So I linked the other day to Kate Beaton’s awesome comic about the obstreperous velocipedrix (inspired by the cartoon I used to illustrate this post). But since then I’ve had bicycle-riding-ladies on the brain and I thought it was worth another post. Besides, it gives me an excuse to use the cartoon above, which Beaton linked to in her Hark, A Vagrant post.
The notion that bicycle- (or velocipede-) riding women are inherently hilarious (or inherently evil) may seem a tad quaint now, but back in the late 19thcentury, when bicycling really took off, these cartoons were every-fucking-where.
And what was so unsettling – even scary – about the specter of women on bicycles? As historian Clare S. Simpson explains:
The independent mobility of cyclists raised genuine alarm for their physical, if not moral, safety; simply put, the bicycle could easily take women to unsavoury places where they might be endangered physically (for example, by being attacked), or morally (for example, by being seduced into imprudent conduct with intemperate company). . . . Drawing on previous knowledge of the kinds of women who deliberately made themselves conspicuous in public, that is, prostitutes, there would be a strong tendency to conclude that cycling women were far from respectable: not exactly prostitutes, perhaps, but possibly women of loose morals or with an undeveloped sense of propriety.
Now why does this sound oh-so-familiar? Because it is so scarily similar to many of the arguments I run across amongst Men’s Rightsers and Manospherians today. Change a few words here and there, and we could be talking about the Slutwalks, and the ludicrously overblown “criticism” of them we’ve seen from MRAs and misogynists generally, who insist again and again that women must be “held responsible” for their actions.
What actions? Going outside dressed in something more revealing than a nun’s habit. Going outside at night. Not reacting with gratitude when dudes patronizingly lecture them on the perils of being a woman in public. It’s the same old shit: the “independent mobility” of women is pissing off a lot of men even today.
That’s why so many MRAs got so angry about the case of Lara Logan, the CBS news correspondent who was sexually assaulted while covering the protests in Egypt last year — many in the MRA camp weren’t so much angry at those who assaulted Logan as they were at Logan herself, for daring to cover political unrest in another country … while being a woman.
That’s why it always strikes me as a little odd that MRAs routinely describe their movement, such as it is, as a new one. It’s not. Theirs is a reactive movement, and a reactionary one – and not just because some of them literally think women should be denied the right to vote. It’s because so much of what they obsess about is the same old shit that pops up whenever women have stepped up and challenged their traditional roles.
Of course, these guys aren’t simply angry at women doing traditionally masculine things – from going where they like, on bikes or foot, to covering world politics. They’re worried that newly “masculinized” women will turn men into a bunch of emasculated pussies.
While poking around to find more cartoons to illustrate this post with, I happened across several that show just how persistent this worry is. Take a look. The first couple are from the turn-of-the-twentieth century; the third is from the 1970s. Notice a theme here?
This same old theme is handled a bit more subtly today, as this bit of clip art shows. Note the pink apron, in case you didn’t get the point: a man washing dishes is an emasculated wussy.
Of course, in the Manosphere, things are not quite so subtle. It’s telling that amongst MRAs and other modern misogynists the insult of choice for feminist men is “mangina.”
Here’s how one little manifesto defines the term. (I’ve edited out a lot; it’s pretty fucking repetitive, though students of misogynist psychology may wish to read the whole thing here.)
Manginas are pseudo-men who fixate their lives on getting a sniff of the female genitalia (figure of speech) at the expensive of others and by betraying real men.
Manginas see women as an ultimate being, places them on a huge pedestal, mind focuses only on sex or the satisfaction of women all the while not giving two bits a damn about his fellow man. …
A mangina is not a man, and we wouldn’t dare honor them by gracing them with the title. …
A Mangina seeks continuous approval from females thereby becoming their servant.
Manginas support women’s issues which are against his fellow men. Someone who espouses feminism but is really being suckered into a form of chivalry in which women’s interests take precedence over men’s. Unaware that they are merely “useful idiots”, doing what women want in the vain/hope of getting laid. When his usefulness is over she tosses him out with the rest of the rubbish. …
A Mangina is a self-depreciating man who subconsciously hates himself and blindly believes women are superior to him. He has been raised to think masculinity is inherently wrong – perhaps even a genetic/evolutionary/social flaw – and must be corrected by embracing his “feminine side” to the point of losing the very qualities that make him male.
Women acting like men; men acting like women. These were the bugbears of the velocipedrix-hating, women’s-suffrage-opposing assholes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; they were the bugbears of the protoypical woman’s-lib-hating chauvinist pigs of the seventies; and they remain the bugbears of an astonishingly large number of those in the Men’s Rights movement today.
And that’s why it, too, will end as a joke, remembered as a quaint holdover from earlier times rather than the progressive civil rights movement it sometimes pretends to be.
In the meantime: Kate Beaton, fucking hilarious, right?
NOTE: I found a whole bunch of awesomely retrograde cartoons from bygone days while looking for the illustrations for this post. I’ll be posting some of my favorites soon.
Hmmm… “Off Scale”. That was never really intended to happen.
Thank you Mr Slave, you’ve broken my Kookometer. 🙁
I’d expect nothing less from the Troll of the Year.
I believe you people broke David K Meller.
Normally he’d be knee deep in a thread like this but unfortunately he placed second in the troll of the year. He could be knee deep in telling us why women should not ride bicycles and how is dolls do not, but instead we are left with no DKM and only feminism can be blamed for this great void.
Kavette: Meller has cycles. I can’t tell if his other obsessions start to ride him, and he has to go to places like Stormfront to relieve himself, or that he is overwhelmed by the respect he is given here and needs to rest and recollect himself before he is again bathed in our respect.
I’m loving this thead–and vaguely remember that reading a lot of novels written in the 1920s in both US and UK some of this attitude still remained.
But here’s another datapoint: novel reading (i.e. staying home and reading books) was also considered horribly dangerous for women and children especially in the 19th century:
http://www.merrycoz.org/voices/NOVELS.HTM
So reading books quietly at home is dangerous! Riding bicycles outside is dangerous.
As we have noted many times before, there is NOTHING a woman can CHOOSE to do that is acceptable!
Speaking of Meller, I just tried him on the Kookometer as well. He broke the scale, too, although he came in about 30 points below NWO. We have such special trolls here.
Here is that Diane Atkinson book mentioned previously.
http://www.amazon.com/Funny-Girls-Cartooning-Diane-Atkinson/dp/0140266992
I did the test and my boy DKM got a 203. Not bad I say.
@Leni, and she’s SUPER helpful and encouraging to learners, like me. All around an awesome person.
@Pecunium, she’s used to a 650 and only dropped down to a 250 for a year now. Probably still used to the greater weight.
Since Ami isn’t here…
Why is that?
How do you know what most other cultures find unpleasant?
How many other cultures have you immersed yourself in?
For how long?
What is the usual statistical break down in most cultures regarding the unpleasantness of women riding bicycles?
What makes bicycles masculine?
Are bicycles designed for people wearing skirts also masculine?
What are “male clothing”[sic]?
Shirts? Socks? Shoes? Trilbys? Belts?
When does a female become a transsexual? When they wear one “male” clothings? Two…? Four?
What psychologically masculates a man?
When does a woman riding a bicycle emasculate them?
When they have a bell on the bicycle? …a basket? …when they wear a helmet?
When fathers rise up their daughters, do they use hydraulics? …Pneumatics? …mechanical risers?
What is the acceptable age to masculine a daughter?
When should a father stop feminizing their daughter and begin masculining them?
How are fathers that teach their daughters to ride bicycles saying one thing and doing the opposite?
To my mind, there are two distinct issues in play here:
1. A man’s perception of his own emasculation
2. The genuineness of a man’s emasculation
In my experience, most feminists will freely acknowledge that perceived emasculation exists, even that it is pervasive among many men. But most feminists will usually attribute a man’s perceived emasculation to his perceived loss of power and privilege. They will then go on to agree that in feminism’s wake, men have indeed lost some gender-based powers and privileges, and being feminists they will probably consider this transfer of power from men to women be a good thing in the name of equality. They will then proscribe a solution to the man who perceives himself as emasculated. He should identify his perception of emasculation with an irrational fear of losing his unjust privileges, embrace the loss of his privileges, and get over himself. His emasculation was never genuine; he just “felt” emasculated because he was not enjoying being rightfully taken down a notch or two. In my experience, that’s the feminist view of emasculation; emasculation is just a misconception of justice manifesting itself. The misconception of emasculation is born out of male power and privilege, says the feminist, and the sooner that you as a man learn to embrace the justice of your own loss of power and privilege, the sooner you’ll grow as a human being.
But what gets left unaddressed amidst the feminist rhetoric is whether the man in question genuinely was emasculated. I wonder if feminists even consider it possible for a man to be genuinely emasculated, with this being considered a negative thing. If a man can genuinely be emasculated, then I ask where is the empathy? This blog is devoted to mocking misogyny, but I suspect that the author believes that it necessarily indicates misogyny when a man feels emasculated. But does David actually acknowledge that the perception of one’s emasculation may also be born out of the genuineness of one’s emasculation? Does he consider genuine emasculation to be even possible? And if so, more importantly, does he care? And if so, then what is his advice for a man who has been genuinely emasculated? I fear that even genuine emasculation — not just perceived loss of power and privilege — is something that the feminist would encourage men to embrace as a positive thing. Masculinity? Who needs it! says the feminist.
In the Mangina Manifesto from the antimisandry site, they describe the “unenlightened mangina” as
.
It’s truly horrifying to know that there are so many men that act respectfully and kind to women. What can we do to deal with this great epidemic of courtesy before it destroys society?
/sarcasm
I used to ride a bike with a trailer attached for my kids to ride in. It was a lot like the picture of “The New Nursegirl” except it was sporty and enclosed rather than being a basket with an umbrella. The tornado tore it all up, and there are probably pieces of it in a creek miles away from here. I need to buy a new one, because we really enjoyed those bike rides.
Explore Nature’s blog is an awesome repository of information. For example, the ostrich is the largest bird in the world, it can’t fly.
*Insert “The More You Know” Theme Here*
No, that might be too costly, especially if they have more than one daughter. I think they must feed them yeast, then cover them with a damp towel and set them in a warm room.
Here’s my take on MRAL.
http://www.hyperdeath.co.uk/kook/analyse.php?name=MRAL&data=mcaafkfglmdfagap
But look to our very own NWO, who has said that creating eunuchs was done at the instigation of women; for no other reason than it amused them. They didn’t do it themselves though… they are too, “genteel” for that. They got men to do it.
Long before Manboobz, I became familiar with this process of reasoning through the rants of spectacularly nutball cartoonist Dave Sim. After a while, all his explanations for how the world works fell into the same pattern:
Did a woman do something bad/stupid/wrong? It’s proof that women suck.
Did a man do something good/smart/right? It’s proof that men are awesome.
Did a woman do something good/smart/right? It’s because she has a “male brain” and is secretly a man, which is proof that men are awesome.
Did a man do something bad/stupid/wrong? This gets tricky, and depends on whether the man in question is a girly man or a macho man. If he’s the former, he’s been feminized and is secretly a woman, which is proof that women suck. If it’s the latter, he was manipulated by evil women hiding behind the scenes, which is proof that women suck.
I approve of this thread being all about cartoons.
Dear Dave Futile:
How do you manage to write such mediocre material and get approximately a dozen women to post comments at one-minute intervals for hours on end? 9:26am, 9:27am. 9:28am, etc., etc., etc. That’s amazing!
[img]http://www.clicksmilies.com/s1106/alles_moegliche/mixed-smiley-023.gif[/img]
@shaenon:
Holy shit, Dave Sim?
Didn’t he also have this “theory” that women are a “void”, and that men are “light”? And that female voids consume male lights?
It’s a shame that he is such a misogynist wackjob, really. I think he was quite talented.
It’s always disappointing when a talented artist turns out to be a raging bigoted asshole.
Hyperdeath, that’s an awesome kookmeter you’ve got there. Was it intentional for kooks like NWOslave to be able to go off the scale, though?
@Pam…. the fact that I considered you idea worthy of attempting proves I should never be a parent.
I much prefer when brilliant artists just turn out to be crackpots like Neil Adams. Or lovably eccentric like Alan Moore.
When they go the way of Sims or Frank Miller or Scott Adams or Orson Scott Card it ruins any enjoyment of their work I had.
Alan Moore believe torture is useful/redemptive. That’s more than eccentric, and far from lovable.
Notice how the servant girl and washerwoman both have sort of a monkey face. Presumably they’re Irish.
Misogynists never tire of making fun of the fact that ladies have fleshy bits. It’s terribly amusing when women move around because those bits wobble! Har har har!
“It’s terribly amusing when women move around because those bits wobble! Har har har!”
But I had been told than hetero males likes when ladies’ bits woble!
Pecunium and Noadi, do you have an opinion on how to treat the work of someone you loathe while loving said work? I can’t reconcile the fact that I hate, for example, Orson Scott card while loving all the books I’ve read by him.
@Xanthe
Thanks.
Converting the score to a straight percentage is a bit tricky, as even most crazy people will only get a small fraction of the maximum possible score. Therefore, to stretch the scale out, and to allow moderately crazy people to achieve respectable scores, a grading curve was used. The first 30 points each add 2% to the final score; the next 20 points each add 1%; all subsequent points add 0.5%. A 100% score is reached at 90 points. Beyond this, the curve fails.
When the Kookometer was written, I assumed that this failure mode wasn’t particularly important. Surely no real person could be that deranged? Needless to say, I had yet to encounter an MRA.
Was this from V for Vendetta or was this an interview later (regarding water boarding)?