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, honey, the lesson here is HAVE ENOUGH LIFEBOATS FOR EVERYONE. It’s not difficult. If you don’t have enough lifeboats for everyone, children and primary caregivers first, with one person who knows how to operate the lifeboat per boat.
I do think that male disposability (specifically, the disposability of young men, poor men, and men of color in order to defend the rights of hegemonically masculine men) is a thing? But it’s definitely overplayed in the MRA movement.
If I were in a lifeboat-type situation I’d probably offer to give up my seat for someone else. I don’t want to live through the guilt of all those people dying while I lived.
AntZ: Your pro-MRM argument is that they want women to be aborted with chainsaws? Goodness. I’d hate to see your argument against it.
Somehow I doubt those aboard, including the men and boys, would much agree. I get the impression (correct me if I’m wrong) that you’re happy that they had to go through what they did, because it brought attention to something that makes you feel bad. So, their suffering helps… you.
Bleh. MRAL, your being ridiculous. What happened on the Titanic? Is not relevant anymore. Furthermore, it stems from a male enforced chivalry that based around women being less competent. Comparing that to hate organization where white men lynched black men for funsies is barbaric.
Let me repeat this, because it’s important. Men being socially expected to take on more risks to protect women is not the same as active and willful genocide. It’s just not.
(Though for the record, I don’t think it’s right either. I’m just talking about scale, here.)
Their beef with Laura Wood isn’t because they don’t want us to return to a time when women had no skills, voting rights, property rights, etc., they just don’t want the “white man’s burden” portion of those times.
It’s really frustrating to hear oppression of women–things like treating them as equivalent to children–reframed as proof of the evil of women. Most of the talk about “male disposability” is women being blamed for not doing things men wouldn’t ALLOW us to do. Argh.
Look here, them rules about women and kids going first is right on, because if not then in EMEGENCIES:
-Men would push the women out of the way to make it to the boat.
-Men would trample women and kids to make it to the boat.
-Women wouldn’t be strong enough to fight with a man who did a last minute cut in line.
-Men wouldn’t give women a chance even if some women made it to the rescue boat firstly and fairly.
-Women are weaker and they wouldn’t be able to compete with most of the men who are mostly stronger and bigger.
That’s why it’s mandatory that the physically weaker humans go first. If not, children and women would all perish because the tough guys most likely would fend well in emergencies by dominating the rescue boats and life suits just because they are tougher and can.
And finally, without women the community would die off so you need more women around than men around. It aint hard to get.
@Amused
You are as misinformed as you are bigoted and ignorant.
“Of course, on the Titanic, although many steerage passengers survived, the likelihood of survival was still much more strongly linked to class than to gender — so the gist of what you said is correct. Although female survivors outnumbered male ones within each class of passengers, first”
Here are the numbers, bigot:
First Class Women: 97%
First Class Children: 86%
First Class Men: 34%
First Class Total: 63%
Second Class Women: 86%
Second Class Children: 100%
Second Class Men: 8%
Second Class Total: 43%
Third Class Women: 49%
Third Class Children: 31%
Third Class Men: 13%
Third Class Total: 25%
http://www.ithaca.edu/staff/jhenderson/titanic.html
Sorry you were lied to in college feminist-indoctrination camp. By FAR the most important predictor of survival on the Titanic was gender. First class men survived less frequently than third class women. And women were given priority over children.
Do you care to revise your ignorant and bigoted statement, nos that you have the facts:
“… the likelihood of survival was still much more strongly linked to class than to gender …”
According to the spearhead http://www.the-spearhead.com/2011/04/11/when-titanic-sank-99-years-ago-this-week-people-were-more-honest-about-gender-roles-than-they-are-today/
324 women survived and 325 men survived the Titanic. Equality. The percentage of women vs men is much higher because there were many more men on board. Sort of the way people like to use black/white stats as if there are the same number of blacks and whites in the US. Pisses me off. If you use actual numbers you can sometimes get some perspective.
One thing about not being able to travel as much as men also means being less likely to die on a ship.
Not that the spearhead is the greatest source of things.
A greater absolute number of men survived the Titanic. Anyway. No one here wants men to be last in line. All we want is equal treatment. MRAs never seem to get the concept of “maybe we could oppress NOBODY next time!”
A single female pilot makes an emergency landing because of faintness and Lawrence Auster and the rest of the manly-men-doing-manly-things club call for women to be banned from all positions of leadership. It is telling that “traditionalists” and MRAs are not overcome with embarrassment over the extreme cowardice and lack of professionalism of the male captain and crew. Whither the leadership and objectivity Auster claims as exclusive to his gender? One might expect male passengers to be unconcerned with fellow travelers, but the crew members were responsible for the safe exit of ALL passengers, not just the women.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/021462.html
Auster uses a few complaints about the lack of a “women and children first policy” to avoid confronting the incompetence of the entire male crew. He’d never let a woman get away with a failure on this level without impugning the competence of her entire gender.
That crew was shoving its way past both men and women to get to the lifeboats. Just what about this sorry episode puts patriarchy in a good light?
Sarah, I’m not talking about men who individually decide to give their spot to women or anyone else. That’s fine, in fact it’s admirable and selfless. But when other men and women (often, it’s women, and I find that even worse) attempt to impose their own shit on other men- well, it’s not genocide, obviously, but it’s a real problem. And when it’s actually forced cooperation, that’s attempted (and possibly successful) second-degree murder.
Also, ozy, I agree that there should be enough lifeboats for everyone, but sometimes there’s not, or they can’t be launched properly (I guess the Corcordia started to keel real fast, or something?). And even if there are enough boats, and everything works out, and all men are saved, forcing said men to wait is still a manifestation of male disposability.
Bobbyjo: So let’s take a female Olympic athlete and a male couch potato. Who’s stronger? Gender is a really bad tool to use to generalize physical strength. If you want to rate people by physical strength using immediately visible traits, it’d be better to say “children and the elderly first.”
Xtra, that makes no sense. If women were not given preferential treatment, proportionally, they would have perished in the same numbers. They clearly did not. They were allowed to go first.
In my opinion, the Corcordia is a goddamn miracle of God.
Um, wow. No. Please turn off the computer and go talk to some real people, people you can’t pretend are NPCs in the video game of your life.
Hey, everyone, remember when Zarat used to pretend he didn’t hate women, and tried to convince us that his fantasies of VR girlfriends and women being segregated to one side of the country would be good for women, too? When did he give up on that and just go for the open misogyny? And what happened to all the hilarious sci-fi stuff? It’s like he’s not even trying anymore.
@Pam
“Their beef with Laura Wood isn’t because they don’t want us to return to a time when women had no skills, voting rights, property rights, etc., they just don’t want the “white man’s burden” portion of those times.”
This is what MRAs mean about the little “squirrel cage” in the feminist head.
http://manboobz.com/2012/01/17/rationalization-hamsters-or-hamster-rationalizations/
You just CANT accept what is right in-front of you, so you come up with … what?
Pam, you are either the dumbest person on Earth, or you don’t actually believe what you just said. There simply has not been enough TIME for the squirrel cage in your head to spin enough to come up with THAT.
I guess Bobbyjo thinks that all passengers should take a strength test before boarding. Then we can order them individually, first to last. Sorry Dolph.
There’s a point about the “women and children first” courtesy that hasn’t been addressed: in the past, the sheer bulk of women’s attire was for all intents and purposes a dead weight if women entered the water fully dressed. Men’s clothing did not hinder their efforts to stay afloat and swim anywhere near the degree than did women’s stays, heavy skirts, and layers of petticoats. Not to mention that men were more likely to be skilled swimmers than were women.
This was tragically illustrated in a sinking of a steamboat and barge on the Mississippi River during a severe storm in the late 1800s. Most of the people went overboard; most of the survivors were men. Children simply weren’t strong enough to manage the waves; most of the women swiftly sank from the weight of their heavy, water-soaked garments. This was commented on by the townsfolk who managed to find and rescue the comparatively few survivors, and who had to find the bodies afterward. So the chivalric concept was based to some degree on simple practicalities.
I meant the behavior of the passengers was optimal, not that the boat actually sunk. That sucks.
What if the crew of the Concordia had “informally” tried to enforce a blacks-first or whites-first policy? I wonder how people would have reacted.
Hit a nerve, did I, AZ? Hmmmm, let’s take a look again at the quotation that you provided for what Wood thinks about the sinking of the Costa Concordia:
“Men must take care of women precisely to prevent women from feeling the need to take care of themselves;…”
Seems that I’m not the one who cannot accept what is right in front of me.
Mral, I will say again, the number of women survived 324, the number of men 325. It is not possible for the same number of women to die even if all of them did because there were way fewer women on the ship. It would seem that is what you would have wanted to happen. It would seem to me allowing man/woman in equal numbers would be the way to go if there are not enough boats and since the numbers are damn near equal it turned out.
MRAL, did you mean to say, “the Corcordia is a goddamn miracle of God.”? Is this how you feel about this event?
Xtra, we are talking in PERCENTS, not numbers. If there were, say, 50 men and 10 women clustered around a boat, and the 10 women were allowed to go first, that is preferential treatment, and that’s basically what happened.
The fact that there were many more men than women on the ship, and yet the raw survival rates were the same, is evidence of heavy preferential treatment, not evidence against it. I don’t mean to be rude here, but are you dumb?
MRAL, what do think should have happened?