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.
@Neurite
I think it is important to direct the messages a bit better. The NPR link, I think, mentions a Girl Scout negotiation badge, which is great (for a number if reasons) and assertiveness has other benefits in life as well. That, I have no problem with. The later-in-life advice seems more flawed.
So if a girl doesn’t have the Scouts or grows up without certain resources, is later-in-life advice better than no advice at all? That makes no sense.
@hellkell
When my whole issue is that the advice to women is glib and ignores reality, it seems like ignoring the complexities of the situation because sexists might end up with the ammo that women sometimes suck is counterproductive. (Plus, they are notoriously lazy and it isn’t like I actually linked to the study.)
@hellkell
It means later-in-life advice should treat women as adults capable of deciding whether or not to take the risk of being more assertive and should not portray women as cog in the machine most in need of change.
I don’t understand why, when we talk about the counterproductive and victim-blamey “don’t get raped” advice, we focus on the rape culture, but when it comes to business, the counterproductive and victim-blamey advice is the best we can do or better than nothing.
I do not agree with you or your sweeping pronouncements. We’re going to have to leave it at that for the moment.
@hellkell
Okay. Can we both agree that whether Sandberg is right or wrong in her advice, the MRA’s “critique” of it is way off-base?
There was an echo of this MRA at CPAC today.
Yeah, they suck no matter what.
the bewilderness: this is me reading that quote: O_O
REALLY? Disenfranchised, my foot.
And then there is this: http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/03/martha-stewarts-best-lesson-dont-give-a-damn.html
Because success or failure to provide a daily requirement of nice is always the focus of articles about successful women. The conditioning goes bone marrow deep in all of us.
@hellkell
I think my face did the same thing.
@thebewilderness
And now I’ve remembered CPAC. *starts to wonder if it is time for a glass of wine*
@thebewilderness
But it didn’t talk about her clothes or hair so that’s something…
*deep sigh*
It really is one of those WTF who are these people days. Yanno?
Pear_tree: “I have to admit that I rolled my eyes when one speaker suggested that you need a relationship not where your partner helped but where he took responsibility for household chores. I guess it is possible, but it seems so unlikely. I hope people here have relationships like that but it just seems asking so much.”
Wow, that actually makes me sad. Assuming that both partners work, how on Earth would one defend the idea that the household chores are still predominantly one partner’s responsibility, and the other partner would just be “helping” (which carries a clear implication that the “helping” partner is not, at heart, responsible for the chores).
I could see that if one partner is not working, or working part-time while the other partner works full-time (though in the latter case I would still think a split in responsibilities is reasonable, just not necessarily a 50-50 split). But if both work similar loads?
I understand that there is still some resistance, that the idea of “household is women’s work” still lingers, but really – in this day and age, people moving past that is still so rare that it’s seen as “unlikely” and unrealistic? That’s saddening. And not what I’ve experienced in my relationships, but maybe I just got lucky.
I keep staring at the pictures at the top of the page to try to see where there is any resemblance. Sandberg us starting ti remind me of some celebrity I can’t place and Loyang is making me sleepy.
It probably goes without saying that Lohan was picked because she is widely seen as stupid, incompetent and a trainwreck, and I can see why MRAs would want Sandberg to be those things. I can even, if I squint really hard and pretend the bits quoted in the OP make sense, imagine how they actually manage to see Sandberg as those things. But Sandberg as a Lohan look-a-like?
Even in MRA world, that is nonsense.
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.
Yes, but just look how much better the countries run by men are doing! Italy, for instance, with its famously macho political culture, has had nothing but smooth sailing lately.
I don’t know which countries this guy thinks are doing badly with women in charge, but it should be easy to narrow it down, since only 17 nations currently have female heads of state (down from an all-time high of 20 a few years ago). For the record, here they are:
Germany
Liberia
Argentina
Bangladesh
Iceland
Lithuania
Costa Rica
Trinidad and Tobago
Australia
Slovakia
Brazil
Kosovo
Thailand
Denmark
Jamaica
Malawi
South Korea
Some of these countries are doing well, some badly, but there doesn’t seem to be a direct correlation between the health of a nation and the plumbing of its head of state.
How does he jump from “If half the world’s countries and half the world’s corporations were run by females” to “if the world was run by females”?
Because to people who think in terms of strict social hierarchies, equality is impossible. The only options are Us on Top or Them on Top.
In reality, the only country that has more women than men in government is Rwanda, and the reason for that is very sad. The 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which men were murdered and women systematically raped, left the population 70% female. Encouraging women to take on traditionally male jobs, including leadership roles, has been essential to rebuilding Rwanda.
Although now that I think about it, “New Women” was a 19th-century term for feminists, so maybe by “those countries that have women in charge” he means Victorian England. The rantipoles were running rampant through the streets of London Town, I tell you!
*Lohan
I swear I fixed that more than once. Now my autocorrect knows it is a word.
When me and Mr BigMomma decided to have kids, I was very clear with Mr BM that it was a 50/50 shared care job. Luckily Mr BM is a very cool guy who loves kids so this was not a problem. So he got up through the night, did the early mornings, changed nappies, did all the drudgey, unappealing bits of child care (naturally he was admired and complimented for this).
I work part time, he works full time. Mostly during the days I’m at home, I do the child care which takes up a phenomenal amount of time with nothing concrete to show other than a living, breathing child. It was also agreed between us that his working day doesn’t finish when he leaves work as running the family unit is a shared job. So we share household chores and neither of us finishes until it’s all done and the kids are in bed. Ah, the blissful glass of wine thereafter.
All of this because we use words to communicate and articulated clear expectations and agreements. Those first few months after the first child is born are very stressful and your whole life is turned upside down down. I couldn’t have made it without Mr BigMomma.
And the Lindsay Lohan thing? I don’t get it. It’s an old trick of course that we assign attributes based on visual presentation so if Lohan is coded as a bubble headed addict (etc etc) then those qualities transfer. Lohan is possibly representative for MRAs of all the qualities they deride in women.
And I didn’t know about Steubenville so I went away and read up. Now I feel sick. The Guardian says the defence is resting on the boys’ perception of her state of inebriation but so much evidence (phone pic, vids and posts) have been deleted. If someone has thrown up on themselves, how can we even be considering that those boys can argue that they thought she wasn’t that drunk?
also @starskita, congrats! Are you still nauseous? Usually I get The Hunger about 20 weeks and eat myself silly until about 30weeks when I am too full of baby to be able to fit in much food.
I wonder how Kendra is doing? Also I wonder how many mini Manboobzers we have?
I think the difference between advice like “be assertive” and “don’t get raped” is that the former tries to counteract the prevailing cultural meme while the latter is merely reinforcing it. Girls and women hear not to walk alone at night/etc. all the time but they don’t get told nearly as often to be ambitious.
And ambitious doesn’t have to mean you are super outwardly assertive, or act “like a man” would. It just means you have places you want to go and things you want to accomplish; this can often be done by appropriately “feminine” means (like using polite people skills and even good ol’ sneakiness), if that’s a better strategy than more aggressive approaches.
Jumping from page one here, but “New Woman”? They were using that term in the nineteenth century! Did time travel scramble his alleged brain?
On ambition – sure, if you’re addressing graduates, or if you’re talking about the way women are socialised against ambition. But I would not care to be told “you should be more ambitious”. It’s blamey, yes; it also assumes everyone wants to be a leader or boss of some sort.
Stop right there, Kittehs’! Lecture time! If you were more ambitious, maybe you’d be The Kittehs’ Paid Help.
;D
ROFL!
Now that would be an interesting study – how human ambitions run into the immovable wall of feline indifference.