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!
The rim of the bowl. Sorry, today has been tiring. *sleeps on face*
creativewritingstudent — pun-y, though that was apparently lost on JeanM (either that or JeanM is trying to make a funny and failing in comparison)
It was no lamer than looking for a “stud” which she’s unlikely to find. 🙂
@ Nana-there are lower urinals for midgets and kids.
Now where I’m from, children have gender-seperated PE lessons from age ten onwards. though honestly – I think it would do the girls good to have more PE together with the boys. To us it seemed like they had very little drive to actually actively engage in the curriculum. Or at least we used to beat them easily at volleyball. And god, did we hate volleyball until it finally stopped being painful as fuck.
“It was no lamer than looking for a “stud” which she’s unlikely to find”
You’re one of those trolls who think ending things with smilies makes them okay, huh? It doesn’t. In non-puns, your walls have studs every 18″ usually, potentially every 24″ on newer construction; in puns, wtf does it matter what’s likely? No but I get the point there, you’re trying to say that creativewritingstudent couldn’t possibly date a stud, which takes multiple assumptions — 1) that ze’s female, 2) that ze is interested in men (or that studs come in female, or non-male, form), 3) that ze is interested in a partner in general.
Kakanian — I think you might be on the wrong thread? Though damn do I agree on volleyball being painful.
I’m confused. Why is volleyball painful?
I didn’t think JeanM was a troll. I’m a little confused. Zie made several pertinent and perfectly fine comments, and then played along with the stud/gelding thing with a “that’s misandry!” come-back that’s in keeping with the jokes lots of people here make (e.g. scented candles), and now everything’s gone all weird.
Is this all a big misunderstanding, or am I ignorant of some relevant history here?
I really hate manwomanmyth. Probably more than WTF Price and JtO, though it’s a close call. He is probably the most misogynist, in that he seems to be angry that women exist, walking free in the world and he has to look at them. He has said he resents the female athletes competing in the Olympics and the TV time they’re given. He thinks men and women should compete, and if the women lose, “suck it up ladies, you’re just inferior.” He is truly a horrible person. It further shows how laughable the MRM is that this person his held up as a “philosophical” moderate. I guess not calling women c*nts makes you a moderate in the MRM.
About the urinals. My friend is one of three boys, and they put in a urinal in their bathroom. The mother was the only woman in the house, and she had her own bathroom. I can only imagine the amount of pee she had to mop up off the floor before the urinal was installed. And yeah, these MRAs have no idea what goes into keeping a bathroom clean.
Hi manboobz readers. I saw one of those spearhead fliers at the local walmart in lancaster! :O
So I tore it down (:
burgundy — I may just be in a particularly cranky mood, JeanM’s jokes being followed by both “lame” and “midget” set off my “you really don’t give a shit about ableism huh?” thus pointing towards troll. It’s possible that the stud line above was another joke that fell flat on me. Between NWO’s comments on my being “uncissed” and reading about the Aurora shooting, I’m cranky.
Cassandra — volleyball is painful because you’re likely to hit a wrist bone, which hurts if you aren’t used to it.
@Argenti Aetheri
It’s a joke. A joke that’s one endless repeat of Dolly Parton CDs from being my secondary school experience. It’s meant to be an insulty joke, but it kinda falls flat because I didn’t care when I was 14 and I don’t care now.
0/10, I’m more offended by the lack of effort.
I’d say troll. Lazy troll.
creativewritingstudent — yeah, that was what I was thinking — not a troll in our usual sense, but a typical lulz troll who’s failing the lulz. Trying to crack a joke about how you won’t finda stud is closer to an insult than a joke. “You won’t find a partner” is just so typical an insult though.
Ref: Urination
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-actors-who-do-exact-same-thing-in-every-movie/
In at #5, Tom Hanks’ Career is a Urinary Morality Play
And see, I thought the stud comment was a call-back to prior comments about not being able to find actual, in-the-wall studs. Although I guess the quotation marks don’t really help my argument. I don’t have good troll-dar. (Also, from other sites, I am way too familiar with people who are great on feminism and racism but fail horribly on ableism, so often what that says to me is “this person needs some speaking to” as opposed to “this person is automatically a troll.”)
Because I’m on cracked.com right now and am curious, has anybody ever heard of a DickHat?
Freitag, I was just reading that the other day! The DickHats crack me up. Especially because my ex and I always used to refer to condoms as hats – going shopping for hats, “I think it’s time for you to put on your hat.” etc. I’m still considering sending him a link to that.
Speaking as someone who had co-ed PE throughout middle and high school, I have to disagree – I would have loved gym classes divided by gender, because my experience was that in any sort of team activity, the girls mostly didn’t have “drive” specifically because a lot of the boys were exhibiting ridiculous, obnoxious, massively aggressive levels of “drive” (which I would probably rename “stupid macho-man hyper-competitive bullshit”). 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.
Don’t get me wrong – I was a varsity athlete, I liked playing competitive team sports, I’ve got no problem with competition in appropriate settings and at appropriate levels, but the same sort of guys who feel like using a toilet instead of a urinal would emasculate them were once 14-year-olds, and back then, they were busy feeling like if Team People-Who-Got-Handed-a-Red-Jersey-Today didn’t win this gym class volleyball game, their penises would magically fall off on the spot, and if the path to gym class victory required shoving the kid half their size down and stomping on them in order to get at the ball, that kid was damn well getting stomped.
(So, really, I suppose what I want is for gym classes to be divided into “people who are here to get some exercise and hopefully have a bit of fun doing it” and “people who are here to DOMINATE.” I would have had no problem sharing a gym class with the boys who didn’t act ridiculous, and I’d like them to have a refuge from the ridiculous kids, too. Someone should figure out how to make that happen.)
“So, really, I suppose what I want is for gym classes to be divided into “people who are here to get some exercise and hopefully have a bit of fun doing it” and “people who are here to DOMINATE.””
Considering I got a toe broken by an asshole in the latter group, I second that thought. Not acting like anyone who just wants to toss a ball around is somehow failing the purpose of gym class might be a start — gym teachers, at least at my HS, seemed to have a much wider margin of allowed douche-ness than any other teachers. Could you imagine a history teacher going on about how the girls might have to learn history? No? I had a gym teacher go on, at length, about how the girls might have to get their hair wet to swim…not “get swim caps if you don’t want wet hair” but “spoiled princess” (basically, not in those exact words).
This non-binary politely requests not sorting by gender though, I like the above categories better.
Mr. “you might have to get your hair wet” was the same gym teacher who wouldn’t give me a nurses pass when that idiot broke my damned toe, Worst. Teacher. EVAR (I couldn’t have a pass because I must’ve just been looking for an excuse to “get out of class”…while limping…a decade later I still want to tell him to go fuck himself…)
Can you tell which group I was? Even swimming, the sport I do actually do, I just wanted to swim laps, I didn’t really care if I swam THE MOST LAPS!!
I wonder how this guy would feel if he knew that in the “good old days” of the Victorian Era there were lots of female urinals.
They were built to accommodate women in corsets and hoops. As dresses like that faded from fashion, so too the female urinal.
pecunium — do you mean with or without running water? You’ve managed to find something Victorian that I didn’t know, and have thus caught my interest. (Omgs hoop skirts, those things are nose-breakingly evil)
Touche, gender-sorting definitely screws over anyone outside the gender binary, and that should have shown up somewhere in my comment. I’m going to blame sleepiness for this one.
And yeah, gym teachers frequently seem to be exceedingly awful. My “favorite” one liked to yell at kids who were clearly, clearly not built for particular sports that they were “losers, and would always be losers.” (Not that that’s an okay thing to shout at any kid, but it was an extra level of fucking stupid watching him yell at, say, my friend who stood a whopping 4’9” at age 18 about how she sucked forever because she wasn’t super-great at spiking volleyballs.)
In the TMI dept. By and large I sit to piss. It’s more comfortable. I certainly do it in the night, because hate to turn the light on, and it’s easier.
The only reason to stand is that I’m in a public restroom (and so am more vulnerable if my pants are down), or my clothes are just too much hassle to remove.
For different TMI: When I was in Iraq we did lots of convoys, some of them were pretty long. Guys would piss in bottles. Some were bad at it. One of my troops (a female) was able to do it just fine.
I still have no idea how; she didn’t have an STP. But let me tell you, lots of female soldiers I know have them, and they use them to piss in the urinals, because getting all that gear off, just to take a piss, is a royal pain in the ass.
Argenti: I don’t think studfinders are magentometers. I think they are some sort of sonar based densitometers. I’ve never had a problem using them.
Argenti: I think most of them were san water, though I am sure some has constant flow. They were long projections of enameled iron, so that a woman could lift her skirt and (wearing split bloomers) straddle them and let go.