Oh, ladies, you poor, deluded ladies, so unaware of the basic facts about yourselves. If only you had an objective source for information on the mystery that is you! Happily, a Men’s Rights Redditor by the name of nigglereddit has decided to throw a giant clue your way:
You may want to step back and take a look at the entire thread here, especially nigglereddit’s original post about the different ways he and his wife have responded to being new parents, in which he mocks his wife for what sounds very much like undiagnosed postpartum depression, blaming her misery not on brain chemistry or sleep deprivation or any of a zillion other things that tend to stress out new mothers but on all those terrible women’s magazines and books and TV shows she reads and/or watches.
Also, he pats himself on the back for being a totally cool and awesome dude who handles both his job and his duties as a father in a super awesome way — way better than his wife handles her new motherhood — because he’s a man, damnit, and totally able to see the world in an objective way.
Needless to day, this meaty slab of misogynist shitthatneverthappened got dozens up upvotes from the r/mensrights regulars.
Thanks to r/againstmensrights for pointing me to this terrible post.
EDITED TO ADD:
Speaking of which, the good folks at r/againstmensrights have assembled these handy guides to the shittiest comments in the shitty r/mensrights thread. A-one and a-two.
I would love to use a concrete nailer! The closest I came was using a small, handheld jackhammer to take down a tile wall that was put up in the 1950’s (when they used really thick mortar). That was fun.
This MRA sounds like one of those douchebags who believes that logic is the opposite of empathy*. He was probably told all his life that he was smart, so now he thinks he has a prime directive to be an asshole. He’s probably smirking when he says his asshole things, too.
*which is really illogical, if you think about it
I’m glad everyone is amused by fun tools. If you want to know what it looks like, here is a link. The exact shape varies, of course, depending on brand and style. I wouldn’t buy any of the ones I’ve seen online, though. Better to ask at a local hardware store first.
http://www.amazon.com/Remington-Semi-Automatic-Powder-Actuated/dp/B000LDPDTE/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1348681806&sr=8-3&keywords=Remington+Nail+Gun
They’re good if you want to fasten anything to a basement wall (e.g. putting up shelving), or, in my dad’s case, building a wooden shed on a concrete slab. But if you’re looking for a more general took kit, I don’t suggest them. They’re rather specific and it isn’t much fun to have a tool lying around that you don’t use.
Does Linsday Lohan count as spoiled? According to Wikipedia she has been working (admittedly as an actress/model) since she was three or four. I know it is considered a good/fun job but working since that young even if family advantage got her the job (I don’t know enough about her to know if this is the case) is hardly being handed things on a plate. She has been working for over 20 years already!
@ Naira The one my dad had was like this:
http://www.amazon.com/Remington-Light-Duty-Powder-Actuated/dp/B000LDJGXS/ref=pd_sim_sbs_hi_3
You actually had to use a hammer to hit the pin, it was all sorts of fun to use.
Nice. Yeah, the one my dad bought has a different handle, at the back of the nailer, It is nice if you are using it on a horizontal slab, because you can put all your weight on it and make sure the nail goes all the way down.
Not so great for putting in a nail on a wall above shoulder height.
But yeah, really fun to use. If you do it just right, you can open the cartridge casing on my dad’s and eject the spent shell all in one move. It is fun and looks awesome. Makes me feel like a cross between Bob Villa and Dirty Harry.
I read his original post and well… Maybe it’s true that she’s lying through her teeth and pretend to be super happy over the baby when she’s with her female friends. And maybe that’s because our culture glorify motherhood a lot. You’re SUPPOSED to be super-happy over your baby. You’re NOT supposed to be depressed about it.
I googled post-partum depression and got lots of stories by women who talk about how they wish motherhood wasn’t as glorified as it is, this pressure to be happy, they wish we could talk more openly about feeling terrible after you had a baby…
So, what I’m trying to say is that in the midst of a lot of awfulness he does have a small valid point, namely that there’s this media idea that motherhood is just super-happy-wonderful, and this makes it extra hard for those who become depressed and exhausted. But the idea that his wife would have been perfectly fine if it wasn’t for evil media is ridiculous, and the idea that women couldn’t just know from experience what it’s like to be a woman but would need a man to tell them is… so stupid that my head hurts.
Somewhere on the net I came across a comment by somebody or other (sorry about the lack of specificity but my MRA dose-of-the-day is afflicting me with brain fog) which mentioned that some people are able to turn a few grains of truth into mountains of falsehood. That’s how I feel about guys like this. I believe they’re onto something but I also believe that they’re so concerned about their personal take on it that they can’t afford to see it from any perspective other than their own. When they look at female ill-preparedness for life outside the home/after college/out in public, what they perceive is that they’ve been shortchanged in favor of a bunch of females, none of whom has a nuclear physics degree or a completed symphony to her name, none of whom can throw a baseball really well, and all of whom are a tax and a drain on the attention of good men. For them that’s the issue, encased in a nutshell; for them it begins and ends there.
I recognize a certain portion of justice in what this man is saying. I myself was brought up in relative ignorance of the world by a woman who, in me, tried to replicate the protective conditions under which she had been raised. There wasn’t that much male input available to me when I was a kid: I had no brothers and my Dad was effectively absent for months at a time, b/c he was working 14 hours a day or overseas or both. The plumbing-and-carpentry portions of my education were scanted. (Although, like just about every other woman alive, I know how to fix things which break around the house; small repairs are part of housekeeping, which is still a woman’s job. I don’t think the nigglereddits of this world understand how many of the things which break around their house get fixed quietly by women, because it’s the Big Breaks in household infrastructure which command the attention of men — who usually, instead of tacking the problem themselves, hire a professional to step in and solve things. Take a look at the difference in the conditions under which young men live, as opposed to the conditions which manifest themselves around young women, if you don’t believe me. In a Dudical House stuff which gets broken tends to stay that way, unless it’s Big Stuff, which is how the dudes know it’s OK to hire somebody else to repair it. Small stuff gets ignored, for the most part, because the guys all know, without acknowledging it exactly, that dealing with the small stuff is what women are for and that when they set up their own households the issue will be handled.)
A reasonable person, noticing that large numbers of people are brought up in ways which interfere with their effectiveness at handling their own lives, would conclude that it was the ineffectiveness that had to be remedied, through better or more realistic education or more contact with the world. (To be fair, that’s what some of these guys seem to be plumping for when they recommend that girls be raised by their fathers. I personally don’t think that’s a very good idea, but at least they recognize that there’s a problem.) A reasonable person would not use that as an excuse to condemn the lives themselves. Again to be fair, there’s also to some extent a recognition that the Magic Woman role which girls are still taught to at least try to fill is cruel and delusive. But the conclusion which gets drawn, not by any one individual but by the MRA collective, continues to be: “This is more proof that women can’t hack it. They are ineffective because that’s just the way they are. You’ll just have to do it all, old son, remembering all the while that the reason women are told that they have to be fertile, fit, loving, gorgeous, slim as androgynous young boys yet cuddly as stuffed toy animals, and that the reason they therefore get crazy, is that feminism* has prevailed and that we’re all living under its disastrous shadow. You have our sympathy: don’t count on anything else.”
In other words, most of these guys are stuck looking at the result, rather than the cause. Of course they think they’re more rational: they haven’t been on the receiving-end of a mind-bending campaign (whose ultimate object is mainly to sell stuff) aimed at convincing them that if they’re imperfect they’re unsalvageable. Their reaction seems mostly to be to agree with the campaign — which is why I don’t find their observations useful. Funny, sometimes, sure thing. But useful, no.
*for cripes’ sake
I think as far as MRAs are concerned Lindsey Lohan is a spoiled princess, and what she does couldn’t be considered “real” work. Because only men do real work. I believe the OP says he hunts the wooly mammoth to the tune of $100K/year, which means (if true) he probably does the kind of work that tanked the economy, erased people’s retirement funds, and put other people out of work.
… because living their lives as themselves will not provide them with cold hard facts about themselves and their lives?
Is it just me, or does this sound like the lament of a serial gaslighter? “Your reality is not reality. Only my reality is reality.” Yikes.
I’m baffled. First of all, if my partner was miserable for years, I’d say more than, “Silly vagina” and start making some real fucking changes in my life.
Secondly, he actually says he doesn’t complain/whine while *doing exactly that*. Far be it for me to tell someone that they can’t complain about raising a kid–it’s hard–but seriously, your penis doesn’t make your complaints less complainy.
And, seriously, why is he getting a ton of credit for doing the very basics a father should do? SERIOUSLY HE IS NOT LIKE A SINGLE PARENT AT ALL. He seems upset he has to work *and* care for a baby, and that’s “doing it all”. Where the fuck is this kid during the day? Daycare? That’s fine, but seriously, you’re not some saint from heaven because you have a dual-high-income-family.
And, just sayin’? In general, it’s men who insist women need to be thin and beautiful and perfect at this and that and the other. It’s not women and it’s not feminism. Most women I know warned me that having a kid was a fucking misery, that life sucks, that you’ll always be working harder and doing more for less credit. It’s normally the men who don’t seem to have any idea about these things, or really just don’t care.
MRAs’ dirty secret: They love historical romance novels.
Somehow I doubt he does as much work taking care of thier daughter as he says he did. I had an unkle who while admittedly work a very labor intensive job, never actully did anything around the house unless it was repairs. The taking care of thier two kids, driving them to school and then latter work, cleaning doing laundry, all that. My aunt had to do before my unkle woke up for work. She also had to make sure food was ready for him. By the time he woke up. If she didn’t do all of that in the time alloted he would pitch a fit. But if you asked him about his home life, he would tell you how tired he was from working all night and that he was sick of having to do stuff properly around the house too. He made it seem like my aunt was lazy and worthless.
Yeah there’s like two grains of sand of truth in there, namely that our entire culture glorifies motherhood and impresses upon women that it is mandatory to want babies because otherwise you’re not really a woman and to be perfectly dressed with flawless hair and makeup, clean, thin, well-rested and white while being a mother raising your adorable clean and happy white Gerber baby in rooms that are entirely white**, and that this glorification comes heavily from a media that is supported by selling all the bleach and plastic diapers and so on that are involved in that pipe dream.
However guess who has been calling this out as false and dangerous for decades? Not men. Men don’t give shit about the media representations of women or motherhood and their effects on women. Feminists do.
** – think for a moment of any commercial about baby stuff and you’ll know what I mean.
OMG, his wife is going through a stressful time and all he has to offer is condescention? She and the baby have my deepest sympathy.
So where are men getting their cold hard facts about life, and why can’t women just get them from the same place? Cut out the middleman, as it were?
@Karalora, obviously because cold hard facts about life come only from men! MRA thinking at its best. Only a man’s brain and a man’s experience lead to truth, and females need to accept that.
*wondering to self why I don’t have all the facts*
@Naira “I am glad everyone is amused by fun tools.”
Isn’t that the reason most of us are here?
@opium4themasses
+10 points for you!
FYI, the good folks at r/againstmensrights have assembled these handy guides to the shittiest comments in the shitty r/mensrights thread.
http://www.reddit.com/r/againstmensrights/comments/10i57n/mras_defending_a_bigoted_comment_with_more_bigotry/
http://www.reddit.com/r/againstmensrights/comments/10hcvy/i_feel_sorry_for_women_i_really_do_they_have/c6drbxe
@Karalora the cold hard facts are coming from theirs rational man brains something these emotional females could never undertand. At least this is how mras think
I keep hearing Prof. Henry Higgins from “My Fair Lady” singing, “Why Can’t a Woman be more Like a Man?”
This guy has GOT to be a Poe, right?
The combination of “How is babby formed?” spelling, internal contradictions, a 12-day-old reddit account, and 4-dot ellipses cannot exist in nature.
C’mon. Mismgomy don’t real!
On one hand she was a TOTAL LOSER and I had to pull a Professor Higgins to turn her into a LADY. But at the same time she was apparently SUPER AWESOME so naturally I fell in love with her.
The sentences, they contradict themselves. But go on…
Based on your description of your lives together, I am fairly sure she was not the one who was materialistic. And generally, no one is a master parent the second they find out they are pregnant. It is normal to learn about what is happening to you and how to handle having a baby. Most people, and I can tell you are not most people, would read a book, look at a magazine to learn some of these things. They would not, as you apparently did, just *know* them by magic!
Objection, facts not in evidence.
1. You are calling a woman who was 32 when you met a girl.
2. Everyone asks for help now and then. It happens. And she apparently needs all the help she can get to deal with your swarmy condescending ass.
3. Where does this “roll over for anyone” come from? You obviously want her to do so.
“Until she proves me wrong.” You know, I have no idea how to explain what an asshole statement this is.
Er… why are you posting on a sub that opposes the rights of men?
Do you really hate men so much?
Cloudiah, I agree, I am trying to get out my old habits of being dismissive of female celebrities because their is more venom directed at them than male celebrities often for no real reason.
He actually does a fair amount around the house, however in a way just illustrates that what is expected for a woman is exceptional for a man. I have never had children, but I get the impression the feeling of being trapped is relatively common. My mum definitely had it as she literally couldn’t get out after I was born (dreadful weather, not walking distance of anywhere, too difficult to drive alone with a child). My mum also helped her next door neighbours who were going through something similar. It is odd he can’t relate to that. I would expect having a child to be hard but seeing how women change after they have children (going from being bright and energetic to permanently exhausted) I think it must be harder than I can imagine.
Also pretending my life is perfect is not something I do with close female friends, is that normal?