“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 sorry your dishwater weak playskool feminism can’t handle questioning your received assumptions about reality and has to fall back on cliches like ‘can’t handle the truth’ but nobody ever accused you of intellectual integrity.
(Shirt finally comes off at 3:50 or so, btw. Note the screaming from the women in the audience – that isn’t a strip show, those are celebrity guests at a movie awards ceremony. Men’s bodies aren’t sexually appealing and women don’t find looking at them arousing? Please.)
and whining about ‘strawmen’ is pretty hilarious considering that your standard response to substantive criticism is to completely ignore it and the stumble back hear bleating about how we’re just ignoring thing we don’t like.
do you have any powers of self-reflection at all?
Ruby: Beauty=symmetry. That’s how beauty is measured.
Nope. I’ve done some photoshop work where we did perfect mirroring of people’s faces. A perfect symmetric face looks wrong, and not attractive.
Ruby: Your link, is crap.
1: It’s not an actual study.
2: It has a gross logical failure at root.
3: Kanazawa is a crank†.
You can fix one, by linking to the study, but Kanazawa is not going to stop being a crank, so the odds of the study being structurally sound is still slim.
Point two is the real killer. If we assume that evolutionary pressures on secondary sexual characteristics will take place, then we can also assume that what we find attractive now (even if there were no cultural elements) would be less present in the past.
But that would go the same for men as for women. One of the more interesting aspects of primates is the relative lack of sexual dimorphism.
Oddly the direction in which you claim it runs in Homo sapiens sapiens is contrary to all other observed species, where the more dramatic, “attractive” mating displays belong to the male, not the female.
Do you have an explanation for this singular divergence.
†Seriously S. Kanazawa makes the rest of the EvPsych Brigade look reasonable. He is probably the least reputable advocate of EvPsych: among those who are actually credentialed researchers.
ruby, you’re not the first person to wander in here with a vague idea that they like something called ‘feminism’ but they don’t want to do any work for it, gets upset when they’re called on it, and the ends up posting on r/mensrights six months later
you are not a special snowflake. get over yourself.
So, uh, Playboy and beauty contests are genetic?!?!
Yyyyeaaah.
CassandraSays — were they singing? I was too busy watching those dance moves to notice…
Pecunium — “Do you have an explanation for this singular divergence.”
Men killed all the mammoths so women didn’t have to worry about the sort of predation of their young that seems to be the cause of the muted colorings in other animals? /snark
(How did I ever miss that one of those links was Kanazawa though, damn)
well, at least she’s proving everything i just said about conservatives in the art thread. it’s not every day you get that.
Ruby: I never said men weren’t attractive.
No, you didn’t use exactly those words, like Brandon you are pretending the content of your statements isn’t anything more than exactly what you typed; while spending lots of time pretending that things we didn’t say, implictly; nor by implication, are the sum total of our arguments.
You said that “nudity is not a great look for men”, because we aren’t pleasant to look at.
Something which is pleasant to look at is attractive. Something which isn’t pleasant to look at is unattractive.
Q.E.D. you said men were, as a class, unnatractive.
ruby, if your arguments are as strong as you claim i dare you to go back through this thread and quote and respond to everything pecunium has said.
Or hell, just anything that anyone has said. But xie’s trolling for the laffs or whatever, so xie won’t. Anyway, I’m going back to googling jeremy renner shirtless now.
I was going to complain about this, since I thought Playgirl ceased production YEARS ago, but instead I find it’s still alive and kicking. 😀
I clicked over to their site, though, and… it looks dreadfully generic AND gives me pop-up ads. I think this is less about “women don’t like to look at men naked” and “whoever is in charge of the Playgirl concept isn’t enough of a businessperson to compete with today’s Internet porn”. I’ve seen much hotter stuff on my Tumblr, such as this guy in a skirt, this gentleman with tats, and Misha Collins.
Also, Ruby, you know there are other websites besides Playgirl that women look at? And they read romance novels where the male characters are described in detail? And write fanfic, which is about two dudes fucking more often than not?
NWO, no one’s trying to take away your right to be a disgusting homophobe! We’re merely letting you know we’re personally repulsed by it! Don’t I have the right to find you repulsive?
whoa how’d that end up on this thread? oopsie
@Argenti – That video does kind of demonstrate what someone was saying earlier about women finding men sexier when they’re in motion than in still photos, doesn’t it? There’s this one band that I’ve covered multiple times where the bass player stalks like a cat when he walks, and it’s a beautiful thing.
“That video does kind of demonstrate what someone was saying earlier about women finding men sexier when they’re in motion than in still photos, doesn’t it?” — perhaps? *not straight, not cis* but perhaps? I co-sign that people find moving people more attractive though!
I think bodies in motion are just inherently more interesting, although I tend to dislike the kind of pantomine of sexiness that you see in, say, strippers on poles. Which is why I think the pole dancing is the least sexy part of that clip.
Actually that’s part of what’s tiresome about Ruby. The only things she seems to recognise as “sexy” are those things where it’s being really loudly pantomimed THIS IS SEXY, PAY ATTENTION NOW, so…strippers, Playboy, etc. It’s like if a visual image doesn’t have “this is for you to wank to” as the obvious intent she doesn’t read it as even potentially sexy. She’s every advertiser’s dream!
Agreed, on all of that, but that’s not just Ruby, or straight? women — I have a gay male friend who once got into this stupid debate over whether my porn folder would interest him, apparently “there are no cocks here” = “lesbian porn” >.<
I’m a genderqueer poly kinky bisexual, how is my brain evo-pysch wired?
I am curious, because I, like all women and all men need Ruby to tell me as well what my attractions, feelings, and sexuality is all about.
Ooh, I like this game!
Ruby, I’m bisexual. What happens if I’m attracted to a woman? Am I attracted to her money or her body? If I’m attracted to a man’s body and don’t even notice how much money he makes does that mean I think he’s actually a woman? Surely you must be able to explain how all of this works via bad science reporting evopsych.
darksidecat — I’ll see your genderqueer poly kininess and raise you pansexual (I realize bisexual is often used for being more easily understood, I do it myself, this is more directed at Ruby)
I’m really curious what Ruby thinks when the person interesting me is androgynous in appearance though!
And is it just me, or are a surprising number of manboobzer’s either not cis, not straight, or both? Might be that we’re too busy mocking misogyny to mock each other, which I think is bloody excellent.
Also! I prefer pretty boys who’re often a bit androgynous, when it comes to men. I’m guessing you’d think that’s because I’m bi? But wait…babies! Cave people! What is it in me specifically that makes a pretty face more important to me in a man than the ability to go hunt mammoths and defend the cave from sabre-tooth tigers?
A crucial part of Ruby’s argument is the erroneous notion that patriarchy has “diminished” in the past however many years.
It has not. The trappings of mainstream American culture have changed over time, but it’s as patriarchal as ever.
@Argenti: It’s not just you–I have the perception (haven’t done a count or anything) that there’s a lot more people here identifying with alternative sexualities than other places I hang out (could be a feature of where I hang out). All brought together to mock misogyny and talk about Stuff. Pretty cool.