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.
@ Amnesia
“Asking me to take gender out of consideration is asking me to ignore the stuff that happens or could happen to me on a daily basis because of my gender.”
If you really want equality, then you MUST take gender out of consideration when deciding who deserves help and compassion.
@ mediumdave
“Anit wants to leave the gender question out of genital mutilation (how is that even possible?).”
Very simple. Fight to stop genital mutilation. Period. We don’t separate male from female murder victims either do we?
Nothing else of yours, deserves a response.
@ katz
“Responses like this cast doubt on whether you’re actually trying to communicate. Yes, it’s frustrating when people respond to something you didn’t say, but the first responsibility to making sure you’re understood falls on you. If people consistently misrepresent you, you probably aren’t communicating clearly.”
I appreciate the advice but the situation is not that simple. Given the hostility towards me with sentences like
“Anit is full of shit, which he thinks smells glorious.”
added with the sexist assumption that I’m male, you can forgive me for not taking FULL responsibility when somebody misunderstands me. If it were a polite and unemotional conversation, then yes, I’d reiterate my statements. Misunderstandings are possible, but intentional mischaracterization is more likely in this situation.
That becomes even more obvious when people misquote me and completely rephrase statements of mine. How can I be held responsible for the ‘misunderstanding’ that arises from that?
@ briget
“I think that medically we can say that FGM is the worse of the two”
I did say, that if I had to decide between genders, as to which form of GM gets stopped first, it would be girls.
But my point is that we don’t have to decide. Localization of the problem (Africa and FGM) would only justify focusing on say “GM in Africa”. That does NOT justify focusing only on FGM in Africa.
@ Simone Lovelace
“Listen: feminists are incredibly critical of their own. Trufax. It’s when some (male) outsider swoops in and starts telling sanctimoniously telling us how we’re all doing it wrong, in some incredibly sanctimonious way, that we get a bit annoyed.”
I understand. If it were a female outsider, then no problem. Right?
I’m not sure Freudian slips exist in writing too. But this does reveal inherent sexism. And I didn’t even have to pull it out of you. You handed it to me on a silver platter.
Honestly, I’ve had this argument before in multiple contexts. I’ve lost friends (well, facebook friends) over it. I honestly think this might be one of those cases where it’s better to agree to disagree.
So I’m going to give this one try, and I then stop trying to engage with Anit. I think it might be best for others to do likewise.
Some people feel that all social justice movements and spaces, anywhere, ever, need to address issues, not groups of people. Anit, it seems that you fall into this camp.
Other people, myself included, feel that it’s sometimes okay for a social justice space, campaign, or movement to primarily address the needs of a particular segment of the population. While it can be discriminatory to focus on a particular demographic group, it does not have to be. This is particularly true if the group which ones choses to focus on has historically been marginalized in some way.
For example, as far as I’m concerned, any feminism which focuses primarily on white, straight, cis-gendered, able-bodied women is pretty darn crappy, because it’s focuses primarily on the most privileged of women.
But a feminist movement that focuses primarily on women is just fine, since women are, overall, less privileged than men.
The fact that women do have a few advantages in society, and that men do have some real and important problems, does not change the fact that our society tends to value men over women. Privilege is a complicated thing.
Since most of society is typically focused on the needs of the more privileged, and since most spaces center the experiences of privileged people, having spaces which center the experiences of marginalized people is a good and necessary thing.
It is good and necessary, even if it means that privileged people end up being outsiders in certain spaces.
I am totally willing to feel like an outsider in certain spaces, if it means that disabled people, or people of color, or any other marginalized group gets to have their own space.
This is why the existence of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU’s) is not an example of racism, and the existence of women’s colleges is not an example of sexism.
If you were a female outsider, that would also be annoying–though perhaps just slightly less so.
I thought you had identified yourself as male in a previous comment. Certainly, multiple commenters have referred to you as male, and you have not corrected them.
If I am wrong, then I am sincerely sorry, but my position remains unchanged.
To clarify: if I am wrong (that you are male), then I am sincerely sorry (for misgendering you), but my position (that you are being obnoxious and unhelpful) remains unchanged.
Simone, you’re more generous than I am. I had anit pegged for a concern troll from his first post (the false equivalence gives it away), and therefore not worth engaging.
Anit
I’m going to respond to you in the intellectually honest manner you desire. Ready?
On May 13, 2011 at 7:50 pm, Kave said:
“Show us a mra website, thread, forum which you would imagine the mra should be.”
You still haven’t done that. Can you? And if you can, will you?
Thanks for your time.
Johnny Pez, you may be right. But I think the merits of identity politics are still worth discussing–even if, in the end, it tends to be one of those things where folks are unlikely to be persuaded one way or another.
I also think that the non-troll commentariat here probably has a fascinating range of opinions about this, which is being sort of hidden while we’re (mostly) united against Anit’s admittedly obnoxious behavior.
Anit– First, I want to commend you. This blog gets a lot of visitors from MRA sites complaining that their group is being misrepresented, and you’re the first one who hasn’t immediately followed with something along the lines of, “Just as I’d expect from cootie-covered manginas and their evil fat ugly lazy stupid hairy poopy-smelling female masters.”
But I’m curious about what feminist sites you’ve visited where you’ve encountered hate speech on the level of what’s quoted in the post above. Where have you seen feminists say that all men are evil, that even dating a man is akin to putting a loaded gun to your head, and that “if words are coming out of a man’s mouth, he’s a lying dick”? Have you been to a site where people seriously debate whether all men are pure evil, or just 99.99% of them? Because I want to avoid those sites.
Out of personal curiosity, I checked out the recent posts on some of the major feminist blogs. The five most recent posts on Feministing:
— An interview with Stephanie Schriock, president of Emily’s List.
— A quick-links post that includes an update on the It Gets Better Project, a series on transgender students, a piece on the movie “Bridesmaids,” news on an abortion law in Montana, and news on an anti-immigrant bill in Georgia.
— “Is President Obama Pro-Choice?”, a response to an article by Catholics for Choice.
— The winner of a feminist poetry contest.
— News on the revival of the DREAM Act, which would allow the children of immigrants gain citizenship through college or military service.
The five most recent posts on Jezebel:
— An interview with a sex blogger and porn store owner on how to buy a sex toy.
— An article on the opening of “Bridesmaids” and how you can get your boyfriend/husband to go along.
— “Why I Hate My Giant Dong,” an essay by a man on the problems of having a large penis.
— A fashion roundup from Cannes.
— A piece on a woman who gave Botox injections to her eight-year-old daughter, and how this is messed up.
The five most recent posts on Pandagon:
— A post criticizing Mike Huckabee for an email in which he approvingly describes students throwing stuff at left-wing demonstrators.
— A piece on cooking with asparagus.
— A piece on how rock music has become more friendly to female musicians in recent years.
— The Friday “Genius Ten” music post.
— A Daily Show clip about Fox News freaking out over a rapper performing at the White House, with commentary.
And the five most recent posts at the Spearhead:
— An essay on the possible advantages of men becoming househusbands.
— A piece on Mary N. Kellet, a lawyer in Maine who was the prosecuting attorney in a rape case and is now the target of MRA efforts to get her disbarred…I’m sorry, but I’m not familiar with this case, the post doesn’t explain it, and Googling Kellet’s name just turns up a lot of similarly vague posts on other MRA sites. I don’t know what’s going on here.
— “Man Demands Obedience from Women, is Rewarded With Over 100 Wives,” about a cult leader in Nigeria and how his acquisition of a bunch of “wives” is proof that women like to be bossed around.
— A response to W.F. Price’s “NAWALT” post, the one quoted by David above. The response is from a woman explaining that, in fact, all women really are evil.
— The “NAWALT” post. We already know that one, so I might as well include the next post down:
— A plan to photograph women at Slut Walks (a Take Back the Night-type anti-rape protest) and post their pictures online to mock them.
I picked those particular feminist blogs partly because they’re some of the biggest on the Internet, and partly because I’ve seen all of them cited by MRA commentators as dens of radical man-hating. And yet… maybe I’m just seeing things through feminist-colored glasses, but not only does there not seem to be any vicious misandry in these posts, but most of them don’t talk about men at all. They’re either about women’s issues (women in politics, abortion laws, women in rock), about other liberal political issues (immigration, student demonstrations, rappers in the White House) or fluffy, non-political “fun” posts (poetry contests, music roundups, cooking).
By contrast, all the Spearhead posts except the first one are about women and the things they’re doing wrong. Even the househusband post is framed in terms of keeping women in line: “Instead of having to put up with a wifes excessive nagging and being forced to pander to her needs at economic gunpoint, a man can simply decide that she is out of line and leave. This will help keep her behavior acceptable, and remove any fear that a married man might have under more traditional roles.” (No, I don’t know what this means. I didn’t write it.) Even so, it seems to be viewed on the Spearhead as not pessimistic enough about women. The first response, “I don’t see this happening. Women are hypergamous creatures,” has 56 upvotes and only 2 downvotes so far. “Good idea in theory. In practice you’ll need an extremely strong pimp hand to keep her even remotely attracted,” gets 35 upvotes and a single downvote.
Another thing that pops out for me: compared to the feminist sites, the Spearhead is humorless and joyless. There are no fluff posts, no movies or music or cooking, and everything is written in a tone of grim, end-of-the-world solemnity. The closest thing to humor is the mock-the-Slut-Walks idea. (Number of comments before someone declares Slut Walkers too ugly to be worth raping: 4. Number of comments before someone agrees, then adds that they shouldn’t mind being raped because they’re sluts: 5. You stay classy, Spearhead.) Frankly, fighting the patriarchy looks like a lot more fun than fighting the nefarious female hive mind.
Evil, what benefits do you get if you’re right and the world really is one in which women are pathetic and men are strong and do all the work?
What benefits do you get from a society where women and men are respected and treated well and able to grow to their full potential outside the limitations of the gender roles you appear to endorse above?
How would MRAs improve on the problems of the binary gender system while maintaining it?
@ Simone Lovelace
“Some people feel that all social justice movements and spaces, anywhere, ever, need to address issues, not groups of people. Anit, it seems that you fall into this camp.”
No. I think that, if an institution decides to help only one group of people with a problem that affects all, then they need to justify it. And if that justification rests only on sexist generalizations then it is not valid. See my posts on GM above for one example.
“But a feminist movement that focuses primarily on women is just fine, since women are, overall, less privileged than men.”
What if you’re wrong and women aren’t less privileged than men? Who gets to decide that anyway? And why weigh them up against each other?
Because it creates an us-vs-them mentality that is eventually a dead end as far as gender politics and equality are concerned. At first, it’s a powerful tool to win mass support, but in the long run, it will fail.
“The fact that women do have a few advantages in society, and that men do have some real and important problems, does not change the fact that our society tends to value men over women.”
Really? What about self sacrifice that is demanded from men for women in dangerous situations? That says very clearly which gender is valued more. Even if you take all female disadvantages (including the fake ones) and put them against this one alone, they end up looking rather self indulgent to anyone who isn’t in one camp or the other. How does anything measure up to self sacrifice really?
Since, like with most feminists, your view rests on the assumption that men are valued more than women, that dirty little secret above, kind of brings down all your other arguments like a house of cards. If pointing that out to you makes me “obnoxious”, then I can live with that.
And as for the male-female concern, why does it matter what my gender is? I only pointed out people who made premature assumptions about my gender. I don’t ask or care about anyone else’s gender here because it doesn’t matter. I know that may seem strange to many people here – even obnoxious, or trolling, or goalpost moving or whatever other labels have been concocted for me.
@Shaenon
For the record, I totally agree that most MRA sites are infested with misogynists and hate speech. I also agree that they tend to take themselves way to seriously (quite independently from what I think of feminists). But I also insist that not everything they bring up is nonsense or baseless. The example you sited yourself about Mary Kellet is one issue that nobody else brings up although it really needs addressing – even if only for the children’s sake. Now the MRAs are mistakenly making it to be the result of a conspiracy against men. It’s not. Men are just collateral damage in a system that doesn’t care enough to notice when they get persecuted. I would have thought it would be in everyone’s interest to get rid of Mary Kellet. She’s ultimately making it harder for rape victims to come forward. So both, feminists and MRAs have a good reason to fight this problem. Join up ffs and stop just ridiculing or accusing anyone from “the other side”.
@evilwhitemalempire
Wow, I’ve just been called ugly, stupid, a liar, a weakling, and lazy on the internet. To paraphrase ewme, “I don’t have any real arguments to make against what you said, so I’ll just resort to baseless attacks!” Real classy.
What next? Gonna tell me I smell like feet, that my mommy never loved me, that I’m a fat fatty with fattitude, that my driving sucks?
Anit, the idea that men should chivalrously sacrifice for women (say “women and children first” or the all-male draft) is an ANTI-FEMINIST position. It’s traditionalist, and feminists are all for ENDING CHIVALRY and ending the assumption that men are more capable of action or more expected to sacrifice than women.
Sorry about the shouting, but it is just so tedious to always encounter MRAs saying “traditional values are unfair to men too, but feminists like these traditionalist values” when it is NOT true.
Feminists are actively working to end traditional gender roles, something which will benefit men and women. But it’s an uphill battle with all these MRAs, Nice Guys, and other assholes who want their women sexy and subservient and fulfilling the traditional role for women.
Anit, I understand your position. I don’t agree with it, for the reasons articulated above. As I said before, I am not interested in a game of point-counterpoint, since I feel that our views are too fundamentally different for that to be productive.
Your claim that the whole “women and children first” business undermines the idea of male privilege proves that you don’t have a clear idea of what male privilege really means, and that you’re not terribly interested in finding out. And I really don’t have the time, energy, or eloquence to adequately explain it. I do think it’s worth doing some looking into, though, if you’re interested in gender issues.
As other commenters have pointed out, “gender blindness” tends to be a luxury for men; just as “color blindness” tends to be a luxury for White people, and so on and so on ad nauseam.
http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=478
Simone, are you the same Simone Lovelace from Shakesville? As articulate here as you are there!
On the note of gender blindness and color blindness being a privilege of, respectively, men and white people:
Personally, I don’t notice when stores aren’t accessible. That doesn’t mean that accessibility isn’t a problem — it means that I have the privilege not to be inconvenienced when a store has no ramp/elevator/etc. etc. My ability to overlook disablism doesn’t mean that I’m superior to the TAB/disabled binary, it means that I’m super privileged by virtue of being TAB.
I am the same Simone, Comrade! And thank-you for the compliment. *Blushes.*
Aw… I feel unloved. anit has decided I am no longer worthy of detailed takedowns. If this were formal debate I could count on the win (silence = assent).
On to the questions (though the goalposts are still moving)*
WTF does this mean: What about self sacrifice that is demanded from men for women in dangerous situations? That says very clearly which gender is valued more. Even if you take all female disadvantages (including the fake ones) and put them against this one alone, they end up looking rather self indulgent to anyone who isn’t in one camp or the other. How does anything measure up to self sacrifice really?
Care to list the referenced “dangerous situations”. Care to explain childbirth isn’t in the list (it can’t be, since you are saying women aren’t expected to engage in self-sacrifice). When you answer, don’t forget the Men’s Rights Types are, by and large, demanding the right to determine the level of sacrifice women make in childrearing, on top of the risks of childbirth).
But, unless you are arguing that female cops, firefighters, EMTs, pilots, soldiers, seamen, airmen (yes I know those are oddities, but they are the names of the ranks; and the women in them have said they don’t want them change, so i go with it) and Marines aren’t expected to make the same sorts of sacrifices the man are? Because I can tel you, from personal experience that 1: it ain’t so and 2: I never had any worries the women I served with werent 1: willing, and 2: able, to make those sacrifices.
*the goalpost moving “label” hasn’t been “concocted”, you’ve earned it by moving the goalposts. One of the reasons goalpost moving is such an effective way of managing a losing argument in informal debates is that it’s subtle. The new questions demand answers, and dodging the old questions (where are those ideal MRA sites BTW, the one’s that aren’t like Roissy, or Spearhead?. I ask because you’ve again brought them up, “For the record, I totally agree that most MRA sites are infested with misogynists and hate speech. If it’s “most” kindly show us the one’s that aren’t infested with misogynists and hate speech. I, for one, should like to see them, and how they frame the issues.
Sorry, I got ahead of myself: Unless you are making the argument that women in those professions aren’t expected to make the sacrifices that go with those jobs the argument is nonsense.
Because men aren’t, “expected” to make them either. Not in a way which demands it. Yes, the social ideal is that “men” will rush into burning buildings, dive into lakes, etc., but when a man doesn’t, no one shuns him. The law doesn’t punish.
It’s the praise for doing which is is heaped on him, not a shame of not doing. If a woman does the same, she too is praised. So the argument you are making is either for continuing a separatist stereotype, or for some essentialism in the doing of deeds.
Both of which fail to meet any sort of logical proof of the validity of the underlying argument (that men are expected to engage in dangerous self-sacrifice). It also puts a much greater value on the rare occasions a man might engage in “dangerous” self-sacrifice, while discounting the social pressures for ongoing, if not “dangerous” self-sacrifice women are expected to make (i.e. staying home with the kids, getting paid less, promoted more rarely, putting off college, etc.) and the attendant problems that creates (need to have a partner to raise children) and the secondary sacrifices the MRA sorts would impose (all or nothing on childcare in the event of a break-up. All or nothing childcare if they refuse to get an abortion; because the man doesn’t want a kid).
So the actual rate of sacrifice is greater for women, and the MRA groups would make it even greater.
That’s one damned interesting definition of equality they’ve got going, and you are defending.
Pecunium – I think Anit does have some what of a point there, in that on average men do still die younger than women and a lot of that is related to the kind of work they do, and the kind of behaviors they’re expected to engage in, things that cause serious health problems. I found a great huffington post article on this (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/myles-spar-md/why-do-men-die-younger-th_b_457660.html):
“While women are taking on more and more professional roles previously held by men, in the US, 95 percent of workers in the 10 most hazardous occupations are still men. Men die in workplace accidents at much higher rates as women, even excluding combat deaths, which were the leading cause of occupational deaths in the US when last reported in 2005”
There are a bunch of other things mentioned there and some of them are less clear cut, but I really like the conclusion:
“Women have strongly advocated for their own health, leading to increased research, public policies favorable to women’s health concerns and health care delivery approaches that specifically address women’s health issues. Men need to do the same, not to take away such programs for women, but to add years to the lives of their fellow men.”
Indeed.
But that’s correlative, not causative. Why do we exclude combat deaths? Because we refuse to let women into the combat arms branches.
Why aren’t there more women in pipefitting (which is one of the more dangerous professions)? Because we discourage them, directly, and indirectly, from being pipefitters.
Then people says, “look at at how the men are willing/expected to do the dangerous work.”
Which is a post hoc argument.
Simone –
Thanks. I do actually read Holly’s blog from time to time and I appreciate the takedowns of out-there feminist ideas like. I definitely wouldn’t say that’s the focus of her blog in the way this one focuses on MRA mocking though.
Why aren’t there more women in pipefitting (which is one of the more dangerous professions)? Because we discourage them, directly, and indirectly, from being pipefitters.
Sure, but the flipside of that is that we ENCOURAGE men to do it. I mean, someone still has to do it.
@ Comrade Svilova
Never said feminists aren’t fighting chivalry. My statement was a response to the “women have it worse” statement.
“Your claim that the whole “women and children first” business undermines the idea of male privilege proves that you don’t have a clear idea of what male privilege really means”
Try not to be patronizing. I’m very willing to learn and I appreciate when people honestly point out mistakes in my reasoning. But you will have to go to the effort of pointing them out properly and not just saying “you just don’t get it”.
The gender blindness argument can work both ways you know. Neither gender can know about all the burdens of the other. That’s why it’s despicable to come and say that your own gender has it so much worse and then to deny others the same self indulgence by referring them to gender blindness a la “you don’t even realize how privileged you are”. Well you do YOU know that you know how privileged you are? Simply telling men that they don’t know how privileged they are, and therefore aren’t qualified to decide on the mater is the perfect example of gender oppression.
@ Pecunium
“anit has decided I am no longer worthy of detailed takedowns.”
Are you joking? I’ve written far more here than anyone else since I came. Just read my responses to your accusations of goalpost shifting and the link spammed comment of yours, not to mention your embarrassing attempt to use a logical fallacy in teaching me about logic.
“Care to list the referenced “dangerous situations”. Care to explain childbirth isn’t in the list (it can’t be, since you are saying women aren’t expected to engage in self-sacrifice). When you answer, don’t forget the Men’s Rights Types are, by and large, demanding the right to determine the level of sacrifice women make in childrearing, on top of the risks of childbirth).”
Another fallacy. Childbirth is in no way comparable. While it obviously has risks, that doesn’t remotely compare it to giving up your life for another (stranger) simply because of their genitalia and yours. You couldn’t be more mistaken to compare the two. Talk about loss of perspective. On top of this, it is a choice. Nobody is forced to get pregnant nor should they be in the society we all want to live in. Nonetheless, many people choose to do so and many of them are very happy with that choice.
“But, unless you are arguing that female cops, firefighters, EMTs, pilots, soldiers, seamen, airmen…”
Not talking about them. Though, last time I checked women were not used in the front line by the US armed forces and, if wounded, got priority treatment. But, please bring me up to date if that’s changed. The people who go into the jobs you describe know that it might require self sacrifice. I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about everyone else.
“One of the reasons goalpost moving is such an effective way of managing a losing argument in informal debates is that it’s subtle.”
I’ve answered that above and as for losing argument, try learning to concede when you used a logical fallacy and were caught in the act. That would give you some credibility. Until you can do that, I can’t take anything you say very seriously. You’re obviously far more interested in discrediting me than learning the truth. Perhaps you should ask yourself why.
“For the record, I totally agree that most MRA sites are infested with misogynists and hate speech. If it’s “most” kindly show us the one’s that aren’t infested with misogynists and hate speech. I, for one, should like to see them, and how they frame the issues.”
Unlike others here, I do not claim to know what ALL MRAs or feminists are like. To demand that of me is ridiculous. Even if I find one that is free of misogyny, by David Futrelle’s standard (and yours apparently), all it takes is ONE stupid comment by one stupid visitor and you all come, guns blazing, that I’m wrong. THAT is why I criticize the method of finding raging comments and displaying them as representative. If you look, you will find whatever you’re looking for – especially on the internet. To demand of me to point you to a troll-free zone is revealing a high degree of desparation in your position.
“That’s one damned interesting definition of equality they’ve got going, and you are defending.”
You clearly do not know my definition of equality. But there’s a simple test that anyone can make to find out how much equality they can take. Just ask yourself the “what if it were reversed?” question. And, for all their faults, it is the MRAs who are using that test most frequently. Of course, it only works as well as you’re interested in the truth over what’s more politically useful to you. Protecting women sells and wins voters. Protecting men does not. Hence, the source of the problem is not a conspiracy but just lack of compassion for men and the resulting blindness and ignorance to their suffering.
But feminism is NOT to blame for men being encouraged to do dangerous jobs or women being discouraged from the same. Feminism is against BOTH scenarios. How are feminists at fault for the fact that the status quo — which feminists want to change — is so terrible?!?