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.
Now I need to eat, shower, go to work. I’ll be gone all day (Concert tonight, The Waterboys). It is too hot for this shit.
Have a pretty picture, with a problematic subtext: Synagogua
OMG I love the way all the folds in that robe.
Pity it’s so anti-Semitic. >:(
It’s sort of… hard to explain; the lack of visual imagery as present story means a lot of the direct anti-semitism is diminished, but when I was tracking down the ID, I found a website which was using how horrid the anti-semitism was, to PREACH THE SAME FUCKING MESSAGE!
I wrote a blog post about it.
AAAAAHHHHHHH! *dies of envy*
Yeah, I know a fair bit of medieval Christian imagery and I wouldn’t have gotten the subtext without the ID (and still don’t see it, but that’s what it meant when it was made =/= it must be obvious now)
Cassandra — the birthday wishes are for my 28th, I’m probably not that much older than him, it was just the “ack, that comment was not permission to comment on more than fashion!”
SittieKitty — yeah he’s a tiny little guy (or gal, do they follow the same anatomical patterns as the other plecs?). Like, some of the others in the tank, who had to be siblings, still had the slightly translucent “I can see your cute little curled intestines!” bellies.
And time to get up and check on them! Or rather, test the ammonia on the puffers’ tank since the little shit machines gorged themselves on snails.
Well never mind, the plec didn’t survive the first night. I don’t fucking get it, get danios and a plec and the danios are fine, and then plec doesn’t last more than a couple of days.
Apparently that tank isn’t ready for another plec.
Puffers are fine though, and hunting snails again. Failing since I removed as many as I could, but acting normal. The danio is engaged in a game of fish tag.
Fuck. The really weird part is I’d had four plecs in the span of ten years before this, andlost one to “I bought it as an attempt to baby the underdog” and the other three to ich as full size fish. And now my stable, clean tank has managed to kill two to IDFK in a week. The goddamned heat maybe, but you’d expect them to take it best.
I guess I’ll be waiting until I’m sure it’s safe to add loaches before I try again, because they’re so very much hardier than loaches. (Of course, I was debating getting a pair yesterday, but I’m not entirely sure how much of the biological filtration survived the velvet + ich = the plague)
Time to feed the 55g I guess, and test ALL THE THINGS on the puffers. The ammonia detector suction thing says safe, but I don’t trust it.
RE: Argenti
Bummer about the fish.
And I know I’m kinda ignoring the post, I’ve just pretty much bunkered down over the Trayvon Martin horror. I only recently regained the sanity to plan for the future; I don’t want to LOSE it again so soon, especially with that big trip coming up. (Already had to delay it ONCE for lack of sanity, I’m DETERMINED to fucking do it this fall.) Just. Ugh. Noooooo.
LBT — I’d post puffer brain bleach, but they really are the size of peas. And their water tests out fine (well, my pH continues to be non-existent, but no ammonia or anything) — ditto the 55g, it’s got just a barely registerable level of ammonia, but that plec had been dead in there for at least a few hours, so I’m not going to worry about it until I test again tommorow.
I don’t get it.
RE: Argenti
Sounds like a case of Plot’s Disease. Don’t worry, once your life story hits an important climax, it’ll magically resolve itself via deus ex machina.
…I should probably eat lunch.
Well now I just want to stare longingly at Pecunium’s delightful collection of hats. My own hat shelf is nowhere near as well-stocked ;_;
As far as why trilbys/fedoras are associated with asshats, I always thought it was some lowlevel PUA peacocking thing? In addition to the fact that those chumps never got hats that fit their heads properly. But I don’t have sources either, so remember your grain of salt, haha.
Our hat collections:
Sneak’s pink cat hat, complete with ear flaps.
My black knit hat, popular with cinematic bank robbers
Jaegermeister baseball cap
Hideous gray baseball cap with dubious dark stains and a neck flap
I AM SO ALPHA Y’ALL
🙁 Sorry about the plec Argenti, that’s a shame. Sometimes it’s the store? I know that I have a couple stores I used to get fish from where the water they had was worse than mine and mine required a huge settling in period where I literally added about half a cup of tank water every couple hours until the bag they’d came in was full before dumping them in the tank, simply for them to get used to it. Plus a bunch of that fish stuff you can get that helps to protect them (as well as dechlorinate). Bristlenoses are interesting, the males have more elaborate bristles and start earlier, with more branches – in general. I like them 🙂
It’s a chain, but I tried the other (reasonable to get to) branch this time. And I do aclimate them fairly slowly, the puffers I did a have (bathroom sized) cup every half hour~ until the bag was full, half emptied that, and started again. The danio and plec I only did once through but the danio’s fine. In any case, I’m waiting at least a week before I try again!
Also, I got video!
This one’s a but old, so it’s only two cories, but hey, they’re cute —
http://youtu.be/RQLMGxWRUoI
And one of the puffers came to see what I was doing earlier —
http://youtu.be/os2ugCxKjY0
Happy birthday, Argenti.
Oh right! Happy birthday Argenti! Maybe I’ll have semi-hemi-demi porn up in time for yez birthday.
Thanks guys!
LBT — you’re giving Thomas one hell of a case of blue balls.
I should probably footnote that huh?
There are no actual physical balls involved, Thomas is a character in LBT’s long running Infinity Smashed series. Which you should read.
Wouldn’t accuse someone of giving a dude blue balls, he can deal with that himself, but story blue balls? Get Thomas laid already! 😛
Oh boo hoo, get used to it.
RE: Argenti
I CAN’T HELP IT PLOT AND CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT KEEP INTERFERING.
This is why I’ll never be a pornographer.
Also Mac says he doesn’t share.
Happy Birthday Argenti!
There was a comment last page about the impression someone not from Europe got was that sexism in Europe wasn’t as “in your face” as it is in the States. Sorry can’t remember who it was.
Well I’m from the UK and have travelled a bit in Europe and I think I’ll have to disagree going on personal expereince.
In the UK I’ve had plenty of street harassment, groping and general creepiness from men in public and in Italy when I visited it was absolutely awful. However the level of it when I went on a school trip (big gaggle of teenage girls) vs. when I went with my ex-boyfriend. Yeah take a wild guess.
I’ve got the kind of low level misogyny that women in the States get, remember that Laura Bates of the Everyday Sexism project is a Brit.
I think where it differs from the States to the UK is that abortion rights are a conversation that isn’t really being had. You might run across it in personal conversation from time to time but I think there is exactly one MP in our Houses of Parliament who tries to make it an issue (Nadine Dorries MP) so we lack all the kinds of conversations in our media around it. If access to abortion is a given then you won’t get the “legitimate rape” type interviews that the US has.
Obviously it’s different in other European countries, but obviously a lot of what the US gets from “Europe” is in fact from the UK.
Also part of the issues is that a lot of Feminist though and dialogue is coming out of the US so the relative dearth of stuff coming out of Europe makes people assume that we are “better” in terms of mysoginy.
I urge everyone not from the UK or Europe to look up things like “Lad culture” which has been a big thing in the UK recently, particularly around University campus’s.
The first sign I got that my first roommate in college was a total drama king was when I came into our room one evening. He’d gotten back from a date with his GF while I was out and was standing in the middle of the room, apparently waiting for me, because as soon as the door opened he fell over and started complaining about blue balls like they were an actual thing.
This was his idea of bragging to me about kissing his GF.
RE: Falconer
Wow, that is an impressive drama llama there. “I got kissed and OH NOES I WANTED TEH SEXXORS!”
There was this time his grandmother called him, and he was out, so I wrote him a note to tell him. And then he started writing me notes about everything, and wouldn’t say a word. So after about a day I asked him, why all the notes? and he said, “You started it.”
And if the window in the dorm room was open, it created a big draft when the door opened, like lifted all the acoustic tiles a bit. So his idea of asking me to stop opening the window was to set a book before the open window so that when I came in the wind blew the book off the windowsill and he got to slam the window shut.
Dude, just use your fucking words. He was an asshole.
Knocked up his girlfriend, too, before she graduated from college — she was at least two years behind us. He married her, but that’s the last I heard of it. I hope she managed to finish all right and that they’re happy.
RE: Falconer
Eeeech. Sounds like a prize for sure.