MRAs and MGTOWers are, as you might have guessed, some pretty acronym-happy people. And one of their favorite acronyms — besides those two – is NAWALT, which stands for “Not All Women Are Like That.” This is a phrase often uttered by people who are not misogynist assholes in response to things said about women by people who are misogynist assholes. Apparently many MRAs and MGTOWers hear this so often that they’ve turned it into a running gag, the “joke” being that in their minds all women really ARE like that.
Now W.F. Price of The Spearhead has caused a tempest in the teapot that is the manosphere by admitting that, in fact, not all women are like that:
We all know that there are good women out there, including some who comment here, in our families, at work and in neighborhoods all over the land, so why shouldn’t we listen to women who tell us this is the case?
Now, Price has not suddenly become a feminist or anything. Indeed he went on to argue that even if not all women are horrible monsters,
a lot of them are, and we have no assurance that the nice girl who is smiling and saying she loves you won’t at some point destroy your life. …
If somebody handed you a revolver with three loaded chambers and three empty ones and said, “go ahead and aim this at your head and pull the trigger — not all the chambers are loaded,” would you go along with the suggestion? Of course not. It would be sheer folly.
And, oh, it goes on. Blah blah blah, men, don’t get married. Blah blah blah, and you good ladies out there better give up some of your rights – sorry, advantages — because the bad ladies abuse them and pretty soon no man will want to marry any of you:
[T]hose women who really “aren’t like that”… are less likely to find a man willing to marry them, and more likely to be used and abandoned at the first hint of commitment. Society at large is increasingly skeptical about the virtues of women, and the word is bubbling up from the grass roots that women are a risky proposition. …
Until the laws are reformed and some balance is restored to relationships, men who care at all about their lives will have no choice but to regard any woman he becomes involved with as a loaded gun pointed straight at him.
So, yeah, this is the same old W.F. Price we know and don’t love.
On The Spearhead itself, the dissenters were at least generally polite. “Nah, sorry Mr Price,” wrote oddsock. “Your well written post cuts no ice with me. All women are like that.” Herbal Essence also challenged Price’s math:
The argument needs to be rejected because nearly all women are enabling the behavior of the worst of them. And nearly all women stand, arms akimbo, as a bloc to preserve female superiority. ..
[I]t’s time that men take off their rose-colored glasses and realize that nearly all women are waging a war against us. For god sakes, our own mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters support the female hive mind over their own flesh and blood. (us.)
Over on MGTOWforums.com, the judgment was a little harsher. The commenter calling himself fairi5fair reacted as though Price had lopped off his own dick and announced his engagement to the ghost of Andrea Dworkin.
W. F. Price is just a daisy-picking mangina with a chip on his shoulder imo. Even the woman MRA I knew was probably just using it as a slick way to trap a nesting male.
Bottom line: if words are coming out of a woman’s mouth, she’s a lying cunt. Mr. Price probably wants to believe in some romantic fairytale because he just got divorced and wants pussy again, and doesn’t want to face the reality of his options.
Yes, Mr. Price, you’re going to get your sorry ass handed to you again if you keep thinking with your dick and your heart. Use the brain, moron. Next!
Whenever I run across something this idiotic, I have to remind myself that Not All MGTOWers Are That Astoundingly Stupid. NAMGTOWATAS, for short.
So, titfortat recycled an old Robin Williams joke (“If women were the world leaders there would never be any war, just intense negotiations every 28 days”) and followed it up by saying “To ward off any nasty comebacks I apologize for the sexist humour.” Now he says that the reason he believes the Robin Williams joke is sexist is mainly that it shows women to be less violent than men.
That brings us up to date, to the point in time where I say bullshit.
The “joke” is sexist because it relies on age-old concepts about how women are at different times during their menstrual cycles. Conventional wisdom says: We turn into raving bitches! We’re irrational! We pick fights! We invent grievances! We cannot possibly ever be angry, discontented, irritated, or put out for any valid reason because someone (I hate to point fingers, but some man, really) will accuse us of being on the rag. We are ruled by hormones, unreliable, not to be trusted, and … many other things that the MRA and other misogynists like to accuse us of.
So yeah. You’ve totally mischaracterized why the “joke” you’ve admitted is sexist is sexist. Remember how I called you disingenuous before? You’re doing it again.
titfortat: The point isn’t that the joke was sexist, qua sexist, but how you used it. Context matters.
Lydia: It’s not a question of, “inherent” violence. It’s a question of relative violence.
I think titfortat’s misunderstanding is that he is confusing the factual aspects of one statement (i.e. men have started more wars) with an idea that it’s also a statement of tendency (i.e. all things being equal men will start more wars).
I can say that Beth seems more willing to start wars than I am. It’s a single datum, but there you go.
I’m also sure I’ve also participated in more wars than Beth has. It’s a single datum, but there you go.
It doesn’t tell you anything about whether Beth more, or less, violent than I am. It certainly doesn’t address any questions on “male vs female” because even the situations at issue (starting/taking part) are apples to potatoes: they aren’t even in the same category (that is to say, both potatoes and apples are</i edible reproductive bodies of plants, but one is a sugar rich fruit, and the other a starch rich tuber).
As you say, he's made a false equivalence.
I was reminded of a song and realized Im in way over my head. Here are the tale end of the lyrics.
Do you think I bow out cause I think you’re right?
Or cause I don’t wanna fight?
I said, “I give”
Cool tune actually, here you go in case anyone wants to listen. Bonsoir.
titfortat: I can’t say was meant. I can only say what I inferred.
This is the One thing not mentioned about the danger men put themselves into is the fact that men tend to be more of stupid risk takers then women are, fail to read the directions then women do and otherwise make it more likely that they will hurt themselves. Also, it tends to be men who cause war not women. (Note the Tend.)
Beth made it, she can tell you what she meant.
But you didn’t ask what she meant. You immediately charactarised it as an attack on me.
What I see is that, in response to a comment implying men are expected to sacrifice themselves that wars (one of the places such heroics are made, and one of those in which there is an actual social pressure to perform them [I’m retired from the Army, I can say that, as a culture, the pressure to do things at risk of life and limb; for other people, is strong], and so relevant to the comment it’s addressing) is a situation caused not so much by women, but by men, and as such the sacrifice isn’t really in the same category as jumping into the Potomac to pull people out of sinking plane.
This is a debatable claim, but pretty strong. The debatable part is for the more recent wars where public opinion is important in starting them. At that point women, who are now part of the active political world (as franchise holding citizens, as opinion makers [Maureen Dowd, Judith Miller, Laura Ingram, etc.] and office holders) they have some share of the blame in legitimising wars.
Look tit4tat, your joke sucked. Have you noticed that nobody defended you on this board? As far as I can tell, everyone here thought your joke sucked.
You did not amuse anyone with your joke, because it was sucky.
All you accomplished with this joke was to (1) derail this comment thread for a couple of pages and (2) inspire at least one person (myself) to develop an intense dislike for you personally.
So you might want to rethink whether you joke was a good idea. Just saying.
er, an attack on MEN. Not me. I don’t think your questions about that idea have been attacks on me.
@titfortat
http://psp.sagepub.com/content/34/2/159
Not sure if you can read the article due to publishing access but the abstract is pretty clear. Sexist jokes are pretty much a bad thing. I’m not quite sure how you thought a bunch of feminists would react. Not to say I’ve never laughed at one ever, but this one wasn’t very funny (to me anyway) mostly because it was unoriginal (ie how basically every internet comment thread contains some joke about a woman making a sandwich or getting back to the kitchen).
Not even that–it’s just that, regardless of the merits of his complaints, it’s his job to fix them.
And yes, on an unrelated note, T4T’s joke sucked.
katz: That’s a different thing, and ought to go without saying. I note that anit spent a lot of time saying I quoted, “out of context” and misrepresented what was said.
I further not that specifics weren’t actually forthcoming, nor were clarifications of the positions I, “got wrong” so that people would know what was actually meant.
So, in addition to the fallacies, anit doesn’t seem to know how to actually argue.
Pecunium, exactly correct on the self sacrifice part not being quite what is going on when a man goes off to war since it is mostly men, for various previously stated reasons, who cause war.
So it seems odd to me to claim “men self sacrifice for women because they go off to war that men probably started.”
@Bee,
EXACTLY!! With a wave of the “on the rag” wand, women themselves are the joke and need not be taken seriously.
Don’t actually have another comment to make, seems like everyone else has covered it pretty well.
I’m just here for the popcorn.
So what are these self sacrifices men are making? I’d love to know.
It is pretty awesome with the bacony flavor.
I think the point of the acronym “NAWALT” is that some people use the rebuttal “not all women are like that” to a person who was never arguing that all women were like that in the first place. Of course not all women are like that. Not all women are like anything. Not all women have vaginas, for Chrissake. But SOME women may have a given trait, and sometimes, a trait is more common among women than it is among men. It doesn’t mean all women are like that.