My Man Boobz staycation continues. Here as promised is an interesting video.
I’d also like to take the opportunity, while I’m off, to as you all, dear Man Boobz readers, some questions that I’m really interested in seeing your answers to.
The first one: Are MRAs right about anything?
My answer to that is “no,” but there are some issues they bring up that a real, non-misogynistic men’s movement could focus on. These are:
1) Prison rape. A troubling new survey suggests that it’s far more common than previously thought, and that the number of people raped inside prison (overwhelmingly male) is by some estimates nearly as great as the number of people raped outside of prison (overwhelmingly female). (Trying to break down the numbers to make clean comparisons between prison rape and rape outside of prison is difficult; Stephanie Zvan digs into the numbers here.) Of course, MRAs don’t seem to want to do anything about the problem except use the issue of male rape to attack feminists. And of course if they focused on prison rape they would have to acknowledge that female prisoners are also raped, and that LGBT folks are much, much more likely to be raped than straight cis men.
2) Disparities in prison sentences between men and women. Even after controlling for assorted relevant variables, men tend to get longer prison sentences than women for the same crimes. (I don’t have a citation handy, alas.) This is not driven by feminism; female judges tend to be harsher on women than male judges. And of course there are gigantic racial disparities in sentences as well. MRAs again have done nothing about this except use it as an excuse to circle-jerk about evil women getting a “pussy pass.”
3) Domestic violence against men should be taken more seriously. Needless to say, though, most of what MRAs say about this issue is repugnant nonsense, and they have done nothing to actually help men, instead trying to get resources taken away from women.
Thoughts, on these or on any other issues MRA might be kind of, sort of “right” about?
I love being a feminist killjoy sometimes all the time when folks bring up sentencing
umich.edu/~clemency/clemency_mnl/ch1.html
so…
Ithiliana, was the website on the flyer AVfM?
I am torn on this issue. On the one hand I think MRAs have a few (maybe more than a few) good points. I have said here already that I sympathised with them for a while. But on the other hand… wow, no. A world in which most men thought like most MRAs would be terrifying to me. Do you think they could ever ‘take over’, or will they just fade away? I guess we will see in the years to come one way or another.
I get a bit paranoid about this sometimes. I can’t be the only one, right?
Non-con-sensually cutting bits off of the genitals of male babies is not good.
The gloves really do help a lot – they just don’t keep your hands warm! Buying them in pairs is definitely a perk, but even if you type for a living (like I do), using it on your dominant hand is a big help.
You know, this is a really tough one for me, because I keep finding myself hearing one of my male friends talking about men’s rights issues and for a while I’ll be nodding along and thinking, “yes, that does need to be thought through and reformed..” and then suddenly something will come out of their mouth that leaves my jaw on the floor.
Divorce and child custody is a problem, and I do know men who don’t get to see their children anywhere near as often as they would like. Of course they then go off the deep end with weird conspiracy theories as to why that happened. And I do know a good friend whose wife cheated on him and thought that she and her boyfriend were going to run away and be happy together, so she asked for a divorce. Once her boyfriend knew that she was going to be “free” to be with him, he dropped her like a hot potato. So now my friend has been waiting for two years for her to finally sign the papers on the divorce that she asked for.
Though he *did* get custody, and she’s on supervised visits, so that worked out properly…
I think the most basic problem MRA’s have, which prevents them from being right about anything at all, is that they don’t view most people as people. It’s not just women, although that’s the most obvious population being dehumanized. A lot of them don’t seem to view a sizable portion of the male population as human, either. Anyone different from them – especially anyone who is not white, middle-class, heterosexual, cis – are dismissed as not being “real men”, or as men who are undermining other “real men”.
And once you stop seeing people as people, it narrows your perceptions – your worldview, if I can use that term without a lot of extraneous connotations – to the point of being fundamentally unable to recognize the reality around them, or to even empathize with anything outside their narrow field of experience.
I think that, if one thinks of women as resources for men to use rather than human beings in their own right, the MRAs are broadly ‘right’ about a lot of things.
For example, the infamous alpha-cock carousel. They’re right that feminism, by allowing women to be more self-sufficient, has freed women up to chose their partners on the basis of something other than his ability to loyally work and provide resources for herself and her children. We aren’t forced to enter that patriarchal bargain anymore (as much), where we exchange our reproductive capacity for food and shelter, and signal our trustworthiness in this contract through chastity. And they’re right that the serial monogamy that can result from this does mean that the less desirable males (i.e. them) will miss out on access to a female during the time at which her reproductive value is highest. Because she is freed to enter into and leave relationships without fear of poverty, she isn’t forced to sell when her value as a resource is highest to the highest bidder. I suppose that’s where their resentment comes in, that they feel that they are missing out on this high-value resource, that women are using it for their own pleasure and happiness instead of selling it off early to males like themselves.
Of course, all of this is premised on seeing women as things rather than people, which is fucked up in the extreme.
Carleyblue: No, they don’t have good points, as outlined above. They get within spitting distance of reasonable and then fuck it up by blaming women for their perceived ills.
I don’t think they’re ever going to be more than an internet pest.
What’s more frightening is the everyday sexism spouted by mainstream culture: art, politics, etc.
And their points about education have some basis in a real problem – boys are not well served by an educational system that is overstressed so that each teacher has upwards of 30 students in the class. In that case, teachers do tend to reward behavior that helps keep order in the classroom, like sitting quietly and paying attention, which girls are socialized to do (as well as being generally socialized to try to please authority figures…)
Of course the other side of that particular coin is that teachers tend not to crack down equally on the relational aggression and bullying that girls do because the classroom standards and guidelines for most schools are written to control physical aggression and fighting rather than the more subtle forms of aggression that girls tend to use so well.
As a teacher, it was easy to control the behavior of anyone who spoke back to me, or physically assaulted other students. It was almost impossible to address relational aggression or crack down on the subtle bullying that went on, because the school’s guidelines had few ways to recognize it, let alone address it in a way that didn’t put the underdog students at more risk…
ellex, I think you’ve summarised it there. It’s like Pratchett’s comment about Mr Teatime, who saw things differently from other people; one of the differences was that he saw other people as things.
No kidding. Did anyone here suggest it was?
(Though I suppose, the notion that women are not property is a relatively new one, so we’d have to expect some of this way of thinking to linger).
Kittehs…not sure if the Westworld scenario would be terrifying or weirdly hawt.
wordsp1nner…yep, definitely going to hell, but I’ll be right there with you with champagne and pop tarts.
I think there’s a genuine issue with men not having a say in the outcome if they get a woman pregnant and then being forced to pay child support for a child they didn’t want to have. I’ve known men who really got screwed over by women who either claimed they were on the pill or deliberately went off it to try to get pregnant without telling the guy. You could easily say “Yeah but he knew sex makes babies before he shtupped her” but the same could (and has been ad nauseam) said about women seeking an abortion. In the same way that no one should be forced to carry a baby against their will, I don’t think anyone should be forced to be a parent against their will.
Another thing is the general assumption we seem to have incorporated into society that men can’t be trusted not to be pedos around small children, as witness the infamous Virgin Australia policy of not allowing male passengers to sit next to kids who are flying alone. I seem to recall a story of a man seeing a toddler alone and calling for help rather than helping her because he was afraid he’d be accused of something if he was found with a child that wasn’t his, and the kid died while they were waiting for help to arrive. I can’t seem to get the right string of words for Google to give me a decent search result so can’t verify that.
On the other hand, I find it utterly enraging that so few men realize just how wrong their ideas about the health system are, especially with the continuing fact that men are still treated (biologically) as the norm from which women are the deviation. One of my colleagues had a heart attack and didn’t get help for over an hour because she didn’t recognize it. Why? Because the symptoms that everyone tells you to watch out for are all based on the male experience of heart attack. Ugh…
And don’t get me started on the whole argument about why they should get free condoms if hormonal birth control is going to be covered by insurance. I’ve been known to just walk away from the table when that one comes up.
@kittehs “It’s pronounced ‘teh-ah-tim-eh’.” Heeeeeee!
I should have phrased what I said above differently: I thought they had good points about gender roles being limiting to everyone, but they were not coming from the same place I was. I don’t know what place they are coming from, except that it’s one that I don’t really want to visit.
I thought of the Pratchett quote too, and how he says in one of his books that evil begins we you start to see people as things.
Gillian LOL!
Carleyblue – yes! I think Granny Weatherwax says that. Can’t remember which book it’s in – Lords and Ladies, maybe? It pretty much describes how the elves see everyone (human or not) at any rate.
MRAs usually aren’t the ones talking about gender roles limiting people. In fact, they seem to policing gender roles more than anyone.
Kitteh’s: I think I just read that quote in Witches Abroad.
Okay, show of hands: how many folks here have read more than three Practchett books?
*shoves hand into the air*
I’m currently rereading Going Postal.
^ this, this, a thousand times this. Their sneering contempt for “betas” and “omegas” coupled with the simultaneous hero worship/jealous rage of “alphas”, and the need to shoehorn all men into one of those categories, does nothing to recognize the complex humanity of their fellow men.
Nice. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head.
Gillian: I’m just getting started on Pratchett, I’ve only read two so far.
hellkell: I envy you. Though I love Pratchett’s humor and his wordcraft as much on the third as the first reading, there is nothing like the experience of discovering the work for the first time!
Ghost Betty: does it strike you that a lot of what they seem to rage about also stems from self-loathing? I read a lot of the comments that come up, and the other side of the “omg, women feel free to sleep with whoever they want to and aren’t shamed into settling down with someone first” seems to inevitably be “but they aren’t doing it with me!!”
What frightens me about MRA’s is the thought that once you start dehumanizing entire categories of people, you end up with terrible concepts like slavery. And really, the concept of women as chattel is no different from slavery. It’s just dressed up prettier.
Although some of these MRA’s seem to be A-okay with slavery, as well…
I desperately hope they really are a tiny minority and that the mass communication phenomenon of the internet has simply made them more visible.