Complementarian Loners, a relationship blog of sorts run by two kinky but reactionary Catholics (and which I’ve written about before), describes itself as “primarily a blog of ideas.” The main idea seems to be that women are awful, worthless creatures. Surprisingly, it is CL, the female half of the blogging team, who is often the most vociferous on this point.
In a post unironically titled “Tits or GTFO (a.k.a. How Women Ruin Everything),” CL defends the regular harassment women face when entering – sorry, “invading” – “male spaces” online. As she writes:
Too many women will waltz in and expect to engage everyone, with no sense that perhaps they should just hang back once they’ve had their say if they even have it. They talk and talk and talk, derailing conversations, going off-topic usually to talk about themselves, until all that’s left is a room full of clucking hens and all the smart guys eventually get fed up and leave.
They want to be considered equals yet prove they do not deserve it both by showing that what they really want is to be up on that pedestal and that they are incapable of rational thought.
I have to confess that I have never actually seen this happening in any “male space” online, though I’ve seen numerous female spaces invaded and overrun by blabby mansplainy guys, often of the MRA persuasion. That’s certainly happened often enough on Reddit, where virtually every woman-centric subreddit from TwoXChromosome to Feminism has been rendered almost useless for discussion, a process depicted symbolically in the gif below.
Meanwhile, over at the “male spaces,” women are all too often shut down and/or run off by obnoxious dudes calling them bitches and worse and demanding nude pictures. CL, for her part, finds this all rather wonderful, and suggests puckishly that Complementarian Loners might well adopt a similar “policy” to deal with gals who won’t stop disagreeing with her shut up.
There’s a reason the only people we have banned on this blog are women and a couple of manginas. These people don’t know when to shut up and have no sense that they’re wearing out the welcome mat – also known as being entitled. … I’ve lost whatever patience I had for it and I don’t like to see insightful comments lost in the kerfuffle of women clamouring for validation.
So, perhaps a new policy for women should be, since they refuse to apologise or drop anything, tits or GTFO.
Sure, that might be seen as demeaning. But these women are asking for it through their behavior:
If a woman is making no sense and adding nothing to the discussion, while making it all about her, defending other women, being a special snowflake and NOT wanting to learn anything, she is a liability and worthless in that forum, so she has reduced her worth to only sexual. Therefore, she should just be sexual and show her tits to show she has something to offer.
Really? Because I’ve run across a lot of awful guys online who continually say things that make no sense, and I’ve never once thought that this “reduces their worth to only sexual.” I think it just means they are incoherent assholes with terrible, terrible ideas.
But no, in CL’s mind, women bring this sexual harassment onto themselves. Not only that, but the harassment is good for them:
Men do not do this to women; women do it to themselves. Due [to] their lame, banal talking, they show they are only good for sex. Showing her tits is a humbling and reminds her of her worth. With any hope, it makes her think and realise that in order to be more than a sexual object, she must STFU or prove herself able to be rational.
CL, your argument here isn’t exactly, you know, rational to begin with; you’re essentially demanding that the women you disagree with transform themselves into people who are irrational in the same way that you are.
I am embarrassed for my sex. It makes me cringe to see how they ruin everything once they get their claws in, and how little they really seem to care for men and male spaces. We all want our own spaces free of drama. Perhaps they don’t realise that it is they who create all the drama, but apparently this is what women seem to want.
Yeah, it’s not like angry dudes online are ever known to conjure drama out of thin air (*cough*avoiceformen*cough*).
Of course, when those poor MRAs start having fits over nothing, we need to remember that the poor babies have been treated so badly by the ladies of the world:
Women need to understand that MRAs and MGTOWs are disgruntled, angry, and frustrated with good reason … These are men who have loved, and their anger is proportional to the love of which they are capable.
Well, that’s your theory. My theory is that, by and large, they’re a bunch of entitled assholes.
In the end, CL brings it all back to one famous naughty lady and her love of apples:
If only women would stop this fight. If only women would submit to male leadership and stop this urge to control everything. Alas, it seems unlikely that most will ever be able to see, but it is sad how bad things have gotten, how cursed the world is, by dint of the daughters of Eve and our disobedience.
That’s right: Because Eve bit an apple, it’s fine to sexually harass women online when you don’t like what they say.
Of course, CL is perfectly fine with offline harassment as well. In the comments, she laments that fact that dudes can’t call a woman a “whore” in a bar these days without that woman getting mad, and suggests that women working in male arenas – sorry, women “playing at being construction workers or what have you” – just learn to appreciate this sort of “jocular speech” from the fellows.
Blessed are the sexual harassers, because women talk too much.
Ayla: I am confident that I am on the right side of the issue.
Of course you are. So are lots of people, say Todd Akin, or R-Paul. I told you why I think you are a bigot.
You’ve not managed to convince me otherwise.
After all, it’s not as if catholic priests don’t work against the death penalty; saving lives. Nope, they all run around buggering altar boys. Right? And every one of the 1 billion people who profess to be catholic is all hunky dory with that; and you can prove it.
America rapes people. Because US Marines did it. America kills brown people for fun, because US Soldiers did it. They’ve been doing it a long time. I suppose I ought to leave the US and go to someplace where that shit never happen, and any USian who doesn’t renounce their citizenship supports it.
It’s not that you are against rape and hate, it’s that you are blanket in your treatment. Be a catholic = evil.
That’s the bigot’s rationale. Brown people = job thieves. Muslim = terrorist. How do we know? Just because. It was Arabs, after all, who hijacked the plane to Entebbe, and Muslims who flew the planes on 9/11, and muslims who issued the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and…. So everyone who doesn’t stop being a Muslim is guilty by association.
And you can’t deny that’s the style of your reasoning: It’s too bad the blanket statement is based in indisputable fact. You really can’t argue that the church could continue raping without ongoing support. It couldn’t. It would be impossible.
Go ahead, show me the doctrinal condoning of rape. Show me where “The Church” did it, as opposed to priests in it.
I left my particular church about two years ago. Our archdiocese chose to ordain openly gay clergyman and women, and several of the high-ups in the communion also have made very firm statements in order of gay rights. My congregation went into a tizzy. There was even talk of leaving the Evangelical Lutheran Church and joining a breakaway communion. After a series of meetings, the majority voted to remain affiliated with the main body. They sent a letter to the archdiocese explaining that they rejected the church’s stance on homosexuality; they also stated that they would never receive a gay pastor, or allow a same-sex marriage to be performed on the premises should it ever become legal. Obviously the passages of the Bible that condemned homosexuality were more important to these people than the ones that order us to love our neighbors.
A few of us left and never looked back. I do, however, have a few same-minded church friends who stayed. They’re hoping that by advocating tolerance and love, they can change minds. Their faith and patience are about a thousand times stronger than mine, and I wish them well.
That said, I think Ayla does have a point that financial support does help keep corrupt institutions running.. And Rutee definitely knocked it out of the park by mentioning that we would never give MRA’s the same kind of leeway we’re giving the Church hierarchy.
But I’m still uncomfortable with judging people by their associations, especially on something as personal as faith.
Fitzy: If we were giving the same leeway to individual priests, that would be one thing. If we were saying, “the Church is good, and so nothing it does can be critisised, or critiqued”, then yes, that would be a valid point.
But we aren’t. The other difference is that the MRM doesn’t have much beyond “Women are evil”. In those places (related to wanting to see balance in the ways family law is treated, and that the social presumptions of male/female roles need to be overturned) we aren’t in disagreement. When an MRA isn’t going on about how women are nasty, and is trying to address those issues, we give them the benefit of doubt.
There is no benefit of doubt in ayla’s stance. To not renounce catholicism is to be worthy of hate. That’s a big difference. There is no wiggle room. That’s the problem.
Fitzy: I left something out. The condemnations aren’t of the hierarchy. It’s the entirety of the laity.
I have no love for the Catholic church, for a variety of different reasons, one of which was their support of dictatorship in my country.
That being said, I know a lot of people who are catholics and they are good people who don’t agree with many of the Church’s stances, and I think at worst they could be considered victims of the Catholic church.
Religions tend to permeate the whole of society, from family rituals to media to support groups and many people can’t simply abandon their religion because it would cause their entire lives to collapse. I have read many accounts of atheists who are not out with their atheism precisely because of that.
Add to that the fact that many Catholics do good things and you are likely to have a lot of people wanting to change the religion rather than abandon it. I do think that there needs to be a more dedicated effort to do that, because a lot of people simply go with the flow and don’t question their assumptions, but you could say that about a lot of society.
myoo what have you done to your cat?!! you made it a transformer!!
I think Molly’s question is the right one: When do you draw the line? When do you leave?
I would argue that the Catholic Church as an organization takes positions that are harmful and dehumanizing to a large number of people: queer folks and women, for example. And that the Catholic Church in practice continues to enable and defend priests who rape children.
At the very least, lay Catholics who are feminists, support queer folks, and oppose the sexual abuse of children have lots of work to do to change both the fundamental teachings of the Church and its actual practices.
@Jumbofisch
It’s actually M.O.D.O.C. – Matriarchal Organism Designed Only for Cuddling.
I based it on the comic book villain M.O.D.O.K.
That’s no Transformer, that’s M.O.D.O.K.
Okay, so I was one letter off.
@Dracula
I considered using “Kuddling” but I thought better.
That is the question, but at the end of the day it’s a matter of individual conscience. Every person will have a different threshold for how much is too much, and different people will have different ideas about how to deal with corruption (that is, some will want to scrap the whole thing and start over, while others prefer to attempt to fix the system from the inside).
pecunium: Touche!
For those who are “changing the church from within”, what the heck are you doing to do it? Other than still giving the church your money (they don’t care that it’s coming from a dissenter– still goes straight to NOM) and sitting your butt in the pew, that is.
If you are going to support an organization which does such morally shitty things all the time (has anyone mentioned letting women die in their hospitals from pregnancy complications yet?) you better be trying your damnedest to do something. Are you supporting radical priests and nuns? Does your congregation put pressure on local hierarchy to knock off its lobbying and put donations towards poverty initiatives rather than political activities? Are you part of an abuse watchdog organization?
Oh wait, silly me, the catholic church is a decidedly non-democratic organization with a hierarchy that puts a dude who supposedly talks to God at the top. It’s almost like they don’t take their orders from the lay people and anyone who attempts to do anything substantial is excommunicated. Maybe you guys can wait until you get a new pope and hope he gets some “clarification” from God on whether women are full human beings or not. Just hope you get a liberal one and not one who wants to execute gay people .
(For the record, I’m not a Catholic, by the way.)
Intent: it’s fucking magic!
okay, someone linked me to this thread, so I’m going to comment here
First, rutee and blackbloc have been solid here.
Secondly, there’s a lot of false comparisons. The objection isn’t because the Catholic Church or any organization has a few problems, it’s about the specific problems, including hundreds of years of oppression, supporting dictators and fascism, child rape cover ups, etc. What the problems are and how institutionalized they are is important.
Thirdly, Catholicism is a powerful colonizer religion, the leadership of which is extremely disproportionately white. In the general it is white coded in the popular imagination. So, comparisons of Catholicism to colonized religions and religions that are coded as people of color religions are out of line. It’s the fact that ‘criticisms’ of the latter are often thinly veiled excuses for racism, are based on racist stereotypes, are used to excuse colonialism and war, etc. that makes them suspicious. An extra level of caution is obviously called for when westerners, especially white westerners, start criticizing colonized people and people of color. The contrary assertion is flat out absurd. The reason it’s not the same is because racism, colonialism, imperialism, etc. are all major and important things. Also, just the way that people posed questions here about islam indicated ignorance and stereotyping. The assumption that all muslims are members of a single religious denomination with a single hierarchy is a patently ridiculous one.
Fourthly, millions, and even billions, of people are assholes. That’s pretty much a given for anyone who thinks oppression is a thing. If you think privilege and oppression are things, you think this, at least in other contexts if not in this one.
Fifth, if there’s some magic no oppression country that takes all comers and everyone could afford to travel to, then national citizenship would be comparable. As it stands, it’s not. Being stateless is an incredibly vulnerable and sometimes fatal issue. It’s most certainly not the same as quitting the Catholic Church, though in situations where it were, the only defense then would be the coercive nature, not that it’s okay to voluntarily participate. And it’s a very weird thing to say when one of your opponents is an anarchist and the other plans to officially expatriate.
Not to mention that it erases native americans, descendants of slaves, and other colonized people. To quote Malcolm X, for some people ‘We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us!’ If you want to fucking talk about land rights issues, let’s start with talk about Pe’Sla…
Also, I don’t give a fuck if ‘America’ must be destroyed. I care about human life, human suffering, and rights. If we can have the same or better rights/less oppression w/out too much cost in life and suffering, I don’t give a fuck if ‘America’ is destroyed. I’m not a nationalist. And blackbloc is, again, an anarchist which makes it an even weirder example for him, because presumably he does want the US government dismantled rather than reformed. And I most certainly would not show up when colonized people or people who are victims of the US’s oppressive past and present say they hate it or that it’s evil and whine about how ‘not all Americans are like that’ to them.
The US is a powerful aggressive colonizer, which does play a role in the privilege of being able to not give a fuck about ‘death to america’, whereas if the US says ‘death to Iraq’ a quarter of a million civilians die. Still, the issues there are the ones about colonialism, imperialism, racism, human death and suffering, etc.
Sixth, and this is partially an aside just because it notably odd to me that people seemed to be ignoring it, the KKK is explicitly religious based and does require specific religious positions from its members. It’s not neatly separable from religious sentiment.
I was wondering how long it would take darksidecat to pop up and announce that everyone who believes in God is an asshole.
It’s weird and interesting to me how many of the comments keep talking about “you people”, “your religion”, etc, when many of the people saying “hey, it’s not cool to say all Catholics are assholes” are not Catholic and have identified as such.
Also, I wonder if DSC realizes that a lot of the people zie is calling assholes are POC. The mother in law I mentioned earlier is Asian, for example. She’s Catholic, and you’re calling her an asshole too. And yep, it’s because of colonization that she’s Catholic, but she’s still not going to appreciate being called an asshole because of it.
I’m really learning a lot from this thread. Everybody here, on both sides of the discussion, are giving points of view that I do not come across in my white, Christian conservative community. Thanks for the brain food.
I didn’t see that at all.
POC aren’t somehow above criticism, Cassandra, the issue here is that social realities, imperialism, and racist coding matter in discussing issues. Anyone who can’t see why criticisms of Islam and criticisms of Catholicism is ignoring the social realities of how each group is seen and treated, and racial and imperialist narratives and coding around the issue. Not all religions hold the same social position, the insistence that we craft our criticisms of religion, or of a specific religion, as if they do fails to take into account the very real intersections with racism and imperialism. White coded religion vs. people of color coded religion, imperial power religion vs. imperial power victim religion, colonizer religion vs. colonized relgion-these things absolutely do matter. And they don’t just matter to atheists, they matter in the way that theists treat members of other religions as well.
It’s just a mindblowingly fucking ridiculous notion that westerners, esp. white ones, treat Islam the same way they do Catholicism or Christianity the same in general, why would the only place where we act like it’s all on the same footing be here?
@katz
‘I was wondering how long it would take darksidecat to pop up and announce that everyone who believes in God is an asshole.’
wait, katz, when did all theists become church affiliated catholic? And here I spent so much time talking about how Islam is not socially comparable to catholicism…
@pecunium
‘Oh…and if you want to see what I think about things like abortion, and gay rights and the like… just click the link in my handle. It’s the top post right now.’
Oh, we’ve seen how you feel about queer people and our rights, pecunium, we saw it both times that you defended sodomy laws and denied queer history. Also, that time you compared queer sex to rape, wasn’t that grand fun?
http://manboobz.com/2012/06/01/mras-would-rather-complain-about-male-disposibility-than-work-to-enable-women-to-serve-in-combat/comment-page-4/#comments
Sorry, my bad.
Darksidecat thinks all church-affiliated Catholics are assholes.
Better?
This, and like Katz, not a Catholic.