Ugh. No jokes this time, just an appalling little exchange on Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit. First, a Redditor called xbyiu offers some unsolicited, and pretty pig-ignorant, thoughts about SlutWalks. The basic thesis:
Personally, I think a lot of feminists just don’t care about rape victims. They’d much rather see women as a whole being a victim of the patriarchy and fight against that sort of abstract idea then deal with the reality of rape, which can be fought against with simple tips on how to protect yourself.
Hold on; it gets worse.
To this the r/mr regular EvilPundit replied (in a comment that, last I checked, had gotten three times more upvotes than downvotes):
I’d go even further, and say that many feminists love rape. For them, it’s a perfect way to demonise men in general.
If rape didn’t exist, feminism would invent it. In fact, feminism does invent a lot of rape, with its imaginary statistics such as “1 in 4”, and so on.
In other words, feminists don’t really want to prevent rape. But most rape is imaginary. So feminists are trying to not prevent something that doesn’t much happen anyway. Brilliant.
A note on the “1 in 4” thing: EvilPundit’s insinuation that it’s an “imaginary statistic” is a common MRA talking point. It’s not imaginary, but it’s not quite accurate either. The one-in-four number comes from a study conducted in the 80s by researcher Mary Koss: based on a detailed survey of college women, she found that roughly one in four of her respondent had been a victim of rape or attempted rape since the age of 14. This is often simplified – and distorted – into “one in four female college students are raped while in college.”
In fact, Koss’ survey found that one in eight college women answering her survey, not one in four, had been the victim of completed rape. Other studies have reported numbers not far off from this. The National Violence Against Women Survey, for example, found that roughly one in six of female respondents reported being the victim of rape in their lifetime.
The fact that some people have misrepresented Koss’ study doesn’t mean that her findings are “imaginary.”
I’m not even sure why I’m writing all this, given that as a feminist I presumably don’t care at all about rape.
Pic above taken from here.
EDITED TO ADD: EvilPundit’s comment has gotten some downvotes since I posted this, but it still has more upvotes than downvotes.
tl;dr version:
– Calling people “it” is really nasty.
– Grammar is weird.
– I am a ginormous nerd and will stop boring you all now.
His meek, submissive Asian wife hired me to do some work at the house. I spent the entire 6 hours being subjected to his nasty temper, hearing him yell and bitch at his wife and child and heard, very clearly “I should have left you in the shithole I found you in,” among other equally horrible things. She seemed to take it in stride, but he sulked around the house with an enormous chip on his shoulder and treated everyone and everything like it was this enormous burden. After one of his outbursts, she’d just smile at me and give me a “were going to pretend that you didn’t just hear my husband call me a slant eyed whore,” look.
He hated me for the first few hours. HATED me. He complained that I was there, insisted that I was going to break or ruin something, that he wanted me to leave and other such nonsense. Then I asked him a question, he noticed that I have a non American accent and his attitude changed for the better. It went from unapologetic hatred to grudging tolerance, so that made things a little easier.
Toward the end of my job there, I was working in the garage and I hear this sniffling coming from the crawl space. I look in there and the couple’s young son was in there, sobbing. Apparently, he thinks that his father hates him. Apparently dad ignores his son on a regular basis (which I witnessed plenty of myself) yells at him, uses Asian ethnic slurs and that he was told that he was a dumbfuck, just like his mother. I died a little when he said that. No, strike that, I died a lot. And, yes, he repeated the f-bomb.
They asked me to do some more work for them in a few weeks and I had to decline as I’m “too busy.” The wife was really, amazingly sweet and I really liked their little boy, but BAW guy was such an asshole that I wouldn’t want to be subjected to that kind of shit ever again.
And, how do I know he was a BAW? I was going through some papers that they asked me to sort through, and found some MRA stuff. That, coupled with the poorly treated Asian wife kind of made it obvious.
Nova, that sounds horrifying. And yet I’ll take bets that if/when they divorce, he’ll be in line to do violence to the court system and/or officials for “shafting” him “because he’s a man” in giving custody to the mom, *who actually spends time with the kid*.
Ugh. That poor kid.
Why not just say “if he’s a man”, then? The “it” in this case reduces the person to a non-person. This is a situation where the gender of the person is being questioned, and in the second part of the sentance “he is petite” the implication is that this is something unusual for a man to be. If a car has tinted windows and you’re not sure of the gender of the driver I don’t think it would be appropriate to say, “if it is a woman, she’s certainly doing a good job of parallel parking” either.
I don’t think you’re cissplaining, but I do think you’re sort of overlooking how problematic that comment was. It’s possible to be on the same side, to mean no harm, and still say something cissexist (I’ve done this myself) or racist or whatever. This really doesn’t seem like a “finicky grammer point” to me. It’s like if someone is talking about a “nude” colored dress and someone calls them out on it, and you were to explain that oh well I think you’re misunderstanding because I’ve worked in the fashion industry and that’s what the color is called. It’s sort of missing the point.
Also, gahhh Nova that’s so horrible. I really hope the wife and kid can get help to get out of that situation.
I don’t think he’d be the type to go on a shooting spree or anything and I highly doubt he hits his wife or kid. He has the personalty of a flatulant asshole, but I didn’t get the violent or seriously unhinged impression. More than anything, he seemed like a passive aggressive whiner. Like, he never complained about me to my face and he easily could have. He bitched about me to his wife and I overheard it.
If she leaves him, he’ll just go to an MGTOW site and bitch about it endlessly. If he leaves her, it’ll be for a younger Asian woman from a different Asian country, known for having more docile women. What I don’t doubt is that they will divorce. After what I heard, it’s really just a matter of time.
Yeah, even if he’s not physically violent he sounds really emotionally abusive and not fun to live with at all. And you never know, people like that can escalate to physical abuse if their partner tries to leave, so just crossing my fingers for them. What a douchebag.
Also, don’t discount emotional and verbal abuse. It wears the victim down until s/he has no self-esteem and destroys a person’s dignity. It’s meant to keep that person from even considering the fact that s/he has the right to leave. They start believing what the abuser tells them, about how they’re garbage and how no one else would ever have them. A person doesn’t have to get hit to be destroyed.
I’ve been raped a couple of times. It’s not that bad.
Thats so horrible Nova. I really hope they can get away from him. No one should have to go through that.
re the “it’s” problem.
It is perhaps not the best grammatical construct, but I don’t think there is a better one. The question is the pronomial referent.
Let’s try a recasting.
“If it is a man” in that photo is the expansion.
It is referring to the situation.
Substituting a gender based referent gets wierd.
“If a man is a man, he’s certainly…” changes it, a lot.
“If a woman is a man he’s…” makes no sense.
Which is because, grammatically the “It” isn’t referring to the person, but the situation. A few more words would help, “If it’s true that it is a man, he’s certainly…” would avoid the confusion of the statement of the verb, “to be (is) in that contraction, as opposed to it being a substitutive pronoun for a non-person subject.
Thanks, Pecunium – you explained that WAY better than I was able to at 2 AM.
Snowy: I agree that the “he’s petite” part was problematic – the intent was obviously to defend what the poster in question thought was a woman being attacked for not being “girly” enough, but “she looks like a woman, so she is one” isn’t really a good defense. I’m not disagreeing that that bit warranted calling out in the same way “nude” to mean “the color of white people’s skin” does. I’m just defending the “it,” since in this particular case it really isn’t a de-gendering “it.”
There’s a better solution than “It”. Use any of the gender neutral pronouns, or if you hate those ‘because they’re ugly’, use “He or She” until their preferred pronouns are known. I kind of hate the idea of using “He or she” because it enforces the binary, but it’s the only one I can see for people who refuse to use the neuters and it’s still better than it. But really, use the neuters.
@Snowy If at any point I said “it” while trying to point out that the person is a he, I’m sorry. 🙁 I tried not to- I’m just horrific at grammar.
Amused:
Humans and chickens also have a common ancestor. Bawk!
Mags:
I don’t think he really is standing by the Koss study. He comes out and says it’s inaccurate.
Can we agree that in this specific instance the usage wasn’t intended as degendering, but that someone who did intend to be degendering would had done the same thing?
I think americanlink was unwarrantedly piled on; if I’d been faster my reply would merely have been:
Are you guessing from the person’s appearance or do you have a source?
Same thing CassandraSays seems to have been going for, but without assuming malevolence on americanlink’s part.
But now I’m just tone trolling. I’ll get out of this area of the discussion for the time being, I think…
Oh no! I don’t remember you doing that, besides, even if you had I don’t think it would have been so side eye inducing in the same way the other comment was because it was pretty obvious that you were just trying to correct a mistake in the description of the photo and not trying to like, be the gender police.
Anyway, I haven’t seen you around before so welcome to the blog! Or if you’ve been around longer than me then greetings new person and I need to read the comments here more :]
One could always say “If the person in that photo is a man …” More wordy, but more specific and less prone to misreading, maybe?
Hershele, it wasn’t americanlink that made the comment I had a problem with it was vacuumslayer in response to americanlink. So you would have to ask vacuumslayer about that if you want to know for sure. I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt on this, but yeah, like I said before, being a slight guy with delicate features myself the gender policing that seemed to be going on really bothered me. How difficult was it to just go look at the original photo on slutwalknyc.com and just read the damn description, which is what I did, before you start claiming that you “know” what gender the person is? Even if it wasn’t intended to hurt anyone, intent is not magic.
BlackHumor:
Do you have a link? That sounds AWESOME.
This is very true I’m sorry if I came off as downplaying the emotional abuse and seeming to say that physical abuse is the only “real” kind/kind you need to be worried about.
Nova: Ugh, ugh, ugh. I hope she and her son can get out safely. 🙁
Jumbo and Molly: If boobs make someone a girl I’m FUCKED.
Oh, no problem at all. I just got on my soapbox there and got a little too lecture-y. It’s clear from Nova’s description that the child is already suffering some trauma by living in this household.