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.
If only Samantha and your unnamed speaker had been allowed to take respectable jobs, they wouldn’t have to badger their husbands.
But I guess you can’t see far enough in front of your nose to realize that not oppressing women is the solution to exactly what you’re complaining about.
@Holly Pervocracy
Yip-yip-yippie.
But if women “cared” like they say. And are all about equality why are there any gendered institutions at all?
Shouldn’t there just be a DV shelter? Single parent support? A Scholarship?
If feminism was about equality, that’s what there’d be.
NWO: You want to know why women didn’t fight? Because they would get their asses turfed out if they were found (in the US civil war, and yes, several women did fight in disguise and DIE for their countries). Because they would get burned at the stake, or raped by their own men. Because they couldn’t leave their families for extended periods when the men were off fighting. And some women defied all that and still fought, but they were very rare and lived in fear of being caught.
Shouldn’t there just be a DV shelter? Single parent support? A Scholarship?
Um… yeah. The latter two things exist. In abundance.
Unisex DV shelters don’t exist because of the fear that abusive partners would check themselves in; however, a number DV shelters will house abused men in motel rooms, not just turn them away.
Seriously, NWO, you might want to educate yourself on some ACTUAL history before you go spouting off to people who study it. Just a thought…
I actually agree with NWO (holy shit y’all) that in a perfect world where gender equality had been achieved, women’s scholarships and the like would be unnecessary.
However, we are not actually in that perfect world right now.
@Moewicus
” If only Samantha and your unnamed speaker had been allowed to take respectable jobs, they wouldn’t have to badger their husbands.”
If only women had the entrepenurial spirit to do that on their own back in the ancient days. No one helped individual men, they did it on their own back then. As oppoessed to Big Daddy’s loving help these days.
If women are equal in ability with men, they always were. Men could never have stopped women from doing anything ever in all of history, all things being equal.
NWO: Riiight, because men didn’t need women to stay at home and take care of the house and the KIDS she risked her life to push out while he went and worked. They wouldn’t make it near impossible for women to work outside the home, with laws and social constrictions and every fucking religion out there telling women that all they could do was take care of the house and kids.
@KathleenB
“Seriously, NWO, you might want to educate yourself on some ACTUAL history before you go spouting off to people who study it. Just a thought…”
I know my history very well. Do you? I have pre-1900s history books and quite a few volume XI and pre volume XI brittianica’s?
You’d be surprised how much modern history books deviate from what eyewitness writing has recorded in history.
an excerpt from one of the links I posted which you obviously didn’t read being the ignoramus that you are:
“On August 5, 1943, these two efforts — WAFS and WFTD — merged to become the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), with Cochran as director. More than 25,000 women applied — with requirements including a pilot’s license and many hours experience. The first class graduated on December 17, 1943. The women had to pay their own way to the training program in Texas. A total of 1830 were accepted into training and 1074 women graduated from WASP training during its existence, plus 28 WAFS. The women were trained “the Army way” and their graduation rate was similar to that for male military pilots.”
wow, 25,000. That’s a lot of ladies not eating bon bons. No special requirements either or help from “Big Daddy Guvmin!”
Hahaha, NWO thinks that history books which are older are more accurate, because they’re closer to history, y’all.
I have the Book of Learnin’ open for editing right now and I guess I have another one to add.
NWO: Bully for you. Have you actually read them, or just used your Awesome Manly Mental Powers to divine their contents?
Yeah, I’m sure your average shit shoveling farmer in the Bronze age had a whole lot of entrepreneurial spirit.
Men as a whole just wandered around in the wild, founding businesses and only interacting with the female communes in order to breed, which was how the women captured them and made them do all that warring.
If men are superior in ability to women, then how is it women are net oppressors, according to you? Women never could have suppressed man’s entrepreneurial spirit. Stick to a single argument, numbnuts.
How shall we break it to NWO that a lot of the ancient historians lied through their fucking teeth?
NWO, do you just look at the pretty engravings, or do you comprehend any of what you “read?” I’m guessing the former.
Do you know what zero-sum means? It’s an open book quiz, feel free to wiki it up, you might learn.
@KathleenB
“NWO: Riiight, because men didn’t need women to stay at home and take care of the house and the KIDS she risked her life to push out while he went and worked.”
I suppose women didn’t need men to perform those dangerous jobs where HE risked his life to support their children as well. They both carried a cross, therefore no oppression took place.
I can play the oppression olympics all day.
How about this. She risked her life during childbirth, several times in her entire life. While HE risked his life every fucking day in a dangerous job, right up until the time he died in that job.
Ya still wanna play?
Ah… so NWO doesn’t know what a “zero-sum” game/equation equals.
NWO, in your world, do men work in offices, or all they all miners and milk machine techs? Not every man has a dangerous job.
Shorter NWO:
Men did everything all on their own, always!
[response]
Oh yeah! Well women needed men too! So there!
I’m leaving.
@hellkell
“Do you know what zero-sum means? It’s an open book quiz, feel free to wiki it up, you might learn.”
Oh reheheheaallly now? Then why do feminists always say, “equality isn’t a zero sum game.”
Amirite? Amirite? Amirite? Amirite?
NWO: Perhaps you need me to spell this out: I studied history. A lot of history. I continue to study history, though not in an academic setting. I have done historic records research and worked with the original records. I have designed museum exhibits and helped install them. I am an historic recreator and am conversant in many period fighting techniques.
So, if you were given a name and told that they lived in your county in the 19th century, find out as much as you can about them, would you have any clue where to start? Do you know how to treat old paper to ensure it will not be unduly damaged by handling? Do you know the difference between primary and secondary source?
NWO, for the love of god, as the sort-of-resident-lurking-libertarian-friend Ami invited, let me ask you to please stop acting like women are these insatiable, nation bankrupting, naturally statist creatures grabbing and grasping at the government tit. Or daddy hand, Or nanny state. Or whatever the metaphor is this morning.
We couldn’t even get the damn ERA passed. What tiny sliver of the State’s resources are really devoted to women? Poor people? Pretty much any basic social welfare net? Bueller? Oh, hell, you made me say it, the 99%? You’re actually making me approvingly quote DWORKIN:
There is not a feminist alive who could possibly look to the male legal system for real protection from the systemized sadism of men. Women fight to reform male law, in the areas of rape and battery for instance, because something is better than nothing. In general, we fight to force the law to recognize us as the victims of the crimes committed against us, but the results so far have been paltry and pathetic.
*I FEEL DIRTY*
Feminists don’t use the state because of some Womanly Need To Have Big Govmint. Feminists use the state because it’s what avenue we have. And no, it’s not so broad as you think. And yeah, most women, and most feminists are Statists. But you know what? Most PEOPLE are statists.
You seem to have some form of post-pond-life intelligence SOMEWHERE in your skull, or at least some message repeating “State Bad!” – Which, yeah, you’re getting SOMEWHERE.
Let’s just concentrate on that, and your damn conviction that anybody who’s a have-not is doing nothing but voting themselves free pie. What do the best and brightest and most clever people feeding at the Republican and other big-time Statist trough tell somebody who’s got the “bad state!” message? They don’t tell them “state good!” They tell them not to look for a moment at the many ways the State creates poverty and class stratification as we know it, and to look at the tiny bandaids they pass out to people if they scream loud enough as rack and ruin, and the cause of our empires decline.
There’s nobody administering the beatings, it’s the people asking for some padding on the sticks who are the problem. Jesus Christ on a Pogo stick, this is basic stuff.
You’re a patsy, NWO, and if there’s an Illuminati out there, it’s laughing all the way to the bank while you preach to us about fiscal responsibility.
You know who was and is out there forming health collectives, co-operatives, journalism collectives, shelters, without a penny from the State? Feminists. What we couldn’t “vote” ourselves for in a smorgasbord of government suckling, we tried and are trying to build. Now shut up and get out of the way.
How many times has MRAL left in the past week?
NWO, you’re starting to sound more exciteable than DKM. Do calm down, dear. Have a nice glass of warm milk.
NWO: Not every single man worked in a mine or was in an army. To claim that a clerk risked his life every day to provide for his family is bullshit, and you know it.