So our excitable old friend MarkyMark (not the actor-singer) just put up a not-very-original rant of the “women are worse than Hitler because of abortion” variety. More interesting than his post — which is frankly not very interesting — is this comment from an anonymous fellow that takes misogynistic self-righteousness to a whole new (low) level:
This is one of the reasons that I use women for my convenience. They can kill with impunity – nothing I do to them comes close to that level of evil. So they are for my pleasure, then I ditch them although I do come back sometimes. (They aren’t very bright which is what makes it workable.)
Yep: He’s not just a self-righteous prick; he’s self-righteous about being a prick.
I can only hope his own “evil” is mostly of the “slept with a woman and didn’t call her back” sort — or is just imaginary internet boasting — because his “logic” could pretty much justify anything short of violent murder.
“Any tv commercial with a male and a female”
These are the first two I found that met the criteria of being tv commercials featuring a man and a woman. Note the rampant man-hate.
Here’s the first one I found, although I’m not sure if it aired as a tv commercial. Note the rampant man-hate:
Meanwhile, I found this related video. Note the rampant man-hate:
@driversuz
So complains a woman who grew up in a country that last saw hostilities on its own soil in 1865. (I’m not counting that Japanese invasion of Attu simply for reasons of scale.) Hey Suz? The world isn’t composed just of America. When wars are fought, they are fought somewhere — places where people of both genders and all ages reside. In places where fighting takes place, civilians don’t only lose loved ones, they actually get killed. In fact, in circumstances of “total war”, being a soldier provides you with better chances of survival than being a civilian. It’s mind-boggling that we even have to explain that to you. What are you, like, five?
Are the women in those commercials begging for the attention of our “intellectually curious” friend’s super macho son? If not, it’s man-hate!
FUCK YOU, you dim, evil bint. That you would conflate divorce court with rape shows exactly what your black little soul is all about. The rest of your chatter is meaningless.
FUCK YOU.
I think if Suz ever found herself in a genuinely challenging or dangerous situation she’d curl up in the fetal position and cry. In a war zone? She’d be about as much use as an ice-cream maker in a snowstorm.
@CassandraSays: I suspect race might be at play in her argument as well. Like, when wars kill brown people, or Muslins, it’s not real casualties.
I had that thought too, actually. I was waiting for the words “collateral damage”.
I hate when trolls pretend to be women. I’m not sure if they like the idea of women arguing with each other, ’cause weeee, catfight! Or if they’re trying prove some women don’t dig equality.
Shoraz: why do you think Suzfail pretending to be a woman? What did I miss?
Whatever they are, they’re ignorant and dull.
I don’t get FeMRAs. I just can;t imagine having that level of self-loathing.
^Shiraz. Sorry about that.
I kind of hope it is a dude pretending to be a woman, because if the stuff about the son was written by a mother about her kid then my creep radar would be screeching like a fire alarm.
No worries, hellkell.
Why do I think suz is a man? Suz never uses anecdotes to sound superior. There’s no, “Well, back when I was a girl,” or “I gave birth, and as a mother I believe that…” or even, “Well, I never experienced that kind of harassment in my life!”
Suz talks about women like they’re aliens, and his arguements are generic MRA whines and grunts. The whole equality means inequality for men paranoia makes me think it’s just another dudebro.
And yes Cassandra, the alleged son/mother relationship reads creepy. I think he imagines himself as the son, while he plays the role of the ideal mother.
@Cassandra:
Yes, I know, and that’s a terribly good counter argument against people who claim that women should be forced to be pregnant. If I remember correctly Judgy Bitch was the first to point this out and I was the one who said that’s originally from Thomson’s “a defense of abortion”.
But if someone says “abortion is wrong because it’s killing, the right to life is more important than other rights” etc, you can’t convince anyone not already agreeing with you that this person is wrong by just going WOMEN ARE PERSONS. To someone who isn’t already a convinced pro-choicer that’s gonna come out as just changing the question.
When I was a teen I thought that maybe abortion is morally wrong because maybe it’s killing someone else. I wasn’t sure one way or the other, and therefore had a terrible time for a while when I thought I was pregnant (turned out I wasn’t). I would have soaked up at the time if someone had pointed out that a) you’re not obligated to keep someone else alive at a great cost to yourself, or even more importantly (for me, with the moral beliefs I had at the time) b) fetuses at an early stage may have a beating heart and lots of other organs, but not a properly functioning brain yet, and the brain is the morally relevant part. But someone merely going “YOU’RE A WOMAN AND THEREFORE A PERSON” wouldn’t have made a bit of a difference, because that’s not what I doubted.
I have encountered, afterwards, people who thought I was a complete idiot for not realising the absolute obviousness of the moral rightness of abortion, and that pisses me off, because I wasn’t being an idiot. And I know you’re not arguing against some doubting teenage girl here, but primarily against misogynistic politicians and anti-choicers who are simultaneously against birth control, but still, it does no one a favour to pretend like the complete and utter rightness of abortion is so obvious that you can sum it up with “women are persons”.
Honestly I think there are two things you’re overlooking here. 1. Most people who call themselves pro-life aren’t actually focused on the saving babies part at all (you can tell this by how they frame their arguments, as well as by their lack of interest in other child welfare issues). 2. For a lot of people who identify as pro-life, there is no way to reason them out of that position.
I’d be a lot more optimistic about the possibility of reasoning people out of that position if I hadn’t seen it tried so many times before. For the ones who are actually motivated by wanting to save “babies”, the best way to persuade them to change their focus is to point out that pro-life policies don’t actually lower abortion rates, at all. For the ones for whom it’s really all about sex and controlling women’s sex lives, or the ones who see women as sort of holy incubators, there is no way to talk them out of that position other than convincing them that women are people. And good luck with that.
@Amused:
This. So. Much.
I just saw “Scott Pilgrim vs the world”, and I thought it was hilarious and enjoyed it very much. Still, it’s the tired old “mediocre guy gets hot girl” story. I read this feminist internet site where a girl complained about this, and was immediately shot down by people who went a) attractiveness is subjective and b) surface isn’t everything. Eh, right. Still, we can all agree that there is such a thing as “Hollywood attractive”. Scott isn’t, all the girls he dates are. Plus, he doesn’t display any particular intelligence or charm or any other compensating quality either. All girls just fall for him anyway. And, most importantly, it’s not just this movie. It’s a pattern we see OVER AND OVER AND OVER again in movies and TV shows – and I think it’s really weird to interpret the message as “women are beautiful and intelligent while men are stupid slobs, so women are better than men”.
“In places where fighting takes place, civilians don’t only lose loved ones, they actually get killed.”
Not to mention raped, tortured, and sometimes even enslaved.
@Cassandra:
I think you’re completely right about most convinced anti-abortionists (as we’ve already covered, if they were really super-concerned about not killing fetuses they’d be pro all kinds of policies they’re not actually pro). But since there are people who waver on the issue and are insecure, it’s probably still good to make good comprehensive arguments for the cause in case any of these are listening/reading.
Like, if you actually point out the kidney transplant analogy, you might make some listeners think, and someone who thought an anti-abortionist had a point when he merely went “we gotta save babies” might change their mind if he either starts evading your kidney transplant analogy or bite the bullet and goes “we should totally force people to donate kidneys!”.
I’ve had some anti-abortion students who do the bullet biting, and I sort of respect them for being consistent, but I also think they thereby scare people away from their position, which is a good thing.
Also I think we may have a miscommunication as far as goals here. My goal is not to persuade anyone who thinks abortion is bad to have an abortion. If our hypothetical teenage girl decides that she isn’t OK with abortion and doesn’t want to have one, that’s her decision to make. What I’m not OK with is for that teenage girl not to have access to good medical information about fetal development, or for pro-life people to be allowed to manipulate her by either guilt-tripping her into thinking that as a woman her life is supposed to center around self-sacrifice so of course abortion is out of the question, or that an 8 week old fetus is like a toddler that loves her dearly and will experience emotional trauma as the result of being aborted, and also she herself will be emotionally scarred for life.
Give young women access to all the medical data available, let them know that the adults around them will support them in whatever decision they think is best for them, and then let them decide for themselves. I don’t want any outside group influencing that decision one way or the other.
I’m seeing a lot of confusion about what Driversuz meant by referencing the Dear Colleague Letter and preponderance of evidence. I think I can clear up what she meant.
In 2011, Russlynn Ali published a Dear Colleague Letter providing guidance about US universities’ obligations to protect students from sexual assault. This letter included standards for grievance procedures, one of which was clarifying whether schools should use a preponderance of evidence standard or reasonable doubt standard. the DCL said that schools should use the lower preponderance of evidence standard, and MRAs have been whining about how unfair it is ever since.
For more information about how fucking unfair rapists have it in university nowadays, I refer you to recent announcements from sexual assault victims who had to leave Amherst and Northwest Universities because of the way they were treated by the administration as a direct result of their rapes. Boo fucking hoo.
@Cassandra: Maybe I read in stuff in your writings that weren’t there, and therefore I started sounding condescending against you, I’m sorry. It’s just that because of my personal experience I’m a bit edgy when people sound as if you have to be downright stupid not to realise that abortion is okay. Although I guess you weren’t really saying that, only that it obviously should be legal. Sorry.
I also think that it’s important that people make up their own minds when it’s their own pregnancy. (I think it sucks that, here in Sweden, pregnant women/girls don’t really have the option to adopt the baby away when it’s born, although I bet this would be the preferable option for many people. In Sweden, it’s abort or keep.)
Still, it’s good if people who might consider abortion get, not just accurate medical information, but also the kind of philosophical arguments that have come up in this thread – like, what reasons are there to suppose heart beats are morally relevant, what kind of obligation could one have to keep another alive? When you’ve heard them, you can then make up your own mind about them, just like you do with empirical medical information.
Not long ago a male friend told me that a female friend of his (whom I’ve never met or know who she is) was pregnant, and sort of wanted to have an abortion, but worried that it was morally wrong. She had told him this because she wanted his perspective, and he didn’t know what to say, since he thought abortion is obviously completely unproblematic, but he didn’t know how to put this to her since she was so worried, so he dumped it on me. I said that I thought the best thing to do was to acknowledge that it’s not strange to think abortion might be wrong, but then present philosophical/medical reasons why HE doesn’t think so. And then, obviously, at the end of the day, it’s up to her, and if she decides to keep it that’s perfectly fine. But it might be good in that situation to hear proper reasons for abortion being right. And you never know how many people in that situation, or people who might eventually end up in that situation, might be reading.
So Bee, from what you’ve explained it seems to me that the issue MRAs have is that someone argued Universities should believe students who report sexual assaults. Am I understanding this right?
(From the three minutes I’ve spent on Wikipedia, it seems like the options are [reasonable doubt] “DNA evidence and it’s on video and five hundred witnesses testify” or preponderance of evidence] “person reports a crime, there’s enough evidence to suggest that it most likely happened”; the latter is obviously more ideal for survivors whereas MRAs, naturally, prefer the former.)
I am not a lawyer.
No worries. I’m curious about why adoption isn’t an option in Sweden, though. I assume adoption isn’t totally illegal, so why isn’t it an option for someone who’s pregnant and trying to figure out what to do?
BTW if I’m sounding very uncompromising in this thread it’s because we have people like Bitchy and Suz here. making the usual disingenous arguments. When it comes to counselling individuals about what their options are I’m all for laying out every single possibility as compassionately as possible, and not ever telling them that their feelings are wrong. When it comes to a theoretical discussion with a bunch of sexist dipshits who want to undermine women’s ability to control their own lives, though, I’m not going to compromise at all precisely because of the people reading along who might not be sure what they think. I don’t want those people feeling like they have to acknowledge pro-life arguments as valid or reasonable if they don’t want to.
(Again, this is the big sisterly tendencies coming out. I’m incredibly grateful that I wasn’t exposed to pro-life propaganda until I was already an adult and not as easy to manipulate, and I feel a strong need to protect young girls from the idea that they’re nothing but incubators.)
Moonz, yeah, that’s pretty much it. I should mention, I guess, that Russlynn Ali was the Assistant Secretary of Education, so the DCL has the force of law. And I was wrong about the burden of proof that some schools had been using before the DCL — I guess it was clear and convincing not reasonable doubt, but either way, it was a higher standard that pretty much meant that there needed to be a video and 500 witnesses and basically meant that most student rapists got to stay on campus while their victims were forced to leave (or stay on campus with the person who had raped them, but who wants to do that?).
The DCL also said things like: Hey universities, if a student comes to you and says that they were raped, don’t put it on them to hash things out privately with the person who raped them. Have an actual clear, fair grievance procedure. So yeah, reaaaaaaally controversial and terribly mean to the poor rapists who totally don’t mean anything by raping people!
As a person who spent a year living in a dormitory with her rapist, I am totally okay with kicking rapists off campus.
Some places actually expect survivors to do that, don’t they? 🙁
“…hash things out privately with the person who raped them”
Shit. Why not just go ahead and demand that they be forced to marry the rapist?
Sick fucks.