I swear, sometimes I wonder if the entire Men’s Rights Movement is an elaborate hoax. Our old friend Fidelbogen weighs in today with a typically pompous post on the cutting-edge issue of women’s suffrage, posted with the almost-too-good-to-be-true headline: Women Couldn’t Vote.That Was “Oppression?” If I didn’t know better, I’d be tempted to dismiss it as half-baked satire – except that FB is serious, deadly serious. (And deadly dull, too, most of the time, but I’ll try to keep this snappy.)
Fidelbogen’s thesis:
It annoys me to hear the feminists say that women were “oppressed” because they didn’t have the voting franchise in olden days. Excuse me. . . oppressed? I would take exception to the semantics in this case, for is not a bit clear to me that what was happening ought to be called by such a heinous name.
While most people are either for or against women having the right to vote – though I’ve never met any of the latter group outside of MRA blogs – FB bravely declares himself “a third way thinker upon this subject.”
Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen, because Fidelbogen is going to get all philosophical on us:
I would submit that women’s historical lack of voting rights was neither a good thing nor a bad thing. Rather, it was a morally indifferent state of affairs, based on a cultural consensus that was shared by men and women alike in the past.
Hey, it was the olden days. People wore silly hats and watched silent movies and no one had iPhones.
Our ancestors lived in a very, very different world than we do, and their cultural norms were very, very different from ours, yet undoubtedly befitting to their world — a world mysterious and unknown to us nowadays. Who are we to judge?
I mean, really, how dare we offer any sort of moral judgment of anything that happened in the past. The Holocaust? Stalin’s purges? Hey, it was the mid-twentieth century – people were just into that shit back then.
Well, FB doesn’t mention either Hitler or Stalin, but he definitely considers women’s former lack of voting rights to be just one of those things that, hey, people were into back then:
[W]as it really, inherently, such a horrible thing after all, that women could not vote? … Why should it even matter? Did the average woman in those days honestly feel that voting was “all that”? Seriously. . . who are we to judge the men and women of past times for their very different way of life which we can no longer entirely fathom?
And besides, most men had been denied the vote earlier, so even if it matters and it totally doesn’t, what’s the big deal if the dudes in charge decided to deny the vote to the ladies for a while longer? As FB puts it:
[W]as it really such an unspeakable crime that the female population couldn’t always go to the polls during that comparatively trifling span of years?
Or is that entire concept nothing but feminist historiography, meant to wring pathos out of history for present-day political purposes by the device of retrojection? That would certainly conform to standard feminist tricknology, wouldn’t it?
Seriously. Those feminologicalnists are totally retrojecting the fuck out of the pastological period using their standard sneakyfulogicalnistic tricknology.
And besides, even though we’re not supposed to judge the past, and even thought that whole denying-the-ladies-the-vote thing was totally a “morally indifferent thing which ought to concern us very little,” FB thinks that maybe it was actually sort of, you know, cool.
I believe a case might be constructed that it was a positive good in the context of those times.
FB decides to leave that case unmade, and returns to the whole “who the fuck cares” argument.
Once upon a time, women didn’t have the voting franchise because societal norms found nothing amiss about such an arrangement. Then times changed, norms changed, and women were admitted to the franchise. That’s all. And women were never, at any point along that general story-line, “oppressed.”
Besides, the whole idea of “rights” is, well, just like, an opinion, man.
Furthermore, women were never at any time deprived of any rights. You see, women’s “right” to vote simply did not exist in the first place — or not during the period when the so-called deprivation occurred. I mean that “rights” are only a figment. Only a mentation. Only a notion. Only a construct. Rights do not exist in their own right. They are not some mystical pure essence which hangs in the air all by itself — they must be conjured into existence by a strictly human will-to-power, and fixed by law or custom.
And so, if the dudes of the world denied the ladies these “rights,” well, uh, it was “morally indifferent” yet also probably good for some reason.
In conclusion, shut your pie holes, ladies:
So in conclusion, I wish that second and third-wave feminists would shut the hell up with their dishonest, self-laudatory rhetoric about “the vote”. They need to quit tooting on that rusty old horn. It is getting really, really old.
Well, unless they’re this lady. She’s actually pretty good at tooting a horn.
NWO is either desperately googling or he’s waiting until I stop posting and he thinks I’m gone. XD
Yeah, he’ll pop back several hours later and act like he didn’t see your comment. Or maybe he’ll change the subject. Or “blah blah skippy Rockefellers and Rothchilds built the DV shelters!!”
Those are my guesses, anyway.
Simon: But you’re right that I don’t like women, I admit that. I don’t like humans in general if that makes it better.
No, because (based on the evidence) you like female humans less.
gjdj : Depending on the definition, the United States has an arguable claim to be the world’s oldest surviving democracy.
Depending on the defnintions is palming a lot of cards.
Athens, as a democracy, lasted something on the order of 350 years (and after some flirtations with autocracy [thanks Socrates/Plato] when back to it)
Iceland, as a democracy, is going on 1,000.
So the US, as a democracy, isn’t anything like the oldest, much less the oldest extant.
So you are either pathetically ignorant or using, “depending on the definition” to stack the deck and make specious arguments seem reasonable.
I guess there is an argument to be made that that is the case. I don’t agree because I’ve never heard anyone say as a legitimate argument, for example women shouldn’t be soldiers because they are too valuable as baby-making machines
Don’t get out much, do you?
Take a look at Figure 1 in this paper. For the 18-64 year olds, many more health dollars are spent on women than men. Now you can probably point to a few diseases where men have better outcomes, and some female-targeting ailments that are not handled well. But I think you’d be seeing the trees and ignoring the forest.
Care to take a guess at what percentage of that money is spent on pregnancy/fertility issues (see above re value as baby making machines).
And if it’s a black woman, she gets charged with vehicular homicide
http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/woman-charged-with-vehicular-homocide-after-jay-walking/question-2009941/
Also people are only upset about female crime victims if she is the perfect victim. (Darksidecat has covered this but it bears saying again, TRUTH!) She has to be the right race, dressed the right way, not engaging in any activity that is frowned upon(drinking excessively, to opinionated), or involved with the wrong man. Fits the property argument more. Also, not having my contributions valued does not in any way make me feel valued as a person. How exactly does one value someone as a person without valuing what they do for you anyway?
It’s true. Rapists also get a lot of media sympathy. See: NYT coverage of the Cleveland gang rape, the Roman Polanski petition, any number of athletes, professional (Ben Roethlisberger, Kobe Bryant) or not (the Glen Ridge case) … BEE
Even black men that are rapists…. http://www.whataboutourdaughters.com/waod/2011/10/17/allstate-and-tom-joyner-indoctrinating-young-black-children.html
OH and boycott Allstate insurance for supporting rapists! Info on that is in the link.
Even black men that are rapists…. http://www.whataboutourdaughters.com/waod/2011/10/17/allstate-and-tom-joyner-indoctrinating-young-black-children.html
OH and boycott Allstate insurance for supporting rapists! Info on that is in the link.
LyssatakeaBow: Johann Lamont is a feminist, and she led the refusal to support the proposition. Which men’s activists minimize female victims in their efforts to help male victims? If you follow the links that Marc included in his comment, you would see how feminists treat and regard male victims. Unfortunately, most feminists do not support efforts to create centers and shelters for men. If they did, we would not be having this discussion.
thebionicmommy: Which men’s activists deny that women are victims of domestic violence or blame women for their abuse? I am not a men’s rights activist, however, nothing in what I have read from them remotely suggests that they do not care about female victims. You can focus on any issue you want to, but you cannot to care about all victims and then chastise people who try to help male victims. That is the height of hypocrisy, and it only hurts the victims you say you care about.
random6x7: To my knowledge, NOW does not support any efforts to address men’s issues. In the UK, Women’s Aid initially refused to help male victims until the government mandated that women’s groups must provide equal access. The UK’s national group of rape centers boots out any center that provides services to male victims. All of these are feminist-run organizations. I am not a men’s rights activist, but I assume you are still a feminist despite their open discrimination and denial of male victimization, right?
Bee: The Court only acknowledged that shelters provide services. It never specified whether all the services given to women were available to men. The irony of Amperand’s misandrist rant is that feminists did the exact same thing 40 years ago. Funny how when feminists do it, it is not wrong.
darksidecat: According the Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women, STOP can fund support services for men, but “funding may only be directed to those entities whose primary focus is combating violence against women.” That would imply that requests for funding for services specifically for male victims would be denied. Dr. Richard Gelles testified something similar last year in front of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. It appears men’s rights activists have a valid compliant.
Quackers: How do you know the money you give to women’s shelters does not harm men in the process? That said, I understand your suspicion. When I see feminist sentiment, I get suspicious. A bunch of random comments do not prove that men’s groups or men’s activists push to eliminate women’s shelters, and criticizing feminism does not mean they hate female victims.I agree with Blumhorst’s efforts. There is no valid reason for publicly funded shelters to discriminate against men. The men’s movement does not want to hurt women. The problem is that feminists do not think violence against males is a serious issue, and any attempt by people to acknowledge male victimization or challenge preconceived notions about the prevalence of male victimization pisses feminists off, hence their negative response.
The valid reason is to prevent abusers from getting access to their victims. Which is one reason why having an all male shelter makes equal sense TS, and I know you have had this explained to you before.
And the men’s rights movement certainly does want to hurt women.
PFKAE: You should treat him as if he is intelligent. I’m sure he knows what you say is true, and is pretending he doesn’t, because he has an ideology which requires him to disagree with you.
Toysoldier said,
Keep reading then, because MRA’s blame do blame female victims of domestic violence, and think women bring it on themselves by nagging and witholding sex. How do you explain the comments at the Spearhead, AVfM, and In Mala Fide where bloggers and commenters give advice like evilwhitemaleempire gives to battered wives? In response to a woman’s statement that she didn’t have enough money to escape an abusive husband he said,
That little “gem” of advice got 18 upvotes and only two downvotes from the Spearhead readers, who are part of the MRM. When do feminists ever say things like this about male victims? If they did, other feminists would call them out on it.
How do you explain the blogpost “How to slap your way to Slavery” where an MRA explains that women make men hit them when they whine, nag, and try to change men. It’s the classic abuser’s logic of “I can’t help beating her, because she made me do it”. It shifts the blame from the abuser to the victim.
Stop calling me a hypocrite, because I do not chastise those who try to help male victims, because I already told you that you have a noble cause if you wish to build shelters for battered husbands. I don’t chastise that. I hope you are successful, but I can’t drop everything to join you. I am busy giving time, money, and energy to Habitat for Humanity here in Joplin, because they are building houses for people left homeless by the tornado. I wish I could help with every problem in our society, but I am only one person so I have to set my own priorities.
Ah, toysoldier, the old “don’t read your own links” thing:
It is also worth noting that STOP is not a grant that applies to domestic abuse shelters, but rather a grant that applies to training of criminal justice personnel:
http://www.ovw.usdoj.gov/ovwgrantprograms.htm#17
Like I said, look this shit up before you start blathering on about it.
Aww but then he would have nothing to blather on about!
Really! Men fought and lobbied for funding for DV shelters for male DV victims, and then feminists insisted that women should get access to those shelters, without doing any kind of lobbying, fundraising, promotion, or fighting themselves? That would be ironic.
Toysoldier, considering your prior misrepresentations, I’d really like some cites for what you’re saying. NOW doesn’t provide services for female abuse victims, either, since they’re mainly concerned about affecting political change. So, no, unless you find NOW actively campaigning against male victims, they’re blameless. They are specifically for women, and work on a lot of issues related to that. It’d be nice if they had time to help men out too, since that would imply a better world anyway, but you can’t expect activist groups to support whatever your cause is. The other two examples, the ones in the UK, seriously need cites. Why wouldn’t Women’s Aid provide services for men? Were they cackling evilly while petting their white cats, or were they underfunded and -staffed and trying to help women, which was their original cause, and just didn’t have the resources to help men. If the latter’s the case, then fucking donate to them or something.
Also, yeah, I’m still a feminist, even with freakin’ Sarah Palin claiming she’s a feminist these days. Why? Because despite the mistakes and the misappropriation of the movement, we’ve done a lot of good. Women are no longer chattel, prevented from owning our own property or attending good schools. If I’m raped or abused, there are services out there to help me, even if the police won’t. If my boss harasses me, there are ways to deal with it. It’s not perfect, and even with what resources there are now, plenty of people are still victimized and can’t get help, but it’s miles beyond what it once was. Okay, you’re not an MRA, but you really can’t see the difference between what it’s like now and what it was like fifty or a hundred years ago? And you can’t see the difference between feminists, who’ve started shelters and raised awareness and money, and MRAs, who just whine?
Toysoldier, if you are not an MRA, why do you spend so much time apologizing for the MRM? I also want you to do this for us, since you make so many demands yourself: can you provide an example of an MRA that pays even nominal lip service to female victims of domestic violence? I’m not asking for you to even provide an example of an MRA that advocates for or donates to women’s shelters. I just want you to provide an example of an self identified MRA that says ze cares about female victims and doesn’t blame them for the abuse they suffer. You are holding feminists up to much higher standards than MRA’s. Of course I don’t blame you since feminism is a real social justice movement, and the MRM is not.
PosterformerlyknownasElizabeth: Can you present any evidence showing the rate in which male abusers pretend to be victims in order to gain access to women’s shelters and continue to abuse their partners?
thebionicmommy: So one person’s online comment represents an entire movement? Since most feminists do not challenge sexist comments against males, should I assume feminists do not care about male victims? No, I will not stop calling you on the hypocrisy of claiming to support male victims while opposing mens’ activicts’ efforts to help male victims. There is a difference between saying something is not your focus and saying you will not support something because a group you hate raises awareness about the problem. I object to feminist attacks on the men’s movement because the attacks are on the issues the movement focuses on, and those attacks have a direct affect on my and other male victim advocates’ ability to help male victims. I am not holding feminists to a higher standard so much as I am holding them to their word.
darksidecat: Ah, the old “selectively read the link” thing. The complaint is that VAWA does not approve services specifically for male victims. Your first quote has nothing to do with that. Your second quote states “… and the development and improvement of advocacy and services in cases involving violent crimes against women”. The article also stated, “… STOP funds should be used for projects that serve or focus on adult and teen women who are victims of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, or stalking.” In short, STOP grants apply to women’s shelters. To quote you, look this shit up before you start blathering on about it.
Bee: I am pretty sure that feminists demanded access to social services and various programs that existed 40 years which feminists had nothing to do with creating or maintaining. So yes, it is ironic that feminists cry foul when a group does exactly what feminists did.
random6x7: I never said NOW provided services to victims. I stated that the organization does not support efforts to address men’s issues, and it does not. Women’s Aid’s had a rather pathetic excuse for denying men support, but it has nothing on the UKs Rape Crisis network kicking out a group because the group opened its services to men. The only difference I see between men’s activists and feminists is that feminists created services that discriminate against male victims. Otherwise, both groups sound exactly the same to the point that if you switched the genders in their articles you would mistake one group for the other.
Since most feminists do not challenge sexist comments against males
Oh? o:
Why do they need to quantify it to you TS? They have a concern (which is a legitimate one) of abusers trying to get access to those they abuse-to protect the victims they are going to do things like tell men to go elsewhere.
Which is why we tell you to go work on opening male centered shelters (which by the way the operators could, and maybe even should, prohibit women from being admitted) so that way men have their needs taken care of.
PosterformerlyknownasElizabeth: They need to quantify it because if male abusers rarely or never pretend to be victims in order to get access to their victims, the concern that granting access to male victims will allow in male abusers is unjustified. While I agree that male and female victims deserve their own spaces to address their needs, I disagree people must deny certain victims access to services in order to provide that.
The line you quoted does not say this at all, and that is not what these programs funds are earmarked for. Go read the links. I am not sure it will help, because you seem to be able to mistranslate everything you read into wildly different meanings than the actual words said, but my earlier links already covered it.
Toysoldier, I see you couldn’t provide me any examples of MRA’s that care about female victims of domestic violence. When feminists say they do care about battered men and believe them about their abuse, though, you say that’s not enough. You want feminists to build men’s shelters for them. What have MRA’s done except protest and sue shelters for women and children? Oh yeah, they also spend plenty of time online blaming battered women for their abuse. You think it’s fine for MRA’s to belittle and blame female victims, and there is the real hypocrisy.
When have feminists opposed men’s efforts to build shelters for battered men? When have feminists said battered men deserve to be beaten? You make a lot of accusations, and now you need to back them up with evidence. You keep claiming that feminists prevent MRA’s from doing helping male victims, but the real problem is that the MRA’s don’t do much to help male victims in the real world. How could feminists be hampering MRA efforts if MRA’s don’t do anything?
Did you realize that abusers are master manipulators? Abusers lie, because they don’t want other people to know what they do, or they try to twist things around to blame their victims for their actions. They also don’t want their victim to leave, and when the partner does leave, it can turn deadly. It would be dangerous to make shelters be coed just to appease MRA’s.
Oh no! Not the “Men built elevators, so women don’t get to ride on them” argument! Although in this case, I suppose it’s more like, “Men built country clubs, so women don’t get to join them.”
I know you’re not so smart, but perhaps you can see why feminists suing for women to have the right to pay membership fees isn’t quite the same as MRAs suing for women’s DV shelters to divide the meager funds they’ve fought for with them.
And, to be clear, male victims of DV clearly need support and assistance. My only argument is that if MRA activism starts and ends with trying to limit resources that women have access to, then it starts looking a lot more like punishment than actual activism.
@bionicmommy, I actually support “coed” (gender neutral) shelters. Of course, that still would not mean 50-50 usage, because on this side of reality men abuse women more often than women abuse men (though the latter does occur), but it would apply to access on an individual level. First of all, a gendered shelter means that many queer people’s abusive partner can enter easily. Secondly, the issue of not allowing the abuser to be a resident of the same shelter could be easily dealt with by putting the first one to contact the shelter in the shelter and providing the second filer a hotel voucher system. The latter system also allows queer victims assurances that their abusers will not be allowed in the same shelter as them. While the is reason to have system in place to keep abusers out of the same shelter as their victims, gender specific policies are not the best way to do this. They end up reducing safety and access of some victims, and are not the mostly neatly tailored way to address the needs of others.
darksidecat: Actually, it does state that the grants apply to women’s shelters, hence the “STOP funds should be used for projects that serve… women who are victims of domestic violence”. STOP grants even apply to incarcerated victims of domestic violence. Go read the link.
thebionicmommy: You argued that men’s activists do not care about female victims, so you must prove they do not. If you can only come up with a random comment, that is not proof most or all men’s activists do not support female victims. I do not support sexual discrimination, so I see no problem with men’s groups suing publicly funded women’s shelters that discriminate against male victims. I linked to an example of feminists opposing efforts to fund services for male victims in my prior comments. If you choose to ignore the links, that is your decision. I am well aware of the things abusers do to control their victims, but that has nothing to do with the feminist claim that providing access to male victims would let abusers in.
Bee: So if I understand you correctly, when feminists protest women being denied access to a social club, that is valid, yet when men’s activists protest male victims in immediate need of help being denied access to potentially life-saving support services, that is sexist? Perhaps it is just me, but I think protecting abuse victims is far more important than allowing women to pay membership fees to some crappy club. Under state and federal law, sex-based discrimination is illegal, especially for anything publicly funded. Trying to justify sexism with the “there’s not enough money for men” is a truly despicable, cruel, apologist argument.