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.
Oh, here we fucking go.
If part of your point is that you’re allowed to call a religion’s adherents assholes in a general sense because that religion is coded white, then it actually is kind of relevant to point out that many of the people you’re including in that “you’re all assholes” category are not actually white. I mean, clearly we’re not going to agree on this, but I’m not going to consider my mother in law an asshole just because she was raised Catholic and has not chosen to leave that faith*, regardless of how you feel about that decision.
*She has kind of tweaked her beliefs to include a lot of New Age stuff, and chosen to ignore the doctrine that she thinks is stupid, which in my observation seems to be what most socially liberal Catholics do.
Molly’s question is the question. It’s a question everyone who disagrees with some policy (which is not the same as apostasy of a group to which they belong/share an identity has to decide.
The broader issue, in the condemnation of every catholic,is just that, a broader question. The Church is vast. The individual churches in it are not so vast. There is a broad path they all follow, but even in that there is a wide variety (the Tridentines, for example, are as much a part of the “Church” as are the most liberal of Liberation Theology congregations, and the Jesuits who would have been willing to baptise my siblings (as my mother and step-father were both Catholic, but also both divorced; and remarried) just as much a part of it as the Dominicans who wouldn’t have been so willing.
The US Church is fucked up. It’s been shaped by the surrounding protestants environment, and is far more insular than is good for it. It, as with other religions in the US, gets too much in the way of preference from the state; when they politic from the pulpit that parish doesn’t lose its tax exempt status, and it should (actually, I don’t think any church ought to be tax exempt, but if there is an exemption, and part of the requirement is a lack of political action, then it needs to be enforced).
But it’s larger than just that aspect of it. Yes, the Curia did evil things. Yes, they tolerated large amounts of abuse; and there were people who were in positions to know that it was larger than one, or two, priests in a couple of parishes in this diocese or that. But that’s not the whole of the church.
In the same way we can have people be, “Against the war”, while they, “support the troops”, someone can be deeply opposed to the covering up of abuse (because that’s the problem; not that some priests committed abuses, but that the Curia did it’s utmost to keep it hidden; and didn’t do enough to stop those priests it knew to be pedophiles from being in positions to abuse others), and still be agreement with the broader theological precepts of the Roman Catholic Church.
And inside that framework they can work to make things better. Jesus didn’t wash his hands of the imperfect. But my religious worldview is, for good or ill, shaped by years of upbringing, and the shapes, and frameworks I have for what religious sentiments I have are those of the Roman Catholic Church. I could abandon it, in a righteous dudgeon, but that wouldn’t change the church, and wouldn’t take those frameworks away.
So leaving is problematic. To paraphrase Brokeback Mountain, “I can’t quit her”. The Church is part of my being.
Holy fucking shitballs, did we just go into “It’s not official church doctrine so you can’t blame the entire church” territory? Would you like a side of No True Scostman with that? You need it fucking spelled out for you because the decades of shuffling abusers around to hide them, the hush money and everything else isn’t quite enough to make it official? I’m unapologetically with Ayla and Rutee on this. You go ahead and tell yourself you’re affecting change from the inside if it makes you feel better. The hierarchy of the church doesn’t seem too fucking impressed with your attempts. You ask yourself what you “social identity” is worth. What your accustomed ritual is worth. When it rises to the level of some kid’s life, some LGBT person’s life, some woman’s life, just ONE life, you fucking let me know. This entire thread’s turned into just about every fucking justification for abusive authority I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Just a few bad apples, everybody supports something that’s bad for someone else, it’s custom, it’s tradition, it’s a part of people’s lives, blah blah fuckety blah. The church has influence, it has power, because of the laity’s votes, money and numbers. Many of them know exactly what it’s been doing with all that power and influence. They’re not living in some part of the world where becoming an apostate is a death sentence. I’m not about to go all Nordic Death Metal and suggest we need to start burning down churches but neither am I going to listen to this “It’s not fair” shite. There is a choice here. Continue to feed this monster or starve it of your money and your support. If you’re going to keep feeding it out of some mistaken notion that you can eventually get it to stop savaging the innocent in the next 200 years or so, you can get fucked if you think I’m going to applaud your efforts.
kladle: 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.
Among other things, I don’t give the church my money. I speak out, as a Catholic. I point to the actual doctrines, as opposed to the common misunderstandings of them. I go into Catholic fora, and speak to these issues, and to others; some of which are more esosteric, and don’t make it into the broader world.
I give public support to events such as the friars who supported the female religious the Pope was upset with.
In short I do much of the same sorts of things anyone who is trying to change a large organisation to which they belong.
It’s not as if the Dems, for example, are doing a whole lot of listening to the rank and file. And the Pope doesn’t actually get to set the rules. Ex cathedra is a more limited doctrine than that; and one that is seen by many (Cardinal Martini, for one) as fundamentally flawed, but I digress (that would be one of those issues I said doesn’t get talked about much, outside the church).
Many doctrines are pretty damn clear about their hatred of women and queer people no matter how much you try to bend it, there is not many “misunderstandings” about those things unless you are referring to something else.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but believing that a religion teaches bad things does not make it okay to think that everyone who belongs to that religion is a bad person. Pretty much every religious bigot in the universe thinks that the religion they’re bigoted against teaches bad things.
‘So leaving is problematic. To paraphrase Brokeback Mountain, “I can’t quit her”. The Church is part of my being.’
NO JUST STOP.
Homophobe co-opting a story about queer people to defend a homophobic institution, which he has defended the homophobia and homophobic history of before-get the fuck away from me.
Remember, everyone, Pecunium doesn’t think sodomy laws are anti-queer or that the Church outright literally murdering us ever counted as spreading oppression.
I AM JUST MOTHERFUCKING SHOCKED THAT THE HETEROSEXIST MANSPLAINER DOESN’T GIVE ANY FUCKS ABOUT THE CATHOLIC CHURCHES’ HISTORY AND OPPRESSIVE POLICIES.
I don’t even…were you trying to make some weirdo comparison to being gay and being part of the church?…. please just…stop..
‘If part of your point is that you’re allowed to call a religion’s adherents assholes in a general sense because that religion is coded white, then it actually is kind of relevant ‘
Nope. My point is that the reason that progressives and leftists are suspicious about and cautious about criticisms of Islam and Muslims to a far higher degree than about Christians and Christianity is because the former is often closely entangled with racist, colonialist, and imperialist narratives.
A criticism of a white coded Christian denominations by westerners is unlikely to be coded racism or imperialism and far more likely to be a criticism of practices, history, doctrine, etc. People of color can be assholes too, the issue is them being labeled assholes because they are people of color and because of racism, colonialist, and imperialist systems.
Asking a western progressive or leftist criticizing Christianity why they don’t talk about Islam the same way ignores how discussions of Islam are tied up in issues of racism, imperialism, and colonialism in western discourse in a way that white coded Christian denominations are not.
And you’re missing the other part of that issue, which is that the other part of the reason we don’t tolerate “all Muslims are assholes” comments (or, say, all Wahhabis, if you wanted to get more specific) is that, regardless of what you think about a religious organization and its doctrines, it’s still not OK to call all of its adherents assholes when you have no real way of knowing how they came to be part of that religious organization, what they think about some of its doctrines, or what their reasons for staying are.
This is especially the case when you’re talking not about a very small and specific religious group, but a huge one with many millions of members. If you wanted to say “I think that religious group X is assholish in terms of how it behaves as an entity”, then I’d be fine with that, it’s extending that to all individual members that people are mostly objecting to.
Cassandra, if I were actually Catholic, I’d dedicate a mass to you. (I think it’s OK to dedicate masses to people who are not dead?)
This.
I have no problem with a statement like “many of the positions of the Catholic Church are terrible” or even “the Catholic Church is often terrible.” I have a problem with saying “even a Catholic who loudly and explicitly condemns the Church’s coddling of rapists, and refuses to donate to the Catholic Church until they make serious changes to prevent future abuse, and works for a support group for rape survivors, and generally is really really obviously anti-rape totally supports the Church’s treatment of rape victims because all 1.2 billion Catholics are super cool with rape,” because that’s fucking stupid.
Yes, this. I don’t get what’s so hard to understand about that.
“Asshole” is somewhat strong language, but the point remains that anyone who provides support (material, ideological, whatever) to the Catholic Church has their hands dirty. They willingly associate with an organization which has (and has had for centuries) immense power that it uses for disturbing and immoral political goals. Anyone who considers themselves to be anti-sexist/feminist, anti-racist, pro-LGBT, etc. has a lot to answer for if they choose to continue to be affiliated with an organization which has consistently worked against these values– and in fact in the US is probably the biggest single political force standing in the way of marriage equality, abortion rights, and contraceptive access (among other things). If your cultural or family affiliations or whatever else is keeping you in the church trumps your concern for human rights, then fine, but acknowledge that. You’re just going to have to deal with the fact that everyone who is affected by the abuses of the Church has the right to hold you accountable for your choice.
I have every right to complain that people are supporting an institution that contributes to my oppression regardless of why they’re doing it. I find it disturbing that some of you would rather prioritize the feelings of those who are attached to the Church for whatever reason than those who are deprived of rights, dignity, and life by its policies.
“That’s the bigot’s rationale. Brown people = job thieves. Muslim = terrorist. How do we know? Just because.”
I never said it was just because. All of your examples are things that are either involuntary (most people can’t just move out of their home country) or aren’t centralized. Catholicism is centralized.
Fucking hell, if you are going to argue with me, could you at least argue with things I actually say instead of just making shit up? You’ve been extremely dishonest.
“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.”
Precisely!
Kladle: From the outside I am sure the Catholic Church looks much more centralised than it is. From the inside, it’s not anything like that, honest.
“I AM JUST MOTHERFUCKING SHOCKED THAT THE HETEROSEXIST MANSPLAINER DOESN’T GIVE ANY FUCKS ABOUT THE CATHOLIC CHURCHES’ HISTORY AND OPPRESSIVE POLICIES.”
Oh god, the posts of his you linked to really say it all. I had no idea what I was actually dealing with here. Mansplainer indeed.
And co-sign to pretty much everything else you’ve said in this thread.
‘And you’re missing the other part of that issue, which is that the other part of the reason we don’t tolerate “all Muslims are assholes” comments ‘
No, my issue with saying all muslims are assholes is the social and cultural context, especially racism, imperialism, and colonialism. People literally die based on the villainization of muslims, just in the past few months in the US sikhs, mistaken for muslims, have been gunned down, a mosque has been burned, orders were signed that sent drones to murder children. Is anyone on this thread actually concerned that ayla, rutee, blackbloc and I saying this is going to encourage someone to literally kill everyone in the Vatican? What I am concerned about in regards to rhetoric about Muslims are things like that, and a quarter of a million dead Iraqi civilians suggest I’m right.
Also, the argument here is that enabling/supporting the Catholic Church is in and off itself an asshole thing to do, not that Catholics happen to be more asshole than average randomly. So, it’s different from a statement like ‘all gamers are assholes’, unless you think gaming is somehow intrinsically assholish.
So, when I make statements like ‘all homophobes are assholes’ and ‘all republicans are assholes’, that’s more like the ‘church affiliated catholics are assholes’ statement, because the assertion is that the act or support alone is sufficient grounds to declare someone an asshole.
Of course, even hardcore bigots aren’t one dimensional villains, most assholes do have other things they do, sometimes even well. Being an asshole on at least some fronts is largely the human default, considering how widespread many oppressive systems are. Not all homophobes eat kittens for breakfast and then go out and kick babies, but they’re still all assholes and it’s fair to call them that. Ditto with Catholics.
I’m not going to waste much of my time here, but this is some fucking honkey bullshit. Bigotry requires systemic oppression. More than half a century ago, you could claim this with a straight face for catholicism, although it would be nothing compared to the shit it had more than a century ago. Much like the Irish, Catholics are not really discriminated against for their catholicism now.
More fucking honkey bullshit. WE know because they are still there, and still offering material support to the fucking catholic church, which actually, factually does these things. I don’t fucking give a shit what they say they think when they are providing material support to the fucking premiere anti-gay organization on the planet.
And you assholes are reminding me that I really need to stop saying feminism doesn’t end up with problems with the gay (Race, class, and others are already well known). It is some serious fucking bullshit, protecting the supporters of an organization that spreads massive evils because it isn’t somehow fair to judge that support.
FFS, most of your defenses would apply equally well to the republican party and you all cheerfully castigate republicans because they are in a very real sense assholes for remaining republican in the face of the evil the republican party perpetrates. You just can’t consistently apply ethics because RELIGION.
“FFS, most of your defenses would apply equally well to the republican party and you all cheerfully castigate republicans because they are in a very real sense assholes for remaining republican in the face of the evil the republican party perpetrates. You just can’t consistently apply ethics because RELIGION.”
Had Ayla said “fuck all republicans” we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now because no one’s identity is tied up in it here. I’m pretty sure that sentiment has all ready been expressed here without any fuss. Even though they haven’t been in the oppression business nearly as long as the church. Republicans are amateurs at this compared to the church.
QFT.
I think if people are going to get personally offended when you call them out on the groups they belong to, they should probably try to associate with groups that aren’t misogynist rape and hate organizations. I’m not sure why anyone’s personal desires, family history, or tradition are even relevant when what’s on the line is this important and basic. It’s not like the church does a very good job of hiding things anymore.