Most of the coverage of the Costa Concordia disaster at the moment seems to be focusing on the Italian cruise ship’s captain and his douchey behavior, which involved not only running the ship aground but also abandoning ship prestissimo while passengers remained trapped on board.
MRAs, by contrast, are using the tragedy as an excuse to rail against the notion of “women and children first” and, of course, to make jokes about women drowning.
Now, the Titanic aside, “women and children first” isn’t now, and hasn’t ever really been, the standard way to evacuate those on a sinking ship, though many in the public — including some of those who were on board the Costa Concordia – seem to believe that it is. (See here for more details on how evacuations are typically handled these days; generally only those with mobility problems are given special treatment.)
In the case of this particular evacuation, some on board apparently tried to enforce an informal “women and children” policy, but many men weren’t willing to wait.
What’s got some MRAs in a snit is that some people, in the media and online, are calling these dudes cowards. In The Daily Mail, a right-wing British tabloid, A N Wilson wrote:
[I]n our day, with the advent of feminism and the professional woman, chivalry and manners are considered stuffy and old-fashioned.
As the father of three daughters, I do not, with a single fibre of my being, wish to go back to a time when women could not have the vote or get a university degree. Nor do I, surrounded by extremely strong-charactered and intelligent women in my family and among my friends, feel tempted to regard women as the frail sex.
But the fact remains that there is a longing among most men to protect women and children, and chivalry is simply a manifestation of that longing.
And whatever transpires about the reason for the Costa Concordia disaster, the disappearance of a chivalric code is a sorry reflection on society today.
This is not what you’d call a feminist argument; it’s a traditionalist argument, published in a tabloid rag that’s generally quite hostile to feminism.
Nonetheless, some MRAs are using the Costa Concordia disaster as an opportunity to deliver a big “told you so!” to the … imaginary feminists who live in their head.
Over on The Spearhead, where one familiar commenter actually described Wilson’s Daily Mail article as “feminist,” guest poster Lyn87 wrote:
The MRM is getting more vocal, and a lot of guys are now saying, “You wanted equality. This is what it looks like.” And they are saying it aloud and in public. Even a few women chimed in, saying that men have no obligation to die for women if women want equality. (Somehow I suspect there wasn’t much, “I am woman, hear me roar, watch me drown” on the Costa Concordia itself, but hey, it’s a start.)
MRAs: Always up-to-the-minute with their pop culture references!
This post was helpfully illustrated with a stock photo of a woman drowning.
Commenters got in their digs as well.
Keyster riffed on Lyn87’s incredibly au courant Helen Reddy reference:
I am woman hear me…blurp….rah…gurgle…raha…ffftt…orr…roar…gurgle…help me…somebody…fffft…please…blurp…help…help me please!
Aharon told both ladies and fish what’s what:
I eat fish. Fish don’t eat me. My life is too precious to sacrifice it so some spoiled bitch can have a pussy pass into the life boats.
Anti Idiocy got all hypothetical-cruise-ship tough guy on us:
Anyone who attempts to keep me on a sinking ship because of the genitals with which I was born is attempting to murder me. I have the right to respond accordingly.
And Thomas Tell-truth kicked chivalry – not to mention basic human decency — to the ocean floor:
Equality means that when the ship is going down and you are a woman, you had better get out of my way or you are going to drown with my footprints on your back.
Apparently Thomas Tell-truth is actually George Costanza:
Jeb, meanwhile, offered a more scientific rationalization for being a complete douchenozzle:
As far as I’ve heard, the one and only sport in which women naturally out-do men is endurance swimming. Women are also more bouyant, and as survivalists will explain, women float easiest on their backs (making it easy to breathe while expending minimal energy) whereas men float easiest in “the dead man’s float” (ie. face down, head in the water) and must expend more energy to stay alive. Furthermore, women have more body-fat than men which insulates them better against aquatic dangers such as hypothermia.
Given all these factors it is quite rational for men to pick women up by the seat of their pants and toss them overboard to make way for men and children to safely be rowed ashore on the lifeboats.
It’s all about doing the right thing and saving lives, after all.
MRA humor is very sophisticated indeed.
EDITED TO ADD: The Spearhead has put up a followup post, once again taking aim at imaginary “lifeboat feminists,” though the only person the post cites lamenting the end of “women and children” is Rich Lowry from the National Review (not a feminist publication).
MRAL:
For someone fond of boasting what a gargantuan IQ you have, you don’t half come out with some brain-numbingly stupid shit.
And the problem with your posts now is that I no longer know how to read them. You’ve pretty much reverted to your pre-confession persona, but since you confessed that this was deliberate trolling for effect, does that mean that you’re trolling now? Or were you lying to us during the big heart-to-heart?
Not that I really care overmuch, as you’ve picked up Brandon’s discarded crown as the whiniest and most tediously narcissistic poster here. And if you don’t enjoy posting here, if even the merest instance of someone looking at you the wrong way sends you into a howling rage… what exactly do you get out of it?
Oh, and what everyone else said: your behavior, specifically the way it swings so violently between raging abuse and whining self-pity and back again, is classically abusive. The fact that you’re the only person who doesn’t recognize this speaks not so much volumes as encyclopedias.
that fancy hot-chocolate place in Harvard Square.
Ooh, I love that place – and now I’m craving adorable ganache-filled chocolate penguins and mice.
Quoting burgundy’s eminently reasonable (and infinitely patient) comment as MRAL seems to have completely ignored it.
“The lack of noise re. the “Glass Cellar”, or the men who make up all the shittiest, most dangerous jobs.”
This is about class, not gender. You’re also leaving out one of the most dangerous jobs of all, statistically speaking – prostitution. Which is heavily female dominated.*
* Notice that unlike MRAL I’m not making sweeping generalizations in order to support my point. Sex work of all kinds is female dominated, but there are men involved, and it’s a dangerous line of work for them too.
* Burgundy
A wonderful explanation of the realities of patriarchy.
MRAs will ignore it, because it “FTSU” and makes their sad little “movement” redundant.
Hilariously, MRAs should be amongst the first to endorse this but instead recoil and scream “feminazi” at the word patriarchy.
What a bunch of losers.
Actually any radfems that are hostile to men are of the mindset ‘men can hurt eachother I can’t stop it but leave women and children out of it’ it’s cynical of course but I don’t blame them.
Incidentally, the most hilarous thing about that Spearhead write-up is that one of the commenters (I think AZ?) refers to the Daily Mail’s article as “feminist”.
The Daily Mail writers wouldn’t know what feminism was if it crawled up their butts, and the regular commenters might as well be MRAs.
The notion that the Daily Mail is feminist is one of the funniest things I’ve heard this year.
Mind you, I suspect the writers know perfectly well what feminism is, and I sincerely believe that more than a few of them are well aware of what absolute hooey they write. But it’s an exceptionally well-paid gig as far as journalism goes, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there were quite a few Faustian bargains being struck.
I couldn’t write for them under my real name, though – I was once hired as a freelancer to ghost-write a piece on behalf of someone else, and I felt soiled even then.
You don’t need to. The notion that shitty, dangerous jobs are exclusively a male preserve is so self-evidently ludicrous that it could only be put forward by someone with absolutely no critical thinking skills who’s glugged the MRA Kool-Aid as eagerly as a baby searches for its mother’s nipple.
Or a troll, of course.
Honestly, I think too much exposure to MRA ideas combined with all the trolling has broken his brain. He may have just intended to troll to start with, but words are powerful, and if you repeat them often enough sometimes you start believing them even if they are ludicrous.
In this respect his comment about Jacques Futrelle is especially revealing.
I don’t imagine for one millisecond he paused to think “Hang on a minute: this isn’t just a real person but the ancestor of someone posting here – is it really a good idea to shoehorn his death into an ideological point?”, but I certainly would have done, and suspect I’m far from alone.
Aw, I missed all the fun =(
I think the group “people who wouldn’t stop and realize that they were doing something appalling” pretty much consists of MRAL, NWO, and Meller. Even Arks would have enough sense to be quiet in this case.
So what was the argument? If we wanted equality that means men push women and children out of the way to get to the lifeboats first? Doesn’t sound very equal. Sounds like douchebaggery.
Joanna, that pretty much sums it up. anything bad a man does is the fault of women/feminism, which is what the spearheaders have been screaming for quite some time.
Dalrock has made many postings saying that the religious Right is feminist. These guys see feminists everywhere.
@ no more mister nice guy
If you take an MRA’s considered stance that anyone who isn’t an MRA is a feminist and then juxtapose this stance with the fact that virtually nobody has heard of the MRM (and those who have roundly reject their mad views), then suddenly the MRA dogma of (anti-feminist) newspapers actually being “feminist” makes perfect sense.
@ David Futrelle
Here’s an idea… How about running a competition to see who can guess, to the nearest MRA, just how few turn up to the “Sink Misandry” event that Elam’s ramshackle bunch of divorcees are putting on?
I’d bet 36.
What could the prizes be?
Right, all those men just jumped out of the way to allow women and children and the elderly to take the first seats so as to protect the weaker swimmers and keep as many families together as poss-
Oh wait, according to every God damn article out there about this stupid chivalry thing, most of the men were shoving those women, chlidren and elderly aside in order to take the places. Well, isn’t that so chivalrous of them?
Also, ever seen the Titantic or read anything about it? Sure, more women than men survived, but who got first dibs? The Upper Class, it didn’t matter if you were male or female on the Titanic it you had cash you got a seat.
You should read the book: “Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers”?
In one section of the book the author spoke to an FAA investigator who is charged with the responsibility of picking through the remains of airline crash victims. One thing they mention is that male survivors almost always outnumber females. The reason being?: Men will literally trample over anyone and everyone to get the fuck off that plane in the event of an emergency.
Lastly, drowning jokes? Real classy when reporting on a disaster where people have died.
Happy – Thirty-six?!?! I guess four.
When is that happening? I guess 7 and that they’ll call it a success.
12, but most of them will be random people who saw the 5 actual attendees shouting and wandered over to see what they were making such a fuss about. They will leave as soon as they realize that there is no cake.
It’s happening on 12/04/12 at Washington.
I wish I was closer. I would go along just to have a look at these curious individuals.
I wonder how it feels to be less popular than the Westboro Baptist Church…
I thought everybody knew that by now…
I guess 3 and if I win I want my prize to be never having to listen to My Heart Will Go On ever again.