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.
Cassandra: Yep. If it were a boxing match she has predictable footwork, leads with her right and leaves her body unprotected.
It’s gonna hurt when she tries to move in.
Sadly I have work, then I have a party to go to (so that’s happy) and I work tomorrow too. I am likely to miss most of the fun. Perhaps I’ll pack the keyboard and try to pay attention on my phone.
Amused: I don’t think it is cool to say that SAHM/SAHDs live essentially like a child and that they have no responsibilities.
Where Bitchy is going is the argument that if women are acknowledged to have personhood (by being allowed to control their own reproductive systems), then they are morally required to do the things that MRAs* would like them to do. Which is a pretty dumb argument. I hope she does still try to make it, because I enjoy pointing and laughing when people make dumb arguments.
*She may also invoke God, some idiosyncratic definition of “the good of society”, and a bunch of other nonsense just as weak and unsupportable as the ideas she’s already laid out.
BTW, Bitchy, it’s not that I’m the next Nostradamus, it’s just that you’re really very predictable and you keep tipping your hand.
When I went to the Catholic medical center to get birth control, the doctors had to put menstrual cramps on my medical records or else they couldn’t prescribe.
I’m pretty sure if you boiled down every pro-life argument you’d wind up with “but but but SLUTS!” or something similar.
And it’s not that I think the question of personhood is hard, it’s that the other side in the debate is trying to deny personhood to some class†. It’s, at root, and immoral position.
The only way to frame it, and have any hope of appearing morally right, is to have some greater value than that of personhood. They can then appeal to that, and negate the legitimate claims to personhood of the class they want to disadvantage. It makes it hard to deal with them, because the claims have to torture logic; since they are trying to say 1+1 /= 2.
That is, they are making one class of person not a person; but only in specialised ways. It’s always a logical house of cards, and much propping, and shifting, and special pleadings have to be maintained; while contradictions are ignored; or hand-waved away.
All in the interests of saying some people aren’t really people.
† this is the same argument of institutional bigots on every class they want to disadvantage, be it women, the disabled, homosexuals, immigrants, blacks, Native Americans, &c, &c, ad inifinitum
The only way you can get to the position that abortion should never be allowed is if you decide that a woman is less of a person than a fetus. Call it a baby (though “potential baby if all goes well” would be more accurate), call it a blastocyst, whatever you call it you’re arguing that it is more of a person than a woman is and therefore its rights outweigh hers.
I do sometimes wonder how they reconcile this argument with the fact that about half of all fetuses are female. Maybe women don’t become un-people until puberty or something.
Cassandra: It’s not that “babies” are people. It’s that they have reified, “unborn life”.
First they had to reify “life”.
But that doesn’t really work, becuase they aren’t against things like the death penalty (as a whole, the Catholic Church; as en institution is very much against capital punishment; see Scalia, Antonin: Hypocrite, for examples of individuals who don’t follow doctrine on this; but are slavishly anti-abortion).
So they have to make it, “innocent life”, with all it’s, “potential”.
Then they have to deal with the lack of a social safety net, so they make exceptions for, “the parent’s poor life choices”.
At which point they still haven’t done more than make the, “innocent” a small remove; somehow being an infant, instead of an, “unborn”, removes the huge level of potential, and the kid suffering isn’t all that important.
Mostly, because that would require taxes, and taxes are Teh EVUL!.
Because it’s not about life, it’s about personhood. More, it’s about unpersonning women, and as such the gender of an “unborn child” isn’t material; what matters is the woman coulg get pregnant, so she’s not a real person.
That piece themisanthropicmuse posted reminded me of our woeful sex education at my Catholic high school. I remember one day they brought in a load of badges which were tiny pairs of gold footprints (apparently the footprints of a 12-week old foetus) and told us to pin them to our blazers. My refusal did not go down tremendously well. ]
Off topic but I have a sad. My sister just called to tell me that my last childhood pet was sent to ceiling cat today. She was 19 and it wasn’t unexpected but it still sucks baws.
freitag,
An “honest discussion” with a “career academic?” One who assumes criticizing misandry makes me a defender of misogyny? I don’t suppose it has occurred to you that a person can disapprove of the small minority of men who hate women (most of whom must express themselves semi-anonymously for fear of retribution) while simultaneously disapproving of the large majority of women who hate men (openly, in every venue in our culture.) You don’t have much intimate contact with logic, do you?
I’ve been reading this site for months, and there is no honest discussion here. There is nothing remotely akin to intellectual curiosity here. There are half-baked “opinions” and slogans, substantiated with out-of context and/or Googled soundbites (see: Date-rape, exciting.) There are personal anecdotes masquerading as evidence. There are straw men, obfuscation and misdirection. There is shaming and group bullying against anything resembling dissent. This is not the stuff of honest discussion; this is how sixth grade girls establish the pecking order within their carefully defined (and arbitrarily exclusive) cliques.
Ironically, I read this site for the express purpose of getting easy practice in quickly identifying dishonest debate techniques. You see, there are other venues where the intellectually dishonest are more intelligent and more subtle, where it takes a relatively sharp mind to catch their little tricks. Such “tricks” are so obvious and blatant here, they are impossible to miss. And yes, I admit that when I do bother to comment, it’s rather unsporting of me. It’s the mental equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.
I have cats too.
Suz, this place is for mocking misogyny, which if you assholes could ever comprehend the header would save you a lot of time and trouble and showing your ass.
HAHAHAHA. Fear of retribution, my foot. And can you point out anyone here who openly hates men? Shit, if you can point to this overwhelming cultural hate of men, I’d love to see it.
It’s cute you think you’re on speaking terms with logic.
@Cassandra (and Pecunium):
If an anti-abortionist wants to argue that abortion is wrong even to save the mother’s life, THEN zie must argue that fetuses are worth more than grown women. However, if the anti-abortionist merely wants to argue that abortion is wrong in non-life-threatening situations, zie merely has to claim that “the right not to be killed” weighs heavier than “the right to decide over one’s own body in non-life-threatening situations”.
I don’t think the “right not to be killed outweighs right to decide over one’s own body” is a good argument, for two reasons:
1. We don’t count “refusal to keep someone else alive by donating of your own bodily resources” as killing in any other context, and
2. For reasons I’ve already stated I don’t think fetuses at the time of development when people perform abortions can have rights anyway.
So I don’t agree with it, BUT the latter argument doesn’t violate any basic laws of logic, and it’s not the same as saying that 1+1=/=2.
Now, if an anti-abortionist SAYS “Women and fetuses are equally valuable, it’s just that the right to life outweighs the right to decide over one’s own body”, do they really MEAN that? Probably not, since if they really cared about fetuses not getting killed they’d be pro free birth control for everyone. So you can BOTH accuse them of being misogynistic hypocrites AND give perfectly good counter arguments to their explicit claims. But because this is so easy, I don’t really see why you think you need to build up some kind of anti-abortionist straw man to argue with.
Well, I would be interested to know why you think that is how things are. It’s doesn’t seem that way to me, but you seem to find it obvious.
Sorry, let me trim that quote
That’s the bit I’m interested in, since I disapprove of baseless hate myself, and don’t need that bit explained.
Someone who comes to a site devoted to mockery to learn how to debate feminists shows poor judgment, to say the least. Funny thing is, though, that along with jokes and cute videos, there’s more real debate and discussion here than I’ve ever seen on AVfM.
It’s not a straw man (and you can stop patting yourself on the back about how much more clever than everyone else you are now). Nobody gets to use my body to sustain themselves without my permission. If you think that they do in this specific situation, you’re not considering me a person in the same way you are a person, so unless you’re also arguing that men must be required to, say, give bone marrow or kidney transplants any time there’s someone who’s a match who needs them, the “right not to be killed” argument is assuming that the rights of the fetus outweigh those of the woman. Which is elevating the value of the life of the fetus above that of the woman.
Or, to put it another way – if a person has a rare blood type and they choose not to donate blood then they are quite possibly indirectly contributing to the death of another person. Their blood could save that person’s life. But we don’t compel people to give blood even though it’s relatively painless and unlikely to cause them any lasting physical damage, or take up much of their time. Ditto organ donation, etc. It’s only in the case of pregnancy that some people decide that the right of one person to bodily integrity is less important than another person’s right to life. The reason for the difference is that pregnancy is the only one of these scenarios where the person whose bodily integrity is being disregarded is usually a woman, and a there are a lot of people (mostly men, but some women too) who don’t believe that women are people in the same way men are.
Suzy D, I am honest to goodness impressed with the degree to which you project. You show up, puke up your bizarre assertations with no backup or facts whatsoever, cherry-pick the shit out of everything, and then high-handedly declare yourself the Winner of Everything.
I absolutely believe that you come here to get practice with intellectually dishonest arguments. You are not very good at using them, though. Sorry.
You are consistently one of the most out-of-touch trolls who shows up here, and that’s really saying something.
Suzy puts the lol in delusional.
Suz: “I’ve been reading this site for months, and there is no honest discussion here. There is nothing remotely akin to intellectual curiosity here.”
OK. So I guess you’ll be leaving soon? No? Well, in any event…
“…a person can disapprove of the small minority of men who hate women (most of whom must express themselves semi-anonymously for fear of retribution) while simultaneously disapproving of the large majority of women who hate men (openly, in every venue in our culture.)”
Could you give a citation or two (that is, if you insist on hanging around) that supports openingly hating men is supported by mainstream culture (and don’t give me that dumb sitcom dad horseshit), and misogyny is rare? Or better yet, don’t. Just stop coming here.
@Judgy, i’m about to go into my third embryo transfer (previous two unsuccessful) because my husband and i want kids desperately. It is VERY clear to me the difference between an 8 celled embryo, a morula, a blastocyst, a cluster of 50-100 cells, a fetus, and a baby.
I will not be pushing the morula in a stroller. I will not be cuddling the pipette of frozen blasts. “Dad” won’t take the cell cluster to the zoo. When you do IVF, they give you pictures of the cells for your records, and no one puts that shit on their refrigerator or mails it as holiday cards.
To keep it brief, THERE IS A HUGE DIFFERENCE. Kay? 🙂 To pretend it’s no different displays ignorance that is stunning in scope.
It’s not a baby, it’s a fetus/embryo/zygote/blastocyst. As I’ve said several times, a baby is an autonomous human infant that can breathe on its own.
And abortion is the termination of a pregnancy. The words baby or fetus are irrelevant. (Fun fact: a friend of mine suffered a miscarriage but her body didn’t complete the process, so she was still pregnant. The procedure she needed to “end the pregnancy” even though it wasn’t going to result in a living child was an abortion.)
Also define “killing.” Seriously. Every time I scratch my skin I remove hundreds or even thousands of skin cells, in effect killing them. Nobody accuses me of murder for exfoliating. Nobody would even call that “killing.”
You know what I got out of this sentence? You’re claiming to argue from a superior position, but you have never actually bothered to look at the statistics about abortions and why women have them. If you did or even spent 5 minutes with Google, you could use an actual statistic to make your point instead of assuming that your opinion and the fact that you write about your opinion on your blog consists of a compelling argument. It doesn’t.
Absolutely not. I’m not an incubator. Women do not exist for the purpose of producing offspring. To suggest that women should be paid to spawn is reducing women to livestock. That’s appalling, though coming from you, unsurprising.
You have that exactly backwards. Insisting on calling a fertilized egg a baby obfuscates that the issue here is government control of a woman’s body against her will. It brings in a lot of complicated emotion to what should be a rational argument formed on a legal basis regarding individual autonomy. You can pretend all you want that words don’t mean things and persuasion and rhetoric don’t rely on those meanings (which really, really explains your horrifically bad debating skills) but here in the reality-based community they do.
Calling it “baby-killing” is how the forced birther people have pushed their agenda so far in so many US states. Nevermind that they’re wrong legally and semantically. That’s how they’ve avoided the significant problem that they’re belief that life begins at conception is just that, a religious belief, not a fact, and it’s unconstitutional in the US to pass laws based on a person’s religious beliefs.
The weirdest thing about the religious arguments for a foreigner who lives here is how convinced the people who make them are that they should be important to other people. It’s not weird that they have religious beliefs, even if I think those particular beliefs are nonsense, what’s weird is their absolute conviction that those beliefs are or should be universal. It’s like they think that everyone else secretly agrees with them and just isn’t admitting it.
No one seems to be mentioning the fact that over 70% of abortions occur in the first 10 weeks, through medical (medication induced) abortions. At this point, the organism isn’t even categorized as a fetus, it’s categorized as an embryo. So, if you want to call it anything, at least call it embryo killing, because at that point, it most certainly isn’t a baby.
“Shit, if you can point to this overwhelming cultural hate of men, I’d love to see it.”
Pffft!
~Any TV commercial with a male and a female.
~VAWA +
~”Must Arrest” policies, the implementation and subsequent quashing of “Dual Arrest” Policies.
~”Dear Colleague,” and the “preponderance of evidence” vs. “reasonable doubt.”
~Resources for battered men vs. resources for battered women.
~Affirmative action.
~Little girls wearing t-shirts that say, “Boys are dumb. Throw rocks at them.”
~Court sponsored divorce rape.
~Non-consensual genital mutilation.
~Women and children are the real victims of war because they lose their loved ones.
~”Women Only” scholarships.
~”Women Only” public events.
~Media attention given to female rape victims vs. media attention given to male rape victims.
~Government funding for female-specific healthcare issues vs. funding for male-specific issues.
~Selective service for men but not women.
~Low prosecution rates and paltry sentences for female criminals, including false rape accusers. Men go to jail, women go to counseling.
~The presumption that patriarchy benefits men at a cost to women.
Just a few, of many.
Not one person here will address these, or other, issues honestly. Someone will tell a story about an abusive male in her life, and that will justify the personal and legal abuse of random innocent men. Someone will say that since women are “oppressed by patriarchy” (ignoring how patriarchy oppresses far more men than women) women deserve some form of reparations. Someone will find a way to define every element of misandry, which fuels female privilege,as “male Privilege.” A mother whose son was circumcised at birth, will say that men aren’t qualified to make decisions about women’s reproductive organs. And someone will interpret my last sentence as evidence that I believe women should have no reproductive rights at all.