlies your overall view. This could be anything from data on employment segregation or the prevalence of rape to your sense of how media representations of women and men have or haven’t changed, or even how people you know have changed the ways they talk about gender. What do you think are the significant data points to look at?
The question isn’t just what has changed for women but what has changed for men as well — with my underlying question being: what if anything in the real world has changed that might be making the angry men we talk about here so angry? I think we can agree that most of their own explanations are bullshit, but could there be a grain of truth to any of them? Or something that they don’t see that’s far more compelling?
In the interest of spurring discussion and providing some data to work with, here are a bunch of articles responding to (or at least vaguely related to the issues raised in) Rosin’s End of Men, including a link to her original Atlantic article. In addition, here are some posts by sociologist Philip Cohen challenging many of Rosin’s claims, as well as more general posts of his on gender inequality. (Feel free to completely ignore any or all of these; I just found them useful resources.)
Posted on May 11, 2013, in antifeminism, david has questions, feminism, further reading and tagged antifeminism, end of men, feminism, hanna rosin. Bookmark the permalink. 800 Comments.
Joe’s getting tiring? He’s been that way for a year now. I wish the banhammer would drop on his lying head.
Having him being able to comment here is like being stuck at a family event with the one drunk uncle that nobody in the family likes but he always turns up anyway. And then won’t shut up.
Re date rape: I was in college when Date Rape entered the social consciousness. It’s not as widely accepted as it ought to be (i.e. everyone should believe it exists, and that it’s really rape), but it’s a long way from the “how can that be a thing?” that it was back then.
The complaint (people will call “bad sex” rape: see Katie Roiphe), is still the complaint people make. It’s the bastion of the, “I don’t want to have to listen to what women want,” crowd. It lets them be abusive, without having to admit they are being abusive.
Joe, if the DoucheCanoePocalypse of Angry Manbabies Going Their Own Way and Taking Their Toys With Them Too and Never Being Womens’ Friends Ever Ever Again So There is so inevitable, why the need to exert so much of your time and energy arguing with people in the comments sections of a blog dedicated to mocking misogyny?
Uncle Joe has a sad.
Anyone else notice that his routine is to get his ass handed to him, and quit, then come to a new thread and act as if none of that ever happened.
There will now follow pages of personal attacks and shaming attempts directed at me,
Why should we treat you as if you were honest? We know how you act. You lie. You ignore responses. You pretend to be responding to things which were never said.
Exemplia gratia:
Got any citations? Ought to be easy, what with it all being here on manboobz.
As to shame; if I thought you could feel shame, I’d attempt it. Instead, mockery is all you deserve.
“So, IF feminism did what it said on the tin, i.e. “equality” then feminists should be focussed on getting women back into the mines.”
Which is why we haven’t been saying that women are. Nope. Totally hasn’t been happening for this entire page. Never happened.
Have I mentioned that my dad used to be a miner, and my uncle remained one until his retirement? Let me tell you, it’s so much fun having your uncle’s (and dad’s former) field be the go-to job for MRAs desperate to appropriate other men’s hard work and twist it to their own purposes.
@kirbywarp – ” I think he’s just convinced that feminists want women to be superior to men, ”
Maybe there’s a nasty little worm of self-awareness wriggling away in Joe’s brain, whispering to him that almost everyone’s superior to him.
Show some citations? C’mon Joe, don’t keep us waiting.
See, for Uncle Joe when the media doesn’t agree with him, it’s because they are counter-revolutionaries.
“Ah, can you feel the joy that comes from a happy life just pouring out of Joe? Let’s bask, everyone.”
Basking in the sun of Joe’s happiness*:
*not really.
I was going to say that Joe’s basking is more like a basking shark, but those are too cute to be associated with him. About equal in intelligence, though.
Is there any non-human creature, however unpleasant to humans, that isn’t too cute to be associated with Joe and his ilk? They make Guinea worms look appealing.
Yes?
@Hellkell:
Well, to be fair, this is the first time I personally have had to deal with him. Yeesh… I’m so looking forward to when he comes back tomorrow on a new thread and says the exact same crap.
…The fuck is that? That’s a real thing?
Argenti … hmm, close call, but they’re prolly still cuter’n’smarter than this (sub)average Joe.
@Argenti: Kilroy was here?
I personally think the blobfish looks rather funny, and thus, kind of cute, how it looks vaguely like a cartoon human. Funny, unlike Joe.
And you proved my point, just as I said you would.
Ignored and denied men’s suffering.
Dragged everything back onto: but-but women’s problems / “arrrgh teh glass ceiling” / “teh patriarchy”
And threw a load of childish insults.
^*This* is part of why feminism is increasingly unpopular.
Back before the internet only feminists who wrote books or newspaper articles were visible.
Now with the internet, every feminist with a keyboard is making it clear just how much feminism is not some kind of “universal human rights movement” but is very narrowly focussed, at best and horribly misandrist at worst.
@Kirby – you don’t get to even apply to be a corporate CEO unless you’re already high up in the corporate heierarchy ergo, part of the 1%. The super-rich of whom corporate CEOs are part of, are much less than 1% of population.
Of course you can become CEO of your own company by starting one, but that’s expensive and risky, most start-ups fail. So naturally there are even fewer super-rich CEOs who made it by that route. Altho’ I think that one Spanks (the elastic “shaper” pants things) billionaire did start the company herself? I could be wrong.
So, ignoring Joe’s latest ragespit…the blob-thing is sort of cute, which is why it seems odd that it’s real. It looks like it should be in a Pixar movie.
@Kitteh – adding people who overuse the word “ilk” to my list of pretentious pseudo-intellectual red flags! :P
It’s called a blobfish, for obvious reasons.
But yes, most fish are smarter than him (actually, probably all, as a generalization, but there are certainly some stupid specimens)
I think basking sharks are kind of dumb even by fish standards, hence the comparison. They don’t seem particularly angry, though, so not a great comparison.
They also don’t look anywhere near as weird while they’re in the water for some reason.
Hahaha!
Yeah, Cassandra, calmly pointing out how you fail. Is a “ragespit”! /sarcasm
lol!
Also on the pseudo-intellectual red flag list, people who use the words:
spout
spew
spit
hurl
throw
bludgeon
vomit (and ridiculously “vomitus”)
as synonyms for “said”
double pseudo points if coupled with:
spleen
bile
XD
Jeez, Joe’s not just scared of big words, but of small ones, too!
When I go to the dentist they ask me to spit in a little sink that sits off to the side of the chair. OMG, dental assistants are so pretentious!
This guy’s too boring, let’s not feed him attention. He’s not even saying anything anymore. Let’s talk about the blobfish instead. I may have been too quick to say it doesn’t look weird underwater, as that’s the only video I can find of a blobfish underwater. They are rarely seen, as they’re a combination of two things: endangered and deep sea.
I still think the blobfish is cute, it’s just weird looking. If it’s a deep sea fish that makes sense, since weird-looking seems to be the norm beyond a certain depth.
Joe must have read one of those style manuals where they tell you that the only speech tag allowed EVER is “said”.
Pity that’s the only thing he seems to have taken away from it.
Uncle Joe: “And I’m not “part of a movement” by the way.”
No… not a card carrying member. More a fellow traveller. You say what they say. Project their inevitable vicory and hate their enemies.
But you “don’t belong”.
Poor Joe, He suffers so
Also more appealing than Joe.
@Argenti – Well, feminists demand that any man bringing up issues re. men’s suffering first renounce anything any MRA said anywhere, evAR.
Joe. You slap-happy idiot.
I’m well aware of all the “safe-work environment” training that the US army has put in to cater for women recruits, to try and appease the feminist lobby.
How much time have you spent in the US Army? I’ll bet it’s not even six months. So how the fuck do you know what it’s like?
Oh right, the MRM has told you. And you believe them.
Women make up 0 percent of comabt troops. They make up about 3 percent of the total fatalities. They make up abot 10 percent of the US Army.
One of your dudes (Micael Coren, a clueless, dickless, worthless, fuck) went off about how a woman was forced (by volunteering) to suffer in the wilds of Afghanistan (with the Canadian Army). It was exactly the same argument you are all upset about being made by the Victorians.
Michael Coren ain’t a liberal. He thinks women ought to be at home, cooking, cleaning, or waiting to be told to put out.
Kind of like you.
Recalling Fibinachi’s quest for Julie: It was arduous. It requires one walk, knowingly, into the Slough of Despond, and traverse it, with nothing but one’s sense of self for armor.
It only works if one has something I have never seen a troll to possess; which is why I think they never interact. Trust. One must trust that if one falter, someone will be there there to raise you up again; and set your face into the wind, and your feet to the path.
Look at Joe, he can’t imagine telling anyone anything personal (so is the boat a lie?), because he thinks it will be weaponised. We, we share our fears, our sorrows, our joys and our pleasures.
Moreover, what lifts us up, and makes it possible to face the vomitous pussbuckets emptied in our midst, we share our hope.
Thanks so much for the nightmares I’ll be having about this.
@Joe:
… So what?
A) The glass ceiling is not simply about CEOs, the lack of female CEOs is just a symptom. It is a general problem of women being unable to advance up the job ladder.
B) The glass ceiling itself is not even the problem per se, it too is a symptom of how society treats women, which affects all socio-economic areas.
Why aren’t more women in a position to become CEOs? Why does the wage gap exist? These are questions that highlight the greater problem that feminists are fighting against.
(note to all, I’m perfectly willing to be corrected on any of this…)
My mind just went back to time at home (and Home) and it struck me: there’s just one letter’s difference between “Joe” and “joy”, but can anyone imagine the former feeling, let alone giving someone else, the latter?
Ah, but you see, Joy is a woman’s name, whereas Joe is a man’s name. The misandry goes so deep that it even infects our way of naming children!
Cassandra – yikes!
Memo to self: never watch Finding Nemo.
That shot reminds me of how scared Mum was of the witch in Snow White. Disney and huge bug eyes, oy!
True, true! I iz such a misandrist that I associate a girly girl name with an emotion about a man!
… hang on …
How about the tripod fish? Another deep sea fish. It gets its name from these three protrusions from its underbelly. This allows it to just sit on the ground. It eats by sitting on the ground while facing against the current with its mouth open so that small sea creatures will just fall into its mouth.
…It’s still less lazy than Joe’s repeated arguments.
It has to make the effort of sitting up on that tripod, so it’s definitely less lazy than Joe, who just seems to be on a feedback loop.
Say, he’s not a sort of MRA spambot, is he?
OK. I’ve fucking had it! I’m a bit testy right now – all will become clear shortly.
Joe and all his fuckheaded feminists-are-just-women-who-hate-men mates can just fuck right off. I’ve been a feminist for over 40 years AND I’ve been deliriously happily married to a very nice man for 35 years – we have 2 adult children and, surprising though it may seem to these lackwits who’ve apparently never met a real person let alone a real feminist in a really equal relationship, we’re eagerly looking forward to grandchildren.
As it happens, my husband has not been here with me for the last 3 months. He’ll be coming home, to stay forever, next weekend. Why did he go away they ask. Well it wasn’t because he finally saw the light and abandoned a man-hating partner.
The only reason he’s coming back is that he’s alive. Why is he alive? Because when he lay dying at my feet I didn’t hesitate. I dialled triple zero – and I did CPR for 10 fucking minutes until a 3 ambulance, 8 person resuscitation team arrived. And then we did the whole fucking desperate routine – a week in a coma in ICU, month in hospital including a bout of pneumonia as well as minor surgery to implant a defibrillator, further weeks in rehab routine. (Rehab necessary because, unsurprisingly, none of the succession of me, resuscitation team, ER team could avoid him suffering a bit of brain damage from lack of oxygen.)
I’m generally coping pretty well as the months have gone by. But ….
How, fucking. dare. they.
Feminists love our partners as deeply and passionately as anyone, everyone else might. When the chips are down, we will literally drag them back from death’s door if it’s at all within our power to do so. I did it. Others have done it. Others will do it if a similar thing happens to them. I’m not a one of a kind, super-special, discountable, dismissable version of not-really-a feminist.
I’m just like all the others who love their partners – not in spite of the fact that they’re a man, but _because_ they’re a man worth loving.
Life for these miserable, woman-hating fucks would be a lot better and brighter if they could become remotely as worthy of love and commitment, passion and patience as all the wonderful men happily living with their feminist women.
Until then, they can fuck right off.
mildlymagnificent, if you want them, ALL THE HUGS!
And all the cheers for that post.
And for you, and MrMagnificent.
I give y’all the rattail fish and a round of applause for mildlymagnificent (both for saving her husband and the “fuck off” comment in general)
Oh and anglerfish are the ultimate misandrists, the females take on multiple males which they absorb into their bodies turning the males into nothing more than sperm factories, to the point they use her stomach for nutrients. Just in case you didn’t have a big enough case of the creeps.
More hugs from me!
The thing is, I think what’s behind a lot of the anger from MRAs is that they know that when they get into a situation where for other men a loved one might step in to help, there will be nobody there to save them. Certainly not a woman, because they will by then have driven off every woman who ever cared about them. I guess it’s easier to rationalize that as meaning that something is wrong with women than to look inside and try to figure out why other men have women in their lives who love them but most MRAs don’t.
mildlymagnificent: I’m glad Mr. MM is on the mend and coming home. Right on to the rest of what you said.
The MRAs always like to say we’ll die alone with our cats, but they’ll just die alone.
mildlymagnificent: Hugs.
Nope. Radical feminism receives plenty of criticism from other feminists. The fact that you don’t know this is telling.
Wrong again. The trans*-misogyny from transphobic radfems is a product of cissexism and a severely flawed perspective of gender essentialism, not prejudice against men.
You fail at criticizing even the feminists we criticize. That’s amusing.
Not just mildly, I think. Completely magnificent. Congratulations on the return of your husband, and many, many more years together.
hellkell, you beat me to it! That’s just what I was thinking. When they say “you’ll die alone with your cats” it’s because they’re envious.
I wonder if angry dude can even name some transphobic radfems. I can. I’ve argued with some of them directly.
We should throw a little internet party for Mr Magnificent’s getting out of the hospital.
Oooh, yes! With cake, and Scented Fucking Candles!
Forgive my snappiness, but i am super tired of men whining about how women supposedly whine about being promised to have it all. You guys actually do get it all in terms of gender relations and now you’re whining your asses of that someone might mention motherhood and employment are not contradictory
Who cares?
Joe doesn’t believe in citations. The only way to prove things is by doing as he instructs.
…
Ah, yes, the state school system.
Where in sex ed, they told us that sleeping with people took down your value. So feminist.
And where in history, there was barely any mention of women for the first semester. Incredibly feminist.
I could list more examples, but I actually want to see you respond to these first
You are full of shit, Joe.
To be fair, whenever he types that up, I start almost cracking up for real. It’s like… he’s so far from getting it that when he tries to laugh at us, I’m just like…. XD
not that i’m saying your reaction is wrong, for the record. I definitely see how it
could beis obnoxiousAww, that brought a smile to my face
And since I don’t wnat to have a super long comment, i’m gonna post this, though I’m not all the way caught up on the thread yet
RE: mildlymagnificent
I’m glad your husband’s okay, and coming home.
In other awesome partner news, I’ve been with my husband almost six years now. I would not be surviving this hellish time without his support, love, and periodic refusals to put up with my shit. Especially since suffering can cause narcissism in me–I forget that I cause pain in others by stewing.
So yeah, hurrah for supportive partners and the power of trust!
Never mind that “the state school system” that Joe’s blathering about is in ONE country and ONE time. It’s not the state school system I went through. FWIW, we didn’t get any anti-sex crap at school, but what we were taught was more biological than social. Pretty good for the 70s, though.
Women were certainly absent from our history lessons, but so were individual men, mostly – it was very broad-brush stuff indeed and wouldn’t have got anyone interested if they weren’t already. The only individuals I can remember at all from high school history were Bismarck and Napoleon III, and my essay about him was mostly “WTF are you people doing asking a bunch of seventeen year old know-nothings to pass judgement on him?”
Amazingly enough, I passed.
/high school history sucked
RE: CassandraSays
*snrk* I have an EASY time thinking of some! But then again, I know my trans history… poor Sylvia Rivera.
Rogan – is it appropriate to say happy coming anniversary?
You guys have been married about the same time Mr K and I have. :)
Thanks everyone.
btw, learn CPR if your job doesn’t already require it. Far too many people think it’s a bit like mouth to mouth. It’s not. It’s basically a form of extreme, but controlled, violence. When you do it right, you’re more. likely. than. not. to break a rib or two, that’s how forceful you need to be. Whether you do or don’t know what to do, the emergency phone people are pretty good at coaching you through it. Even if you don’t really learn it, remember that really irritating song – Stayin’ Alive – that’s the speed and rhythm you have to maintain. The most difficult thing is actually using enough force – in exactly the right place. But call emergency first. You’ll notice that a resus team will change over every couple of minutes or so, it’s really hard to do correctly for much longer than that. Though adrenaline is a wonderful hormone when you need it most.
(What you’re actually trying to do is to drive blood circulation by external pressure rather than just getting the person to breathe. Breathing is just a sign that everything’s working – CPR is about getting/keeping blood circulation going even though nothing’s working – that’s why it’s preferred to mouth to mouth. You don’t have to think very hard about adding up the total length of all the major arteries and veins to realise how much seriously hard work the heart muscles do.)
@mildlymagnificent, Hugs (if they’re wanted) and applause.
Also, Joe is on Facebook? Weird. Doesn’t he know the C1A can monitor him there?
Finally, more proof that women don’t care about the issues that men face at all. See also, the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina, etc. etc.
Do you even know about all the different kinds of feminism out there? You brand it as a corrupt, classist political movement while completely ignoring the kinds of feminism that are decidedly anti-capitalist, pro-worker, etc. I myself am an anarcha-feminist who opposes the kyriarchy, capitalism, and the state. And there are countless others who espouse the same kind of feminism.
But there are plenty of feminists who aren’t anarchists like me yet still do advocacy work for people at the lower socioeconomic classes of society. I already mentioned some of them. At the very least they call for the end of discrimination against women in traditionally male fields and the end of gender essentialism that steers women away from these jobs.
You’re yet another person who regards feminism as a monolithic social movement. Same old shit we’ve seen before.
RE: Kittehserf
Thank you! I’m really hoping we can actually do something for this upcoming anniversary… the last one, I was… kinda in the mental health care system. <.< WORST ANNIVERSARY EVER.
And that was just when we got together. Our wedding was about a year and a half later, but it was really just a big party. Our relationship had already gelled by that point.
That’s what always gets me with seeing CPR on telly – they’re not doing it anything like forcefully enough to be convincing. (Understandable given the actors prolly don’t want broken ribs.) Hell, it’s why they teach it on dummies, not on people. I learned it years ago and yes, it’s bloody hard.
Why? You obviously spent exactly zero time analyzing feminism, yet you think you’re clarified to say what’s right and wrong with it.
Only a misogynistic cis man could come up with the idea that transphobia is actually misandry.
And where do you get this idea from, Joe? You’re just as boring as that Jacob-troll, except less faux-polite. You think that continuously saying ideas without proof is going to make people believe you.
Ugh, I hate that. People (read: MRAs and other misogynists) whine about how women get all the “easy” jobs, ignoring how they kept us out of the “hard” jobs and then when we could get in their, they sexually harrass us!
There is no way to win, but no, this is an example of misandry somehow.
Got any reason for believing this? And no, assfax is not a reason
And it was still incredibly wrong.
Duh.
I don’t know about the things you’ve said personally. All I know is you’re a) poor, and b) think that poor women have it sooooo much easier than poor men becuz misandry. The first issue is not the reason why I disagree with you. It is the second.
We don’t talk about your personal situation, we talk about your shitty words and ideas, which you put in every comment you make
There is nothing to say here except the more you use those “bwahahahas” and “XD”s the more I crack up because they are so riduculous when you use them. I’m 99 percent sure that’s not your intended reaction, though
posting again before I’m caught up due to not wanting to have super long comment. So think of this as like, a comment from the past or something. the very recent past.
Urgh, that would be the worst!
Sounds like your wedding and ours were similar – we didn’t have a ceremony at all, we don’t really do that sort of stuff in Spirit. It was an excuse to frock up (I pinched the design of an Edwardian gown in the V&A for my wedding dress) and eat and dance and say “Look everyone, we’re married, isn’t that cool?”
And I spilt a sticky pastry on my skirt. Some things don’t change.
@Argenti
Those blob fishes made me crack up
Saying someone proved your point does not make your point automatically proven. Trufax
This is reminding me of 1984* where they control the language to control the ideas. I get the impression Joe doesn’t like anyone being able to identify his vitrol
@Mildlymagnificent
Holy shit, that sounds like a bad situation. Jedi hugs for you and your husband, if you want them.
*not that I have read it XD
Okay, I’m on board with the blobfish being actually kinda cute, but that anglerfish. Yeesh!
I think that y’all have hit the nail on the head. It has nothing to do with miners or the military per se. It’s all about the misery. Feminism is horrible, it’s a racket, because it allows women to envision themselves looking up, working up to better things, instead of being stuck in misery like he is. Men don’t necessarily want to be miserable, but sometimes they are, and feminism doesn’t seem to address that directly (it does address it by trying to make less overall misery, but feminism isn’t catering to men and so, by MRA logic, it *must* be wrong because of that).
Feminism has worked to reduce misery in the world by offering a wider range of possibilities to a wider range of people, quite a number of whom are not hetero, white, cis men. This is it’s crime, in the eyes of MRAs and their fellow travelers, like our First Whinger. Some people (other than them, of course) have been empowered to pursue happiness and evade misery. This cannot be permitted, because the other can not escape misery unless and until there are no longer any men anywhere who are miserable (so never, of course).
And so I come back to my central contention, that for MRAs the answer not to work to make anything better but to accept the world as given and seek to increase the misery, to punish the other. Hell, they come over here not to try to engage or have a conversation, but just to make as big a nuisance of themselves as they can as a way to increase our misery.
Luckily, their attempts are so pathetic, they are only able to effect a mild uptick in annoyance.