So apparently I’m way off base with this “misogyny” thing. For example, I have been under the impression that I have been finding misogynistic stuff in the Men’s Rights subreddit, like, all the time. With upvotes, and everything. But evidently I’m wrong.
Because now ignatiusloyola, one of the subreddit mods, has done a very scientific study that proves beyond a reasonable doubt that, well, whatever misogyny is there is officially not a big damn deal.
Ig explains his protocol:
I did a quick scan of the first 400 comments on the list (100/page, 4 pages in). I scanned for words like “cunt” and “whore”, and read the context of these. I looked for the words “woman” and “women”, and read the context of these. I looked for “suffrage” and “vote” also.
I found two comments that used the word “cunt”, one of them was used to describe men, the other to describe a specific woman. The only instances of “whore” were “attention whore”.
There were two comments involving the word “woman” that generalized women with negative stereotypes.
“Suffrage” and “vote” instances did not involve any context that suggested that women did not deserve the right to vote.
How a person defines “hatred of women”, either loosely (suggestive from context, rather than explicit) or strictly (explicit statements), it is pretty clear that out of 400 comments, very few are misogynistic.
Does misogyny exist? Yes. But it does not seem to be a significant contribution to r/MensRights. At best, people are seeing a few comments and focusing on their existence while ignoring the rest.
It’s a lot like that time Michael Richards did that standup routine, and everyone focused on that one word he said, totally ignoring all the other words he used that were totally not racist slurs. I mean, yeah, he said that word a bunch of times, but it still made up a very small percentage of all the words he used that evening.
So that’s that, then. Misogyny, officially not a problem!
Or that would have been that, had Ig not actually posted about his experiment to the subreddit he had just proved was, like, totally non-misogynistic:
Because it turned out that a couple of the fellas had an issue with Ig’s methodology. In particular, that stuff about female suffrage. Because, apparently, you can totally be against women having the right to vote and still not be a misogynist. As zyk0s put it (garnering upvotes in the process):
[T]here’s the matter of female suffrage. I really don’t see how suggesting women should not have been granted the right to vote is misogyny. It might be motivated by it, but not necessarily so, and treating it as such is akin to criminalizing holocaust denial: it’s censorship, pure and simple, and if [1] /r/MR wants to keep calling itself an open space where ideas are not silenced, that attitude has to change.
Our friend Demonspawn went even further(and got a few upvotes himself):
Suggesting that the government works better without the women’s vote is not misogyny. It’s an analysis of the facts and the consequences of allowing women’s suffrage.
Suggesting that women retain the right to vote without the corresponding responsibilities that men face is misandry.
So there you have it. The Men’s Rights subreddit doesn’t have a misogyny problem; if anything, it’s a hotbed of misandry.
I didn’t mean to sound like Rahu was defending it. We can’t get that from Rahu’s post at all.
I was just helping the thoughts along.
@Rahu
The argument I’ve seen went like this:
A woman can vote either the same way as her husband or a different way. If she votes the same way, then he effectively gets two votes, which isn’t right. If she votes a different way, then his vote effectively gets cancelled out and doesn’t count, and that’s not right either. It almost sounds plausible until you realize the absurdity of treating the situation as though men’s votes were the real deal and women’s were just confounding factors. Basically, you have to already be questioning women’s right to vote for this argument to have any persuasive power at all.
Plus, as indifferentsky points out, not all women have a husband to compare their vote to. I’m single. Is my vote doubling the vote of a single man who agrees with me, or cancelling the vote of a single man who disagrees?
“In our current voting methodology, there is no distinction in a woman’s vote vs. a man’s – therefore, her vote for candidate A effectively nullifies his vote for candidate B, which makes her, a female, equal to him, a male, and that is not right.” – Rahu
lol. Why let two men vote oppositely, but not one man, one woman? Oh that’s right. Misogyny.
@feministgamer
Because men’s opinions matter. Women aren’t supposed to have opinions 🙁
Exactly, when are the MRAs going to realize that all these woman-hating clubhouses are hurting their cause? They’ll need to purge a lot of the loudest voices (like the people David quotes here) if they want to resemble something like a real rights advocacy group.
Great image, we can see how well the “u ugly” argument worked out antisufferage people.
The whole “canceling out a vote” doesn’t make any sense. There’s a pile of votes for one candidate and a pile of votes for another candidate. Then they add it up and whoever has the most wins. Technically, all the votes except for the winning number of votes are “canceled out” by this logic.
But that’s not how voting works. It’s a sheer numbers game.
Voter turn out is bad enough as it is (the elderly, the young, non-whites and those in rural areas are some of the most vulnerable to being unable to register for the vote)- adding in GENDER based requirements are even more fucking ridiculous, because there is LITERALLY no difference in voting practices that can be directly tied to one’s gender.
Basically, what these misogynists want the very most in the whole world is to limit the access of voting or having any citizenship or say in how society runs or how society operates if you don’t fall into their white heterosexual male utopia. So if you have any color to your skin, a religion other than Christian, a sexuality that is more fluid than missionary-for-reproduction-only or a gender that isn’t XY genetically determined, they want to keep you silent and downtrodden because then they can do whatever the hell they want.
But don’t they understand that in a world where the few tyrannical misogynists take over, they’re going to have to contend with the vast number of people who are going to say “fuck this shit” and organize to overthrow them?
If you want to stamp around and play the dictator, don’t be surprised when you encounter a coup.
For sans serif fonts, it’s hard to go wrong with Helvetica. There’s a fascinating documentary about (and named after) it. Apple was nice enough to license Helvetica for their OS’s, but Microsoft cheaped out and licensed the knock-off font Arial instead. They’re almost identical looking, but Helvetica is a bit nicer.
Or you can go with Roboto, designed by Google for Android 4.0 and open-sourced. I’m probably biased because I work there, but it is a nice looking font (unlike Droid Sans, the previous Android font, which was kinda meh) and the specimen text includes the phrase “Self-driving robot ice cream truck”, which would be pretty awesome and I’m sure is next on the list after they get the self-driving car to market.
I suppose it wouldn’t be awesome if it was GLaDOS driving the truck, because then the ice cream would be a lie. Or maybe the truck would be filled with robot ice cream, which is probably loaded with motor oil and screws or something equally inedible to humans. Because all female AIs are lying wh**es. Or is it only 98%?
Of course MRAs aren’t misogynist. They don’t hate women, they would totally love to own one!
/puking
Rahu: The problem with the MRM reasoning is in this sentence: which makes her, a female, equal to him, a male, and that is not right.
There is no difference between women and any other group.
Make it, which makes a Green equal to a Republican, and that is not right. and nothing in the actual argument is changed.
That reasoning is used to justify oppression everywhere oppression is the rule. That MRAs hate women is expemplified in that statement; not mitigated.
p.s. I don’t think you are endorsing it, I’m just showing what’s wrong with the underlying thought they are using.
”It’s a lot like that time Michael Richards did that standup routine, and everyone focused on that one word he said, totally ignoring all the other words he used that were totally not racist slurs. I mean, yeah, he said that word a bunch of times, but it still made up a very small percentage of all the words he used that evening.”
The problem with this analogy is that Michael Richards is one person, and the Men’s Rights reddit is a loosely moderated(is it moderated at all?) internet forum with many different people contributing. This is cherry picking plain and simple. You know it is, and it’s all you know how to do. You never address any of the actual arguments or ideas that any of the MRAs have. You pick the quotes that sound bad, have no evidence that the entire movement supports those ideas, and then write a little bit of what you probably consider witty prose underneath the quotes. You disregard an entire different way of thinking, and a lot of new ideas just because of a few things some guys on the fringe posted in an unmoderated forum. That’s the exact same thing as people disregarding all ideas that came out of the feminist movement just because of things like that old ”all men are rapists, and that’s all they are” quote or the notorious S.C.U.M manifesto. That’s your schtick in a nutshell. You’re a one trick pony, but your trick only works with a very sympathetic audience.
That audience isn’t growing. Your movement will eventually die out. And years from now, hopefully many, many years(wouldn’t want you to miss out on what’s coming), you’ll be lying in your death bed wondering why you wasted so much of your life on something as stupid as this blog and a movement as morally bankrupt as feminism.
I challenge you to write a post about the recent incident involving Janet Napolitano. But you won’t. MRAs at least acknowledge that some men do bad things. Feminists only criticise women that are non-feminists.
…and the argument collapses completely when it’s applied to a system with more than two parties.
For example, my wife and I voted for different losing candidates in the last UK election. And since the winner had an absolute majority over all his rivals put together, it wouldn’t have made any difference to the outcome if we’d decided to vote in sync.
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking: Surely no one should be allowed to vote for a different candidate than anyone else, lest they make someone’s vote not count.
I thought the idea was how dare his woman counteract his vote.
I felt my stomach twist when I read this sentence.
And um…how common is it for people to marry and have two opposite political views?
Somehow I was under the impression that political viewpoints were formed on the basis of the values and beliefs of a person, and that ones family of birth would likely be very influential on that…at least until personal experience had a chance to modify it. Also, age…people seem to get more conservative as they get older.
MANBOOBZ!
It is my birthday today, and I demand you derail the thread with pictures and/or videos and/or news articles about octopi doing cute things!!! Because srsly, gaiz, OCTOPUS.
Also, I like Georgia. (The font, obvs.)
Happy Birthday!
Rahu, welcome! It’s good to hear from you.
My father wasn’t an MRA, but I think he would have been upset if he had realized that, about during the Reagan administration, my mother started voting for Democrats, not Republicans. In the 2008 election, she told me that she wished she could just tell him that there was no need for them to vote, since they were cancelling out each other’s vote. At that time, my father was pretty much bedridden and getting him out of the house was very difficult for them. But she knew it would upset him and so she never told him. (I’m not sure why they didn’t use absentee ballots.)
pillowinhell, I heard that men get more conservative as they age, while women get more liberal. But I googled and found this (link below) that suggests it’s not true of either men or women. This article suggests that people get more liberal and tolerant as they age; the difference is that they started off more conservative to begin with, so they’re more liberal than they were, but more conservative than younger people.
http://news.discovery.com/human/voter-conservative-aging-liberal-120119.html
Feliz cumpleanos!!
I’m on a tablet, so don’t know if this will embed — anyway, happy birthday!
Happy Birthday moonz!
http://youtu.be/fDxBVZhZZwI
Octopi are evolving extremely rapidly, and perhaps in a few million years……..Or maybe only a few thousand, they may soon crawl out of water and learn to live on land.
Happy birthday, moonz.
Happy birthday whataboutthemoonz. Here’s some pics:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/06/22/friday-cephalopod-begging-for-the-lolcephalopod-treatment/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/08/03/friday-cephalopod-diaphanous/
Cliff,
I noticed your comment about Owly reading your blog. It made me curious, so I went and checked it out. Great blog! I especially enjoyed reading about Darth Vaders. Now I have a better vocabulary for explaining my ex, who I refer to affectionately as The Lunatic.
Also, my husband is very much an anti-Vader, which helps a lot.