This Just In: Reddit MRAs don’t know crap about rape prevention, but still have strong opinions about it

(And because I’m sounding incredibly overbearing, atomicgrizzly is totally entitled to like and agree with whatever articles zie wants and doesn’t need to justify that.)

If anyone wants to watch that on Netflix Instant. it is the first episode on “TEDTalks: Beauty & Fashion: Beneath the Skin Deep.” (I prefer to watch things on television screens so I looked it up and thought I’d offer the info to anyone else who might want it.)

I think there is definitely some truth to the idea that hard work can help you meet your goals, which is good! I just think it can be a problem when people take that idea to the absolute extreme: 1) you can’t get anything you want without hard work, and 2) hard work will always produce results. It fits right in to the Just World Hypothesis. I’ve gotten loads of things that I wanted and that I never worked for, and there are probably some people out there who work incredibly hard every day and want some of the things I’ve just been given, and they will probably never get them. Not because they’re not putting in the effort, just because they’re not as lucky.

It’s just so easy to start thinking like “Oh, you never bought a big house? Never got a promotion? MAYBE YOU SHOULD LEARN TO WORK HARDER THEN bootstraps etc. I have all of those things because I’m better than you.”

I was put off by the “what you do, not what you are” thing in Wong’s article myself. Sometimes who you are IS what you can do for other people. If you’re an honest person the people around you may value you for that because they need someone trustworthy in their lives. The implication that you have to DO something and that’s the only way to have value to other people was way too reductive. I suppose he might have meant “what you do for others” to have a wider meaning but his later writing in the same article undermines that idea.

I sympathized with the point I thought Wong was trying to make, which was (IMHO) “basic human decency does not entitle you to a date or a relationship or sex and thinking it should is a bad thing to do” but it got lost in Wong’s hyperbole.

Some Gal: I got into a huge shouting match at the SF MakerFaire, when my housemate and I were talking about someone who had just gotten a disability claim. The guy in front of us had heard of it, and chimed in to say that the awardee was faking.

We asked what he meant (assuming he knew something we didn’t) and he said, in essence, “he’s not in a coma, so he can get some sort of job”.

The shouting match ensued when he said I wasn’t entitled my disability, because… I wasn’t in a coma.

The thing which was irksome, was the people around who basically told me to shut up, because they didn’t like people being angry near them; they had kids and all.

They got an earful too. I hope their kids were listening, because I tore into the idea that I had to be quiet, and polite, and “not offend people” when someone was being a bigotted asshat, and that was the lesson they were teaching their kids (I was a bit worked up).

At which point the dude, and his friend, left the line.

No, I look fine, and most of the time I can do things. But I ache. There are things I used to do, that I can’t really do anymore (horseback riding is never again going to be a regular activity. I pay for it now), and people seem to think that being able to something = not disabled.

Well I’ve never hopped gaily!

I have.

Which relates to another interesting thing wheelchairs. The day I broke my ankle (two years ago this month… I still have bruises) we were going to the De Young to see an exhibit (last day). I went (thought it was just sprained all to fuck) and got a wheelchair.

People looked through me.

Two days later I was in a cast, and using crutches. People would talk to me. I was the opposite of invisible. The two months I was in a “kneelchair”/using crutches were eye-opening. By the end I was a champion hopper, sometimes gaily.

But I think the difference was the cast. It was obviously temporary. The chair was less obviously so (even when I had a cast on in one). People treated it as if I wasn’t there, sort of like I was contagious.

atomicgrizzly: I just that David Wong piece… what a douchebag.

Let’s try a non-money example so you don’t get hung up on that. The demographic that Cracked writes for is heavy on 20-something males. So on our message boards and in my many inboxes I read several dozen stories a year from miserable, lonely guys who insist that women won’t come near them despite the fact that they are just the nicest guys in the world. I can explain what is wrong with this mindset, but it would probably be better if I let Alec Baldwin explain it: (link to “all that matters is that you sell bullshit to people)

No, your brain jumps to that conclusion so you have an excuse to write off everyone who rejects you by thinking that they’re just being shallow and selfish. I’m asking what do you offer? Are you smart? Funny? Interesting? Talented? Ambitious? Creative? OK, now what do you do to demonstrate those attributes to the world? Don’t say that you’re a nice guy — that’s the bare minimum. Pretty girls have guys being nice to them 36 times a day

Which he concludes (after more distracting bullshit) by saying…

I’m sorry, I know that this is hard to hear, but if all you can do is list a bunch of faults you don’t have, then back the fuck away from the patient. There’s a witty, handsome guy with a promising career ready to step in and operate.

He really does reduce it all to what one does to earn money. All else is bullshit. He mouths words to placate people who disagree, but his actual arguments

Nobody cares about your dirt. “Who you are inside” is meaningless aside from what it produces for other people.

It’s clever, but it’s bullshit.

Do I need money? Yes. Because I need to eat. But the things I do, “for me”, which aren’t shared… those are useful; to me. They make me happy.

This dude, this, “writer” (he makes a big deal about that… and in his abusive way he’s right, if you don’t write, you aren’t a writer. I also get the feeling he’s conflating being a writer, with being an author), just said Emily Dickinson was a worthless human being, because she didn’t share her poems with people.

Which is half true. She would be unknown to me, had she not written those poems; and others been willing to publish them (posthumously, in her case). The same is true for Basho, and Homer, and Shakespeare.

But that doesn’t address his underlying argument; he is pretending this is the recipe for being happy. Not for anything else, but for being happy.

And it’s not so. It’s corrosive as all fuck. It tells people that if they don’t have some salable skill… if they don’t do something someone is willing to pay them for, they are worthless. Looking at the undertone of the piece I wonder how happy he is with his life.

I know a lot of authors. They aren’t rich. Most of them aren’t even comfortable. They work like blazes (wordcounts are murder. Follow Elizabeth Bear’s, or Seannan McGuire’s twitter if you doubt me).

I wonder if he, for all he’s made the NYT, is happy with the life he’s got, and how hard he has to work to make the bills. Look at the Philip Glass story, this guy seems to be arguing that Glass’s music meant shit, while he wasn’t making serious money at it, because he wasn’t, “producing something someone wanted.

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.

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 think that’s a conflation. His school of “tough love” has a failing; like Diogenes presuming he knows me well enough to tell me what I know how to do, and how to go about it, he is extrapolating a stereotype, and then using what he thinks that stereotype needs into a “truth universal to all”.

It ain’t so.

I actually wrote a bit about the same subject recently. As you may imagine I come to a quite different conclusion.

I am what I am, and what I am pleases me, and the rest of the work can piss up a rope for all I care.

Maybe Andy Stewart says it better

There’s many that feign enjoyment
From merciless employment,
Their ambition was this deployment
From the minute they left the school.
And they save and scrape and ponder
While the rest go out and squander,
See the world and rove and wander
And are happier as a rule.

It’s basically a more wordy version of the idea that a man can earn access to a woman’s body by entering the correct cheat code, but in this case the cheat code is apparently an impressive job.

Sorry, but this article is entirely misleading. The incidence of crime in America has been declining since the 18th century. Rape is no exception. The rate at which the incidence of rape has declined closely matches the rate of decline if all other forms of violent crime. So the author’s claim that the feminist movement reduced the rate of rape is just as wrong as the MRA’s claim that the incidence if rape hasn’t decreased.

Even doctors.

BOO stupid doctors! HOORAY BEER!

This is waaaaaay late, but a few pages back someone was talking about rape culture in India. As you no doubt know, there’s been a lot of breathless hand-wringing in certain corners of the (US) media about how India ‘needs to sort out its rape problem’. I just read an article where Indian feminists have responded in kind.

Perhaps the spectacle of 3rd world rape allows Americans to forget its own “rape culture”–the one where the US has had a long history of putting the victims of sexual assault on trial while ostensibly pretending that they were holding a fair trial for suspected rapists. The one where 11 year old girls are gang-raped– –continuously over a period of months. And in which the entire town and one of the nation’s leading newspapers—the same one which points to India’s need to straighten itself out—manages to blame the child. Yes, that moral beacon of colonialism and hypocrisy: the New York Times.

It’s like a portal to misogyny…