So there’s a young woman who attends a “a small liberal arts school.” She majors in Philosophy, and minors in Women’s Studies. And she has a job as an aide for one of her feminist professors.
Her big brother disapproves of her academic choices and the fact that she’s a — wait for it — feminist. And apparently he expresses his disapproval to her at every opportunity. He’s a Men’s Rights Activist, you see, and arguing with his sister is evidently an important form of activism for him. He writes:
I cannot have a discussion with her without it turning into a huge fight. I try to debate, discuss and challenge her to at least entertain ideas that oppose her own – and I get accused of ‘mocking her principles’ and ‘not taking her career choices seriously’ – because apparently I am not allowed to take men’s rights seriously, it could only be a joke with the sole purpose of pissing her off.
So she writes him a note asking him to stop:
‘men’s rights activists’ as I have experienced them not only oppose everything I think, hope for, and fundamentally believe, they hinder the progress of it. They take examples of injustice where men are the victims (of which I will never deny there are plentiful) and they take quotes of some mostly second wave feminists (of which most modern feminists disagree with) and conflate it to fight against feminist agendas. They seem to see that as male oppression.
This seems to me to be a pretty accurate summation of Men’s Rights Activism as I have experienced it too. She continues:
Everything I want to do with my life, my passions, my academic pursuits, my role models, etc. are all put in jeopardy by the ‘men’s rights activism’ I have seen. And when you send me these articles to try to… I don’t know, explain your position, show me why I might be wrong, etc. it hurts me and deeply saddens me because it makes me feel like you’ve never given much thought to my life.
Now, if I were having constant arguments with someone in my family about an issue close to their hearts, and about which we had major disagreements, and this person sent me a note like this, I would, you know, stop arguing with them about it. Because whatever disagreements I had with them would matter less than my relationship with them. And because people who are not assholes generally try to avoid doing things that hurt and sadden those they care about.
I mean, there are limits. If someone in my family became a literal Nazi, I might react differently. But someone in my family majoring in something I think is a dumb thing to major in? Not really any of my fucking business.
So what does MRA Brother do after getting this note?
He goes to the Men’s Rights subreddit to moan about what a terrible ideologue his sister has become, and to get advice on more effective ways to, well, keep doing the things he’s doing that she’s explicitly told him make her feel like shit.
Naturally, the Men’s Rights regulars support him in his quest to be an ongoing asshole to his sister.
One thoughtful fellow going by the name IHaveALargePenis responds directly to the sister’s comment about how her brother’s actions are “hurting and sadden[ing] her,” saying:
Glad we’re making a difference, but what really strikes me is that she can’t deal with being questioned/criticized and this usually applies to a lot of feminists. If their points had merit, then why the fuss? I honestly think it’s because for 50 years or so they were completely unchallenged and were able to get away with insane claims like 1 in 4 women are raped, etc. Now all of a sudden people are asking for sources or stating that yes, women make less, but it’s not due to sexism.
I honestly think you should keep challenging her. She’s been in an echo chamber full of people constantly agreeing with those feminist ideals for far too long and is now convinced everything is true without even questioning it.
Irony alert! Code RED!
Tim8080 is even more blunt:
You may still love her but she almost certainly doesn’t love you anymore. I’ve seen this type of transformation before with one of my friends from highschool. Trust me its only going to get worse.
The creatively named SarcastiCock adds:
Aside from her opinions, she’s completely fucking useless and unemployable. … She’ll be looking for a sugar daddy some day.
JabCross vaguely remembers that some famous philosophers were themselves misogynists:
If she studied Kant at all in Philosophy then she should be shaking her head at the Womyn’s Studies bullshit.
But frankly, a lot of women love to feel like the victim and will subvert their own intelligence to believe it’s true.
MRAMoment suggests that a young woman like the sister in question is unlikely to respond to reason, and suggests that the brother instead try to, well, trick her into seeing the world his way:
I would hazard a guess that she’s currently living in a bubble. She’s on campus, completely enveloped in the ideology without any outside force acting on it. You are her brother, likely her older brother so she views you as some sort of fuddy-duddy who’s opinions don’t matter.
Rather than use reason, expose her bubble to the needles it needs to pop it. Bring her to places where her ideology clashes with reality. If you ever have time to mutually consume entertainment, watch a movie that will bait her into the objectification framing of it and follow up with a counter view of male disposability. Place the debris in the oyster and watch the pearl of doubt grow. Ask her to come volunteering with you at a homeless shelter, and not one specifically aimed at women.
Ironically, it is the generally repugnant OuiCrudites who offers the brother the most straightforward and sensible advice. Oh sure, he declares the sister “a supremacist ideologue demonstrating dangerous levels of solipsism & superiority complex.” But then he adds: “I would just stop talking with her about it.”
Alas, brother makes clear he’s not going to follow this bit of advice.
“I’m more concerned about her dedicating her life to this,” he writes, “than having a peaceful relationship.”
And the mansplainers mansplain on. Because clearly a bunch of random dudes with penis-related usernames on the Men’s Rights subreddit know more about feminism and philosophy than, you know, some dumb chick actually studying those specific subjects and hoping to devote her life to them.
@Pear_tree: it was a DDoS attack that was partly orchestrated by some of the “residents” of 4chan’s /b/ thread. A 4chan user also allegedly released personal information about her.
http://www.dailydot.com/news/adria-richards-fired-sendgrid-violent-backlash/
@deniseeliza
Yes. qft.
Well, I hadn’t heard about that internet thing that blew up (w/ the people getting fired) 🙁 No coherent thoughts on the matter, other than bleh.
I’m rambling, so I’ll just…post this and hope it makes a little sense. Headaches scramble the brain.
Gillian, giving into threats is not necessarily the best tactic, but I am glad I haven’t had to deal with that situation. I can’t find the original details but certainly if the threats were credibly, and you had no reason to believe the people making them could be stopped, what else can you do? Obviously Richards is not at fault for the threats in any way, but that does not help the company. It is a scary story about what will happen if you speak up about sexism. To some degree, I imagine many people are happy about that.
Ya know, when I first started getting into feminism I talked about it all the time. Like, yeah, all the time. I was a temp at the time doing a lot of really boring data entry type work and I’d often read feminist sites on lunch breaks or during periodic lags I’d have in work throughout the day. It was a new thing for me to think about and my brain was super excited for a new thing to think seriously about. So I was excited to talk about it. And since my sister lived with me at the time, I talked about it a lot to her. A lot, a lot. I admit, I was probably pretty annoying at times. I knew she didn’t agree with me on everything, was even afraid of the icky word “feminist”, so coded to mean “bitch” by so much of society, but I thought, maybe feminism could for her, be the key to growing in her confidence and body acceptance as it had been for me.
I was wrong. She finally yelled at me once that she hated my soapboxing, that it made her feel like I judged her, like I didn’t think she was as smart as I was, etc. There was some internalized sexism in her screed too (“women are naturally less strong, women are naturally more nurturing”, etc), little of which I actually registered because in that moment I realized that it didn’t matter that I felt like what she believed was wrong, what mattered was that I was being an ass and making her feel like shit.
So I backed off. Don’t get me wrong, there are times I DO still point out sexism in things she says, but I do so in a way that doesn’t invoke an argument. I’m careful to frame of lot of my words in terms of “well, I think” or “my view is that it isn’t quite like that” rather than the combative “you’re wrong because xyz”. She acknowledges my thoughts and she tells me hers and we chew on them and move on, having reached a previously vocalized agreement to disagree. Since I’ve done this too, she seems to at least consider her words a bit more as well. It’s a mutual agreement to not be shitty to each other. It’s not perfect, sometimes we both fuck up, but I think the acknowledgement on both ends that maintaining our relationship is more important to both of us than proving a point is half the battle.
I don’t know if it was because of my approach, the way I phrased things or if I was able to turn her off from feminism because, as a budding feminist myself, I probably didn’t fully understand the concepts I was trying to expose her to. Perhaps it’s because she’s committed to being what she calls “old fashioned” or a combination of all of the above, but one thing I did figure out was that continuing to evangelize my beliefs as a means of “saving” her wasn’t going to turn her into a feminist and it might destroy our relationship. Plus, evangelizing was turning me into an asshole I didn’t really like to be around either.
I hope for the poster’s sister’s sake at least, he can come to the same realization I did. Though somehow I doubt it. A big part of the reason I was able to eat my foot and knock it the fuck off was because there were some great feminist writers who reminded me that auditing women’s choices as not being “feminist enough” was another means of trying to control women’s choices which also wasn’t cool or necessarily a feminist act. I don’t think there’s any such parallel writing in the MRM. Which is not surprising, but kind of sad. They could actually focus on how judging men’s choices to be feminist is as bad as enforcing restrictive gender roles, but then that would mean acknowledging that gender roles are bad and they don’t seem to ever want to do that unless they’re in the mood to whine about the Titanic for the elventy biebillionth time.
The link is here http://pastebin.com/ubmznGhn
The Richards thing blew up on MetaFilter, too, but there, only people who have joined the site can post, so it was the regulars saying she deserved what she got for “publicly shaming” the men, or both sides behaved badly and she shouldn’t have started it.
What she got was rape and death threats. So yea… (I know you, Deoridhe, weren’t saying she deserved it.) Anyway, David just posted about this so come on over to the new thread to circle the wagons against the coming MRA/dudebro invasion. 0_0
Anonymous did it. Anonymous didn’t do it.
That’s the thing with decentralized networks with only a name and a vague ideology behind their existence. The ones who attack Sony because they hate DRM and the ones that attack the Steubenville rapists and the ones that attack Richards are probably entirely different people who all claim ownership of the name Anonymous, and to be quite frank they all deserve ownership of the name as much as any other. The only way non-asshat Anonymous can get rid of the asshats is through example. There’s no voting, charter, or process by which they can stop them from claiming Anon. There’s no leader. There’s not even a General Assembly, which even us anarchists and your average Occupy cell has.
@ostara, when Mr. AK and I first started dating, he didn’t identify as a feminist and when I’d get tipsy I’d tend to argue with him about it….until one night, he very nicely explained to me that it didn’t make him feel good when I did that, and that he’d be happy to talk with me about this stuff sober, but I tend to be more argumentative when drinking and sometimes I hurt his feelings. It honestly never occurred to me that I did that…my family tends to argue very harshly about political/social/philosophical issues whether drunk or sober. I just tone it down most of the time, but a lowering of inhibitions and I’m right back to being argumentative. The difference is, with my family it’s more like a sport. We like to debate and, short of personal insults, we tend to be a bit take-no-prisoners in our style. Feelings don’t get hurt (and on the rare occasions they do, you just say so and the other person apologizes and it isn’t a big deal).
So anyway, when Mr. AK told me that, I was a bit shocked because he never said anything and always argued back, so I just figured he was having fun. And even though I feel really strongly about feminism and it did kind of bother me that he didn’t identify with it and, while pretty good, held a few unexamined misogynist beliefs, I backed the hell off because I love and respect him.
Incidentally, much time has passed and those unexamined misogynist ideas have mostly been examined and discarded, and he actually came around to identifying as a feminist when he saw some of the shitty treatment I’ve gotten because of my gender. 😀
It’s just common decency to stop hurting someone when they tell you that’s what you’re doing. If you can’t do that without compromising yourself (such as the white supremacist relatives–BTDT myself, by the way, so hugs if you want them and I understand…fortunately mine actually left the group and did a 180 so now we’re working on rebuilding a relationship), then you still stop arguing with them by removing yourself from the situation. You don’t just keep hurting them every chance you get by arguing about it.
@Fade, yeah, ACL injuries are scary. My doctor even prefaced his diagnosis with, “So don’t get scared when I say this, because when I tell you what happened, I don’t want to have to give you CPR.” LOL (my doctor and I have a great working relationship as I’m blessed with good health insurance and cursed with clumsiness and various athletic injuries over the years) It’s just a very small tear/lesion though, which is good since major ACL tears usually require surgery and a much longer recovery time.
Hope your knee is all good now! Any serious soft tissue injury scares me a bit, probably from my background with horses where a torn ligament could be career-ending. Fortunately it’s a bit better for us humans. 😉
Oh, at least she doesn’t have a brother who flirted with Third Positionism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Position
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Third_Position
Yeah. That sort of sucked around the Xmas dinner table.
How sad and frustrating. I’m having a similar problem with one of my brothers – my favorite, sadly – who seems to be morphing into a racist, particularly against Black people. I call him out on it every time he says something, but it really sickens me to hear him crack jokes about “monkeys” and similar. It’s breaking my heart, but what can I do about it? He listens to a lot of Nazi-themed heavy metal music and hangs out with a(n extremely) rough crowd of significantly older men. I feel as though I’ve done my best to pull him away from that crowd, but I can’t bring him around my friends because of the things that he says, so one-on-one is my only real option.
(P.S. Hi, I’m a long-time lurker.)
The important thing is that Third Positionists have found a way to feel superior to both capitalists and Communists, I guess.
@ Marie and cloudiah I love internet hugs. They have all the emotional support but without all that physical contact that I’m not fond of.
@blitzgal
Reading Scalzi’s blog just now has made me want to buy all of his books even more than I already did. I want him to have a good chunk of my money for being a very respectable human being as well as a first class science-fiction writer.
@Rabbit, Hi and welcome. I’m really sorry to hear that about your brother. I wish I had some good advice. All that comes to mind is that, assuming he values having you in his life, you could let him know that you will not interact with him as long as he is spewing racism; that while you love him and care about him, the price of admission for being around you is canning the racist talk.
Anyone else have any ideas for Rabbit?
Rabbit: I saw your question and thought CAPTAIN AWKWARD! But I can’t find anything that fits your situation. 8( She does say a whole lot about setting boundaries. My favorite of her advice for dealing with bigotry in difficult situations, like with family, is to just say, “Wow.” and stare at them. Or to do the “stare and raise eyebrows.” Another favorite is asking them questions about their beliefs until it becomes obvious how stupid bigotry is.
Another option, though, if you feel comfortable is to flat out tell him you dislike being around him because his jokes are both not funny and bigoted, you don’t want him around anyone you know because you’re ashamed of him, and if he wants to spend more time with you he knows how to behave now.
Good luck! Bigotry in family is always a pain in the ass. 8(
Sadly it’s still been consistently not good. When I just heard the diagnosis, the doctor was like “You’ve got a 33 percent chance you recover completely, a 33 percent chance you can still do most of your stuff but painy* and a 33 percent chance it’s gonna be bad”. It’s stuck between 2 and 3 right now.
*he did not actually use “painy” though
Sadly, I do not have any advice for Rabbit. Actually, I just handled something like this poorly. (At my Dad’s Fiancee’s house, she was being all like “Girls are just more dramatic than boys” and when me and my sister got upset about it, she said “I’m sorry, I won’t point out the fact that girls are more dramatic than boys around you” which pissed me off b/c it was a nonpology).
Anyway, my point is she’s got mainstream internalized misogyny*, I’d have no idea how to even confront it if she had something as extreme as Neo-Nazi stuff.
So I wish you good luck with your relationship Rabbit, but unfortunately I can’t be of any help.
*She probably also has mainstream “colorblind” racism due to some stuff I overheard her saying
CWS – sucker bet, I ain’t taking that one on!
Gillian – love collapsing puppy. And that black kitty looks just like our Mr Hadji. 🙂
PurpleTwit: “So they try to treat women with respect in the hopes that it will help them get laid” That isn’t actually treating women with respect; it’s seeing us as sex vending machines.
AK, very glad to hear your knee’s not as bad as it could have been!
Rabbit, welcome, and I wish I had useful advice. My sister’s a racist too, very right-wing, but we agree not to talk about politics (in the broadest sense) because our opinions are so opposite and neither’s going to change, and we know it’ll only spoil a conversation. I wish your brother would at least get to that point, though it’d be better if he lost the racism and the creepy mob he’s hanging out with as well, of course. 🙁
On brothers … I haven’t seen mine in about 35 years. Because of the age difference between us, and my being only in my teens then, I have no idea what his politics are like (though I’m betting right-wing) or his attitudes to women. However I do not have high hopes of someone who came home drunk and attacked our mother, and I want no contact with him again in this life. Give it a few centuries and maybe, but not before then!
First, as a (male) philosopher, I think that it is great that so many departments have forged connections with Women’s Studies departments. Feminist philosophy has reinvigorated the entire field of philosophy over the last few decades and I think that it could offer a great deal to students in Women’s Studies and vice versa. (As an aside, it was Kant who first developed the notion of sexual objectification, so the young woman described in this post may not be ‘shaking her head’ after or if already she has studied Kant.) Obviously, then, I think the sister is on the right path.
I have a mansplaining story that might make her feel a little better. Sally Haslanger is an eminent feminist philosopher, esteemed within the profession for years–she is the person to read on social constructivism and feminist epistemology. At a conference recently, a 19-year-old boy decided to explain to her what feminism is and isn’t, what feminist epistemology is wrong. Even Sally Freakin’ Haslanger can’t avoid such idiotic nonsense. So stay strong. You’re on the right side. MRAs are as intellectually vacuous as they are morally bankrupt.
http://mansplained.tumblr.com/post/44217137825/male-undergrad-manpslains-feminist-epistemology-to
eSEB
@Rabbit
Deoridhe’s mention of Captain Awkward jogged my memory of this letter:
http://captainawkward.com/2012/07/14/297-help-my-brother-is-a-teenaged-misogynist/
While it’s about misogyny, not racism, you may find it helpful anyways.
Welcome, eSEB!
It’s like this dude didn’t even read what the brother’s sister had to say in her note.
Two welcome packages on one night!
eSEB, let me offer the complementary welcome package consisting of a misandrist hard chair, matching bath towels, SCENTED MOTHERFUCKING CANDLES and cupcakes, delivered by female (whore) penguins in spanx.
I have really got to track down citations for the trolls who inspired that! Though I guess I could just offer it curtesy of Tom Martin huh?
The hard chairs and penguins were from the inimitabl* Tom Martin, tho’ before my time here. The matching towels were either driversuz or judgybitch – I think it was from a feMRA’s site about how a house has to be a man cave and anything remotely feminine was an evil attack on his manly manliness (throws, towels etc).
I don’t remember where the SMCs came from, it was before my time!
*inimitable because who’d want to imitate him?