In a case of spectacularly bad timing, Fox News happened to choose the day before the Zimmerman verdict was handed down to publish an op-ed proclaiming “the White American Male” to be the most oppressed creature on Planet Earth. In a piece entitled “Men — The New Second Class Citizens,” professional antifeminist Suzanne Venker declared that
From boyhood through adulthood, the White American Male must fight his way through a litany of taunts, assumptions and grievances about his very existence. His oppression is unlike anything American women have faced.
What is revealing about this quote, besides its complete disconnection from reality, is that Venker makes no other references to race in the rest of her piece, which runs through a number of tiresome and oh-so-familiar MRA talking points about the alleged oppression of men.
Venker complains about schools being biased towards girls, from grade schools that force students to sit still to colleges with their infernal Title IX. She whines about “sit coms and commercials that portray dad as an idiot.”
Quoting antifeminist psychologist Helen Smith, a friend of and sometime contributor to A Voice for Men, she suggests that women can get their boyfriends or husbands locked up on a whim just by claiming abuse.
I’m surprised she didn’t talk about the evils of “friend zoning.”
But when Venker refers to “men” in all of these complaints, she is evidently thinking only of white men — why else would she switch so seamlessly from talking about the alleged oppression of “men” to proclaiming “the White American Male” the ultimate victim?
There’s really no other word for this than, well, racist.
The day after Fox published Venker’s nonsense, we were of course reminded (as if any of us really needed to be reminded) of the very real oppression faced by “the Black American Male.”
Trayvon Martin didn’t die because he happened to see a show featuring a bumbling sitcom dad. He died because George Zimmerman saw a young black man in a hoodie walking home from the store and assumed, apparently because Martin was young and black and wearing a hoodie, that he was up to something sinister.
Trayvon Martin didn’t die because he was male; he died because he was a black male. His killer walked free not because his victim was male, but because his victim was a black male.
Suzanne Venker did us all a favor by revealing the unconscious racism underlying so many Men’s Rights complaints. The Men’s Rights movement is not only a movement that is overwhelmingly made up of white men; it’s a movement that’s almost exclusively about white men, and their largely imaginary oppressions, as well. We might as well call it the White Men’s Rights Movement.
I am wondering why did you say this:
“Feminists have pushed for more rights for women, but they haven’t pushed so hard for more responsibilities. Why aren’t you pushing hard for women to be drafted?”
I agree that people should be fighting for equality for men and women. However, the draft is a non-issue. Why did you bring it up?
I’m feeling the feminist love.
(Hugs Argenti, pecunium, Kittehs, Ally)
Feminist love! I’d offer to feed all of you too but I think you’re too far away.
Ok, you’re rapidly closing in on ten points. You have a baseline of five for the dancing goalposts, one for the tu quoque, at least one appeal to emotion. So that’s 8 without me even getting the game show lights up!
@Bailey – Not a single person on my facebook news feed that day said anything in support of the rapists. They were all ready to go out and lynch them.
(And also there’s nothing I’d make that Kittehs would like, except maybe pasta sauce? I do make a mean bolognese, and a tomato/basil sauce that’s pretty good too.)
Jason. We are not obligated to like you.
Especially, when you have said that women manipulate men, send men off to die ect.
And now I’m going to sleep pronto.
Group hug!
No one using other people’s suffering to further their agenda allowed.
Just one particular woman, Pankhurst. And a few others.
It’s actually far more complicated, and less fair, than that:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/aug/21/gender.pay
All right, I can go with Argenti’s comment…
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:fs7nOQAUXQwJ:www.gao.gov/new.items/d0435.pdf+gender+gap+earnings&hl=en, via http://www.echidne-of-the-snakes.com/gendergap/gendergappart2.htm
(Reads Jason’s last comment, contemplates showering in bleach.)
Jason: Knock what off? I was comparing the two groups, not contrasting them.
Disingenous much?
You weren’t comparing them at all.
If you think war is a cakewalk. And by the way, you’re wrong on veterans. More have committed suicide than died in Iraq
BTW, I don’t think war is a cakewalk. I think it sucked. But I’m not, “haunted” by it. I live with it, every day, because I have a combat related disability.
So I think I have a bit of comprehension. I also know a lot of women who served. I had a number of them in my squad at Madigan Army Medical Center. They were there for the same reason I was, they had been medevacced out of theater.
There was the one who had grenade fragments in her knee. There was the one with the concusssed eardrum from the IED. There was the one with the scars you can’t really imagine, who had been cut out of her truck (an LMTV) when she had to choose between going over a 40′ high berm, or slamming into the one the RPG had stopped in front of her. Her A-Driver, was decapitated in the wreck.
Friend of mine took an IED fragment in the eye (luckily she didn’t suffer any vision loss). Then there were the ones who merely have to cope with having their friends killed (vehicle rollover, on the way to a change of command ceremony).
Those, of course are some of the extreme things (well, apart from the last one, everyone knows someone who died). I have a friend who spent less than six months with her husband, out of the first four years they were married. Either he was deployed, or she was.
So go on, tell me what war is like.
You should read Why Men Earn More by Warren Farrell. It’s very illuminating.
@Jason
Good for your facebook. Too bad your newsfeed isn’t actually “news.”
Hey, I’m terribly sorry to hear that. It must suck. But the fact is, throughout history it’s been men who were expected to die in wars, not women. That’s been a male cross to bear, up to this century.
Why does every MRA resort to reccomending Warren Farrell? As though nobody else but them has read any of his books?
If you’d read any Warren Farrell, you’d be an MRA. So yeah.
Except we have and we aren’t.
Fuck off, sockyboy. Racist and sexist, what a piece of work. Not original, though.
@Cassandra – “(And also there’s nothing I’d make that Kittehs would like, except maybe pasta sauce? I do make a mean bolognese, and a tomato/basil sauce that’s pretty good too.)”
Yum, yes please! 🙂 We’re having lasagne for tea tonight, I think, though we’re so full of cake we might end up just having sammiches.
See when I said:
What does that suggest?
None consensual touch! Get our fucking hands off of me, that qualifier specifically excluded you.
Well, some people are just thick, I guess. And I guess I’ve wasted my time here; if Warren Farrell couldn’t convince you, I don’t see how I ever could.
Allergic to evidence, this one is