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.
Naturally. Like brown people, women are incapable of making their own advances in philosophy and ideas.
Men get turned down for sex. That’s “oppression”?
100 years ago – mysterious and unknown. 100,000 years ago – totally got that nailed down.
I can’t help but wonder, if none of this felt oppressive back then, how the hell did any social justice movement get started? Aliens?
There are, besides men’s rights, no social justice movements, just people whining about feeling “oppressed” – which is a vague feeling of “specialness” that afflictes moderns. This “specialness” allows us to create ACTUAL Oppression With A Capital O – A vague feeling of “unspecialness” that affects men.
Well, sex is a necessity for men. Not like having a say in your own life or government, or not getting murdered for biological traits. Really, we need to consider what’s important.
I seriously thought you were kidding about the “shut your piehole” conclusion then bam! There it was.
Dang! Betcha he slept right through history class!
Seriously, not having the right to political representation is no big deal. We only FOUGHT A GODDAMN REVOLUTION OVER IT.
Indeed, the suffragettes did believe the right to vote was not only all that, but all that and a bag of potato chips. Who could forget Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s famous speech, “We just want to vote and act like we’re all that”? Seriously, though, from now on whenever I vote, I will have the extra satisfaction of annoying misogynists like Fidelbogen.
Wow, I hate winning by default, but I’m really feeling good about my IQ now.
Thanks, Fidelbogen! Your impression of the anti-Spock is great!
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/adams/filmmore/ps_ladies.html
MRAs prove again and again that showing up to history stoned is a bad idea.
I’ve found that it’s no long in vogue to say “okay women were oppressed in the past, but feminism fixed that long ago and now it’s gone too far!”, now they just go the whole length of the field and say “WOMEN WERE NEVER OPPRESSED! FEMINISM IS A CONSPIRACY TO OPPRESS MEN” >_>
Honestly, I wonder if they think anybody was ever oppressed xD Cuz it sounds like that as long as they don’t want to believe a group is oppressed, they can handwave any injustice in the past. Chinese head tax? Well, white people were poor too and didn’t have many rights either! xD
Ami – I’ve noticed that too. It’s gone from “nowadays straight white men are oppressed!” to “straight white men are the only group that has ever been oppressed!”
Some sort of clumsily attempted Overton Window shift, I guess. (Or the window has shifted, within their little group, because they’ve said “women aren’t oppressed anymore!” to each other so many times that it’s become the merely moderate viewpoint.)
And the “poor men were oppressed too” stuff makes me double sad. Doesn’t that mean you should be advocating for poor men, not for everybody to be equally oppressed?
zhinxy:
I think it’s a version of NAFALT, and the sort of anti-feminism that takes the form “the core principles of feminism are good, but feminists have moved away from them.”
simon:
Yup. Not sexist oppression, but some kind of oppression. Is that one of those supposed MRA gotcha questions that says more about MRA delusions about feminism than it does about feminists?
Without knowing anything about what you’re referring to, I’m going to guess the referendum came up after Australian women had achieved suffrage, so not oppression. A referendum on conscription might itself be oppressive, in the way referenda on marriage equality are. Gender-based conscription is clearly oppression, but again, not a lot of feminists would say otherwise.
Addressing this is, traditionally, one step away from invoking Godwin’s Law.
“And the “poor men were oppressed too” stuff makes me double sad. Doesn’t that mean you should be advocating for poor men, not for everybody to be equally oppressed?”
This confuses me as well. The fact that people were opressed along class lines doens’t make it somehow okay that people were opressed along gender lines.
It just means there was more opression going around.
It seems like in this modern age I get to use this phrase less and less, but I think this is about as appropriate a situation as any for it:
“What sophistry!”
As a female horn player I’m definitely going to keep tooting my own horn, but not an old rusty one and sadly not nearly as well as Alison Balsom. Though watching that video does motivate me to go practice.
In other news, FB needs to look up the definition of oppression and then check out some history books.
Oh the poor women were always sooo oppressed. Why so many of them seem to remember being unable to vote as if it were just yesterday. I chat extensively with women born pre-1899 about how they felt about their horrible oppression.
Did men fight wars to save their wives and children? Why yes they did.
Did women from aggressor countries cheer men to their deaths to bring them more exotic goods? Why yes they did.
Did women whose country was being attacked cheer men to save them? Why yes they did.
Did men often send the women and children away from danger zones in war to protect them? Why yes they did.
Have men always willingly done the most hazardous work to support their families? Why yes the have.
Have men died in staggering numbers in these dangerous jobs to support their families? Why yes they have.
Did mothers instruct their daughters to make sure they marry a man of means? Why yes they did.
In order to claim oppression, you have to actually be oppressed. Men as a whole, have always had it much harder in every aspect of society than women as a whole. So how can women as a whole claim oppression? If you’re going to point at a tiny handful of elite men who had it better, I can play the same strawman game. Isabella sat at the table with ferdinand and the pope when they divied up the new world. She was a woman therefore all women were oppressors of men. There. See. I played the strawwoman game.
Since in this country, all men weren’t given the right to vote until 1894/women in 1920. Was that scant 26 years in the history of the world too unbearable? I’ve never voted. What’s the point? A politicians promise is simply a promise to take my money, since the States only form of income is debt at interest. The “change” Obama promised has cost so many trillions that your grandchildren are indebted to what he’s spent. How’s that voting thing workin out for ya?
But back to your rights. Do have all you have the right to life, freedom, property and the all too important vote? That’s all she wrote. When you vote for more entitlements and privileges, did you think it was free? You keep voting yourselves more and more of everything. The well has run dry kiddies. Womens privileges are costly, the middle class is gasping it’s dying breath. The poor abound in numbers too great to concieve. You’ve done a bang up job with that vote thingy. Of course you could blame the patriarchy, thereby shifting the blame and women will remain innocent of any wrong-doing. And you can once again claim oppression.
Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Everyone should be able to vote in a democracy.
Is there one intelligent MRA in the manosphere? Seriously? Can you give me just one? All of their prose and arguments seem to be spurious, making up their own facts on everything from rape to suicide statistics, blaming feminism for their ingrown toenails, historically absurd propaganda. David, how/why do you keep reading this MRA tripe?
NWO, all I got out of your comment was “men exist and they’ve done stuff, so women weren’t oppressed.”
Also your usuals, but just refer back to previous times they were refuted and you didn’t listen because you’re in love with your own ignorance.
Yawn.
Hey NWO is back! 😀
What privileges and entitlements do women have? 😀
You say we have privileges, but you don’t say what they are o_o Presumably you also think this is true for all the other groups you don’t like right? xD Like queer ppl, etc…
What privileges and entitlements do *I* have that you believe I should not? o:
That’s an interesting alternative history you live in there, NWO.
NWO: For fuck’s sake, would you please read a fucking history book? Seriously, your total fucking ignorance is bugging the shit out of me.
@DSC that’s TRUE history DSC. NWO’s 500 years old *HE* knows xD
Actually I find story time w/ NWO hilarious xD
Can you imagine him having his own children’s TV show? :3
Children gathered around his feet as he has a guitar and sings them songs of the past…