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MRA: Women Couldn’t Vote.That Was “Oppression?”

Women campaigning for suffrage for no real reason, because not voting was just what women did back then.

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.

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Ami Angelwings
13 years ago

He could be! 😀

Except with his amazing logic skills, he wouldn’t even be able to get his plans halfway off the ground like Savage xD

And if he does, then Miss Martian (me 😀 ) will stop him! 😀 (I’m also sometimes Supergirl :D)

Ami Angelwings
13 years ago

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?

I thought you had no money? o_O

CassandraSays
CassandraSays
13 years ago

The really old history books are the ones in which it’s taken for granted that slavery is OK and where women hadn’t even asked for the vote yet, right? I can see why Slavey would prefer those.

Dracula
Dracula
13 years ago

Give ‘im hell, Ami. 🙂

Quackers
Quackers
13 years ago

haha exactly Ami. I have heard about radical feminists in the past trying to suppress female on male violence. It really pissed me off when I heard about it and I hate that radicals put a dent in the feminist movement. I really don’t believe most modern feminists would be against male shelters though. The problem though is that MRAs just want to shut down women’s shelters and deny the severity of male of female violence, rather than ask for donations and lobby the goverment for money to build shelters for men. It’s like saying, well if we have to suffer, so do you! that’s just not the way to go about things. If MRAs make it clear that their interest is getting support for male victims and not at the expense of female victims, I don’t see modern feminists having a problem with that.

And fuck, for a society that hates men so much, how come its nothing but slut, whore, bitch make me a sammich, wimminz is dumb comments all over the interwebz? just sayin’…

Btw Ami your Safe Space Project is awesome, I will keep it in mind if ever someone I know is in need of an agency 😀

Flib
Flib
13 years ago

Oh, look, it is the ignorant Toysoldier, returning again to regale us with false historical anecdotes and bad logic.

CassandraSays
CassandraSays
13 years ago

I think Toy Soldier needs his own version of the Book of Larnin.

Ami Angelwings
13 years ago

@Quackers thank you! 😀 Also if you know nebody who can contribute 🙂

The problem though is that MRAs just want to shut down women’s shelters and deny the severity of male of female violence, rather than ask for donations and lobby the goverment for money to build shelters for men. It’s like saying, well if we have to suffer, so do you!

That seems to be a LOT of stuff I see from some MRAs… and I’m always confused…

cuz for example, the recent thing where the McDonalds employee viciously beat 2 women with a metal bar who slapped him… and I see a lot of “YOU KNOW IF IT WAS A WOMAN SHE WOULD BE PRAISED AS A HERO AND LET GO”… and I don’t know what that means… do they mean that the woman is treated correctly, and therefore the man should be praised as a hero and released? (i.e. disproportionate violent responses should be legal) or do they think that the woman should be charged… in which case… then what’s happening w/ the man is correct, and their problem is that in a theoretical situation they believe there might be injustice… o_O

gjdj
gjdj
13 years ago

Obviously, not extending the right to vote to women was a form of oppression.

What is a fair point though is that most *men* were not allowed to vote until the mid 19th century or even the early 20th century depending on which country you lived in.

Firstly, democracy is a fairly recent development. Secondly, in most anglosphere countries you had to have a certain amount of land, a certain amount of income and have white skin to vote. Not sure of the exact number, but I think I read that over 80% of Canadian men were excluded by these rules up until around 1900. Canadian women got the vote in 1924.

I would say that all disenfranchised people were oppressed (both men and women).

Often you will hear people say that the fact that women couldn’t vote for “thousands of years” is evidence of a conspiracy of all men to keep all women down. In reality, it was a conspiracy of a small elite who kept the majority of men and women oppressed.

Why does this matter? Because people today will often argue that women should be given special privileges to make up for “centuries of oppression”. I consider this to be an invalid reason, since we are all descended from many male and many female ancestors who were oppressed.

To be honest, I’m okay with a certain amount of social engineering to level the playing field based on what is happening now. So for example, I’m okay with female-only scholarships in engineering where women are currently underrepresented. But if someone argued that female-only scholarships in psychology are acceptable because women have traditionally been oppressed, I would find that objectionable. Most psych students are female now, and as I said before I reject the traditional oppression argument.

Shaenon
13 years ago

From way back in NWO’s first missive…

I’ve never voted. What’s the point?

My day suddenly and unexpectedly got a little brighter.

Folks, I appreciate all the suggestions, but please remember that the Book of Learnin’ is strictly a compendium of FACTS. As fascinating as NWO’s opinions, speculations, and one-act plays where imaginary historical women nag their husbands for pretty dresses may be, entries for the Book should be only factual statements explaining how NWO’s home universe operates. Out of this thead, I will be adding his definition of “zero-sum game” to the Mathematics category, and possibly his description of the plot of the Iliad to Literature. This is serious scholarship, people.

Moewicus
Moewicus
13 years ago

I think the Book of Learnin’ should be prefaced by his statement: “Women were never oppressed.” To him it is the most important fact of all.

It might also be worth compiling his version of the Art of War. If ever a woman thinks she is oppressed, she is blaming all men and only men for her oppression. Therefore her evil deeds must be met with logical fallacies, because the ultimate argument is the one you learn in Kindergarten.

Quackers
Quackers
13 years ago

Ami, I will keep other people in mind who might be able to contribute 🙂

Also in terms of the McD’s incident, I think what they mean to say is that there’s a double standard. That if a woman were to beat a man with a metal pipe because he slapped her and tried to attack her, society would praise her actions as heroic. I can kinda see where they’re coming from, but the attack would still be excessive, because like in the actual McDonald’s case it goes beyond self defense. Also they compared it with battered wife defense, which is usually brought up after years of abuse, not just one isolated incident.

Bagelsan
Bagelsan
13 years ago

No one helped individual men, they did it on their own back then.

Prehistoric men hunted down some mammoths, cured the mammoth hides, made those hides into bootstraps, and then pulled themselves the fuck up with those bootstraps. Prehistoric women just spent all day lounging on cave-couches eating cave-bonbons, got fat, and thanks to their girly lack of upper body strength could not lift themselves by the bootstraps. Therefore women were too low to the ground to see the ballot, and thus naturally could not vote. History, bitches! Also evolution; that’s how evolution went too. Yes.

karak
karak
13 years ago

But…but women then DID think it was big deal! And more than that, in the Western states, a lot of them COULD and DID vote, for decades before the Constitutional Amendment. And it wasn’t a “trifling” period of time women were denied the right to representation in Western or even American history–it was CENTURIES.

Just… such a weak grasp of fucking history itself, man.

comrade svilova
comrade svilova
13 years ago

I got one of those women only awards…in a field that is 90% male. In school, vicious sexism and sexual harassment kept women quiet, kept us from participating, and kept our numbers low. Having one moment where women’s achievements were recognized was very welcome, since every other day, we were very much marginalized.

Eneya
13 years ago

Re-posting my comment here as well, because I honestly don’t believe it will be allowed.
Sorry if I crtash the Owly-smash party, but it’s everyday of the week when Owly shows his complete lack of understanding of things like hsitory, so… 🙂

P.S. I adore how the world is in only bipolar (is this the right word?) in his view… with good/bad men/women and nothing in between. Short and simple…
_______
However, my response as follows:

This post is a mess.
1. If we assume that things just are, why do you think that your complaints matter at all, since “it’s just the way it is”?

It seems like you suggest that nobody cared that women couldn’t vote, because it just was, than suddenly, out of the blue, they started to care and granted women the right to vote without any delay or fuss… and then the eevil feminists came along and said their was opression. It completely erases EIGHTY YEARS of movement and political activism and the fact that women’s rights were something FOR which feminists were fighting for and because of their actions women were granted rights and then the movement evolved to be a lot more.

It sounds horribly dishonest to devalue the work of all these people, the social changes that have happened and somehow present the past as something that has happened in an alternative reality to which we have only tangential access and knowledge of.
There are literaty hundreds of thousands of books on the topic, written by both feminists and people who opposed the idea of women getting the right to vote. There have been riots, protests… it sure as hell didn’t happen overnight. So we dfinitely can read them up, think about them, check some history books as well and think for ourselves. The past can be known and understood. Also, different times – yes, different people… not so much. Though society changes rapidly, some things haven’t changed that much and the main point is – people want to control their lives and when they can’t, they don’t like it.

Next… even we assume that you are right and whatever is the status quo is morally ambiguous and everyone is fine with iot and it’s just how it is… why do you complain in that case from specific issues concerning men? The argument being: if society says it’s right, then… you compaint doesn’t matter because the reality is what it is and that’s it.

Last, but not least… yes, rights are a fictional notion we have come up with. We are complicated beings, having compliated societies, having complicated relationships. We create such notions, so we can function and the fact that something is a construct, does not mean it has no influence for the people. Even if I don’t believe in good and evil, our soeciety does and if I kill someone for the kicks of it, I will be in jail, because what I did is perceived as wrong by our society and we have laws for it despite what I believe in, personally. When many people gather with different set of notions… a novel idea, things change.
I would like to point out almost every frigging country that has had a revolution which outs “it is what it is and that’s it” notion a mighty kick and shows how untrue it is.

Maybe you argue that construct notions can’t be positive or negative but as a person with German background… I assure you, you are gravely mistaken.

Kyrie
Kyrie
13 years ago

@gjdj “What is a fair point though is that most *men* were not allowed to vote until the mid 19th century or even the early 20th century depending on which country you lived in.”
No, that’s not a fair point. Many groups of people werer oppressed, obvioulsy. But for a same social level, same color of skin, same nationality as a man, a woman was still more opressed and had less righth. You can argue wether it was worst to be a black man or a white woman back then, but that doesn’t change the facts: sexism existed and still exist.

“In reality, it was a conspiracy of a small elite who kept the majority of men and women oppressed.”
I don’t believe it was a conspiracy. That would mean secret plans, etc It was – is – more a matter of common interest, which is the same dynamics we see in “class warfare” And we go back to the zero sum game^^, where a group is afraid that letting the other have more freedom will mean less for them.
And poor men were still considered as “owner” of their wife/daugther, so not just a probleme of the elite.

“Why does this matter? Because people today will often argue that women should be given special privileges to make up for “centuries of oppression””.
Really? First time in my life I hear such a thing. Can you quote me a few feminists, or politicians who told this kind of thing?

“But if someone argued that female-only scholarships in psychology are acceptable because women have traditionally been oppressed” Has anyone EVER said that? That’s a huge “if”.

Rutee Katreya
13 years ago

Firstly, democracy is a fairly recent development.

Athens is more than 3 millenia old; Town councils have played an important political role since the medieval period in Europe. I respect that we must keep our eyes on the big picture in examining history, but at what point is the cutoff for ‘recent’, in the context of human history if it is not 1 or even 3 millenia?

Secondly, in most anglosphere countries you had to have a certain amount of land, a certain amount of income and have white skin to vote

Nearly every woman was excluded. Yes, many men were as well. In the US it was the majority for quite some time. That is still not equivalent to the system’s being rigged against women.

Often you will hear people say that the fact that women couldn’t vote for “thousands of years” is evidence of a conspiracy of all men to keep all women down. In reality, it was a conspiracy of a small elite who kept the majority of men and women oppressed.

You’re kind of slow on the uptake, ain’tcha? You do realize that those elites played divide and conquer, and part of that was on gender, right? It wasn’t a conspiracy; conspiracies are done quietly. It was vocal, vociferous agreement amongst the overwhelming majority of men that kept the system in place.

I would say that all disenfranchised people were oppressed (both men and women)

Agreed, but to different degrees. A poor white man and a black sharecropper in Merika were both denied the vote in 1870, but that poor white man still was oppressed less.

Why does this matter? Because people today will often argue that women should be given special privileges to make up for “centuries of oppression”.

Troll haet Affirmative Action, because he’s ignorant.

I consider this to be an invalid reason, since we are all descended from many male and many female ancestors who were oppressed.

There should be steps taken to alleviate ableist discrimination, class discrimination, racial discrimination, gender discrimination, heterosexist discrimination, cissexist discrimination, etc. Some of that is going to be temporary, limited advantages of oppressed peoples. It shouldn’t just be women who are aided; that would be grossly stupid and wrong. Just because you’re an idiot who wants to keep things the same doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t see room for improvement.

But if someone argued that female-only scholarships in psychology are acceptable because women have traditionally been oppressed, I would find that objectionable.

How’s that straw man working out for ya?

Most psych students are female now, and as I said before I reject the traditional oppression argument.

http://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2011/01/cover-men.aspx
Notice that despite a strong majority of women, which almost certainly hasn’t started overnight, the overwhelming majority of full professors are men, and a small majority of associate professors are. This doesn’t mean women need help at the student level, but AFAIK they’re not *given* any.

Eneya
13 years ago

Rutee – in ancient Greece access to the “democracy” had only a few.
The “only not-slaves, not-women and non-foreigners and non-poor (that is arguiable moment, I know)” can have a say in the “deomcracy”. I see that you mean that the idea is not novel but actually using it in practice is quite recent.

It is dangerously close to “well, humanism was invented in ancient Greece”. Just… the little details are many, many people who are excluded in both situations (for ancient Greece examples) and I find it important to mention it.

For the rest though I agree with you.

nugganu
nugganu
13 years ago

It would be awesome if Futrelle could ever make a rational argument about anything.

Rutee Katreya
13 years ago

Short version: He didn’t say “Universal Suffrage” was a new idea. I’m well aware of the failings of Greece.

blitzgal
13 years ago

All of this arguing over who could vote and when is beside the point. The OP argued that disenfranchisement is NOT oppression. Period! He happened to single out women as a group, however he still left his argument about “rights” so broad that it includes anyone who can’t vote. So when NWO comes in here to argue that men who can’t vote are being oppressed, he has already rejected Fidelbogen’s central argument and has already agreed with the evil feminists who say that voting is an important right. The end. I’ll take no more questions.

Eneya
13 years ago

I don’t get the whole ‘vote is not important”. It’s truly bizare, especially combined with the Owly comments how men weren’t able not to vote as well (which is stated as a bad thing).
I think that denying people any control ofn their lives or limiting them or putting them on purpose in Cath22 situations is not right at all, yet somehow that dude is actually arguing that the fact that people were denied rights is somehow fine, because that’s changed now and doesn’t matter anymore.
I wonder… does he HONESTLY thin his ass is the center of the universe or he genuinly can’t realise that the world is not US?

CassandraSays
CassandraSays
13 years ago

Pretty much everything Slavey writes about is the very definition of First World Problems.

Well, First World Delusional Sexist Weirdo problems, but you know.

Hershele Ostropoler
13 years ago

Hellenic democracy was particularly undemocratic by our standards, though. If you focus narrowly on just the franchise nearly as many men were excluded as women (I’m not going to say that in terms of general societal attitudes men of all social strata didn’t have it far better).

But your historical point still stands. The Icelandic Alþingi allowed “all free men” to attend, according to Wikipedia, though I don’t know how much of a say they had, and again, it excludes slaves as well as women. But unlike Athens, Iceland didn’t classify large swaths of otherwise eligible people as resident aliens or otherwise NOKD — if you were a man and you weren’t a slave, you were in, which was not the case in Athenian democracy a thousand years earlier.

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