“Men’s Studies” has existed as an academic discipline for several decades now. Not surprisingly, most of those involved in it identify themselves as feminists – as people interested in studying gender tend to do. But not all of them: A couple of years back, a group of mostly anti-feminist academics and popular writers with an interest in gender decided to try to do a sort of end run around the discipline of “Men’s Studies” by conjuring up a whole new, altogether un-feminist discipline called “Male Studies.”
Recently, The University of South Australia announced that it would start offering postgraduate courses in Male Studies sometime in 2014; our old friend Eoghan/Sigil1 brought this earthshattering news to the Men’s Rights subreddit the other day, where it was greeted with … suspicion and hostility.
GotMyFrogHatOn wrote:
Great, now men have the same opportunity as women to waste their time and money on a worthless degree!
Liverotto was even blunter:
YES, because the cure to bullshit is… MORE BULLSHIT! /s
That’s right: Men’s Rights Redditors hate Women’s Studies, and Gender Studies, and apparently every academic discipline with the word “Studies” in it so much that they’ve transferred this hatred to a new academic discipline that could well have been (and sort of was) designed just for them.
But don’t worry, they still hate Women’s Studies the most:
What was I saying the other day about projection?
“I’m a Feminist, you people are extreme Feminists. You make Feminism look bad with your denial about the differences in women and men. I too hate cultures that require restrictive gender roles, but I’m not going to pretend the genders are wired the same. And yes, we do need Feminism as there are idiots like the MRAs who would take away our rights.”
lo-fucking-l.
Really?
You shame fake feminists with your inability to understand that “feminist” is not a proper noun.
I am sorry but stuff like that tends to be really transphobic so no I am not okay with that. Plus I recall similar studies showing gay men had brains like women or some crap. I think that this is full of shit but your own sources of brain scanning that assert men brains are different than woman brains also asserted that gay men have women brains so I guess some men are not mentally different than some women?
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jun/17/science/sci-gaybrain17
Your own sources of brain scanning don’t even support you that all men have different brains than women. XD
(sorry for posting that homophobic “scientific” article but I am just trying to point how ridiculous it is)
“but I’m not going to pretend the genders are wired the same.”
So you missed where multiple people on this thread are not “pretending” such, but citing science that says such? The few differences that do exist are neither related to attraction/arousal/sex nor particularly interesting (unless you’re a neurosci geek, in which case I guess the number of synapses per mm cubed might be interesting?)
Seriously Ruby, these are questions that people with PhDs spend years on, and wtf fMRI’s actually show was still hotly debated when I finished school ~5 years ago. Neurosci, you’re doing it wrong.
“extreme feminists” would make a great band name though…
You’re a shitty feminist with ludicrous ideas. If we’re so terrible, stop hanging out with us, you irritant.
Ruby, you make feminists look bad with your random capitalization of the word and your bullshit, essentialist, erasing statements. If you think we’re extreme or radical, you really know fuckall about feminism.
You could change this by educating yourself, but I fear that might be too much work for you.
Ironically enough, some of Ruby’s statements would be more warmly received on a radfem forum! And others torn to shreds, obviously, but if she’s so fond of essentialism…
True enough, Cassandra. I think she’d manage to irritate the shit out of them too.
Ruby: Sure, Jumbofish, anyone who doesn’t think like you is a dumbass, right? I admire your tolerance.
You could do with being a bit more like jumbofish. You aren’t, “being a dumbass” because we disagree with you, but because you are presenting your opinion as fact.
Historically, when you do that you then abuse anyone who doesn’t agree with you, saving the strongest abuse for those who provide evidence which contradicts you.
If it were so easy to sexually repress people so that they denied their true desires, gay people could learn not to be sexally attracted to people of the same sex. And we all know that’s impossible.
You can repress them so they don’t share those views, or restrict the ways in which they express them. Read Kinsey, or do you suppose that in the 1930-1970s there were just a lot fewer homosexuals in the world?
Can you sexually repress males so much that they don’t find naked women sexually attractive? Somehow I doubt it.
But that’s not what is being said. You are arguing for a comparative difference: Men like looking at naked women more than women like looking at naked men.
That’s not an issue of, “men don’t like”, and no one here has said that.
No matter how sexually free women get, we will never get as exited over a dick as men get over boobies.
Citation needed. So far the only thing we have to support this is your opinion. Want to take a poll of the women here and see how many agree with you that naked men aren’t pleasurable to look at?
You started this trainwreck by making an absolute claim: i.e. naked is not a good look for men; by implication that naked men are unpleasant to look at.
You moved the goalpost to say that men like looking at naked women more than women like to look at naked men.
You can’t prove either claim; the first is completely cultural (and the opinions of aestheticians of previous ages disproves it) and the second might be provable (as a cultural norm), but you’ve not shown any evidence to support it; and I defy you to prove it as an absolute.
Ruby: The fact that men like to look at naked women more than vice versa probably has a lot more to do with women being the fairer sex than sexual repression. I’m not saying men aren’t nice to look at. It’s just that I’d rather view GQ than Playgirl.
What you like isn’t representative of all women.
If you want us to accept the first premise (that men like to look at naked women more than women like to look at naked men), you have to provide evidence.
The middle third is nonsense. “The fairer sex” is a cultural idea. Michelangelo, for example, thought men’s bodies were inherently more interesting than female bodies (and no, he wasn’t homosexual: 1: gender roles were less binary then, and 2: he had female lovers. It was an aesthetic issue, and widely agreed upon that male bodies were prettier than women’s bodies).
Ruby: I’m a Feminist, you people are extreme Feminists. You make Feminism look bad with your denial about the differences in women and men.
I disagree. 1: We aren’t “extreme”. Devout, dedicated, confirmed, but not extreme.
Here is my belief: Men and women are equal. The law, and culture, ought to reflect that.
That’s it.
As to “denial”, prove it. Show where we say they aren’t different.
What we don’t agree with is the idea that these are 1: innately biological for all observed behavioral differences. 2: That you have shown any good science to support the claims you have made in this regard.
Where you are getting the pushback is the ways in which your observation of some cultural behaviors has been transformed into essential truth about the inner nature of “woman”. Moreover, you have the knack of making those comparisons to a male benchmark.
Your views on hypergamy, for example. This thesis of yours is actually related to that one. You argued women like money, and men like looks. That a man with more money was more attractive.
This idea of yours is actually sort of essential to that one. If women find “hot” men hot, then they aren’t really chasing after gold.
If (it’s a big if) you were to put up studies which supported this idea, you’d be getting a very different reaction. We’d probably still disagree; but we’d be doing what we did with the other studies you’ve posted, i.e. examining the data, and the methods.
You don’t link to studies (in general), so the only thing we can do is talk about what you say. And what you say is your personal opinion, which makes it absolutely useless in proving a claim of fact.
ithiliana: There are some significant differences between some of the people who comment here. In the main it seems the less vehement about the issues tend to not speak on them.
I know there is at least one subject I no longer talk about because I know it will be counterproductive, and lead to flaming wreckage all over whatever thread I might take part in.
@Pecunium: Oh, yes, significant differences exist here–but (and this is solely my take on it, and that means my memory, etc.) they seem to be able to be discussed in terms of the ideas, history, etc., not based on personal attacks (and when people are talking about their personal lives, even if they then go on to do fairly uncomfortable generalizations, I still have the sense that, despite the trolldudez chant of ad hominam, there’s less chance the discussion descends into personal attacks based). I remember a few very vehement disscussions, and yes, there are topics I avoid commenting on, but not because I’m afraid of being personally attacked.
I would say, in the main, this is true. But it’s not true on all topics/between all people. It’s rare, but it has happened (at least in my experience).
I did try to avoid saying it was universal! And only my sense. But still, given general internet discourse patterns, the rarity here does stand out!
Yes, this Making Light, Slacktivist.
Those are all places where there is a large, and thriving, commentariat which avoids that sort of problem. Feministe seems to be that way, but I am not enough of a reader to be certain.
My blog is much the same, but lacks the traffic to make it stand out.
“Feministe seems to be that way, but I am not enough of a reader to be certain.” — that seems to depend a lot on the topic, Hugo Schwyzer caused a 1,000+ comment shit storm. Also, while they aren’t radfem blatantly transphobic, they generally need some help in the trans* erasure department.
And then there was that disaster post on Native American identities, that blew up into basically “show me the bodies if it’s still genocide” and someone listing all the friends and relatives they’ve lost (eg went into foster care for no good reason and ended up dead) — that disaster has sent me back to lurking over there actually, that was just a royal mess.
Oh and there was that absurd asexuals versus sex-positive feminism “debate” — that had people calling each other rapists (Cliff, I love your post on enthusiastic consent, I’m saving that as a reference if that shit storm happens again).
Shorter version — feministe is good at this as long as there’s a mod around, and there often isn’t. And sometimes the mod sides with the ad hominems.
Thanks for proving the point feministe >.<
Kill It With Fire
An incomplete list:
Man-jewelry (exceptions: watches and wedding bands).
I wonder if pocket watches are acceptable? (ignore me if this isn’t quite wtf you meant, I really am still bristled over that whole “it’s not genocide, how dare you call it genocide, the holocaust was genocide!!”)
Pecunium — that “small boobs” post was one of those explosions, and you saw how much they were coddling the trolls, they always do that, it’s another corner of the internet women need to “watch their tone” on (at least sometimes anyway, with increasing frequency it seems) — it almost seems like the Hugo fall-out behind the scenes was way more than they let on?
And then stupidity like this, this is a comment from another thread derailed into man-jewelry:
“BTW Jill did put up a pretty comprehensive apology, for those who aren’t following that thread as closely as I am.”
Well brilliant, but I wonder which of the *242* comments it is? The offending line is one of 4 in the post, so maybe link to the comment or something? Buried apologies don’t help any >.<
Now I just sound like I'm complaining about feministe though…idk, maybe I am, I want 2011 feministe back, I warm up to the new theme and the content goes sideways…
@Argenti
I don’t understand what is going on in that feministe post. Why should “man jewelery” be killed with fire? O_o
jumbofish — honestly I think it was just Jill listing things she doesn’t like and phrasing it poorly, and then it blew up because that’s what feministe does these days it seems >.<
I'm not really sure how many of their mods are still modding post-Hugo-fiasco though, Jill has a full time job that isn't feministe, so some of it is just her being at her real job went the shit hits. And idk, I really am still pissed over how that thread about Native American identities went completely to shit (you can see that coming out sideways in my rant at NWO) — that thread got really nasty and there were no mods to be had.
Is there any explanation as to why jewelry on men is supposedly bad?
I feel like there’s this thing that happens on some feminists blogs where “what I like in a man” becomes the One True Path, and any sort of disagreement is taken as a challenge to the first person’s right to like what she likes, and then there’s all sorts of fucked-up stuff said in response, and then other people call that stuff out, and then it just turns into a huge mess. A lot of people seem to have a really hard time grasping the concept that their preferences are neither natural nor universal, and that other people having different preferences is not a direct attack on theirs. I really wish people wouldn’t get so defensive about that, and that they’d refrain from othering groups of men who they’re not attracted to in really fundamentally unfeminist ways, and then backtracking and trying to justify that.
One of the worst clusterfucks I’ve ever seen on a feminist site was started by someone posting something about how she prefers hairy muscular men because she’s not a little girl any more and she doesn’t like little boys and it’s just natural to outgrow any preference for men who aren’t hairy, or who’re thin, and that just looking at men who don’t have chest hair makes her feel like a pedophile. I did point out that that’s a rather racist attitude to have since there’s an entire continent where on average men are not very hairy, and problematic for that reason even if you ignore all the other problems, but she didn’t want to hear it.
CassandraSays — I’m looking for Jill’s apology comment now, but it looks like the blow up is more over “did you just imply all men are cis men?” (among other issues) — I do agree this one probably could’ve been avoided with an “I think that…” in there.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/feminist?s=t
Nowhere in the definition of, “feminist” does it mean that one has to believe men and women are wired the same. So who the fuck are you people to say I’m barely a Feminist?
Found Jill’s apology — looks like she was just annoyed at stuff and venting with badly chosen words.
There’s another hundred comments after the apology, so idk, still skimming.
The “I like X” problem was probably how that asexual/sex-positive feminist thread went so completely to shit though.
Feministe has always been prone to giant angry clusterfucks, though. Not sure why, but it’s one of the notable features of that particular blog.