Racists – victim blamers extraordinaire — like to pretend that their racism isn’t their fault, that they’ve been driven to their racism by the bad behavior of some members of the group they’re bigoted against. Do a search for the phrase “I don’t hate blacks, but” and you will find thousands of examples of this “logic” at its crudest. “I don’t think blacks are ignorant just the NIGGERS,” one YouTube commenter writes, encapsulating the racist “logic” in a phrase.
Misogynists are fond of making similar “arguments” about women. As one commenter on the Scott Adams blog puts it:
I don’t hate women, but I have a pretty low opinion of women overall. I think they have poor priorities, they have poor analytical skills, they tend to be disorganized, they tend to be impulsive, and they think the world revolves around their feelings. I don’t think all women are like that, but it’s the impression I have of the gender in general, and I don’t like those traits.
Naturally, variations of this general argument (such as it is) abound in the “manosphere.” “Misogynists are not born they are made,” writes MRA/MGTOW elder and proud misogynist ZenPriest in an oft-cited rant titled “Hate Bounces.”
“Once, a long time ago when the world was young, I loved women with all my heart and soul,”ZenPriest (also known as Zed) writes. But then along came feminism, which ruined women so thoroughly that poor ZenPriest found himself more or less forced to become a woman-hater:
I began to see women as vicious creatures whose only agenda when it came to me, or any man, was to see how much they could get from the man – then when he had nothing left to give because they had taken it all, toss him out with yesterday’s garbage. In short – as nothing but users. …
I took to avoiding women, particularly groups of them, because I could never sit quietly and put up with the bashing and would always challenge it, which ended me up in a lot of fights and added greatly the count of times that I got called “misogynist.”
Gosh, why would anyone who “see[s] women as vicious creatures” get called a misogynist?
[A]fter 3 decades of listening to it, and hating it, and trying to keep the animosity which had been building in me over it … I caved in and began to really hate women. …
I will not allow most women in my house unless I have known her a long time and she is old enough to have escaped being infected with the plague of man hating or is escorted by someone I trust, nor will I enter theirs except on the same conditions. If I pass a woman stranded on the road, I will not stop to help her because it is as likely as not that she will be afraid of me. …
I changed from a man who loved women and thought they were just about the greatest thing in the world, to a man who can’t stand them, or anything about them.
And of course it is all the fault of women and their alleged incessant man-hatery:
Man bashing and man hating harms women, because it makes men hate them back – eventually. A puppy returns love for love, but if you beat it will eventually turn mean and will one day turn on you when you raise your fist or your stick (or the club of words) to hit it. Men are no different.
As this last bit makes clear, this “she made me do it” logic is the very same logic used by abusers to justify their abuse.
Now our old friend JohnTheOther has offered a similar blame-the-ladies explanation as to why he’s developed what he calls an “indifference to female opinion.” In his telling, the straw that broke the camel’s back was some unnamed feminist who had the temerity to use the word “neckbeard” in an internet posting.
The culture of easy, casual insult by women against average men, creeps, neckbeards, mother’s-basement-dweller and so on, has a effect which might not be recognized by women. Guys generally don’t need to be told they’re held in contempt as a group, our wider culture makes this sparklingly clear. However, individual instances of circumstantial ad-hom have the very real effect of making men not care about women’s opinions.
Yeah, that’s why these guys don’t give a shit about what women say.
Naturally, Mr. TheOther feels the need to tell us that 1) he doesn’t have a neckbeard and 2) he has a (presumably human) girlfriend.
Am I a neck-beard? No, I’m clean shaven, Im not an online gamer, I have a girlfriend, a career, I dress well et-cetera. But whenever I see some casual, throw away comment like creeper, neck-beard or other minor belittling insult used to describe average men, it cements my not giving a shit about the opinions of women.
After being criticized for his blatant misogyny by a commenter in the Men’s Rights subreddit (virtually the only MRA site online where misogyny is ever called out), Mr. TheOther altered that final bit to read “it cements my not giving a shit about the opinions offered.” He evidently thinks that changing the wording of this one sentence, and complaining about “quote-mining” will convince readers that the misogynistic argument set forth in detail in the rest of the post somehow isn’t misogyny. (And, on the Men’s Rights subreddit, that ploy seems to have worked.)
Naturally, like so many misogynists, Mr. TheOther insists he’s really not a woman-hater:
I don’t hate women, I don’t believe in any “back to the kitchen” nonsense, or any other female-targeted belittlement. What I’m talking about is my personal attitude towards women’s opinions, their utterances, their writing, their thoughts, their contribution to society. If you are a woman reading this, that means your thoughts, ideas, speech, writing and so on.
Well, that clears it up. You don’t hate women; you just don’t give a shit what women think or say or do. Obviously there’s no bigotry in that!
Utterly dismissing “female opinion” because some woman called you a neckbeard: Men’s Rights activism at its finest!
Shade — I don’t think they have actually, the research that acknowledges those species are intelligent is kind of new (and amazing, not sex focused). I’ve been out of college a few years now, but they were still proving that bonobos had a concept of fairness and sharing. That they have sex to have sex is more like Known Fact than a research topic. There’s no good scale for “higher intelligence” though, so I don’t think the research exists yet. (And frankly, I think it’ll take a while, because of what it means ethically)
And since the ethics of our interactions with dolphins is actually on topic-ish, I’m going to link this here — Navy to deafen 15,900 whales and dolphins and kill 1,800 more. Those would be unacceptable number if they were humans, considering all evidence is suggesting they’re as smart as us, maybe we should take that seriously?
Silly scientists, looking at general behaviour when there’s Monkey Sex(tm) to be researched!
And yeah, intelligence in animals is a pretty complex topic and I admit I don’t know much about it. My knowledge of it is a basic understanding of which animals are considered really-intelligent-but-not-sapient (monkeys, apes, dolphins and other cetaceans, elephants, corvids etc), and which are considered really clever but not really on par with the above (things like pigs, some other bird species, like parrots, etc), and then the rest.
On the Navy thing: a big 🙁 . Even if we ignore their estimated intelligence, killing/injuring that many animals for no reason is just wrong.
Hey Slavey, maybe you should read the latest research on menstruation. A womans body does quite a bit to prevent a pregnancy from occuring. A lot of fertilized eggs get washed out, and sex does not garuntee a baby every time.
So tell me again…just how is sex soley for babbies?
Good posts everyone….shout out to Cassandra and Argenti for being nice to the new girl. I wish I could buy you all a cup of coffee!
NWOSlave does have a point, our sex drives did grow out of our reproductive drive. What is odd is that he is always going on about being more than just our animal instincts, well sex for pleasure rather than simple reproduction seems to be just that; if you don’t consider social bonding to be an animal instinct, that is. I find it hard to draw the line between instinct and learned behavior in primates, especially hominids.
Yeah, if we’re being technical about it, then most (i’m going to say “most” here instead of “all”, otherwise someone will come along and make me look silly and wrong) behaviours have an evolutionary source. At least to the extent that only the strictly negative ones will get discouraged/bred out of a population (which for a social species, will include negative social behaviours that impact survivability), leaving us with some neutral ones that don’t seem to apply to propagation of the species or impact it negatively. Obviously sex for pleasure wouldn’t apply here since it helps with social cohesion (at least with bonobos, humans might have different reasons for it), so it isn’t a neutral thing.
The thing with Owly is he wants to go into “not evolutionary = bad” mode (i’m still trying to work out how Owly believes the world is only a few thousand years old but believes in evolution, but that just means he’s either doesn’t but argues for it just to be an arse, or he’s just a dumbass and doesn’t realise that evolution + only 5000 years = nope).
That means we end up in that thing we (as in humans generally) like to do where we separate things we are unique (or almost unique) in doing, from things we consider “animal stuff”. It’s the same mindset that gives us the “natural” vs “artificial” distinction. I wouldn’t say this is necessarily bad, after all while they’re not technically right so aren’t technically “good science”, they help in understanding stuff because it’s what we’re used to (unless it’s the whole “humans aren’t animals” thing, that’s not really useful at all).
We just ended up framing the discussion in that way rather than going for a strictly “everything is evolutionary developed” setup, just so we could counter Owly’s pile of arse about “arousal is based on reproduction only”.
Hopefully i’m making sense because this is awfully rambley. 😀
I thought Slavey DOESN’T believe in evolution, because if it was a thing, there’d be superdogs.
Ah, okey. I was learning towards option one (he doesn’t, he’s just arguing for it to be an arse), but I wasn’t sure. Maybe I need to go read through the Big Book Of Learnin’ a bit more. 😛
He doesn’t believe in evolution, but apparently he does believe in evolutionary psychology. And somehow he fails to see the contradiction.
NWO: The 70% had nothing to do with the 50%.
That’s why people are laughing at you. Because you make shit up, and demand they pretend it’s true.
You do this ALL. THE. TIME.
Cassandra: All crepes should be served with either some sort of fruit or nutella. Yes, that if an official Perfect Feminist Proclamation, on account of how I don’t like savory crepes.
Poppyseed. Mmmnnnn.
Shade: The thing with Owly is he wants to go into “not evolutionary = bad” mode (i’m still trying to work out how Owly believes the world is only a few thousand years old but believes in evolution, but that just means he’s either doesn’t but argues for it just to be an arse, or he’s just a dumbass and doesn’t realise that evolution + only 5000 years = nope).
He doesn’t believe in it. He’s trying (badly, as per norm) to use it as a stick to prove to us that we are wrong about something.
But, since he doesn’t believe in it, he has no real understanding of how it works, and so he gets it wrong.
ALL. THE. TIME.
Thanks everyone, at least now I know he’s just a garden-variety Young Earth Creationist and my brain will stop tying itself in knots trying to work out what the hell is going on. 😀
I think it’s inherently correlated with higher intelligence, in that it’s part of a larger trend of replacing instinctual reactions with a reward/punishment system that’s an important part of higher intelligence. The sense of pain is another good example. Before pain receptors evolved, there was just the instinctive reflex to flee if injured. With pain receptors, you just have the a general signal of “you are injured. This is bad. Do something,” and it’s left to the higher function to decide what exactly to do about it. Evolutionarily it creates kind of a feedback loop, since the sudden need to make good decisions in dangerous situations creates higher selective pressure for higher intelligence. In turn, higher intelligence makes any further adaptation that replaces instinctive reactions with decision-making more likely to be successful.
Of course, I don’t have the research to back this up, so it’s just a hypothesis.
s/conscious/active. What I was going for is the simplistic (yet still too complex for the person to whom it was primarily addressed) notion that sexual pleasure is one way of encouraging animals to do it, which results in more animals
It may be more or less an accident that sex is pleasurable, of course; I’m not about to go to the mat for this hypothesis
Meh. Skipped a few comments to get on with the important business of defending the stupid shit I said. Fatman said more or less what I meant.
@Dracula
Oh my, you just described a whole subset of people I’ve interacted with online. Doesn’t believe in evolution, uses basic evolutionary psychology to explain everything (especially women and why they won’t date him).
PsychoDan — I missed your latter comment on “kafka trapping” somehow (blame falling asleep at the keyboard?) but yeah, it seems to be either “disagrees with him” or it’s some kind of weird trap so when I say “I’m really not doing that” he can say “see! proves you are!”…which is ALL THE IRONY, again.
Re: superdogs — he should watch some wild canines, not feral dogs, but wolves or something, and then get back to us on whether our pets are evolved from that or not. Good luck trying to play fetch with a wolf!
As I recall it, a “Kakfa trap” is an MRA way of saying some woman/feminist created a no-win situation.
All rights are human rights, when we support women’s right all humans benefit.
NWO is accusing me of building no win situations? That’s just hilarious. I mean, I am kind of notoriously a monkey wrench to bad ideas, but that caries little weight from NWO. (Watch him decide monkey wrench = a threat or something, *sigh*)
I always thought that any sentence with “but” in it contains a lie.
jamesmmartin — sarcasm or serious there? We really need either a sarcasm font, or MRAs to like, make their nyms include MRA.
Buzz Cook — don’t think I’ve seen you before, have +1 internet for the excellent first comment.
I give it an hour before NWO complains that women’s rights are exclusionary to men, and oh boy do I hope that comment about nyms including MRA isn’t enough to summon he-who-shall-not-be-named.
Sarcasm in text form is either almost impossible to notice or you have to make it super obvious and non-subtle. I’m not sure why sticking “/sarcasm” on the end of stuff hasn’t taken off more than it has, not many people seem to use it. Maybe making it too obvious ruins it for some people (which for people who like subtle sarcasm, I can understand).
When the form of commenting has it (like forums tend to), I also like the idea of using the eye-roll emote for showing sarcasm.
Untainted by the man-hating radicalism of second-wave feminism, that is. Then again, het-sex-positive third-wave feminism seems to have reversed that, by and large, though it made women TOO promiscuous that they can’t even stay faithful anymore tsk tsk …