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).
As far as percentages and raw numbers go: both sides of this argument are somewhat wrong. The correct answer is that you have to look at both, along with the surrounding circumstances.
Simple examples for both: There are 100 men and 1 woman on a boat. There is one lifeboat, which seats 10 people. 9 men and 1 woman take the lifeboat. Ergo, 9% of the men and 100% of the women survive. That’s a huge difference! That’s preferential treatment! Except that it’s not, because that supposed 91% difference actually boils down to a fraction of one person. There’s no particular reason to believe that one women was any more or less likely to end up on the boat than any other individual.
Alternatively, there are 100 men and 6 women on a boat. There is one lifeboat, which seats 10 people. Six women and four men take the lifeboat. Ergo, six women and four men live. That’s a pretty small difference! That’s not preferential treatment! Except, of course, that it very probably is, given the huge difference between percentages saved.
(Of course, as I said, you actually have to look at people as more than numbers. Perhaps the second hypothetical boat had a crew of ninety men and a passenger list of four men and six women, and all the passengers got the lifeboat. Suddenly the supposed preference for women as women disappears, in spite of the percentages.)
Which, in other words, means the situation on the Titanic was unfair with regard to gender, but probably not as unfair as it’s being painted – all of which, of course, is utterly irrelevant because the real issue with the Titanic wasn’t which people died but the fact that anyone did.
The ship sank so fast, endurance. youth, and strength were paramount
Oh, we have read the article Zarat and every time MRAs mention the Titanic to explain feminism, we will mention the Lusitania.
Proof that MRAs don’t hate women!
MRAL, by the numbers we’ve been throwing around, I could agree with you that a higher percentage of women on the Titanic than men made it.
What is deeply, deeply weird is that you took this fact from a SINGLE disaster and somehow got from it a proof that men, as a whole, were seen as “disposable” in American culture for hundreds of years. I can’t even come close to agreeing with you on that, and don’t see how you even came to that conclusion. o.o
Okay, first off, the irony is off the charts here.
Second, last I checked, nobody here is going to be affected by the Titanic (or the Lusitania, for that matter). They happened around a century ago and were singular disasters that killed the people on the boat. What’s more important is how things are conducted, in general. You can’t really complain about lifeboat treatment if lifeboat treatment actually t urns out pretty even. You can’t say “Women are favored in disasters” based on the evidence of one single disaster, as Goose was.
Any more stupid observations, or are you going to keep being your normal self?
Yes, I do happen to be smarter than that — the fact that women outsurvived men in the fit age group does not lead to the logical conclusion that women outsurvivied men in the non-fit age groups, or that women are routinely “pampered” in times of disaster. Once again: provide the breakdown by gender of all victims, or admit you are full of shit.
MRAL’s in the right about using percentages instead of totals. BlackBloc explains it well.
Where I don’t agree with MRAL is in his insistence that this has anything to do with the world we live in now. “Women and children first” is far from feminist thinking. As demonstrated earlier in this thread, most feminists really do want equal survival likelihood among equally-ablebodied adult passengers, with preference for non-ablebodied passengers (who may be less likely to survive without assistance) and children. For the good of the children, most feminists will also argue that at one caretaker per child should also get preference. Now, perhaps the majority of “caretakers” may be female, but that’s the same old tripe about “women being natural caretakers” in action that skews custody decisions as well, and–newsflash!–you’ll find most feminists railing against it. We want men to be able to realize their potential as caretakers (if they want to!) as much as we want women to not be forced into being caretakers (if they don’t want to be!). “Women and children first” is insulting to everyone.
The only people arguing that “feminism”=”men should be trampled” are the strawfeminists that those MRAs’ hamsters are hallucinating. (Also maybe some second-wave feminists from the past? Still not relevant to today!)
Many, actually.
That article is very poor. I don’t know about the study they’re writing about, but the numbers they are reporting are worthless as far as trying to figure out whether there is anything there to talk about. This shows the poor level of science reporting in this country.
The study said Males ages 16 to 35 were 7.9% more likely to live than the control group. There is no indication of the way the groups were sampled or how many samples were in each, and there is no indication of the level of statistical significance (so it’s not even clear that the *measured* 7.9% difference is an actual phenomena rather than *statistical variance*).
Without these numbers you can’t even know that Males 16 to 35 were *actually* more likely to survive than the control group. But most people don’t know much statistics. They think that the difference between the two measured survival rates is equivalent to the difference between the two *actual* survival rates. But unless you have infinite samples, the measured rate is not the actual rate. It is a value that estimates the actual rate and is *more likely* to be closer the more samples you have.
The same critique can be applied to the 10.4% survival advantage of Females 16 to 35. More damning, however, there is absolutly no mention of whether there was a statistically significant test to determine whether the survival rates of Females 16-35 was statistically significantly higher than the survival rates of Males 16-35. Just because you measured a 10.4% difference versus a 7.9% difference does NOT mean that women were more likely to survive. This can all be variance, statistical noise. You need to perform a difference of means test, and quite frankly with those numbers, from a back of the napkin estimate, I’m not sure you could get 90% statistical significance on that difference of means test, much less the golden standard of 99% (meaning that out of 100 studies you would expect one false positive, as opposed to 1 out of 10 studies).
I believe in giving preferential lifeboat places to children, hyenas, zebras, orangutans, and Bengal tigers.
Okay, Polliwog, point taken, but the percents only become misleading if we’re dealing with very small numbers. There were something like 1500 people on the Titanic, about 1100 men and 400 women. The majority of the women- and the VAST majority of second- and first-class women- survived, while a fairly small percentage of men did, in any class.
Add this to the confounding variable that the third-class passengers had a difficult time even finding the deck (if they had, more third-class women would have been saved) and it becomes even more clear that the central determinant in if you lived was whether you had a vagina.
I love that the MRAs don’t understand the real lesson of the Titanic, which is to HAVE ENOUGH LIFEBOATS FOR EVERYONE. Also, if you’re a ship captain, and it’s night, and there’s zero visibility, don’t order the ship to keep barreling ahead in an area of the ocean in which icebergs have been sighted very very recently.
As I’ve pointed out before, my great-grandfather (Jacques Futrelle the mystery writer) actually died on the Titanic. He was a rich dude and could have survived, but he refused to get on the lifeboat my great-grandmother got onto. That was his choice. (Apparently he thought there was a chance he could get off the ship in a later lifeboat.)
My conclusion from this is not CHIVALRY KILLED MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER. But THE WHITE STAR LINE KILLED MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER BECAUSE IT DIDN’T EQUIP THE TITANIC WITH ENOUGH LIFEBOATS AND OH YEAH THE CAPTAIN WAS AN IDIOT.
I’m glad ONE of my great grandparents survived, because otherwise their kids (one of them being my grandfather) would have been orphans. (The kids weren’t on the ship.)
Mr. Zarat, it has been obvious to most of us that the MRA movement has several strands blending into one another that all involve hating and/or bashing women (which they frequently and inaccurately interchange with feminists.)
PUAs want sex and to degrade those women they do manage to trick into bed. They also hate the women they cannot get into bed and frequently appear to be okay with raping women.
Father’s righters are the closest to reasonable as they mainly want to make sure men have access to their kids. But they tend to go overboard with hating women.
MGTOW tend to be about hating those icky women and claiming they will go their own way any day now. Really, honestly!
The Traditionalists want women to be stripped of all the progress of the past fifty years and forced to stay home, raise babies, cook and clean.
The Non-Traditionalists want women to be stripped of all rights and yet still able to fully support themselves and all children born without any help from a male of any age. (Father, brother, son, husband whoever.)
The MRA movement can have people who are a mix of the different types at any give time.
What they all have in common is they hate women. Period.
By the way, I went on a cruise a couple years ago and everyone will be happy to know that, not only did they have several safety drills, if something *had* happened there would have been enough lifeboats. And we weren’t divided up by gender! 😀
The Titanic is but one example of male disposability, guys.
– Conscription (Most recently, Vietnam. I understand there is no draft now, but men are still the only ones who have to register for the possibility. It sends a message).
– Seemingly endless, endless, fucking endless women’s health initiatives (many run by the government) despite the fact that women live longer.
– The lack of noise re. the “Glass Cellar”, or the men who make up all the shittiest, most dangerous jobs.
>>Even in the young, fit age group, WOMEN STILL OUT-SURVIVED MEN.
Yes. You have not, however, demonstrated that women WERE MORE LIKELY to out-survive men. Which is what you must measure to demonstrate bias.
If my name is Two-Face and I execute a person if my coin falls on head, the fact that I killed 46 women out of 100 women and 54 men out of 100 men does not demonstrate bias. The coin was fair. It was just chance that more men were killed. Pure variance.
Dude who wants to split us by a river and bone vr peeps – “The MRM:
Equal protection under the law.”
Thought I’d point this out –
Well, none of us are talking about law here at all. Women and Children first is a matter of CUSTOM.
Jacques Futrelle’s indoctrination as to his own inherent worthlessness is what killed him, if he had the option to board a boat.
I move that any movement that says “most recently, Vietnam” doesn’t have an actual case.
Unless it’s a movement *specifically about* Vietnam and/or Vietnam vets. Then it’s OK.
You’re sort of right, the real issue here is that you want to compare the *actual* odds of survival rather than the *measured* odds. With only one woman, you only have one sample for that category, so your measurement is always going to be 0% or 100%. Ergo the error bars are way too large, there is no statistical significance, and it’s impossible to demonstrate bias, whether it existed or not.
It’s true.
Not a good custom, I would say, but not a law. Much like “the privelege of getting food paid for” as the demand of vile feminists, when supposedly they want EQUALITY! Blends into the problems they have with divorce law. It’s all one ball of stuff they don’t like, but dammit, they’re rational and fair and they’re gonna make it all about Equality Under The Law.
They seem totally unsure of where the law ends and begins, but are DAMN sure it’s those inherently guvmint lovin women using it all the time against them.
The supposedly all about equality under the law mrm seems to get really wiggly when it’s not really about the law. Like, at all.
The guys at spearhead should have set a better example than to defend irrational and cowardly behavior just because they are men.
You can’t expect women to behave better if you copy the very same bad behavior that you complain about.
This is hypocrisy at it’s finest
For fuck’s sake, really? This is almost completely dead outside of dictatorships. I don’t mean “Because there’s no war now”, I mean “Because there’s never going to be a defensive war fought on the soil of a richer country until WMDs are taken out of the equation”. And we’re not willing to draft for our imperialistic wars anymore; USians won’t even pay for them.
Because most initiatives focus on men’s health *ANYWAY*, they just don’t have to announce it.
Those dangerous jobs pay better than the shitty ones that women frequently aren’t permitted into, you dimwit. I know you think Farrell is smart, but women preside over the lowest status and lowest pay jobs, men get the comparatively better paying dangerous ones, amongst the lowest income groups. Because Farrell isn’t smart, he just said stupid shit that appealed to you.
The Titanic is also an example of male recklessness, that’s encouraged by the patriarchy. The Titanic accident occurred entirely through human error, and I don’t think anyone is going to argue that traditional culture encourages men to take risks for the sake of taking risks, caution be damned. So when this kind of machismo causes a major disaster, trying to make women feel guilty for not dying in great enough numbers from it is a bit rich, you know.
But of course, when the shit really hits the fan, none of this matters, and women will be drafted regardless of what the law says. My family was from the Soviet Union. Of my four grandparents, three were drafted in World War II. The only one who wasn’t drafted was a grandfather. And the reason he escaped the draft was because he was a cop. And incidentally, it was virtually impossible for a woman to become a cop in those days. So that’s just one example of how men are favored.
You have any evidence that those initiatives are causally linked to women living longer? I would grant that the patriarchy shames men for pursuing healthy lifestyles, but that’s hardly something that women should be blamed for.
There is plenty of noise about women being discriminated against at such jobs.