What’s the deal with MRAs and urinals? You may recall the highly touted “URLs @ urinals” campaign from last year, a plan to plaster little posters over urinals in public bathrooms to lure peeing men to Men’s Rights websites; evidently the way to a man’s heart is through his urethra?
Then there was that big to-do in the Men’s Rights subreddit when a Canadian restauranteur removed a urinal shaped like a woman’s lips after some feminists complained about it.
Oh, and who can forget GirlWritesWhat’s weird FemRA lament that men hanging out in men’s bathrooms can’t even bitch about women any more due the encroachment of evil mangina language police. (Note: Men in public bathrooms do not actually talk to one another.)
Well, now the MRA videoblogger who goes by the nom-de-internet of ManWomanMyth has weighed in on the Urinal Problem in a long and rambling blog post titled, and I am not making this up, “Urinals – a genesis for male psychology?”
MWM (let’s just call him that) argues that “male spaces” have been so encroached upon by evil feminists that men have no place they can truly call their own.
Why are female spaces inviolate and male spaces forcibly opened to females?
Why are males spaces not seen to be equally as important as female spaces?
I’ll tell you why, it’s because under our Feminist governance, anything that maintains or leads to any concept of male camaraderie or the enhancement of male self-awareness is actively attacked and suppressed. It’s vital in our society to strip men of their identity as ‘men’ so that they can be assaulted in the myriad ways. …
By preventing the development of male-bonding and understanding between men (which is difficult enough, even under the best of circumstances) men are successfully kept isolated from each other and more easily used and abused.
Seriously, he’s got a point here. If you look at the various photos of corporate Boards of Directors I gathered together in this old post, you’ll notice that a couple of them even have some ladies in them!
So what does this have to do with urinals? MWM explains:
This is where urinals-in-the-home comes in. …
By installing one in your home, what I think is being done is making a claim to a portion of space and making that claim based solely on the fact of your manhood.
Only men can successfully stand up to pee, women have no choice but to sit down. This is a point of difference that has little relevance in normal daily life, but has every relevance to male psychology.
You see, the urinal is just for you as a man. It’s impossible for her to use it. It’s for you. For your son. For your male friends.
In other words, MWM thinks that men (cis men, anyway) should have them installed in their bathrooms for no other reason than that (cis) woman can’t use them. In your face, bitches! Try peeing in THIS! YOU CAN’T!!
Though I should note that this does not stop women from trying, as this album cover from the 1970s clearly documents:
MWM goes on to explain the logic behind this new crusade:
There is no means by which the exclusive use of the urinal can be taken away from you by any claims of unfairness or any other irrational female claim.
There can be no quotas for the female use of urinals; there can be no Presidential Council for Women and Girls calling for more ‘Women into Urinals’; the UK Minister for Women could create no tax-payer funded programme to encourage girls to be the same as men and use urinals.
It’s yours because you are male and can only remain yours.
Now you might ask yourself, why the fuck would anyone care about this? MWM has an answer to that question as well:
Why is this important?
I think that this is an example of a beginning, a genesis for male self-awareness. Particularly if you have a young boy in the household. It could well be the first thing and perhaps even the only thing he will ever encounter in his young life that is not ‘equally’ open to girls and there is no ‘equalities’ agency that can do anything about it.
Most boys grow up today having to play every sport and share every activity with girls and woe betide him if he seeks to win or is too aggressive. …
The urinal could be the only thing in his life that is for him and exclusively for him and others who are like him in only one essential way: they are also male. …
This is a little space in the bathroom, a little space in his life, where his sister can’t go and doesn’t want to go and couldn’t go if she did want to. It’s off limits because she is not male. …
A urinal is not particularity interesting in itself, but it may well be a first step in the development of a sense of self for boys and men that otherwise typically never happens or else is savagely crushed in men. A catalyst towards a sense of what it means to be male and a first seed of understanding of the essential difference between the sexes which goes beyond mere anatomy. …
This is where anti-misandry starts.
While all this is very moving, I don’t think it goes far enough. Consider the Home Pregnancy Test. This is something that woman can pee on, but men can’t – at least not without being ridiculed by society for peeing on such a girly thing.
Wait, you might say. If (cis) men get urinals to pee on, why can’t (cis) women have these little sticks that they can pee on? Because these pregnancy tests involve little chemical strips that CHANGE COLOR when you pee on them, depending on whether or not you’re pregnant. Urinals don’t change color! And that’s not FAIR!
STICKS FOR DICKS!
Now THAT’S where anti-misandry really starts!
*Spots school sports-related rants in the wild*
Woo! I hated sports in school (at least middle school) just because they’re so.. authoritarian about it. Luckily they didn’t grade you on it, just as long as you actually turned up so you didn’t get in trouble.
Firstly, it would be nice if they didn’t force kids to do sports they aren’t built for. They made every boy do rugby in school, and considering I weigh barely 110lbs now, you can see the issue there.
They also made us do things like football (soccer) in the middle of winter, and didn’t let us wear anything to keep us warm. Even if it was raining, windy and cold as fuck, we still had to wear just shorts and a shirt. Same with swimming, outdoor pool regardless of weather, but at least I could just float about and not do much in the “crappy swimmers” group (I suck at swimming, and i’m aquaphobic). Also, we had to wear swimming caps, and I hated that.. it felt like a headcrab was eating my head. 🙁 And the time I just didn’t want to do swimming because it was freezing cold outside, and the teacher actually threatened to throw me in the pool.
Those are nice way to make someone hate certain sports though, if that’s what you’re going for. Unfortunatly in middle school, there wasn’t really a way for me to get out of doing stuff (we had the opportunity to do that in upper school though, but I didn’t really use that for avoiding sports, that was reserved for “General Studies” which I think I went to maybe three classes out of a whole school year – we used to just walk to the nearest town and have lunch instead).
There was only four sports I liked doing in school, and only like three that I was actually good at. Gymnastics was pretty fun, just because you could jump off high things onto soft things all the time, and they let us make up randomly awesome gymnastics courses to use by piecing together all the parts as we wanted. I was a pretty good sprinter too (cross-country on the other hand, ouch), but that didn’t do good things to my legs in the end. I was decent at badminton (and it was pretty fun)! Last one that I was actually any good at (actually, I kicked arse at it for some reason) and enjoyed a bunch was hockey (of the field variety).
As for genderings, our sports weren’t as gender-segregated; they only really separated us for specifically gender-coded sports, ie. rugby, football (soccer) etc. Thinking about it, that was mostly for the male-coded ones (I guess you could say the really physical ones), because the boys still did things like gymnastics. Girls did things like netball instead of football and rugby.
Long post is long. 😛
Activities that were theoretically supposed to be about promoting physical fitness frequently turned into the guys screaming, “HOW COULD YOU MISS THAT, YOU FUCKING MORON?!” at the girls, shoving them out of the way, and generally exhibiting all the douchiest traits of the recently-pubescent. Understandably, if sadly, most of the girls responded to this by deciding we didn’t need that shit and would just do our best to participate as little as possible.
Hahaha, but they do this to the less-athletically-inclined boys too. I fucking hated flag football (tackling optional but encouraged), volleyball, badminton, tennis, definitely anything that required any level of hand-eye coordination. My goal was not to win but just to lose gracefully. Going through a class without completely whiffing with the badminton racket was a good day. Otherwise, I got teased, etc.
They should have separated us into Assholes and Non-Assholes.
Seeing urinals as oh so special just because females don’t use them is extremely silly. And the males who want to pee in ones shaped like women’s lips are in need of therapy.
My HS gym classes self-segregated by gender. Mostly; I hung with the girls. If anyone gave me shit for it they never bothered telling me about it. Then again, that wasn’t a school with a lot of jocks.
None of which means I actually liked PE, but it wasn’t the Bullying Hour I know the “subject” tends to be.
Headine: JEANM is revealed as troll:
Ithiliana-well DKM does make a point about provocation that seems to make sense. Every normal person can be provoked and pushed too far at times where they may respond in an unpleasant manner.
He blamed my graduate student who was murdered by her ex-husband and who did NOT pay child support for murdering her in front of their two small children.
He BLAMED my graduate student who was MURDERED by her ex-husband who did NOT pay child support for murdering her. In front of their two small children.
DKM thinks every man is normal until pushed too far by harpy women until they are provoked to beat and kill them.
Ithiliana-well DKM does make a point about provocation that seems to make sense. Every normal person can be provoked and pushed too far at times where they may respond in an unpleasant manner.
The fuck?
what point? He says that women who are abused actively seek their abuse; they, “know all the buttons to push”.
He blamed a murdered woman for getting murdered.
That’s not sensible. That’s evil. To argue that the victim of a murder is the person who should be held accountable is reprehensible.
And you think this is some sort of debatably valid as a point of view.
The fuck?
Sociological images had a post a long time ago about standing up to pee. Turns out women stand up to pee in other cultures.
They also had a post about the variety of urinals meant to imply women are toilets.
skeptifem — I don’t recall the first soc. images post you mention, but I think the latter was linked to on the previous page of comments. Idk if you meant this post or not though.
I wouldn’t have a problem with PE as a class if it was actually a class, where they taught stuff, instead of just throwing you out onto the field and saying “go”.
I remember once in elementary school, we had to complete an “obstacle course,” and part of that involved sliding down a pole, and I had no idea how to do that, and basically just fell. And of course any competitive game, you were just told the rules (if you were lucky), and not things like “here is how you hold and swing a bat”.
And yes, JeanM = definitely troll. Combination of heinous statement and complete indifference to being the topic of discussion. Anyone actually interested in engaging with the community would have said something about not really being a troll.
Re: JeanM — yeah I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt that I was just being cranky, but then that defense of DKM? About the worst way possible to say “I am not a troll”.
And not only did my PE classes not teach anything, I don’t recall those girls who didn’t want to get their hair wet being asked if they could swim…fail >.<
Yep, the “provocation” my student did was to complete her doctorate degree and get a job IN ANOTHER TOWN where he would have a harder time stalking and harassing her.
That’s provocation for murder, right, Jean??????????????????
Okay, chiming in on the P.E. ranting…
We had co-ed PE throughout my school years. I do think it would have been helpful to break it up by gender, mostly because in any semester where we were playing team sports (soccor, flag football, basketball, vollyball, etc.) most of the girls would be actively excluded. It didn’t matter if you were actually good at the sport–and for a big girl, I was decent at vollyball; it was my favorite and I played a lot with friends and family–you just could not get the ball passed to you, and if the ball did happen to come into your area, there was always a boy to jump in front of you and take it. So after a couple of weeks of trying to participate, most of us just ended up standing around for 45 minutes, bored as hell, waiting for it to be over, while the game played around us. Of course, that meant we would get a terrible PE grade because we weren’t “participating”–never mind that the gym teachers did jack shit about the way we were excluded. The one time I tried to point this out, the teacher just said, “Stephanie and Monica are doing fine. Stop making excuses for being lazy.” (of course all fat kids are lazy!) and didn’t listen when I tried to explain that, yeah, a couple of girls were agressively going after the ball and fighting back, but a) they were in much better physical condition that we were, and it took them a long time for the boys to even grudgingly accept them–regardless of the fact that they were often *on* the school team for whatever sport we were playing, and b) they straight up didn’t care about being called bitches and dykes, while some of us were still having trouble managing to make it through the school day without being physcially assaulted or bursting into tears. Yeah, gym teachers are not the most empathetic people, in my experience.
When I could, I would chose the non-sport classes, like aerobics, pilates, or even *walking* (hated walking, it was just 45 minutes of laps around the track, but at least they left you alone and your grade was soley based on how well you did). Of course, I heard two gymn teachers trying to use the high percentage of girls in the walking/aerobics classes to “prove” that girls didn’t really want to play sports, and thus Title IX was bullshit, without ever considering *why* girls didn’t want to being in the team classes (like, OH I DON’T KNOW, the fact that you are TERRIBLE AT YOUR JOB?!).
I think PE is important, but not the way its currently done. Aside from gender issues, there were no accomodations made for kids who were not physically fit or who had medical problems. In fact, if it was structured for anyone, it seemed to be for those at the top of the class already. At the time I felt like shit for not being able to fully participate (thanks, PE teachers, for making me hate myself more than I already did), until I got older, actually learned about exercise, and realized that what they were making me do was UNSAFE. No, some of us aren’t lazy, useless princesses, some of us literally cannot physically do things that other kids can. And because there was no accomodation (and I couldn’t handle the emotional abuse) I ended up getting a medical pass and spending almost all of PE in study hall with the pregnant girls–which, stupid, we could have really used PE, too, but they would rather just keep us out than work on the problem (who is lazy in this scenario?). From talking with a couple friends getting their degree in the field, there just isn’t enough education given on how to accomodate and help (and not psychologically abuse) overweight kids (or other kids with disabilities). There really should be, especially with the rising number of overweight kids. The solution is not to just have them sit out PE or humiliate and marginalize them while they’re with the class.
Eh, sorry for the ramble, this is something that’s really important to me, and I think there should be more attention paid to the issue.
@student-0/10, I’m more offended by the lack of effort.
Or perhaps you just don’t have a sense of humour.
Argenti and Cliff-you both may want to take a long nap and then get out into the fresh air for awhile. You seem to always be on the defensive and bitter and pounce on anything that doesn’t fit into your narrow view of things.
I write unpleasantness and you both turn that into murder and imply that I was condoning murder.Unpleasantness means just that and if the word doesn’t happen to be in your Newspeak dictionary then a suggest that you get a real one.
And you may want to go poke a wasp’s nest or carry your cat around by its tail to get an idea what unpleasantness is. The cat is not trying to murder you but just protecting itself.
JeanM: Aren’t you the nasty little troll!
Yup.
The other reason I spent gym class wishing all the boys would go away was that it was somehow anathema to make the boys do “girly” sports. I mentioned that I was a varsity athlete; I played field hockey, which is a sport that, in the US, is inexplicably coded as being for girls only. Which meant that not once, in all the years I had gym class, did we ever play any field hockey at all, despite my school having all the equipment to accommodate it, but we could play flag football 800,000 times. We also could not do any form of dance, yoga, gymnastics, archery, or really anything that sounded particularly fun to me. The few times students suggested such things, we were told, “No, we have to do things everyone will enjoy,” which was sort of hilarious given that the whole point of those suggestions was generally, “Please, for the love of god, stop making us play flag football and volleyball over and over.”
(Excluding dance was particularly stupid and obviously gender-based because my school had a national-championship-winning dance team with a truly awesome coach who repeatedly volunteered to teach a gym class unit on dance. She could not be taken up on that, but apparently we could regularly have the school’s soccer coach – who had helpfully led the boys’ soccer team to a succession of spectacularly losing seasons – come scream at us about how we were even worse than the actual soccer team. Not that that was hard, given that his entire coaching technique appeared to consist of yelling, “KICK THE BALL, DAMMIT” a lot.)
Jean: You might want to pay attention to what you are agreeing with. Meller’s argument is (and has been) that women who are abused/killed, did something to provoke it.
You say has a valid point. You agree with him. Don’t be so defensive about it.
I played field hockey, which is a sport that, in the US, is inexplicably coded as being for girls only – Polliwog
Thankyou! I’d picked up the idea that field hockey was female-coded from somewhere and I had no idea where it came from. It was in the back of my mind bugging me, since it’s generally not gender-coded over here (in my experience, anyway) so I didn’t know whether i’d just made it up.
It’s annoying when you pick up something cross-culturally and then have no idea where it came from.
“Argenti and Cliff-you both may want to take a long nap and then get out into the fresh air for awhile. You seem to always be on the defensive and bitter and pounce on anything that doesn’t fit into your narrow view of things.”
I just woke up, you still seem like another incarnation of our standard hateful trolls.
@Not-JeanM — I have remembered though that my freshman year, before I transferred, required PE, with the “do what you want” clause. I swam, a lot (indoor pool, so the weather didn’t stop me). I can’t imagine there’s enough difference between college frosh and HS students that HS students wouldn’t do something given the option to do whatever sport/activity they wanted. I’m the type to see any body of water as an excuse to swim laps, so maybe I’m an outlier here?
I was a fat, uncoordinated kid who had trouble doing laps around the gym in middle school, and yet my most humiliating gym experience was in college. I had to get a couple of PE credit hours as a requirement, so I signed up for a PE class my freshman year. The first thing that happened was everyone was weighed and they had a measurement test where they pinched up the skin of the thigh and measured it with calipers. We were given to understand that our grade would be based in part on losing weight if we came up overweight on that test.
We also had a walking test I remember, in the cold, grey morning one week. We had to do X laps around the track without running (plenty of people cheated), and we were graded on our total time. The coach had a printout with some walking times broken into percentiles based on some study, I didn’t get a good look at it. So if you turned out to be in the 90th percentile, your grade was 90. You had to be faster than three-quarters of the people in the study to get a passing grade on this thing. In hindsight, I don’t blame people for jogging a bit and cheating. The thing was bullshit.
Anyway, I still had three or so laps to go, I turned out to be the last one on the track, and from the far curve of the track, I saw the coach pack up and go in.
I was so humiliated I burst into tears. Then I went in because it was fucking freezing and I didn’t see the point.
I barely squeaked past that class. I don’t remember doing basketball or anything. I do remember watching as a class a video involving footage of football injuries as they occurred. The one that stayed with me [GRAPHIC] was jura bar cynlre gnpxyrq gur bgure ng whfg gur evtug natyr naq sbepr gung gur xarr bs gur thl orvat gnpxyrq sbyqrq gur jebat jnl. The entire class gasped or exclaimed at that.
I think of field hockey as being coded for women. Probably has something to do with how my college had a field hockey girls’ team and no boys’ team. The boys had football and soccer and basketball and baseball (the girls had soccer and basket ball and softball). I guess they thought that football being exclusively a boys’ sport and field hockey being exclusively a girls’ sport balanced out.
OH and do I really have to rant about how girls are allowed to play baseball only if they pitch underhanded? Can we stipulate that I have done so?
“jura bar cynlre gnpxyrq gur bgure ng whfg gur evtug natyr naq sbepr gung gur xarr bs gur thl orvat gnpxyrq sbyqrq gur jebat jnl”
I know someone who had basically that happen — iirc it was soccer (though maybe that’s what you meant, we need to stipulate to calling American football that, or something) — but he spent a couple of months on crutches.
Yet another reason I do not do ball sports, jut put me in the pool, please.
*just put me in the pool
Damned typo faery.
@Argenti — Nope, American football.