The other day Darksidecat introduced me to what I now consider to be the Greatest Webpage Ever (this week): Regender, a handy tool that will take any web page and, well, regender it, turning male pronouns and references into female and vice versa. It even works with names.
Following Darksidecat’s lead, I have started plugging the writings of some of my favorite manosphere misogynists into the magical regendering machine. The results are, well, instructive. And frequently hilarious. As DSC noted, Roissy and MarkyMark are perfect for this sort of treatment. As is, I discovered, MarkyMark’s longtime pal Christopher in Oregon. Here’s what happens when Christopher of Oregon becomes Christine of Oregon with the help of regender, and all the horrible shit he wrote about women becomes the horrible shit she wrote about men:
Men are whores. They are far more likely to have STD’s than women. Be aware of this. Handle with extreme care. Men are filthy, and they will lie about their infections. Condoms will NOT protect you. …
Men are walking cesspools of filth! Most of them have or will have a permanent STD infection. It is unavoidable. These are FACTS, and not the rantings of an unstable misandrist.
(I’m a very STABLE misandrist, thank you kindly)
Men are DIRTY creatures, pure and simple. Be dignified, and don’t lower yourself to engaging in any filthy behavior with them. You WILL be infected with the diseases they are carrying. A moral, dignified woman does NOT rut like an animal with one of these creatures. Sexual intercourse and oral sex are filthy, disgusting activities, and ruin a woman morally. They spread disease.
Elevate yourself above such filth of the flesh. …
Do not lust after men in your mind. Masturbate only as a last result to relieve tension. Do not lust after men sexually. It weakens you.
Goddess made woman in Her image, and men was made in the image of Satan. Squeal all you want, but history proves me right. A man is a test; a stumbling block for woman. Our life is an adventure. A journey. A pursuit of our creator, and a pursuit of excellence in our personal lives. A man and his filth is part of the obstacle course set before us. If we are wise, and avoid them, we will grow stronger as a result. We will finish the race successfully.
Men was not put here to support us as such, and we will only grow stronger if we AVOID his snares. ..
Christine in Oregon
Woah. Critics of Man Boobz often say that feminists are “just as bad” as the guys I quote. Well, if they were, the posts on their blogs would look a lot like this regendered post. I ask all of you: have you ever seen something so grotesquely misandrist on any feminist web site? I thought not.
Here’s a challenge for all of you: See if you can come up with a regendered post that tops this one from “Christine in Oregon.” You can draw from old posts of mine, or go poking about in the manosphere yourself. Post your results in the thread below, along with a link to the regendered web page you got them from. I’ll highlight the best in a future post.
thefemalespectator–yikes–I’d have to check–it’s been about 30 years since I studied Shakespeare at any depth (my undegraduate program )–and those were among my least favorite–so I may be totes wrong! I’m not even remembering basic plots of them let alone characters.
My area of specialization since he 1990s has been 20th and now 21st century work, primarily marginalized authors and genres! Sorry!
Perhaps he’s just Dearth
Some of these regenders also make me acutely aware of how often MRAs use “women” singular. Like “a women” instead of “a woman”. What are the origins of this tic, I wonder?
@Wanderer
“the only times I’ve popped out of obscurity have been to pimp out a YTMND and ask our host about a picture”
have you been lurker for longer than a few months?
http://manboobz.blogspot.com/2010/10/quoteotd-david-futrelle-is-dancing.html
just curious if that commentor “wanderer” is you. I was looking for the old manboobz site on google and that page popped up so now I’m curious.
He reads Darth Vader as an example of an alien being with a completely different morality, and then paints his final transformation as a recognition of kin bond. However, this is comically misguided. Darth Vader is a classically HUMAN villain
Well, I think it’s impossible to get it that much wrong. I think, when he watched Episode IV in the late 70s (he is that old 😀 ) he thought Vader as an alien or something between (remember, there are many of the so called “Near-Human species” in the Star Wars Universe) because there are simply no hints who or what Vader is.
But you are right about what you write later.
Though in the first movie there is no reference that Vader is Luke’s father (I remember reading somewhere, that Lucas hadn’t even yet decided to write the story in this way) it is still a very bad example because that is already revealed in Episode V, not in Episode VI. So yes, he’s pretty confused on this one.
If Ruse had written about Alien, which had already come out 4 years earlier, he could have done a much better job making his argument, without leading to the epic fails outlined above
Well “Alien” is too simple to be used as an example. The alien there is simply totally devoid of any moral feelings and considerations (you remember, Ash admires him for that) and it’s level of intelligence is unknown, so there’s no difference to a beast of prey on earth. That’s too simple, Ruse wants to argue about the situation where there’s some overlap in morality between humans and aliens or some possibility of a common morality.
While it’s not my place to lecture you, in my view your attempts at discussion with (most of) the blog residents here is futile. It’s also the reason I’ve been lurking for the last few months rather than posting–aside from this long screed, written against my better judgment, the only times I’ve popped out of obscurity have been to pimp out a YTMND and ask our host about a picture. Now, attempting to refine your ideas is one thing, but I hope you don’t intend to win any converts.
I totally know that and I don’t expect that a rational discussion is possible here, so I don’t even try.
Look at Pecunium, if he’s a troll, he’s one of the best I’ve ever met. I would bow to him.
He would be such subtle and brilliant parody of the Internet-know-it-all: a guy who knows every single logical fallacy by his name, but constantly wrongly accuses other of them.
A guy who knows every single rule of inference by his name (like Occam’s Razor the weakest of all rules, on the Internet it’s the strongest 😉 ) but always uses them the wrong way.
A guy who needs two minutes to write a 500 word manifesto of substanceless nitpicking and then thinks he’s right because nobody bothers to reply to him.
BRILLIANT if he were a troll!
Sadly, I’m afraid he’s totally serious!
Look at the way he argues, he writes “you are arguing in bad faith” and when I ask him why, he writes “You have said there is no way to convince you.” and his ‘proof’ for this is, that I started my sentence somewhere with “There are no rational arguments that…”.
Oh Jesus … that’s so bad I can’t believe he’s serious. But he probably is. When Richard Dawkins says “There are no rational arguments against evolution…” he must think that Dawkins in principle cannot convinced that evolution is wrong even if we would find massive evidence against it. And of course you’re even forbidden
Pecunium:
We don’t know how you define “cogent argument”, … gimme a break!!!
My original serious position (which you can few pages ago before) was of course not to argue that rape should only be a misdemeanor. But imagine not trolling here and then getting all this Pecunium nonsense… !
I meant with Pecunium you’re even not allowed to use the term “cogent argument” or “rational argument”.
I still think seriously that the reason we think rape is so bad is very tightly connected to the way human sexuality works. If humans as a species evolved somewhat differently, killing other adults would very probably still be bad (there are few mammalian species who habitually kill themselves for no good reasons) but we might easily have totally, radically different attitudes regarding rape.
It’s difficult to explain why rape is so bad with the potential damage alone. As we heard, it’s even punishable by a life sentence in some US-states, the average sentence for rape is nearly 12 years in the US.
It can’t be psychological damage: I gave abundant examples that acts that can inflict enormous psychological harm (paternity fraud, cheating, libel) are not even a crime at all. If libel is not even a criminal offense in the US it only strengthens my point (god, how I hate this Pecunium nonsense “blah blah it’s just a civil offense, hah, I proved you wrong”).
It can’t be unwanted pregnancy either because that’s easy to fix.
So that leaves us with STDs.
If you compare it with DUI, what are the actual sentences for DUI? Much less than for rape, much, much less. And also I don’t think that the chance to kill or permanently injure someone if you drive under influence but is much less than the chance to infect someone with an incurable STD like AIDS or Hepatitis B.
Now one interesting example…
Though it’s a problematic comparison (because the men could have protected themselves and the rape victim doesn’t have this choice) lets have a look at this story:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/26/nadja-benaissa-hiv-sentence-germany
Though sentences are much less harsh in Germany than in the US for nearly all crimes, rapists usually don’t get just a two year suspended sentence. And there are many, many people publicly stating this woman shouldn’t have been punished at all. So being recklessly silent about your HIV infection gets you (a) more sympathy and (b) a much lesser prison sentence than raping someone.
So you see, there’s much evidence that rape is punished unproportionally severe compared with the harm it causes.
Our moral intuitions is that rape is a very serious crime, but we cannot give easily comprehensible reason why that’s the case. As Ruse writes:
“Furthermore, consider one of the major biological reasons why we humans think rape wrong — especially why males think rape wrong. Because humans take so long to mature, males cooperate in child-rearing, unlike most other mammals (Lovejoy 1981). Hence there are good reasons why human morality is transsexual, and why nobody (especially no male) wants some third party leaving his seed around in fertile places. If you have got to spend years raising a child, biologically there are reasons why you prefer it to be your own. However, if extraterrestrial females did all of the child-rearing, unaided, there might be simple moral emptiness when it came to rape. This is not to say the females
would not have strategies to mate with the ‘best’ males (Hrdy 1981); they would! (I am not saying we think rape is wrong simply because males might have to raise the children of others.
I am looking for biological reasons why we might feel so strongly about it. Why is non-physically injurious rape put on a par with assault, or murder even? ‘Because people get upset’ is the whole point!)”
Yes, we get upset about rape, and I’m not different in this respect, that’s our moral intuition. But this moral intuition about rape is so unique and contradictory that it can’t be easily generalized like other ethical intuitions.
We simply can’t say “Rape is rape is rape”. That doesn’t work. The rapist hiding behind the bushes makes us angry, makes our blood boiling, but many people are more relaxed about a husband raping his wife.
You “can’t” (” ” are for nitpicking Pecunium) say “How archaic is that? What’s the difference? In both cases it’s unconsensual sex and that means rape!”
That makes no sense, simply because there’s no abstract justification (why we see unconsensual sex as so extremely bad as we do) to begin with!
Our feelings and inbuilt moral intuitions about rape are archaic and contradictory by themselves you can’t generalize them, sexual violence is not something where abstract moral reasoning works.
Tons of people think that Christine Hubbs punishment of five years in prison for having consensual sex with 14-year-old boys was too severe. And of course they would see it different if the genders were reversed. A double standard, yes. But can we blame them? It’s just that (contrary to normal ethics) reasoning about sexual ethics in an abstract way doesn’t work.
Shorter Marc: I can’t think of any good reason why anyone wouldn’t want to be raped, therefore it shouldn’t matter to anyone. There’s science to back this up!
One of the problems with an evo psych analysis of rape is that rape, as we all know, doesn’t just happen to people with fertile ovaries and the capacity to carry embryos. In fact, it seems to happen to people who a rapist thinks ze can get away with raping: often times that’s the elderly and children.
And that’s the first problem I see with your theory.
Marc – It’s all very well to be above everyone else’s petty little morals, but you benefit from them every day.
Saying “why is nonconsensual sex so bad? It’s just nonconsensual sex!” is as meaninglessly detached and inhuman as… well, itself, really.
Let me put it this way, then: saying “it’s only psychological harm” is meaningless because all harm is psychological. If I cut off your arm, what’s really hurting you is your experience and perception of losing your arm–the arm itself isn’t sentient, but the pain and loss are experienced inside your head. Psychologically.
If we want to avoid harming people (we do! just go with me on that point), then we have to take psychological harm seriously, because that’s the only harm there is.
Marc- If it were purely about “nobody (especially no male) wants some third party leaving his seed around in fertile places” then cheating would be punishable as strongly as rape. It’s not. It’s not punished at all by law unless you’re in a marriage, and then the worst you get is having to pay an alimony. So, how the hell does that fit?
Or, or, maybe those examples of “enormous psychological harm (paternity fraud, cheating, libel)” are absolutely not the same (and see, cheating’s right there!), especially since they do not involve any physical attack on the victim, and therefore are considered a lesser severity of crime? Fancy that!
Oh, a small edit, you can lose all your stuff in a divorce as well if it goes spectacularly badly. However, still no prison sentence, or anything else. It’s all a civil crime (and even then not really…), unlike rape.
Marc: I still think seriously that the reason we think rape is so bad is very tightly connected to the way human sexuality works.
First, you have to stop thinking that what you say the people in the US and/or Europe think is what all people think, especially if you’re going to talk evolution.
Second, you have to stop thinking that “rape is bad” is something that all humans have thought throughout all time (see: evolution) because it’s not.
All your examples, even if accurate (don’t have time to check) are contemporary.
Have you read anything about how legal attitudes toward rape have changed over time?
There are multiple reasons why rape is considered bad:
Physical harm-this could be the actual bruising on the person from the force used if any, tearing (there are some delicate bits in the genital region, especially if anal rape), any other kind of harm that could happen depending on any weapons used. These generally heal (sometimes a rape is violent enough to case permanent damage.)
STI/Ds-a rapist could have a sexually transmitted disease and if the rapist fails to use a condom, the victim could become infected.
Possible pregnancy-not all rapes result in a pregnancy but for those that do, there is a lot of decisions to be made from do you keep the baby or not. If the victim has access, Plan B or the equivalent could be taken. If there is no access or the victim is refused because of moral issues on the part of the pharmacist, the victim could still become pregnant and have those choices.
Psychological harm: From the violation of one’s own person to the violation of one’s sense of safety, ability to have intimate relationships and a dozen of other issues, rape can have lasting and major psychological harm. It is a traumatic experience for the victim and can continue all the way until the rapist is released from prison or beyond. To equate a rape’s psychological damage to a divorce is showing that the equator is unable to understand the pain and suffering a rape victim goes through.
So Marc-essentially what you are saying is “well, cuz someone else hurts for this completely different type of situation, rape is not bad enough to send someone to prison for 12 years.” So I have to ask-if your own sister/wife/female friend or relative was raped, would you be willing to look her straight in the eye and say exactly what you are claiming here?
Shorter Marc: I can’t think of any good reason why anyone wouldn’t want to be raped, therefore it shouldn’t matter to anyone. There’s science to back this up!
How can anybody want to be raped, if “lack of consent” is missing, it’s not rape anymore.
One of the problems with an evo psych analysis of rape is that rape, as we all know, doesn’t just happen to people with fertile ovaries and the capacity to carry embryos. In fact, it seems to happen to people who a rapist thinks ze can get away with raping: often times that’s the elderly and children.
I would never claim that evolutionary psychology can explain everything in every detail.
It’s not that absolute, you have to remember that natural selection probably doesn’t work like a scalpel but more like a sledgehammer.
But evolutionary psychology is still possible if we look at the rough trends.
What could be more natural to explain the prevalence of heterosexuality with evolutionary psychology? What else should be the reason?
But maybe on the other hand pedophilia as a sexual orientation is just an aberration that serves no purpose, something that went wrong, but that natural selection was not yet able to eradicate, something we can’t explain with evolutionary psychology.
We see, that females aged 12 – 34 is the age group with the highest risk, that absolutely strengthens my point because that’s the most fertile group.
Saying “why is nonconsensual sex so bad? It’s just nonconsensual sex!” is as meaninglessly detached and inhuman as… well, itself, really.
See, now you’re distorting again, massively…
I haven’t said that I feel in that way, that that’s really my opinion.
I and Michael Ruse (a really kind guy) are just saying, that if you think about it abstractly you must come to this conclusion.
Let me put it this way, then: saying “it’s only psychological harm” is meaningless because all harm is psychological. If I cut off your arm, what’s really hurting you is your experience and perception of losing your arm–the arm itself isn’t sentient, but the pain and loss are experienced inside your head. Psychologically.
See, nitpicking again. You know exactly what I mean with “psychological harm”. Bodily pain is not something that needs interpretation by the mind, not complex psychological processes going on. The sensation is instantly there, it’s a lower, more fundamental experience and also something that (though some humans are less susceptible to pain than others) is not so daaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn variable from person to person.
And if you lose your arm, you may be very depressed, but still we don’t have to speculate about your feelings to judge the harm. We just have to look at you, your body changed, the arm is missing, that’s something that happened in the physical world that is also observable by other humans.
Watch this video:
Now isn’t it funny, where at 3:10 he says something like “he then said he had trauma… and he had to go into therapy… … he lost me … no I’m sorry.”
So basically he’s absolutely no empathy for this guy… but can we blame him? Can we really blame him?
You see how complex and problematic psychological harm is.
The most unproblematic harm is where something changes in the physical world, like Bill Gates is missing a million (and then it’s totally irrelevant if Bill Gates is ok with it — he’s still a victim) or something happened with your body.
But if there are just massive “unpleasant” feelings but harm to your body can be ruled out, we get problems.
Who are we to judge that forced sensory deprivation (where you experience extreme anxiety and get bad hallucinations) and waterboarding (where you experience the terror of imminent death) feels less worse than being raped?
You may be against interrogation tactics like waterboarding, but that’s not the point. The point is, that there would be a public outcry if rape would be institutionalized the way waterboarding was until 2009, not just some cautious protests!
What else can explain this than evolutionary psychology? What else?
“But if there are just massive ‘unpleasant’ feelings but harm to your body can be ruled out, we get problems.”
I guess you don’t believe in clinical depression or post traumatic stress disorder?
Psychological harm: From the violation of one’s own person to the violation of one’s sense of safety, ability to have intimate relationships and a dozen of other issues, rape can have lasting and major psychological harm. It is a traumatic experience for the victim and can continue all the way until the rapist is released from prison or beyond. To equate a rape’s psychological damage to a divorce is showing that the equator is unable to understand the pain and suffering a rape victim goes through.
Just because I wrote somewhere that many acts that cause psychological harm like are not even punished at all and I gave this example it doesn’t mean I equate them…
There are more drastic example (I don’t tell you the first time…) like the interrogation tactics used in Guantanamo, or massive bullying, harassing and invasion of privacy that drives people into suicide. Or if you substract the actual bodily harm, what about the women that infected her boyfriend with HIV, what’s the psychological harm there, the anger and pain he must feel that she knew about her infection and didn’t tell him? And as a HIV-positive he might have problems with intimacy, too, mmh? And she got a two years suspended sentence.
Now you might say, let’s punish all those people much more severely with sentences comparable to rape, like 10 years in prison for Dharun Ravi, George W. Bush, Nadja Benaissa and others. But that’s very probably not a position the majority of the public would support.
Marc, exactly what is it you’re trying to argue here? I’m not confused about what you’ve written, I’m confused about your intent. You’ve said that you don’t think you can have a rational discussion with most of the posters here. So, what’s the deal?
Is this simply a way to get people to take evopsych more seriously? Are you attempting to argue that even if a conviction of rape should be treated more seriously than a misdemeanor, that 10 – 12 years in prison is far too long? Are you arguing that as human society progresses and advances, we’ll shed these primitive feelings and associations about sexual violence, and violation? That (for example) just as we’ve come to believe, much more prevalently that slavery is wrong, we’ll come to recognize how much less of a big deal rape is because we have antibiotics and abortion? Do you believe that every society, all throughout history has viewed and punished rape in the exact same ways?
Other than promoting Ruse, what exactly is it you’re attempting to argue?
And in what way is a discussion about rape, in the abstract, even relevant?
Well sure, Marc. If you have to rely on a pseudoscience that invents cheap but compelling explanations out of whole cloth and doesn’t even try to meet any kind of scientific standard for its theories — if that’s the only place you can find this theory that that totally appeals to you in some utterly groinal way, then I guess you best buy into it, proselytize for it, and defend it to strangers on the internet.Jesus fuck, Marc.
What could possibly explain my great love for pasta, other than my loving noodly god? All hail FSM.
What Nobinayamu said. ^^
I find the tactics used both at Gitmo and elsewhere to be completely wrong, against the highest values of the United States and probably criminal (although in the theatre of war rather then regular civil criminal acts.)
The sole difference, which is pretty effing important actually: quite a few of the people in Gitmo getting this treatment were not innocently going about their lives. They were making a decision to support or participate terrorist activities.
So unless you are going to state that those who are raped are not innocent? That they invited it by what exactly? Not staying locked in a basement with a million different traps to stop a person from approaching them in any way?
As for the lady who was given a suspended sentence after failing to inform a sexual partner she was HIV positive, she was facing ten years in prison. And it appears there were mitigating circumstances that were taken into account-just like in the rest of the world. Also, if you google “rapist given suspended sentence” you get a lot of stores saying that a rapist was given a suspended sentence.
So she faced a serious prison term and got a sentence that sounds awfully similar to others.
So you are claiming that someone who does have a lot of psychological harm is either the same as a possible terrorist or that rapists are never given light sentences. Neither of which is accurate in anyway.
“So basically he’s absolutely no empathy for this guy… but can we blame him? Can we really blame him?”
I can. Having your boundaries invaded like that can be traumatic, especially for a man that has not been conditioned to expect this kind of unwelcome attention from women. I completely understand the guy’s need for therapy just from hearing the first minute of the report.
I hope you don’t think we should see it as a joke or find it funny.
There are multiple reasons why rape is considered bad:
Physical harm-this could be the actual bruising on the person from the force used if any, tearing (there are some delicate bits in the genital region, especially if anal rape), any other kind of harm that could happen depending on any weapons used. These generally heal (sometimes a rape is violent enough to case permanent damage.)
STI/Ds-a rapist could have a sexually transmitted disease and if the rapist fails to use a condom, the victim could become infected.
Possible pregnancy-not all rapes result in a pregnancy but for those that do, there is a lot of decisions to be made from do you keep the baby or not. If the victim has access, Plan B or the equivalent could be taken. If there is no access or the victim is refused because of moral issues on the part of the pharmacist, the victim could still become pregnant and have those choices.
Yes those points are valid, but compare it to aggravated assault. If you beat someone to pulp you get a lesser punishment than for rape. That’s just the way it is, at least in Europe. And if your victim is of frail health you also risk his life…
So Marc-essentially what you are saying is “well, cuz someone else hurts for this completely different type of situation, rape is not bad enough to send someone to prison for 12 years.”
So I have to ask-if your own sister/wife/female friend or relative was raped, would you be willing to look her straight in the eye and say exactly what you are claiming here?
No, I would not!
But now you’re appealing to my emotions or moral intuitions. We don’t argue about them.
Do you think Michael Ruse (who looks like some friendly grandpa) would say “But… maybe rape isn’t wrong on Andromeda?” to a rape victim?
It’s only an argument that generalized and abstract reasoning about sexual ethics doesn’t work (something that feminists do all the time).
Marc, exactly what is it you’re trying to argue here?
I’m arguing, that abstract and generalized reasoning (though it works well with most of ethics) about sexual morality is absolutely and totally wrong!