John The Other debates John The Other on MRA misogyny, loses

@Quantum

And yet you’ll never see Futrelle point out the many tu quoques, question beggings, and other fallacious bullshit that feminist pundits like Marcotte come out with on a daily basis.

This website isn’t about feminists, so I’m afraid that your statement is ridiculous. Also, it’s amazing how predictable people like you are.

Also, we do know that not all feminists are pleasant people. Nor do we agree with all of them. Telling us that fact doesn’t make you interesting or insightful.

People who post on blogs asking why the blogger does what they want to do instead of what the poster wants them to do reveals a great deal more about themselves than they perhaps realize.

Hey Dude,

did you ever think about the reasons why SOME these men hate women?
The truth is, many have had bad experiences with women, be it their mothers, or girlfriends, wifes or co-workers etc.

Now, i am not asking you to sympathize with their goals or ideology because of this fact.
But i tell you this, without a bit of empathy from feminists (or other mens organisations), these men will keep hating women. They will keep doing what they are doing.

I ask you this: Why are only mens rights activists concerned with the issues of these men? Why are there no alternatives?

Think about it. These people are not neccesarly evil.

Oh look, another attack on a straw feminist.

You get a U for unoriginal.

@Argenti

And like all hallucinogens, you probably want a responsible, not tripping, babysitter so you don’t try anything stupid. Cooking with no sense of time is a bad idea. (Someone experienced in the fine art of not being dumb while tripping also works.)

I think that advice should apply to anyone who is inexperienced with drugs, even ones that aren’t as powerful. One time I passed out after getting high on cannabis (I know, right?) simply because I was very dehydrated beforehand. I’m very grateful that my step-dad was there for me because I would have fallen and hit the ground pretty hard. It was also really scary when it happened, and he was there to comfort me (I mean, I felt like I was going to collapse any second and go to the emergency room. The various hallucinations only made matters worse)

Oh, you said “all hallucinogens.” My bad. I guess in my post I’m talking about psychoactive drugs as well, not just hallucinogens. (Some kinds of weed are hallucinogenic, but w/e)

Energomash:

Hey Dude,

did you ever think about the reasons why SOME these men hate women?
The truth is, many have had bad experiences with women, be it their mothers, or girlfriends, wifes or co-workers etc.

Now, i am not asking you to sympathize with their goals or ideology because of this fact.
But i tell you this, without a bit of empathy from feminists (or other mens organisations), these men will keep hating women. They will keep doing what they are doing.

I ask you this: Why are only mens rights activists concerned with the issues of these men? Why are there no alternatives?

Think about it. These people are not neccesarly evil.

Sure, some people develop their irrational prejudices because of their assumption that a prior bad experience was caused by an irrelevant trait. A friend from high school got mugged in college; since his mugger was black, he decided that all black people were criminals.

The inability of these men to realize that there is some factor other than gender which might account for their experiences is, frankly, their problem. As for why no one else is taking up their cause….

1: In many cases, there’s no ’cause’ to take up. A man who has sired a child out of wedlock, and then wants to leave it up to the welfare system to pay for that child’s well-being rather than paying child support is a cretin, and his ‘issue’ is something I have no problem ignoring.

2: In those cases where there IS a societal problem that unfairly works against men, there usually ARE groups working to eliminate those issues–including many feminist groups. Sometimes this is pretty direct–eliminating workplace discrimination would open up many ‘nurturing’ jobs that currently are heavily woman-dominated to men, in part by ensuring the jobs were paid proportional to the cost of qualification. Other times, it’s less direct–cosmetic male infant circumcision (that is, circumcision that occurs without a precipitating medical need) is a minor issue, but it’s still one that would actually be addressed by creating a stronger underlying support for the idea of personal bodily autonomy–that is to say, if we can advance the feminist cause of, “A person should have control over their own body,” then CMIC becomes a non-issue, because obviously the infant can’t consent to it.

(See also: My above comment about how feminism is, in fact, applied humanism.)

Next up: We’re not saying they’re ‘evil’, and certainly not ‘necessarily evil’. Some of them might be, depending on the definition of the term we’re using, of course. But most are, in fact, normal people with bad ideas in their heads. However, patting them on the back and saying that those ideas are okay and understandable and reasonable is NOT going to get them to stop holding those ideas.

****

Quantum’s drive-by comment, of course, is a big ol’ ball of Citation Needed.

Energomash: I ask you this: Why are only mens rights activists concerned with the issues of these men? Why are there no alternatives?

But you are wrong. Feminists do care about these things. What the MRM demands, however isn’t that women (sorry, “females”) care about them, or work to help them. It’s that women abandon any attempt to redress present structural inequities to women; until these dudes have happy boners, are rich, not required to be accountable for what they do with their dicks, etc.

So long as women (and the law, and other men’s groups) insist on say women deserved to be treated as well as men do, these dudes will hate women.

Quantum: And yet you’ll never see Futrelle point out the many tu quoques, question beggings, and other fallacious bullshit that feminist pundits like Marcotte come out with on a daily basis.

Daily… that means I expect to see lots of them.

Argenti, the neuronendocrine thing is expensive, so I don’t think it’s a money issue…

But i tell you this, without a bit of empathy from feminists (or other mens organisations), these men will keep hating women. They will keep doing what they are doing.

And they can keep on keeping on for all I care. They hate women. So what? That’s their problem, not feminists’ problem.

I ask you this: Why are only mens rights activists concerned with the issues of these men? Why are there no alternatives?

If we are talking about a real problem, like homelessness, poverty, suicide, or the dysfunctional criminal justice system, then yes, people want to help men, women, and everyone of every gender affected by them. If we are talking about a phony problem like “friendzoning” or “paper abortions”, then real activists aren’t on board.

@Quantum, this is David’s blog. He can write about whatever he wants. If you want a blog where you can whine about feminists, then make your own blog. Ta da, problem solved.

That Voynich article is pretty interesting, and now I’m convinced it was written by space aliens, or possibly a hoax, or something else entirely. (I’m covering all my bases here.) My favorite totally out-of-context quote:

All wrong. It was written by the Furrinati on the instructions of the Great Furred Ones, to mess with humans’ minds.

On sexists recognising/denying they’re sexists – do these guys even think sexism is wrong? I don’t think they do. I think any denials are just a cover, because saying outright they’re sexists isn’t generally acceptable, any more than declaring oneself a racist is. Of course it goes further than sexism with them; there’s “benevolent” or “benign” sexism, but there’s nothing benevolent or benign about them: they are misogynists. They want rape to be not a crime, they want women to be their property, and they want to punish us for existing.

How are suicide rate, homelessness and infant genital mutilation (and I would guess he meant male suicide, male homelessness and male genital mutilation) linked to feminism? *crickets* Then why are they spending all of their time whining about ‘feminists’ (in brackets because for them, any woman who does something they don’t approve of is a feminist and a woman who makes a false rape accusation is automatically a feminist even if one has nothing to do whatsoever with the other). While he says that pointing his misogyny is a derail from those issues, I think it is the other way around in that he mentioning those issues is a derail from the fact that his ‘movement’ is based on attacking ‘feminists’.

Indeed, when they say they don’t hate women, they probably believe themselves as they think that just hating those who don’t limit themselves to their womanly duty of catering to men’s sexual and domestic needs, and those who complain when men justifiably punish them for stepping out of their male-prescribed role, is not hating women; actually, they do love ‘real’ women.

Sean R. Moorhead — please accept this Welcome Package as a bribe to get you to stay!

Thank you very much, although you don’t have to bribe me (and in fact, I feel as though I should be paying all of you for the hours of entertainment and education).

On the whole ‘humanism vs. feminism’ argument, my new go-to is to reply, “Feminism is humanism when applied to issues of sexism; likewise, anti-racism is humanism applied to issues of race, and so on. So when I say I’m a feminist, I’m already declaring myself a humanist, to anyone who happens to regard women as human beings. Does that include you?”

Yesyesyesyesyes.

I ask you this: Why are only mens rights activists concerned with the issues of these men? Why are there no alternatives?

The implication that feminists don’t care about men’s issues is perplexing to me on a number of levels.

First, although I agree that sympathy cooperation should be the highest goal of any social movement, don’t you think it’s reasonable for people to have particular areas of focus? Surely we don’t require that Black activists acknowledge White people’s problems, or that LGBTQ activists add to every argument in favor of gay rights that they also support straight rights?

Second, even though it isn’t their primary goal, the current generation of feminists has actually been very active in promoting the ideas that patriarchy is just as harmful to men as to women and that people who are privileged in some respects can be disadvantaged in others (i.e., white gay men), and in criticizing the problems with older schools of feminism, like transphobia in the Second Wave. Frankly, I think that feminism has been far more consistent in acknowledging men’s problems than the self-styled men’s rights movement has been in acknowledging that women have anything to complain about at all.

Third, in response to the suggestion that there are no alternatives for men — I can think of a couple of institutions that are very active in promoting men’s interests. There’s a little group called the Congress of the United States of America, for example.

I don’t deny that there are some areas in which women have an advantage over men, but on balance, have those disadvantages ever really kept us back as a sex? I mean, one of the examples of systematic misandry that MRAs always bring up is the fact that men are more likely than women to be suspected of having a predatory interest in children…and yet there are still a lot of men who work with children (some of whom, like Jimmy Saville, continued to work with children after it became known that they were predators), so to all appearances that disadvantage isn’t very crippling.