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.
@Gillian
*blushes* Thanks.
I hate the idea that math and literature are binary fields in and of itself, but the idea that that ridiculous binary maps neatly onto the (equally idiotic) male-female gender binary? Rage (and laughter and then more rage).
The idea that these binaries can then be mapped to contemporary (American? Sorry for the guess, but I assume it happens elsewhere too) politics? That is just silly. I’ve seen conservative science and math and economics.
And they never seem to understand the irony of “I’m doing badly in school because they dumbed it down!”
It is remarkable how much the world needs “liberal artsy fartsy” type things. Most of the substantial part of our entertainment requires it – video games, books, tv shows, music, and films aren’t much without writers and artists and musicians and directors. Museums and attractions require artists as well as researchers.
And your phone? It’s nothing without designers, not even a bunch of code – because some artsy fartsy type has to design the structure of the computer hardware. You’d have a bunch of programmers going “So, a device to communicate over long distances? And maybe it has a calendar?”
Simply, the modern world needs arts to be useable. This is why I hate it when sciency/engineery people knock arts as a field.
YES IT’S FINE WHEN PEOPLE SAY THOSE THINGS BUT SHE IS NOT A PERSON SHE IS A WOMAN
I give you… the thought process of a misogynist.
@Creative Writing Student
According to the troll here, without videogames, we’ll descend into chaos. (I stripped the racism from that, btw).
A lot of the Sarkeesian hate also seems to come from some odd binary between creation and criticism, application and theory. It is the same type of false binary as all the others. These things are more alike than they think and need each other far more than they’ll admit.
I love that extra space at the end. It’s almost as though even his punctuation was trying to distance itself from that disaster of a sentence.
@Some Gal
It reminded me of GGG, except instead of “If I don’t get a girlfriend I’ll kill everyone starting with myself” it’s “If I don’t get to stare at pixellated titties then I’ll kill everyone and everyone will start killing everyone! CHAOS! Society is held together by boob-shaped polygons!”
What makes me go absolutely spare is the idea of binarism itself, the idea that we could have a decent society without art and technology, without science and literature (and music, and painting, and sculpture and, and, and, and…).
As if all of human endeavor were a zero sum game where any resources spent on seeing that citizens understand history, speak and write well, and have a basic grounding in the arts will suck up all the brainspace they need for technical expertise. As if some of the most productive periods of human history were not also moments when the arts and the sciences fed into and grew out of each other in a robust matrix which both broadened contemporary understanding and provided the framework for future growth and discovery.
Specialization without broad understanding is a recipe for disaster. Either/or pigeonholing is a prescription for stagnation and collapse. Fear and scorn do not provide a useful springboard for innovation and creativity.
Just my opinion.
This is like a rant from bizarro land. Out here in Silicon Valley, most of the feminists I know are pissed as all hell at this woman for that CNN interview where she said that the real problem is that women aren’t ambitious enough.
Should check this book out, though. I get the feeling that her glibness in the interview might have been a symptom of television news, and less a reflection of her own beliefs.
Also, I saw the “Yeah, you don’t like it, but you can’t criticize because you’re not making anything better” from rabid Twilight fans too. It’s like people who have an obsessive attachment to certain media start exhibiting the same behaviors.
(Also, I can see Twilight fans and MRAish gamer types absolutely hating each other and getting into almost-symettrical internet slappyfights.)
or, more to the point, as if the experience and perspective of women had only to do with “women’s things” and “the women’s sphere” (yeesh do I ever get aggravated with the Victorians sometimes) and could only apply to women, instead of being part of the whole of human experience.
@Gillian:
Binaries are the dumbest thing. I remember a professor in college, explaining the Type A/B personality theory:
“Type A personalities are the kind of assholes who identify their own personality type, name it ‘A’, then classify everyone else who doesn’t conform as ‘B’.”
“…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'”
Oh wow, logic. “If you hold them back, they will scream and wail about someone holding them back, which is a total lie!”
“As far as I can see so far, those countries that have women in charge, are not doing that crash hot at all.”
As much as I disagree with her politics in just about every way, it’d be kinda hard to argue that Germany has been doing poorly under Angela Merkel. At least economically, Germany has been doing better than it has been in a good long while since she’s been in charge, and it’s held up as the overachiever in the European Union at this point. Whether that’s because of her or independent of her can be argued (and, if it is because of her, whether the economic boom is worth some of the sacrifices that she imposed), but it’s pretty damn hard to argue that the country is doing all-across poorly now that a woman is in charge for the first time there.
@ some gal
At least I’ll look good in comparison 😉 In serious, it is nice of you guys to give me the words I’m looking for. Normally I’ve learned them before, just forgotten because I don’t use them often.
“As if all of human endeavor were a zero sum game”
That’s how MRAs view all social interactions, isn’t it? Every exchange between men and women has a winner and a loser. Progress for women means men get shafted.
@creative writing student
I haven’t checked that thread yet, but couldn’t he like, draw himself some titties. It’s not that hard. Or if he really desires them on the computer I know my brother is working on 3-d programming (or whatever it’s called where he makes things that appear 3-d?), not for pixelated titties, but the skills are out there. Get your own pixelated titties troll.
@Binjabreel
I only heard about the interview from my sister and it sounded like it would have had me yelling at the screen. It isn’t that women aren’t trying hard enough dammit. We need more people lecturing the men! (I watched my sister’s graduation from a women’s college on the internet and ranted through most of it after the dean said something about how we needed women in business so we’d never have another Enron. Bullshit. Women aren’t more moral and the standard for equality shouldn’t be that women get to be equal only if, or only because they will, prove themselves better.)
Women get penalized for being too assertive so telling us we just need to be more assertive is crap advice. How about we try telling men (and other women) to stop judging women differently? We aren’t some separate species and we shouldn’t have to show again and again and again that we are just like men to get to sit at the table, let alone have to do better. (I get that the world doesn’t work that way, but lecturing women more isn’t doing fuck all to change that, imo.)
Binjabreel: “Out here in Silicon Valley, most of the feminists I know are pissed as all hell at this woman for that CNN interview where she said that the real problem is that women aren’t ambitious enough.”
You know, I can see how this could be an accidental bad phrasing/distorted reporting of a valid point. One way in which our culture does hold women back is by actively discouraging them from being ambitious (’cause an ambitious man is ambitious, but an ambitious woman is a careerist, pushy bitch dontchaknow). See this article in which a writer who has interviewed lots and lots of successful, clearly ambitious women recounts that only one of them ever admitted to being ambitious.
Or, y’know, it could be that Sandberg is indeed that glib and victim-blamey. I don’t know, I haven’t had a chance to read the book.
Now that I’ve read Some Gal’s comment, I feel the need to further clarify: I would be okay with someone a) mentioning that we need to stop punishing women for being ambitious, and b) encouraging women to embrace their ambitiousness and ignore the haters as much as possible. Putting all the onus on women and blaming them for the pressure that society puts on them to not be ambitious? Not so much.
Again, not sure which it is that Sandberg did, and those things do get easily muddled sometimes.
I’m fine with telling recent graduate women –who have a certain measure of privilege right off the bat– to be ambitious. Presumably they already are to some extent, because they are graduating college, so it’s not a stretch to tell them to also proceed ambitiously in their careers. I think it’s a word that should be linked to women more often.
@Bagelsan and Neurite
I think there is a difference between ambitious and assertive, that women are and should be encouraged to be both, and that the advice to “just be more assertive” or “just be ambitious” is ridiculous advice. (I don’t know exactly what Sandberg said, but it sounded a lot like the typical advice women are given and that I have a problem with. She might have a good, more nuanced message. Others don’t though.)
LOL I can’t believe he censored vagina! What a character.
The language is very similar to the sort of thing my elder brother has written in abusive emails to me.
A few decades ago, referring to a female as “ambitious” implied that she would do any immoral thing necessary to get ahead.
“vogina”? “vegina”? “vugina”? WHAT IS HE REFERRING TO.