All hail mikesteane, brave Reddit warrior and champion of the rights of men!
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The Burny Mike Show
We Hunted The MammothBucking the Backlash
We Hunted The MammothAll hail mikesteane, brave Reddit warrior and champion of the rights of men!
FIRST!
And there is a video of women’s motocross that proves that women don’t belong on crotch rockets. I would love just a compilation of women failing videos.
This comment made me sigh deeply:
“The ridiculous thing is when standards are lowered just to allow women into positions they never should have been in the first place, and people are hurt as a result. My wife actually found an article several years back about a female soldier in the same kind of situation, riding turret gunner in Iraq. She could barely see over the top of the turret but the command wanted to “give her a chance to get out” so they put her up. Ambush happened and tiny girl had neither the visibility to target nor the strength to turn the turret to engage, and American soldiers were killed because they had no cover fire.”
…and then MRAs complain that it’s sexist to only conscript men.
Women are 3.7% of all firefighters in the US. If that’s “political correctness,” shit, it sure ain’t much of it.
I was an EMT for two years and I worked closely with firefighters, and you know what? Because it’s so damn hard for women to get hired (they have to not just pass the same tests as the men, but fight against the bro-dude station culture at every turn), the women who do get hired are Tough. As. Nails. They’re goddamn made of wiry muscle and have to constantly stand up to both members of the public and people on “their side” questioning how there can possibly be a lady fireman. However, “tough as nails” does not ever mean “never makes mistakes,” because, you know, human.
Even as an EMT, which is a slightly more woman-friendly job, the gender shit was pretty constant. I was always running into firefighters who thought I couldn’t lift the stretcher, even though obviously I lifted the stretcher 20 times a day, and it made it extra hard to ask for help when I did need it. “Holly, are you sure you can carry this? Maybe a man should get that,” is a barbed question, and if I ever said yes (say, if the thing was 200 pounds and I seriously did need a second person), it got held against me as “see, women really can’t handle this job!”
I shared a quarters with all dudes and had to share a bunkroom with a man (who was a super nice guy, but still, that’s a potentially sketchy situation stemming from the fact that there weren’t enough women to get our own bunkroom). I had a guy I was supposed to train refuse to listen to me because he wouldn’t take orders from no damn woman. The company had a policy against putting two women together on a truck “for safety reasons” which were poorly articulated. There were so few women it was rarely a possibility anyway.
I want to be clear: Except for the gender shit, I liked that job. I was pretty decent at it. I never had any problems with my performance, never got any complaints from management or patients. I left for higher pay and safer conditions, not because I couldn’t hack it.
But when you’re a lady in a dude job, the pressure is always on. The “if you do it right 999 times, that’s because you’re an EMT… if you screw up once, that’s because you’re a woman” thing is always hanging over your head. That poor firefighter in the video… screwed up once. WHAT A WOMAN.
—
…Anyway, this is all very relevant to equal rights for men, of course.
One of our local firefighters did the ATX marathon in just under five hours in full gear. I’d say she’s pretty badass.
By the way, this is extremely comparable to all the discussions of how men can’t possibly be nurses or teachers or secretaries that happen on feminist blogs…
IN IMAGINARY LAND.
Crumb: I want to see this article, about the “female soldier who was too small/weak”, because I don’t believe it.
I’ve been in that sort of spot, and 1: it doesn’t take being all that large to manage a turret/SAW combination. 2: No one is going to put someone who can’t manage the equipment into that spot.
As a personal anecdote, one of the grenadiers in my unit in Iraq was small, about 5’2″. She weighed maybe 115. She could put a 40mm grenade in your pocket.
The launcher adds about five lbs. to the rifle, and about 30 lbs to the basic load (because it’s an extra 40 rounds of grenades, on top of the usual 210 of mixed ball/tracer) She humped it just fine. I’ll take her, any day of the week, and twice on Sundays, over some moron who thinks plumbing matters.
Because if the shit drops in the pot, she’d have dealt with it without sexist bullshit getting in the way.
@Pecinium:
It might very well be made up. But I do see a lot of MRAs say that women aren’t as strong as men(one of the videos on Elam’s Youtube channel contains some unsubstantiated bullshit about how women have less stamina than men) only to turn around and complain how women should be drafted if they want equality.
Although my problem lies in expecting some kind of consistency.
Crumbelievable – There is some consistency. The consistency is that they’re upset men work more dangerous jobs, but they don’t want this to change! They just want to be rewarded by getting sex-on-demand and free domestic labor from women. They don’t want women to take their jobs, they just want women to “compensate” them.
This also goes to a second-order sort of thing, where a guy who works as an accountant also feels entitled to sex-on-demand and free domestic labor, because men have to work dangerous jobs, dammit.
Crumb: They don’t want women to be drafted. The logic is (though I’m not sure they’ve parsed it out): Women are too weak to be soldiers/seamen/firefighters/cops/construction workers/pipefitters/ditchdiggers/welders/riveters, etc.
If women want to be “equal” they have to step up and do those jobs.
Women can’t do those jobs.
Ergo, Q.E.D., equality is not only a bad idea, but morally repugnant.
Except, of course that the syllogism fails in the first part, because women are capable of those jobs.
Ladies and gentlemen, MEN’S RIGHTS.
they just want some justice is that so wrong
just a social justice movement
Firefighter training drill gone wrong. Stuff starts happening at about 1:15.
Strangely, “firefighter bloopers” did not get me a lot of amazing videos for either gender. Most were of people during training. But manwomanmyth thought it was worthwhile to fill the gap with this:
The MRA’s want men and women to have separate spheres in life. Some fundamentalist Christians call this complementarianism. The men go out in the world, make money, and fight fires. The woman is supposed to be the subservient helpmeet at home that puts all of her time and energy into serving her husband. The existence of LGBT people is erased, because they don’t fit into the MRA fantasy. All of this is very similar to the crap taught by Quiverfull people, minus the parts where men have obligations and responsibility for their families.
The MRA’s want the laws to be written so that a man could walk away at any time with no obligations to either his wife or his children. They also want the man to have default full custody available if he desires it after a divorce. They don’t have the political influence necessary to get their way, so they are left with no choice but to whine on the Internet and call themselves Zeta (whatever the hell that means).
I actually find this triggering and angrying….I have seen plenty of youtube videos of kickass women in motercross and sports….My uncle is a fire captian and he says that the women on his team are v ery hard working and tough…btw he also says out of 350,000 or so firefighters usually the woman are around 30 or 40 thousand..
en that love an d respect women want them to suceed not post immature videos going haha men rule girls drool!
I foolishly commented on that thread. I’m sure they’ll tear me apart, but I won’t bother going back to read it.
I hadn’t thought of the usual complaint MRA’s have about making women fight on the front lines if they want equality, but after reading the comments here, I am amused. Of course when someone or a group of someones has such crazy ideas about gender it’s only natural they’d trip themselves up with their own demands and rules for how the other gender should be treated. Fight on the front lines, but not really because you’d get other people killed. I wonder how it is that they could possibly reconcile the two opposing views of women aren’t able to do manual labor jobs yet women should be doing more dangerous jobs because it’s sexist to think men should be the only ones doing them. Of course MRA’s are the only ones who think that.
And now my head hurts. Why do people like this exist? How can they go through life and not have massive headaches from all the idiotic ideas floating around in their brains?
“A woman can actually fail the physical portion of the firefighter test, and still become a firewoman, to meet female quotas.”
I don’t know about whatever goofy reality show he’s narrating, but not in the US. First of all, what quotas, 3.7% of firefighters are women, that’s a damn low quota.
(I realize that statistic is a no-win situation. If 50% were women, this would prove there were quotas. But since a small minority are women, this proves women can’t do the job! Sigh.)
And secondly, and I know this firsthand because I had friends in the ambulance company who were hired as firefighters, women have to do the exact same physical test. It’s called the Biddle test, it’s extremely demanding, there are no gender-based modifications, and an athletic woman who runs and lifts weights can compete it with a competitive time. I know women who have.
Also, I’ve broken down doors. It’s not even that hard. It’s more about technique (go for the lock side, use your foot not your shoulder, and follow through with all your weight) than about penis ownership.
“I foolishly commented on that thread. I’m sure they’ll tear me apart”
They will, without a doubt. You’d be “better off” (that is, more likely to receive upvotes for) saying something incredibly misogynistic than making a mild disagreement with them.
Yes but watch the video, Holly. That one woman couldn’t do it, therefore no woman can do it. Logic!
If the MRA’s want to prove that mice, ducks, and dogs are bad at fighting fires, though, they can use this cartoon. Is Goofy a dog, or something else?
Crumb – It was hard to tell whether her technique was bad and she wasn’t putting her weight into it, or if the guy just had an easier time because he was taller and weighed more.
Either way, it was a goofy reality-show thing, not firefighter training, and not mechanically the same as breaking down a real door (where you’re actually trying to break the latch, not the door).
It’s also ablist as hell to presume that people who can’t do hard physical labor are inferior or worth less. Of course, it isn’t true in general that women can’t do most of these jobs, or that most male dominated jobs require high physical strength (the more higher paying male dominated jobs, like “lawyer” and “doctor” don’t require hardly any physical strength).
When I was in college at the Uni. of Maine, we had a student-run (but faculty-managed lol) ambulance corps. on campus that I became involved in, which didn’t need a member to be licensed to participate, although it was to your benefit if you were.
A lot of the most dedicated, responsible and able members who were there when I was were young women, and there wasn’t even that much of a “bro-dude” culture, in Holly’s words, although there certainly was in the town professional FD. I am very proud to have worked with those ladies, who have been very successful in their field.
It’s something I still very much want to get back into, but it’s a bit of a quandary where I live in Maine, a decidedly rural area, where most of the corps. near me usually hire EMT-B’s only as drivers, and I have epilepsy =( and most of the people I talked to said they probably wouldn’t hire anyone who did not have a driver’s license. I’ve since gotten my license, but there is still a great deal of ambivalence from the people I talk to about my following that career, and the EMT class here costs over $7,000, and I really don’t want to spend (nor do I currently have that much) without being hirable.
Holly, do you have any thoughts from your experience? If so, and if you’re willing to share, I’d love to hear them.
Thanks in advance! =D
>Most failures on the job are by men
>Woman fails at job.
>Obviously women suck and aren’t capable of doing this job.
They should feed their rationalization hamsters some sunflower seeds sometime. That’s what I feed the ones who run my computer.
I am freaked out that this thought actually crossed my mind:
I have sussed out the way to reconcile competing MRA stances on the draft and women in the military: clearly, they want women to be drafted, but never allowed to fight in combat situations–so clearly (an I am indebted to DKM for this horrifying crappy addendum), the women should be drafted to provide sexual service to the military (i.e. official camp followers).
Since women in occupied areas have been forced into prostitution (‘comfort women’) before, this is horrifyingly NOT impossible.
Excuse me while I go take a shower.
2:15 – Hypocritical conservative bullshit about responsibility, when ManWomanMyth takes very little intellectual and moral responsibility for his work.
ManWomanMyth, a gameshow is not exactly the most substantial research to show what goes on among male and female firefighters. You may want to go beyond mere assertions next time and try to back them up with some real research.
It may also help for you to provide some sources as well. (Saying you have certain clips from certain television shows is not enough.)