Sometimes I ask myself: what is it that I really hope to accomplish with this website, aside from entertaining myself and my readers, and exposing misogynist assholes for who they are. There’s a part of me that still hopes that someday, something I write will cause some misogynist and/or Men’s Rightser out there to develop a modicum of self-awareness, look at what they’ve been saying or doing, and say to themselves, “I’m really kind of a tool, aren’t I? Maybe I should stop.”
When the Southern Poverty Law Center report on the Men’s Rights movement came out, I hoped it might have a similar sort of effect. Or that, even if it didn’t persuade any MRAs out there that they were wrong, it might at least convince a few that they were going about things the wrong way. Nope. On the Men’s Rights subreddit, at least, it seems to have sent many of the regulars into an indignant tizzy, and they have doubled down on their peculiar brand of politics-by-whining-online.
Consider this post:
Yes, that’s right. Some Men’s Rights Redditors seem to think that the best way to convince the world that they’re not part of a hate group is to continue to celebrate a self-admitted child abuser who urged men to firebomb courthouses and police stations and kill people.
Then there’s this post, currently the top post on the subreddit:
Wow, if the Men’s Rights subreddit had anything to do with that, that would indeed be a victory. As one regular put it:
Thing is, I read r/mensrights pretty regularly, and I don’t remember any campaign there to protect the rights of fishermen in New Zealand.
Turns out that’s because the campaign, such as it was, consisted of one post some months back, which got all of 11 upvotes at the time. The current post in which r/mensrights congratulates itself for its “victory” has gotten, last I checked, 120 upvotes, more than ten times that. Simplecosine’s self-congratulatory comment in the new thread has gotten 36 upvotes. The comment in the original thread asking r/mensrightsers to send an email to the US Secretary of State’s office got … one upvote. In other words, only a handful of Men’s Rights Redditors even noticed the original post, much less sent along an email.
Reading one of the linked news articles makes clear the real reason the State Department opened an investigation: a six-month long, three-continent wide investigation by Bloomberg Businessweek revealing abuses in the industry.
The Men’s Rights subreddit: Taking Credit for Shit They Didn’t Do Since 2008.
And then there’s this post:
I’ve got nothing to say about this one — it’s basically self-refuting — except that I’m sort of bemused by the notion that the Southern Poverty Law Center is a “semi-women group.” Uh, what is that exactly? A group with some women in it? A group that doesn’t think women are all a bunch of evil bitches? The horror!
Oh, Men’s Rights movement. You’ll never change, will you?
EDITED TO ADD: And speaking of never changing, here’s how one Men’s Rights redditor responded to my comments there suggesting that maybe, just maybe, MRAs should actually denounce and distance themselves from someone calling for terrorism:
Let me just highlight that bit at the end again:
[T]he cost to the establishment to maintain the status quo in regards to divorce, custody, etc. must be made so high that it’s just no longer feasible. If that means instilling abject fear into the hearts of judges, cops and legislators by making them think their careers and/or lives could be forfeit unless they change their attitudes towards men, then so be it.
Trying to instill fear for one’s life in your opponents: that is the very definition of terrorism.
@Mags: Let me explain in short words.
Frank Baum’s Wicked Witch of the West is a made up character.
Therefore, she does not fall into the category of “feminist author.”
Although there are some intriguing ideas about how much Frank Baum was influenced by his stepmother Matilda Joslyn Gage in his creation of female characters in his made up world, Oz.
There are fictional feminists, but I was asking AVT to back up his claim of being familiar with feminist theories by you know actually giving the NAMES of actual feminists who have published articles, books, etc. (and not just on the internet).
There, do you understand now?
What about Mary Daly? Have you read any of her work?
I waded through Gyn/Ecology myself, several times. I did not understand it well until I read about her background in the Catholic church.
FUCK: replace “stepmother” with “mother in law.”
*smacks brain*
Was clearly confusing ‘wicked stepmother’ and ‘wicked witches’ because all the women you know must be wicked………
often. whatta world – whatta world. Who would have thought a little girl like you could destroy by beautiful wickedness…aaaawwwwhhhwwwww
Boggi: If men are to blame for oppressing women then women are also to blame for complicity accepting that oppression.
Bullshit. There are limits to what one can expect of an oppressed people/class.
You are blaming slaves for not rising up; even if it means the entire Appian Way lined with corpses hanging on crosses.
That’s fucked up, esp. since you have elsewhere said that being too, “passionate/vitriolic” is more than should be done to deal with this sort of thing.
Whic is it? Women are complicit? Or “anti-misogynists” being too aggressive in how they fight misogyny?
Glad I’m offensive to everyone!
Why? What is it accomplishing?0
When my “God” and “Nature” comment I didn’t mean to some asshole atheist (even though I am one).
What I meant was to show how people use such ideas as authorities to dictate how something “must be” or “essentially is” so and so.
Which is 1: Bollocks, and 2: you using God and Nature to dissmiss, without really addressing the arguments, those who disagree with you.
If you want to make claims about specific religious people, that’s one thing. If it’s just, “Religious people are stupid”, it’s quite another.
When I said “God is a fantasy” I didn’t mean “There is no God and religious people are stupid.”
Really? Because what follows from, “God is a fantasy” is those who believe in a God are accepting a fantasy, ipso facto as a fact. Which is (as with Brandon on marriage) the logical conclusion from the basic premise.
There was a deliberate misunderstanding,
Deliberate? Who chose to misunderstand you on purpose?
NWO: If someone has sex with a fruit bearing tree are they angiospermsexual
No, they are dendrophilic.
Boggi: I suggest mocking them, and pointing out when they are evil, and when they are stupid, and how they hate women.
If that means I am pissed off enough to be vicious, then at those times I am vicious.
If they don’t like it, they can ignore me, or react, or change their ways of doing things.
My manly day was reading, cuddling, napping, testing the bread I baked yesterday (not as good as three days before… next batch more semolina flour, and a slower start to the yeast), playing some “Total War: Rome”, going for a walk, to buy more flour, a bit of laundry and repotting an olive tree, making a cold salmon salad, drinking some Royal Navy Grog, listening to some QI (second season… bongos), and later, some more snuggling.
ithiliano – what, you don’t think the wicked witch of the west is real? Ha, if she wasn’t, how is it that I borrow her broom and fly around the city at night? Bah! How can one think that a dark green woman with her own army of flying monkey is not real? Bizarre. It’s as if you are trying to to believe.
* It’s as if you don’t want to believe.
@Bostonian: Yes, the works published by Mary Daly earlier on were quite different than her later work (and Mags, you know about the transphobia–do you know about the issue that Audre Lorde raised with Daly’s appropriation of myths from non-Western cultures later on?). I quite enjoyed her work in my first “angry young feminist phase” (1982-3), ditto Dworkin’s work, and a number of other feminists whose later works, stances, and political commentary during the last presidential election I came to reject with a good deal of loathing. Such is the difference between the 1980s and the second decade of the 2000s.
Nobody has to read or agree with ALL THE FEMINISTS, but if one is going to come in and expound and mansplain (sorry if I am not giving you your correct sex designation AVT–there are women who try to attack feminism for being too mean to the men), it behooves them to be able to cite actual feminist works (even if only to point out flaws in some of the arguments, a number of which were pointed out then and later by OTHER FEMINISTS).
Now I’m picturing Mags as Leela from Futurama declaring “there’s no place like home…I want to be a witch!”.
I can’t deal with Boggi today. Headache + congestion + loopiness from meds = all I can think of is to point out that this isn’t a support group designed to help people work through their sexism. Didn’t we already have this conversation with MRAL?
@Magso: I did believe in Oz when I was five.
Perhaps I misjudged you: were you not replying to my question to AVT to cite some feminist authors? I thought you were, but if not, my bad!
I’m pretty sure magdelyn has not read a word of feminist philosophy.
I read, This sex which is not one, by Luce Irigaray, and nearly broke my brain. I attempted a paper on the book and achieved a decent grade, but I am not sure how much I could understand it. I think reading it in the original French would have helped, but I am not fluent enough to read philosophy in French.
@Bostonian: *high fives you* I completely busted my brain when reading excerpts from Cixous and Irigaray in my graduate feminist theory seminar: it was translation, of course, and that may be part of it (but I also busted my brain on Judith Butler), but I also think part of it is the heavy psychoanalytic influences on a lot of the canonical French feminists is part of it.
When it comes to gender theory, I prefer Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick and Judith Halberstam (when by prefer means, I love them passionately and learn something every time I teach them in a class).
And there are real issues about academia’s effect on feminist discourses in the academy — I’m gonna put some links to some of the feminist theorists I think more people need to know about because, well, I don’t wanta go to bed, and I’m feeling perverse.
So first: TONI CADE BAMBARA (nobody remembers the African American feminists active in the 60s/70s; they are totally erased much of the time)L
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/bambaraToni.php
Pauli Murray
http://books.google.com/books?id=TFKRZ9uqA6cC&pg=PA185&dq=Pauli+Murray+feminist&hl=en&sa=X&ei=iP9fT8qfDcycgQelpbG3Bg&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Pauli%20Murray%20feminist&f=false
A History of Black Feminism in the US
http://www.mit.edu/~thistle/v9/9.01/6blackf.html
Paula Giddings
http://www.smith.edu/aas/faculty_giddings.php
Jacqueline Jones Royster:
http://www.iac.gatech.edu/faculty-and-staff/staff/royster
Susan Griffin:
http://www.susangriffin.com/Books.html
Dang, I haven’t read any of her recent work–see, that’s what is happy making. Back in the day, i could buy all the feminist books published in the US in English on a clerical salary (this was after I stomped out of academia and started educating myself).
Nowadays, I cannot even keep up with the stuff in my own academic field, let alone ALL the other feminist works in other fields.
And I do tend to read more in that, rather in the more general audience books (I pretty much quite reading the popular books after Susan Faludi’s BACKLASH–would not buy Wolf’s THE BEAUTY MYTH, for example). And I just read enough Paglia to realize what utter total essentialist misandrist crap she was writing (I assigned an essay of hers in a class back in the early 1990s, and about 90% of the students thought it was written by a man.)
The two feminist writers who had the most influence on me and whose work I still adore to this day: Adrienne Rich
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/49
Joanna Russ
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/arts/joanna-russ-74-dies-wrote-science-fiction.html
http://www.nndb.com/people/553/000029466/
Mansplaining? Wow. I specifically stated that my posts reflected nothing but my own imperfect opinions. I specifically stated that I was entirely open to discussing said opinions with anyone willing to engage in good faith. In response, people came in screaming at me, swearing, insulting me, and behaving in a generally aggressive manner.
I don’t respond well to aggression. That’s something that stems from experiences in my own life- which I’m not going to get into because it’s really none of your business- but it’s the reason I doubled down a bit when DSC first came in talking about how I was spouting “bullshit”. I got angry, I and I pounded out some things without really thinking. I shouldn’t have done that, and I apologize.
I’m willing to listen, and I’m willing to examine my own conceptions, but only so long as people are willing to extend to me basic respect.
AVT: So can you in fact cite feminists whose work you’ve read or not, to back up you’re claim that you’re well aware of the complexities of feminist theories?
Since you don’t even know the basic definition of “mansplaining,” that tells me that you’re not too familiar with feminist blogs where the term was coined to describe men coming in to give feminists the benefit of THEIR PERSONAL INDIVIDUAL OPINIONS about….feminism.
So, proof of reading background in feminist theory, plz, if you want to be taken seriously?
And it’s sad when people think that feminist authors mean only THEORY:
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/feminism/tp/feminist_poets.htm
In fact, a lot of my favorite feminist authors wrote and published in multiple genres.
So, feminist poets!
Oh, AVT, just for you: a couple of sites/cites for the definition of mansplaining:
http://scienceblogs.com/thusspakezuska/2010/01/you_may_be_a_mansplainer_if.php
http://karenhealey.livejournal.com/781085.html