So over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the top post at the moment (with more than 370 net upvotes) is a link to this image:
If I might hazard a guess: that’s because IT HAS YOU NUMBSKULLS.
Sigh. Let’s look at a little chart showing the striking decline in the incidence of rape we’ve seen in the last 30 years.
This is based on data from the National Crime Victimization Survey. Some have criticized the survey’s methodology and say that it undercounts the incidence of rape, but even if that is true, the trend is clear: Rape has declined significantly over the past three decades, and I think it’s fairly obvious that increased awareness and understanding of rape, largely the result of feminist anti-rape campaigns, has contributed significantly to this decline.
Naturally, those who tried to point this out in r/mensrights found themselves downvoted.
“He’s taking his own shallow, self-serving attitudes and projecting them on everyone else as truth.”
But it IS truth. Nothing worth having falls on your lap. Like that Ed Sheernan song said “The worst things in life come free to us.” (Sorry, I love that song) But also the good things require some work.
“Nope. That’s the point. They’re supposed to make some people feel bad so that other people can point and laugh at them and feel superior.”
Actually I’m guessing that most of the readers (like he said in the article, most cracked readers are 20-somethings who are just starting their lives) can relate to what he says. He wants them to take the criticisms to heart and try to improve themselves and their lives.
We’re talking about the article where he’s saying that you don’t have value as a person and no one will like you unless you are good at things.
Nope. Not truth. Opinion framed as truth. I dissent, not because I’m a useless loser but because I see people in a fundamentally better way. I have skills; they are not what gives me value. You are not better than me for having more skills nor worse for having less. I do not evaluate who I want to befriend or even date based on those criteria. He claims everyone does. Therefore, his claim is false.
Take it to heart so that you won’t be one of those losers who just gets angry about it and is a worthless human being. He’s classifying some people as having value and some people as having no value. Don’t you see the obvious comparisons that this evokes?
(If you like, compare it to the fundamentalist Christian saved/unsaved dichotomy. They’ll tell you that they very much want you to be saved and that they were once no better than you are and that you can easily become like them, but it still all runs on pride and superiority over those who chose to reject the message. That Cracked writer is a simple proselyte.)
@Some girl:
“But, then, I’m a big believer in excuses as social niceties that often hide things that are legit, but people are unwilling to say.”
and then you talked about bipolar. That is probably going to be the saddest piece of writing I will read all day. I *hate* the way that people who aren’t “normal” (and what the hell is normal anyways) are culturally pressured to give excuses for their behaviour because some (many?) people have ridiculous ideas stereotypes about mental illness and physical disabilities – the most awful being that somehow people in that situation must have deserved it. I wish I lived in a society that was more accepting and welcoming of difference, but all I can do is work on my own attitudes and behaviour, and speak out where there are unacceptable practices that I observe, including speaking out against bullying at work (which is pretty hard to do).
On that note, I find standing up against bullying at work (that one observes) to be one of the loneliest behaviours to do. Bullying is wrong, it should be stopped, in some cases it could be stopped if a group of workers (rather than just the lone voice) stood together, assuming that management are at all interested in having a safe work environment.
Back to the OT, one possible explanation for why people believe something incorrectly (such as rape rates increasing when they are actually decreasing) is the availability heuristic (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic ). It could be that due to there being more websites that talk about rape (e.g. because there are an increasing number of female-oriented sites over time), and rape being shown more frequently (or more graphically) in the media, it is easier to recall recent individual cases/statistics about rape compared to, say, 10 or 20 years ago. There are numerous reasons why people are generally bad at statistics- type reasoning, and that is one of them.
@Kiwi Girl
I wish I’d said something to the people (this is quite awhile ago now) who I heard say snotty things about my riding the elevator up just a flight of stairs. If they’d looked, they would have seen ACE bandages on my wrists and hands (this is back when they thought my fibromyalgia was carpal tunnel) and could have determined something was up with me. They didn’t care to. I later learned that other people I knew had dealt with snotty comments with braces on their legs! Probably not the same people, but I still wish I’d said something to hopefully make the people I encountered think twice before making someone’s day even harder.
My whole family got into a huge bout of “jeer at people who take the escalator to the gym” a few months back. I asked them whether gyms often have pools, whether swimming is helpful for arthritis, whether arthritis ever strikes healthy-looking people, and whether it makes it difficult to climb stairs. That shut them up.
…Did they think that people wear braces on their legs just for fun?
What, you mean you don’t walk around with expensive medical equipment strapped to you for fun? It’s all the rage with the kids these days.
Those wacky kids with their tattoos and their funny colored hair and their purely decorative medical equipment.
I was shocked at that too. It made my experience with them ignoring the ACE bandages seem almost normal.
Though joking aside, is there a type of medical fashion? I don’t follow clothing trends at all, but a few weeks ago there were pictures of Anne Hathaway at the Les Mis premiere wearing boots that sort of looked like leg braces. I saw a lot of comments in response to those photos about “medical fetish fashion.” Is that actually a thing, or just fashion snark?
well it sort of is.
I mean, steampunk isn’t necessarily medical equipment, but it is a fashion involving arcane-looking mechanical things strapped to the body.
There’s a fetish for that, sure, but if you see a random person wearing medical equipment what’s more likely, that they happen to have that fairly unusual fetish or that they actually need the equipment for medical purposes?
@Some Gal
I used to be very unsympathetic to people using lifts for short journeys when I was a little kid because my Dad needed the lift and he was tetraplegic (and yes, I would have used those exact words to explain it). I’m more forgiving now because of my own stress-related pains, although I still get slightly annoyed if someone hops gaily into the lift in front of someone in a wheelchair/leg braces/et cetera.
Oh, I did not mean at all to imply that people who wear medical equipment are doing it for fashion, if that’s how it came across. I was just wondering if there are actually people who use that equipment for fashion. If they did, I’m sure they wouldn’t look like an average person who has equipment on; they’d probably have an outfit built around it.
Also, even if someone is completely able bodied, why can’t they take the damn elevator if they want to? Maybe they’re tired. Maybe their feet hurt because they’re wearing new shoes. Who knows? Who cares?
Well, I’ve definitely never hopped gaily! I do try to get in elevators first so I can lean against the wall, but it is more of a slow, staying far away from anything that might touch me walk. 🙂
@CassandraSays
Exactly!
If I were permanently or semi-permanently disabled in such a way that I would need medical equipment, I would be tempted to fabulous them up and make them work with my wardrobe. Kinda like how you can buy pretty patterned canes and such.
Admittedly the last time I tried to do this I was six, armed with vast quantities of sparkly stickers, and had Dad’s chair to work with. He only let me put a couple of butterflies on the controls. 🙁
@Katz
I think you’re focusing too much on the negative. Of course everyone has value and should be treated like human beings, but doing nothing isn’t going to improve your life, and that was the whole point of the article. He was writing about all of the people who sent him messages about how they were miserable in their lives and in need of money, love, recognition, etc.
I’m in a committed relationship right now, but it’s only like that because I had to work for it and actively try to find somebody and create a connection. I only have a job right now because I took the right classes and I wake up early in the morning to go there and do my best.
Not working towards anything isn’t a problem because it makes you a “loser.” It’s a problem because people become dissatisfied with their lives when things don’t turn out how they want them to.
He sums it all up at the end:
“While other people are telling you “Let’s make a New Year’s resolution to lose 15 pounds this year!” I’m going to say let’s pledge to do fucking anything — add any skill, any improvement to your human tool set, and get good enough at it to impress people. Don’t ask me what — hell, pick something at random if you don’t know. Take a class in karate, or ballroom dancing, or pottery. Learn to bake. Build a birdhouse. Learn massage. Learn a programming language. Film a porno. Adopt a superhero persona and fight crime. Start a YouTube vlog.”
I don’t think this advice is unreasonable.
That’s a good point. I remember a magazine article once about people who had to wear medical alert bracelets decking them out to look nicer.
If your dad had allowed you to give him a chair that looked like it belonged in Sailor Moon that would have been so awesome.
@Some girl, that’s a horrid experience to have. It would still be a stupid thing to say even if you didn’t have a medical reason to take the lift. You’ve just made me realise that one thing I really like about my current job is that there is none of this stupid office gossip, which is what I imagine their talking (incorrectly) about your lift behaviour was. There’s social chit-chat which greases the wheels of interpersonal relationships with one’s co-workers (e.g. what I did on the weekend, I passed my course) and then there is the talk that falls into bullying – what you experienced was bullying.
Often, bullying isn’t the yelling in your face, swearing, other obvious stuff that is given as examples in anti-bullying courses. It’s also the less obvious things like negative comments said behind a person’s back, or being socially excluded (e.g. from water cooler conversations).
I feel for you that this happened. It’s a bloody sucky thing to experience. Just remember:
– there’s no bloody law that says people can’t take a lift to one floor up (or down)
– there’s also no bloody regulation on this either
– heck, there isn’t even a code of practice!
– in the wider scheme of the universe and everything, your taking the lift has no bearing on any cosmic outcomes
– in the smaller scheme of you and the building, you taking the lift has no bearing on any more immediate outcomes
– self-appointed arbiters of people’s behaviour are a pain in the arse to everyone
– some people seem to get at least some of their feelings of importance or superiority by dissing others. It’s a horrible thing to do, and anything said to excuse this behaviour (poor upbringing, other person is too sensitive, I was misunderstood, I didn’t mean for the other person to feel bad) is an *excuse*. We all do or say the wrong thing at one time or another (e.g. when we’re under stress, when we’re tired or distracted and the brain is not fully engaged), and the only things to do are (1) apologise sincerely ASAP and (2) try to put in place a strategy to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Assuming that the same people/person made both comments (lift, leg brace), has anyone (like a friendly manager) quietly taken them aside and made them aware that these type of comments are unwelcome? Some people have no insight into the consequences of their poor behaviour until they are made aware of these – not all of them are malicious and I have noticed that some people will change once they know they are having a negative effect on others.
You have my sympathy and hugs. If I could pass some freshly made cheese scones to you though the intertubes, you could have some of mine too.
Being judged by what you can do is a pretty shitty metric from where I’m sitting, housebound by pain, fighting with my insurance company… The article reaffirms shitty messages from society. It acknowledges they’re shitty, but calls them truths. They are shitty and WRONG messages. We should fight them.
(There are some good parts to the article, but they are surrounded by heaps of bad.)