I haven’t been paying much attention to the recent brouhaha over Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s new book. But I feel safe in saying that MRA lackwit Christian J.’s “Sheryl Sandberg, Your Usual “Modern” Crass, Arrogant, Sexist, Biased Female” may be the dumbest thing anyone has written, or ever will write, on the subject.
Mr J’s post on WMASAW – the blog that used to be called What Men Are Saying About Women – starts off with a puzzling description of Sandberg as an “arrogant Lindsay Lohan Look-a-like, [who] Promotes sexism, bias and hate.” (Um, what?) And it only gets worse from there:
It is amazing what these sexist and abusive, addled females get away with while they continually praise themselves and raise themselves as being the “Saviours” of the world with the “If Only Women ran the World” meme. Take Sandberg for example, the bastion of that left-wing mentality … .
Yes, that’s right. Mr. J is describing Sandberg as a “bastion” of left-wing thought. Mr. J and the English language are not good friends.
They make the claim that “Equality” is about the aim of making women level with men, erm! level suggests what? In every area possible, even if it means reducing standards and tests and lowering anything that women have problems with. …
Every time they make the same claim that (Lindsay Lohan Look-a-Like)Sandberg bloviates about here, like every other member of that same HATE movement, it was never about anything else but giving women a FREE ride to the top and don’t anyone every dare hold them back because there would be screaming and wailing and it would be introduce another excuse to cry that usual lie of “holding them back”, amazing.
In reality, it’s because job placement used to be based on merit and ability, even though that has been tossed out and replaced with quotas in favour of women. It has everything to do with sexism, v*gina and pro-female “Equal Opportunity” as Sandberg denies is the case. ….
What a sexist loathsome, despicable female.
Mr J. then quotes a couple of not-exactly earthshatteringly controversial comments of Sandberg’s:
“I think a world that was run where half our countries and half our companies were run by women, would be a better world.”
“I hope that . . . you have the ambition to run the world,” Sandberg told Barnard graduates, “because this world needs you to run it.”
As Mr. J figures it, Sandberg is promulgating female supremacy here, “saying that every females alive could out perform any male. Sickening, petty, self-congratulatory, back-slapping and wishful thinking or what !”
I choose “what.” (They speak English in What?)
Mr J, for his part, seems to believe that, in an inversion of the the man-hatred he attributes to feminists, every male alive could outperform any female:
As far as I can see so far, those countries that have women in charge, are not doing that crash hot at all. …
Yet this odious and tedious Sandberg has the temerity to state that the world would be a better place run by women. What a complete, compulsive liar that women really is, women these days have problems being genuine and real, let alone anything else. But it does demonstrate that standard egotistical side of these “New Women”, who have been granted the easy option and helped along the way, every way possible by compliant men. Do they get any thanks for it, forget that. They just get the knife in the back for their efforts and gloat, even after changing conditions, being sued, forced to comply to changes that women demand and then turn around and state “Look at me, I am so good” .
Was that last sentence even a sentence? If so, please diagram it for me. I dare ya!
What hypocrites they are. It is about time men stopped capitulating to these arrogant and narcissistic females, stopped giving them automatic promotions, a free ride and start giving them some competition and let’s see how well they go then.
It’s always funny when blithering idiots suggest that women’s brains are inferior to their own.
You say you have a choice of whether or not to relinquish power (“capitulation”), get to assign where the power goes (“giving…promotions, a free ride”), and have been able to maintain these powers despite doing not even trying (“start giving them some competition”)?
That seems, to my weaker and lesser girl brain, an awful lot like privilege. So much so, in fact, that you could use it as a definition. That’s interesting…and pretty fucking non-self-aware.
Why is it the most privileged people always think everyone else gets a ‘free ride’?
kind of (theoretical? hypothetical? idk what word I’m thinking of). question, but whatever.)
Self-awareness, please.
@Marie
Rhetorical? 🙂
I got this book as a surprise present from my father and I have absolutely loved it so far. As a career driven woman, it has been an inspiring and motivational read so far. It is both validating and comforting to know that the small insults (although cumulatively, they become large) and insecurities I experience are not unique and that I am not alone. I have recommended it to all the women I know – most of the criticisms I’ve read about it are from people who have clearly not read the book. She explicitly acknowledges she has white upper class privilege in the introduction and continually reinforces throughout the book that leadership roles are not the only choice for women but that everyone should at least consider it as an option.
Well, clearly he’s not getting a ‘free ride’ and I suppose that might be vexing. But the fact that other people (perhaps even female people) might be advanced ahead of him couldn’t have anything to do with his general inability to coherently structure an argument (or a sentence, for that matter) or properly use punctuation. One imagines that he feels all other social expectations in the employment sphere, such as a decently groomed appearance and a professional manner are equally unfair and biased against him.
Nope, must be despicable females lowering the standards for each other while raising them for him. Where’s augochlorella with her skeptical cat? This one needs a pretty massive side eye…
@some gal
yes, thanks 😛 I fail the english language a lot, considering it’s my native one. XD
Have some rhetorical cats, btw.
@Marie
If you could hear how many times a day I check my spelling with the boyfriend…
And I’ve had like 12 more years to learn it.
That’s a strange cat.
I’m more embarrassed than usual, though, since it wasn’t even the spelling, I was thinking of the wrong words! And I even guessed twice! XD
You know, this is what I love most about patriarchy and male privilege: being told by some inarticulate troglodyte with shaky grasp of the English language that he is, in point of fact, so very much better than me, and the fact that I was at the top of my class and graduated with honors from a pretty darn good university is because the standards were lowered to enable me to do so.
Boy, don’t I feel silly for all those nights I stayed up late proofreading and rewriting my work when I should have been getting my beauty sleep and learning how to make sammiches and manly cocktails to woo my very own compliant man!
@Marie
No one here is a worse writer than Mr. J up there (except the trolls). There must be something about hatred that attacks the brain’s language centers. (That or they see language as a female thing and are determined to massacre it for its imagined wrongs against them.)
If they get any worse at writing, it is going to be a hell of a lot harder to answer questions like “Are all MRAs misogynistic?” because it will be possible that some of them think they are in a knitting circle or car forum. 🙂
@Marie We all grope for the words we’re looking for from time to time! I’ve always found that flipping through the words I know that are “like but not” the word I’m looking for helps me get there eventually (sometimes with people chiming in to help!)
@Gillian
And the fact thay I taught college men (more men than women fwiw) how to do basic math? They were just humoring me and secretly could already find LCD. They must have spent a lot of time getting together and deciding who would fail and who would pass. How nice of them to put so much work into my “free ride.”
@Some Gal Okay, now you owe me for cleaning the coffee out of my keyboard and worker’s comp while I go have a lie down to recover from my caffeinated nasal lavage.
Oh, he’s one of the meritocracy fairy tale spinners. Hon, that’s never been the reality, not in the entire history of mankind.
it’s rants like these that make me not worried about MRAs.
@Some Gal You know, it just occurred to me to recall that all of my math related professors but one at the college level (algebra, calculus and physics) were women, as were all of my TAs. The men taught the intro and 100 level courses.
@Gillian
No laughing at my very serious theory. 🙁
/kidding
@Gillian
More seriously, the highest level math class I ever took (Intro to Hilbert Spaces) was taught by a woman. Almost all of the math tutors at a different college I attended were women. All of the student instructors (the remedial math class was taught exclusively by students) were women, I think. Our boss was a woman, the head of the math department was a woman.
The only student who ever cried to me was a man who wanted his two weeks of absences, lack of any attempt to make up the work, and repeated test failures excused a second time. (I was really nice on the first extension, but made it clear it was the only one.) The only student who ever cheated on an exam was a man. Funny how I don’t assume that all men are bad at math, cheat, and cry a lot based on these experiences.
We get it, you hate women…and you’re barely literate:
“What a complete, compulsive liar that women really is, women these days have problems being genuine and real, let alone anything else. But it does demonstrate that standard egotistical side of these “New Women”, who have been granted the easy option and helped along the way, every way possible by compliant men.”
“Easy option?” Anyone else know what he’s talking about? Everytime I got a good job, some dude would always come up to me and explain that I got the gig because I’m a woman. Guy’s who didn’t even have the boss’s ear, mind you. But there ya go, bug planted in my brain. So, I’d exhaust myself trying to go above and beyond my job description. In the meatime, the slobs remained all superior, not filing as many stories, slacking off, cherry-picking assignments– but they had absolute faith they were the better employees — and didn’t have to prove it to anyone. I had an anxiety attack my first year out, because the editors were stretching me so thin (I think I had four or five beats at that point, and they usually made me write an editorial every morning). Gee, I think I’d rather have their priviledge than my so-called “Easy Option,” which is what? Being granted permission to have a job at all?
I’ve never had a formal graduation ceremony (UK secondary schools chuck you out the door with a ‘see ya, hope we haven’t broken your brains too much!’) but isn’t that the kind of thing people normally say at these things?
This needs to be pointed out and challenged more often – the underlying assumption that the only way for women to succeed is if everyone goes easy on them and “lowers standards.” You can’t disprove it with facts, since these douchewallows take it as an article of faith that women are given favoritism all the time, in everything.
Somebody likes Lindsay Lohan, was my take-away.
Uh, no. It never was and still isn’t (all I have to do is look around my office for evidence of good-old-boy nepotism). But you know who reallys get off ont his whine to make themselves feel better? People who can’t cut it.
@Some Gal Sadly, I can picture all too well people using such an argument in all earnestness. Right now I’m working on a project to write up technical documentation and end user manuals for an image management software program. The company I am contracting with has personnel in house to do development, coding, implementation, SQA and fail testing, and post installation support, as well as the usual marketing and management staff. They have no one on permanent staff to deal with documentation, and they have left it up to the discretion of their subcontractors to establish their own documentation policies, but haven’t explicitly called for it in their contracts, which means it hasn’t been done in any but the most cursory way.
Because, you know, they are a serious tech company, doing serious things, not those squishy “liberal artsy fartsy”* typed things. Like, you know, explaining to the customer how the software works.
*a direct quote from one of my colleagues
That said, what you had there was a beautiful turn of phrase. I know good writing. Good writing is a passion of mine. You, Gal, are a good writer.