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?
before I read comments (it’s been a long week, which included losing my phone; as it in is almost certainly random bits of glass/metal/plastic along 101, between Mountain View and Sunnyvale).
No, they aren’t. Even the things they bleat about which need attention, they don’t properly address. It’s sad, really, that the issues like prison rape, the social safety net, how children socialise, the role of the male in society; and societies confused attitudes on the subject, and more, are important; and their response is, “bitches keep fucking it up”.
Gordon (are you okay with just Gordon, or would you prefer the Willis as well?) –
That bit about the comfy chair is, I think, why we don’t see the particularly virulent type of MRA in positions of power rather than jut sitting in that comfy chair spewing hate on the internet. Also, the process of getting out there and pursuing what they want forces them to actually deal with and interact with other people, rather than just the other nasty little toerags they find on the internet who reinforce their horrendous notions. And once you start having to interact with other people, stuff gets a hell of a lot more real, and it’s much harder to keep on seeing other people as not-people.
And when people like that step all over others in pursuit of whatever they want, they find more and more people who are unwilling to be stepped on, thus making it even harder to achieve their goals.
At least, I hope that’s the case.
It seems to be a really common theme over on r/mensrights that the instant a man finds out that a child is not biologically his he should be able to immediately excise that child from his life. I do NOT understand that. I totally get being furious at the child’s mother over the betrayal/lying, but if you’ve been acting as a father to a child for __ years and (presumably) love the child… “Nope, sorry, it turns out you have someone else’s genes, so good luck with your life kid. I’m outta here.”
I don’t think most men would be able to stop loving and caring for a child they’d raised.
But I really logged on to share the best airplane seatmate ever. (Even if he does have bamboo breath and hogs the armrest.)
Sorry for vanishing last night. Thank you all for carrying on with the explanations 🙂
My thing on the idea of a “paper” abortion is the false equivalence. If a woman* who has access to contraception but doesn’t use it and has unprotected sex and gets pregnant, she has the right to choose what to do, yes, but she will have to deal with the consequences of her decisions. Whatever her choice is, she has to deal with the situation. The reason abortion must be an option is bodily autonomy – she can’t be forced into having her body used against her will.
A man* who has unprotected sex also has to deal with the consequences. But his bodily autonomy is NOT at stake, and for him to make the choice about what to do about the pregnancy violates the woman’s autonomy – same problem as with making it illegal. His bodily autonomy was never violated. He had a choice to get sterilized/use protection/not have sex. He was never thwarted. And there’s no “right to monetary autonomy.”
The MRA framing always implies that women can “get away with” sex by having abortions or by forcing the man into child support, ergo men should be able to “get away with” not paying child support. This is not “getting away with” anything it’s the dealing with the consequences ON BOTH SIDES. That’s what drives me up the wall.
That and the fact that, as I previously said, men could avoid getting someone pregnant fairly easily. Women’s birth control methods are way more unreliable and messy than men’s. Yes, there are a small number of cases of repro coercion by women, but unless it could be proved that it happened, I would still view men as being required to provide financial support because, as everyone has said, the child exists and has rights.
* – not all people who can get pregnant identify as women, not all people who could get someone pregnant identify as men, etc. This subject tends to get reductionist fast. 🙁
Katz, your blog is awesome. I couldn’t resist a technically correct, tasteless joke.
Makes sense if you regard kids as property: Someone shipped him the wrong product! There should be a recall.
I find it similarly non comprehensible, cloudiah, but I’m also in the process of building a relationship with my stepfather which is a lot more loving than my relationship with my father, so my opinion of biological imperatives is skewed by reality.
Goverments Gets Girlfriends guy needs to get a Tumblr account or something. They only ever shut down accounts over there if you’re violating some powerful company’s copyright or you harass a teenage white girl. He’d be happy as a pig in shit.
@Deoridhe – yeah I feel awful for any children, existing or future, of the hardcore MRAs. Children, like women, are objects to them, not people.
Their attitude toward kids also reinforces the problem with them claiming to support father’s rights. Genetics do not make a father, or a family. If they were serious about promoting the rights of men as fathers they would be advocating for better relationships with kids, more caretaking of kids, more expansion of depictions of gender roles in the media of caretakers (although I have a beef with Perfect Single Father Syndrome in movies, but that’s a separate issue).
They talk about precisely NONE of this. They talk about kids in terms of ownership and rights, not in terms of humanity. It’s depressing as hell.
I thought Tumblr had a reputation for having stricter ToS, particularly towards racism, slurs, threats, etc. Anyway I know trolls who have been banned from Tumblr and none that have been banned from WordPress, not that that’s conclusive evidence.
Also off topic but I wish I could share these awesome vegan gummi bears with y’all.
Princess, I am jealous of your vegan gummi bears. But I’m not sharing my mini Cadbury caramel eggs.
@ellex24
Please call me Gordon. You are saying, I think, that it is one thing to fantasise and another thing to interract in the big outdoors, and also that those who prefer their fantasies don’t usually get to be President. It’s a good job we’re not discussing religion here. I suppose it’s true that we all have our fantasies, and most of us manage to treat people properly anyway, because we know the difference between fantasy and reality, and, more important, we know when our fantasies are a response to some primaeval urge or some unhappy association with a bad experience, and we are perfectly able to grasp that a person who accidentally stirs something up is completely innocent, and therefore treat them entirely properly without any discomfort.
I worry that the internet might give some people the idea that they don’t have to worry so much about the difference between in and out. For example, if you discover that you can blast a young girl (say) with vituperation comparable to the nuclear missile you might hurl at an invading cockroach from the planet Beetul and still not suffer any actual physical or social consequences then you might begin to lose the sense of the importance of the distinction between inside and outside.
Another thing that worries me, specifically in connection with attacking young girls, is the implication that the attack is an expression of sexual desire, and is therefore itself of a sexual nature. It can only happen if the victim is seen as an object, and will be much more violent to the extent that the victim is seen as self-defining and independent of mind. To me, this seems to summarise nearly everything I have observed about MRAs. They are primarily concerned with sexual possession.
Well thank goodness I have these gummi bears. 😀
I am a male rape survivor (male abuser/rapist, female rapist; separate incidents. Yes, I have bad luck). Let me preface what I’m going to say by mentioning that 1: It’s feminists and feminism that I have to thank for being able to deal with all this as well as I have; 2: MRAs are to blame for making “What about men??” something people automatically assume is a derailing tactic, 3: My own experiences of course can’t be generalized to imply big social trends, and 4: I’m mostly furious at MRAs for trying to use people like me to attack the people who help people like me.
But. There are people in the feminist, online community who I think aren’t very careful about the feelings of male survivors, to say the least. I certainly don’t blame feminist ideology or beliefs for the actions of a few unempathetic people, but I’ve been reduced to tears by people dismissing my experience or even attacking me over it (you’d be surprised how often self-proclaimed feminists tell me that the only reason being raped by a man upset me is because I’m a homophobe).
I don’t believe that making the case that cisman-on-ciswoman rape is the most important social problem necessarily devalues other types of incidents, and so it’s really frustrating when people carelessly or out of anger make that case in such a way that hurts victims. The most common one I get is people telling me “Rape is a gendered crime!” repeated like it’s a talisman, which might make sense in some contexts, but I can’t perceive as anything but dismissive and hurtful when spoken to or about male survivors.
I guess my point is there may be two little jewels of accidental correctness for MRAs. First, I know What About The Menz is usually an awful, derailing thing to say, but sometimes it comes from legit feelings, so automatically dismissing it is unnecessarily hurtful.
Second, sometimes people are less careful when talking about the feelings of individuals in privileged groups than when talking about the feelings of individuals in other groups. And that’s crappy, given that it’s completely unnecessary and even counterproductive when trying to call out privilege and fight it.
princessbonbon: are they the Yummy Earth gummi bears? I love their lollipops. I think they put crack in them.
@Gillian: ‘Merchants of Doubt’ was about the use of scientists and PR by corporations to create an inflated impression of the level of uncertainty and controversy around a topic. I imagine that the rhetoric of power under threat has similarities regardless of the level at which it’s organised, but my impression is that MRA-think is a genuine controversy in their minds, and that its expression is more organic than that.
I think it might be a symptom of society in transition. Many of them are men who were taught as boys that marriage and life works a certain way, not just as an option but as an ideal, sanctioned by God even: he will grow up, work hard, marry a chaste woman, and she will bear him children and serve him at home in exchange for the roof over her head and his loyalty into her old age. When they see feminism teaching women to demand more and allowing us ways to break this deal then it really is, according to the rules they’ve been taught, patently unfair and wrong. Feminism looks like an attack on civilisation itself, and as for the woman, she is not only cheating him but using this evil ideology to cover herself and her unreasonable demands from the consequences she deserves.
If women won’t play by their rules (and worse, if society participates in asserting that women have an equal role in setting those rules), they want to be able to pick up their marbles and go home
PUA and MGTOW might both be versions of that reaction. PUAs often have this narrative, that women have become such entitled sluts that none of them are worth marrying, so they’re going to play the system to their own benefit because there’s nothing better to do. And their telling of it is often tinged with sorrow (e.g. Mentu’s swan-song), like part of them wishes they could just find a woman who would accept her role and do her duty, so that they could assume their role and do theirs.
On this point I don’t agree. I think that MRA’s think it’s all about sex. But I think it’s really about power, or rather their perceived lack of it. And since they lack self-awareness, they mistake their lack of power over themselves and their lives with lack of power over other people.
Once someone leaves their comfy chair and the limited interpersonal interaction of the internet behind (try saying that five times fast!), and they are forced to deal with real people in real situations, then yes – most of the time that fantasy world is forcibly left behind, and other people gain status as real people in the eyes of an MRA. Which is why Donald Trump, for example, is a douchenozzle but not an MRA of the extreme status of our unwelcome interloper, Dragon Slayer. Mr Trump has had to deal with the real world and with real people to get where he is (although one could argue that, having had the advantage of pots and pots of money with which to keep the real world at bay for quite some time now, Mr Trump is in serious danger of slipping into fantasyland, if he has not already done so).
I get your point on someone thinking, based on their internet experiences, that they can go out and act like that in the real world. Depending on the severity of their actions, they’re likely to get slammed with some serious consequences pretty quickly (which is small comfort to their victim, but at least consequences mean they hopefully won’t do it again). I don’t know if there’s much we can do about that. The long-term consequences of the instantaneous communication of the internet aren’t fully known yet. But it’s not just the MRA’s spreading their hate – there’s also people like us who are calling them out on it.
I think what we hope for – and what we fight for – is that if an MRA crawls out of his comfy chair and tries his asshattery on real, live women, he’ll get slapped down hard enough to at least learn not to do it again. Not just socially, but legally. We also hope that the societal problems that create MRA’s can be lessened more and more, so that fewer of them are created.
@drst
This is what I was trying to say last night, but couldn’t phrase right. +1+1+1…
@tedthefed
Augh that’s horrible 🙁 I can’t believe* someone told you you were only upset about being raped by a man b/c they think you’re a homophobe. Internet hugs if you want them.
*as in I actually do believe but think it’s horrible. I use that phrase the wrong way to often.
I should add that only people who have no idea what an abortion (let alone pregnancy and childbirth) is really like could claim it is somehow getting away with something. It isn’t the worst thing ever, but it isn’t like take some pills and the fetus (or event potential fetus) is magicked away.
First, I know What About The Menz is usually an awful, derailing thing to say, but sometimes it comes from legit feelings, so automatically dismissing it is unnecessarily hurtful.
Second, sometimes people are less careful when talking about the feelings of individuals in privileged groups than when talking about the feelings of individuals in other groups. And that’s crappy, given that it’s completely unnecessary and even counterproductive when trying to call out privilege and fight it.
Thanks. I’ll try to remember these.
Damnit, why do I miss the Pratchett talks?
I have all discworld except TSoDW 2 and Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook. I have the Bromeliad, Good Omens, and Nation.
I *must have* the Maxwells, Dodger, and the Carpet People.
Why does my autocorrect hate the word “even”? It isn’t like the t is even near the spacebar and I’m accidentally doing it.
I also have a Tepper shelf…
@tedthefed
Rape-victims do seem to attract the attention of people who just assume that the victim is to blame. I blame religion, self-importance, and the will to power. Probably also some feeling of disgust about sex. Possibly also envy. I admire your comment, tedthefed, and your courage in maintaining your stance as a reasonable human being.