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…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.
Ninja’ed by the best! Thanks, pecunium.
Sorry, it’s not. The top post is about Paul Ryan being a liar. My top twitter post is a link to this
http://deadspin.com/5941348/they-wont-magically-turn-you-into-a-lustful-cockmonster-chris-kluwe-explains-gay-marriage-to-the-politician-who-is-offended-by-an-nfl-player-supporting-it
I don’t know about the best, but I’ll take the compliment. 🙂
Ayla, come the fuck on.
@ayla- I’m not Catholic. I’m Jewish. But let me tell you something; there are few things, to my mind, more short sighted than condemning out of hand something that brings comfort, wholeness, and spiritual fulfillment to so many people.
A religion is one tool for societal organization. It, like any other form of society, has the potential to be used for horrific ends. But it also has the potential, like the bishop cited above and the rebel nuns in the news recently, to act as a force for tremendous amounts of good in this world. If you personally don’t feel like being a part of that, it’s fine. It’s why we have freedom of religion in this country. But to shit on all of the Catholics out there doing amazing social justice, charity, and spiritual work is an insult not only to them, but to all religious folks everywhere.
Fuck off right back at you. No one forces anyone to remain a member of this sick, perverted organization. You choose to do it.
And the phrase “out of hand” implies that I haven’t thought about my stance. Just because I don’t agree with you doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about the implications of my opinion.
No, it means that you’re even more of an utter fucking dumbass because after actually thinking about it you still came to the conclusion that a billion people all over the world totally support child rape.
If they give time, energy, or money to the church, they are LITERALLY and FACTUALLY supporting child rape. The church is an actual entity. It owns businesses and billions of dollars. This isn’t some lose group of people just worshiping god. Don’t be mad at me for telling the truth.
I’ll bear that in mind if you ever start. In the meantime, fuck off.
Here’s what I don’t get about Ayla’s argument. Let’s say that all of the Catholics who were horrified about the fact that the Church covered up the pedophile priests were to leave the church. What would we then be left with? Well, the Catholic Church as an entity isn’t going to just stop existing, so what we’d be left with is a church where all the people who might have spoken out about stuff like that have left, and the people in the church hierarchy who have covered things up in the past because they don’t give a shit if individual church members suffer would have an even easier time covering up further abuses in the future. How, from the point of view of people who don’t want to see the same thing happen again, is this a good thing?
There’s no way that an organization as big as the Catholic Church is going to just vanish. I think it’s disgustingly corrupt too, but the thing is, that kind of corruption can only be fixed by people within the organization. If all the good people with consciences leave, they’d be handing the organization over to people who have none.
Good points, Cassandra. It’s ridiculous to think that the answer to every case of corruption (even widespread corruption) in every organization is “everyone leave the organization.”
I believe that most catholics actually do not want the rape to occur, but support it unwittingly. Over 1 billion has been paid out by the church to victims it has raped and abused. That money comes from somewhere and they could not continue to cover their ass without more funds pouring in.
I also believe that if all these non rapey people decided to just stop being a part of the, as you put it, disgustingly corrupt organization and just do their churchy and worpship type stuff outside of that paradigm, the catholic church as we know it would have no power. It certainly wouldn’t be able to pull favors like it has in the past where American presidents have exempted it’s very highest officers, including the head honcho, Mr Pope himself, from being prosecuted. So I guess in that way we fundamentally disagree. I think that people leaving is good for the situation, and you think it’s bad.
But they’re not going to do that. Part of my family is Catholic (and socially liberal), and trust me on this – they’re not going to go off and form their own church. Especially not in large enough numbers to hurt the church’s funding. There’s a bunch of cultural stuff wrapped up in there too, along with the religion. So, the actual alternatives are that either they stay and try to change things, or they leave and we end up with a church where all the people who cared enough to want to change things are gone, and there’s no one left to complain next time something bad happens, or to agitate for change.
Try to apply this argument to any other organization and see how silly your perspective sounds. What if you’re an old school fiscal conservative and you don’t like the way the Republican party is going in terms of social policy. What happens if all those people just bail? The party gets even more completely batshit, and focuses even harder on persecuting women/POC/gay people. It’s impervious to outside influence (like the Catholic Church, except the church is even more so), and it’s not going to just go away, so if all the nice people leave, what we end up with is a party that just gets even nastier.
We could also apply the same logic to the idea that liberal people who live in conservative areas should just leave. Great for them, but what does that mean for the area they leave behind? Nothing good.
Your example about the republican party doesn’t sound silly to me. I guess I just believe in people’s power to change things by creating their own thing more than most people. Following tradition hasn’t gotten us very far. Again I think this disagreement is more fundamental than just the catholic church.
And, of course, it’s negating the possibility that any organization has ever had both corruption and any kind of positive accomplishments.
BTW, who wants to bet that Ayla is a libertarian?
Like here’s a scenario – what if all the socially liberal nuns in the US Catholic Church left? What would the impact of that be on Catholicism in the US? It’s not going to bring the church down, financially speaking, but it would make life a lot less pleasant for a lot of American Catholics, and it would make it a lot easier for more conservative Catholics to push a far less liberal agenda.
“And, of course, it’s negating the possibility that any organization has ever had both corruption and any kind of positive accomplishments.”
I never meant to imply that and certainly do not believe it. I am also MOST DEFINITELY not a libertarian. I’m not really sure why you would think that. Can’t stand them for the most part. I do not align with any political party or left/right/blue/right stuff.
I’m not qualified to comment on what might happen in that scenario with the nuns.
…Well, not if everyone sticks to it no matter what happens, it won’t. Would you like a list of religions that died? Of religious denominations that fell hard, despite being just as entrenched as the Catholic Church?
….Because that’s so hard for them now.
Yeah that’d be lovely except we have their correspondence and this was clearly not so big a problem for them. Try again.
THis is pretty disgusting. The fact of the matter is, material support for the church is material support for not just child rapists, but for oppressors of LGBT rights, anti-abortionists, and a host of other outright bullshit. I’ll readily grant that most people just want to fund food for the homeless and whatnot, but that matters little to the end result.
It doesn’t have to vanish to stop having the material and societal support to keep doing their bullshit.
When the fuck is it the answer, then? At what point do you drop these assholes? What is your moral event horizon? Jesus fucking christ, it’s not like we’re talking about an isolated incident.
Begging the question is not ‘good points’ either.
Seriously, fuck all of you. it’d be one thing to argue that you’re not willing to leave your social net or whatnot, but to pretend that you’re powerless to stop this organization you do nothing to stop to begin with, and then also refuse to leave it, makes me fucking angry. On this matter, you are all assholes of the highest caliber.
The answer is for the church to change, and that’s most likely to happen if people inside the organization push for it. Now, I’m an atheist, so it’s very easy for me to think that it would be better if religion just went away. But I also grew up around enough people who were believers to know that isn’t going to happen. What’s your proposed solution? Because it doesn’t seem to me that swearing at people about how fucked up you think the church is and how they should leave it is going to do much to solve the problem.
Rutee, dude, I’m an atheist.
That’s one answer, and these people have clearly failed, repeatedly. Further, they have failed to prevent their church’s mass pushback. Hence the disbanding of ‘too feminist’ nuns and whatnot. If the hierarchy were being effected, you could make this argument with a straight face. It ain’t.
THERE ARE SO MANY WORSHIPPERS OF ZEUS LEFT.
Catholicism doesn’t even need to die for the catholic church to stop having its influence, jesus fuck.
I already left the motherfucking church. Formally at that, with an attached letter of why. Paperwork I didn’t bother filling out until we found out just how deep the child rape apologia goes.
I am not swearing at you assholes to convince you either. Venting my own rage at “IT IS PERFECTLYO KAY TO STAY NO MATTER WHAT” is entirely acceptable in my book. But I told you my solution already; STOP FUCKING SUPPORTING AN ORGANIZATION THAT HATES ME, MINE, AND PEOPLE LIKE ME. STOP FUCKING SUPPORTING AN ORGANIZATIONT HAT FUCKS CHILDREN. STOP FUCKING SUPPORTING AN ORGANIZATION THAT HATES WOMEN. It will almost certainly not change entirely within a generation, but it doesn’t have to.
And don’t pretend these people make the church a better organization. They don’t, and frankly, if the church needed these people to do as ‘little’ as its done, it should be fucking burned.
I CARE SO MUCH LET ME TELL YOU WHAT. You are saying that it’s totes mcgotes cool to stick to these people no matter what. Fuck you.