I’m back from a brief vacation in Migraineland, and thinking about the ways in which Men’s Rights Activists love to appropriate the language of feminism and other progressive movements, usually in ways that are face-palmingly ass-backwards.
Take this recent discussion on the Men’s Rights subreddit of the dire threat of “fake gamer girls” invading the “male space” of gaming. The generically named guywithaccount sets up the discussion with this post:
![I want to talk about "fake geek girls" (self.MensRights) submitted 9 days ago by guywithaccount For those of you who don't know about this, there's a bit of a controversy in what I'll call the geek community. Apparently, when women attend geek conventions (that is, those celebrating e.g. video games, comic books, sci-fi and fantasy), some men accuse them of being "fake geeks" or demanding that they prove their "geek cred" by correctly answering trivia questions made up on the spot. Here's one article (of many) that talks about it: [1] http://bookviewcafe.com/blog/2013/08/08/the-fake-geek-girl-nonsense/ My concern for this issue is that, like anything else that involves gender, feminists and feminist sympathizers are attempting to dominate the discussion and frame the whole thing from a feminist and gynocentric perspective. The prevailing analysis might be summed up as "geek culture is deeply misogynistic, and the people complaining about fake geeks are just sad little losers who hate women." IMO, the geek subculture has provided a somewhat-safe space for many men who have been snubbed by the rest of society, where they are not expected to prove their value to each other by carving notches in a bedpost or exemplifying traditional masculine traits. The increase in mainstream appeal and female participation over the past decade or so threatens the safety and exclusivity of this space, and the backlash from male geeks is a somewhat-predictable response to the invasion of their space. Of course, there are few spaces just for men, and when someone tries to create or preserve one, they're accused of misogyny. I suspect that some of you don't give a crap about any of this and see the whole thing as petty, but realize that it's not happening in a vacuum. I believe it's merely a symptom of the fact that men have almost no voice in gender discussions and their needs are routinely denied or ignored.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/fakegeek.png?resize=573%2C541&ssl=1)
Now, there is a teensy bit of gold in this pile of bullshit: the notion of a “safe space,” where oppressed people can come forward and discuss their issues without fear of being talked over or shut down by those outside their group — who have more power in the world and who may not have their best interests at heart (or who may just be Blabby McBlabbypants types).
But there are a couple of giant problems with this notion when it comes to gamer dudes declaring gaming a “safe space” for men. The first is that, despite lingering resentments over being “snubbed” in high school or wherever — evident in the OP and in comments throughout the discussion — these guys are not actually an oppressed people by any measure that really matters.
Indeed, many of them — as tech dudes in a male-dominated tech world — are in fact in fairly privileged positions. For them to claim they need a “safe space” to protect themselves from the evils of “fake gamer girls” is a bit like Klan members claiming they need a “safe space” to protect themselves from blacks, Jews and Catholics. (Which is more or less what Klan members have argued over the years, albeit in less PC language.) No, I’m not claiming that all MRAs are the equivalent of hood-wearing Klan members. Only some of them are.
The second problem with the “game world as safe space for men” aregument is that YOU CAN’T JUST DECLARE BIG CHUNKS OF THE WORLD TO BELONG TO MEN. Yes, men dominate the gaming world in sheer numbers, both as game-makers and game-players. (While women make up nearly half of all game players — 47% — men tend to dominate the “serious” games that many geek dudes claim are the only ones that really count.) But gaming doesn’t “belong” to men any more than, say, novel-reading “belongs” to women — even though surveys suggest that women make up a staggering 80% of the fiction market in much of the English-speaking world.
Yep, that’s right: Women dominate “noveling” much more dramatically than men dominate gaming. Yet you don’t find women denouncing “fake noveler boys” or declaring that the male brain isn’t wired to understand the subtleties of written fiction.
No, in fact men are actively welcomed into book clubs. And my best friend, a woman, has spent much of the 18 or so years or our friendship trying to get me to read this novel or that novel, though over the years she’s only succeeded in getting me to read maybe one or two of her suggestions, which were pretty good, I have to admit. (I do plan to read some of the others, really.)
If you’re a socially awkward guy and want a safe space to discuss that, find a therapist, find a support group. Don’t pick on women gamers and pretend this is somehow your right because you’re oppressed as a socially awkward guy.
Anyway, here are some other dumb comments from the Reddit thread. YetAnotherCommenter warns feminists that they may lose some powerful allies if they continue acting so feministy.
Speaking of nerds who can’t get laid — which we weren’t but which these guys keep bringing up (and identifying themselves as) again and again — guia7ri seems to harbor some lingering resentments from high school, and who better to take that out on than attractive geeky women?
Hey MRAs, if you wonder why feminists sometimes describe MRAs as bitter men who hate women because they can’t get laid, it’s because MRAs like gui7ri so often EXPLICITLY DECLARE THEMSELVES BITTER MEN WHO HATE WOMEN BECAUSE THEY CAN’T GET LAID.
Meanwhile Byuku blames it all on evil feminists pretending to be geeks in order to make trouble. Because that’s what feminists do.
That’s how they get you!
EDIT: Added a sentence to temper and clarify my assertion that men “dominate” gaming.
No, there’s no implication because David explicitly specified the behaviors that were analogous.
Yeah, except that you don’t specify why, you typically use “intellectual dishonesty” as a cudgel and then move on without addressing the alleged dishonesty.
From what I’ve noticed I am the only one who has consistently stuck to addressing the specific claims and arguments of others. Everyone else has engaged in various speculations about myself or argument by insinuation. I am the *only* one in this conversation who has been consistently intellectually honest.
Bwa-HAHAHAHAHAH!
Because your red herring appeals to nature/tradition are not intellectually honest, and you therefore hold a double standard for intellectual honesty.
Can someone really lack this much self awareness?
Sorry, the AI isn’t due to hit the self-awareness stage for quite some time.
I openly call myself a “reactionary”. It’s just a label and the particular application of a sequence of letters doesn’t establish the function of a thing.
Cool! I didn’t realise you could just call yourself anything because words have no meaning. What shall I call myself? An anarcho-jazz dancer? Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof? A ham sandwich? The 3.10 to Welwyn Garden City? Wheeee! It’s all the same!
@Argenti Aertheri
then way down for me, cuz I already have headache 😛
You, when you said that societies which fail to recognise an inherent difference between men and women are doomed to fail.
The fall of rome wasn’t the end of civilization but it was clearly a traumatic event for many people. The American Empire is an ad hoc hodge-podge of many different peoples, each with little notion of common morals and norms – that is what an empire is. Such empires are inherently unstable and require a separate ruling class that rules over it; that ruling class eventually develops its own separate culture, as we have now.
because if there can be many, new ones can be created from the rubble of those which have collapsed
Which is what will happen, although that event is likely to be pretty traumatic for lots of people.
I call myself a sugar-glider, because why not?
Setting aside that nobody has brought up peer review except you, it’s actually not. “If something isn’t definitively established in a peer reviewed journal then it isn’t worth considering” is a premise, not a conclusion, so while it might be false, it can’t be logically fallacious.
The applied logic would be:
Premise 1: Anything that isn’t in a peer reviewed journal is worthless.
Premise 2: Your statement isn’t in a peer reviewed journal.
Conclusion: Your statement is worthless.
Which is perfectly valid (if perhaps unsound) logic.
Damn this dude sure likes talking about how special and different he is.
*Slaps Asher with a rolled up newspaper*
No! Bad! Stop equating hypotheses and conjectures. Stop.
Which, ironically, is what makes him so much like every other troll that people assume he must be a sock.
Can you imagine having to grade dozens of essays that read like that? I
As an undergrad, in at least four of my classes I actually had the professor ask me if he could copy a paper I’d written and pass it around to the other students as a model of what a parsimonious and concisely argued undergrad paper should look like. I’m not interested in the spotlight so I made sure they didn’t have my name on the paper and I told no one else in the class.
People tend to resort to intellectual dishonesty when they can’t produce rigorous arguments for their positions; btw, I see this frequently in people with whose conclusions I, generally, agree.
Asher, nobody here buys the idea that women are the gatekeepers of sex,
Then they’re oblivious fools. Several years ago a pic prominently made the rounds of the internet with a woman wearing a tee shirt stating “I have the pussy so I make the rules”. The is a concept that even the intellectually mediocre understand and it take a special type of “genius” to attempt to argue otherwise.
Some ideas are so stupid that only an intellectual could hold them – Orwell (or something close to that as I’m typing it from memory.
So if lesbians have no sex, do gay man have all the sex since they have so much testosterone?
Gay male couples have more sex than straight couples who have more sex than lesbian couples. You ever hear of the lesbian version of the glory hole?
Asher: (If I want the thing, I can’t get it unless the other person agrees too)
Agreed. So, what is it of which men are gatekeepers that women aren’t (in the long run, of course).
We told you, Sex; with them. In the long-run, the short-run, the dog run.
Empathy is the product of morality and not its cause.
What?
But I’ll play, What the basis of morality then?
But you have to take it all the way to the root cause, the οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ (i.e. the unmoved mover, which puts all in motion. I’ll make it a little easier, you don’t have to go furter back than organic molecules).
I openly call myself a “reactionary”. It’s just a label and the particular application of a sequence of letters doesn’t establish the function of a thing. For example, the function of a horse isn’t determined by the fact that we label it with the letters h-o-r-s-e.
What… this from the dude who was all, Identification = exclusion. Now defining traits are unimportant? Platonic Ideals, or Pure Stupid (well, no, the two go hand in hand).
That I don’t support the Klan is merely a product of history, not of some a priori set of moral principles.
I don’t presume morality to be a priori. But you are saying that, were it say… 100 years ago, you might have supported the Klan?
What about 50 years ago?
And, if these, “moral principles” are so mutable, why are you having such a snit that we are trying to change them?
Oh, right, because what we want is for women to not be treated like shit; and you don’t care if they are.
CassandraSays, how can you find this guy boring? With nearly every comment he steps up the lack of self awareness to bold new heights.
“Then they’re oblivious fools. Several years ago a pic prominently made the rounds of the internet with a woman wearing a tee shirt stating “I have the pussy so I make the rules”. The is a concept that even the intellectually mediocre understand and it take a special type of “genius” to attempt to argue otherwise.”
How do you reconcile the above with…
“In other words, I take positions with which you disagree, therefore, I’m a “shitstain”. Nice reasoning you got there”
Wow, dude.
Asher: If no one has any rights, then there is no reason for any social contract.
This is a reversal of cause and effect.
Nope. You could try to argue that the social contract creates rights, but in that case you still have to give reason for a social contract.
Epistemically the rights are the foundation for the contract, which is created to see to it all get to enjoy those rights.
Just what those rights are is still open to some argument, because they aren’t hardwired into the psyche (so that, “freedom” hasn’t always been seen as one, but even slaves were able to kill themselves; and so gain release [there is a story told from Nat Turner’s Rebellion about this.
Certainly, I have the “right” to drive 55 on the freeway and no longer have that “right” if the speed limit gets lowered to 50. This is a rejection of notions of rights being a priori.
Flawed analogy: You don’t have the right to drive at all. If you did there would be no test to see you had skills.
. Clearly, I have a “right” to kiss my wife and I not longer have that “right” at the point she decides that she no longer desires it.
Clearly you don’t. She has the right to decide if you may kiss her, or not. That the social contract avers that intimates may make such gestures on the idea of tacit permission stems from an individual’s right to the freedom of their person.
Or were you just collecting random notions you hold and throwing them into a single post. Can you give me an example of a standard to which I hold others that I do not hold myself?
Again?*
You made a qualified analogy. You said this was fine; because you used, “if/then”. Dave made a qualified analogy (subgroup of X engages in behavior Y, which other Group Z also engages in). You said that wasn’t fair.
Why? Because Group Z is ill thought of, and you don’t think it’s fair to ALL of Group X to say that some of them do evil things (which has been supported with references).
So you think it’s OK if you do it, but not if someone else does it.
*BTW, that is what I suspect you’re referring to and I’ve already addressed it. When I say cite examples I am not restricting it to peer reviewed journals.
Which is why I quote you, liberally (well, also to keep you from pretending I am responding to something other than what I am. Lets just say you’ve not persuaded me of your probity).
Asher: Objection: asked and answered.
Except the answer was just a rehash of the initial analogy and didn’t bother to address my objections
Nopetupus. The answers have been detailed as to why your complaint is structurally invalid. You are ceasing to argue (insomuch as you ever started) and are resorting to mere contradiction: which the record shows to be mendacious.
Men are the gatekeepers to sex with men.
If you mean male sex with other men, then, sure, but not if you mean sex between men and women.
*sigh*
Since no one has the intellectual curiosity to even try to assay a response then I will tell you the answer: investment.
In the long-run men are gatekeepers of investment.
@Asher:
Urk. Take this up with Pecunium. I tried to paraphrase to describe how you were taking a small portion of his post out of context, but then you took a small portion of my post out of context. Go back to the source.
I could do without the condescension, thank you very much (and “modern liberal” is not my name, it’s “kirbywarp”). I’m assuming you’re taking issue with your free will post appearing out of nowhere, and trying to argue that in fact it was not a random tangent. Pecunium was not trying to argue about the premise of morality, he was just describing a situation. Thus, no matter how you view free will and whether it is a good premise to have and whether you think modern thought on morality is valid, none of that is relevant.
But again, I guess I could argue free will vs. conditioning if you want…
ASHER:
Your glory hole comment was beyond stupid.
And this?
I’ll take “Shit That Never Happened” for $500, Alex.
Asher: You lying fuckmuppet
So, you are pulling shit out of your ass.†
Because me (as a “lifer) do understand all that, and am not incorrect on the facts (which you admit you don’t know)… and it’s not relevant to what you said.
You said that women who claim to be geeks aren’t likely to be “REAL geeks” unless they have sexual relations with other geeks.
Now, if you’d argued that women who date geeks become geeks, then this analogy with spouses of soldiers might have some merit.
But that’s not what you argued. Again, you are holding us to one standard (re the “aptness of analogy”, but yourself to a much more liberal one.
†Again, I still recall that in your first comment you stated you didn’t know much about geek/gamer culture, but that surely wasn’t as described. Which also calls into question your complaint about the analogy: the only way you can validate it is to know how much all subsets of the culture are.
Again, intellectual honesty seems to be antithetical to you “debate” style; despite the rhetorical tic you have of claiming to adhere to it. One might speculate that it’s a form of defensive projection.
Okay, look man, just stating something confidently doesn’t prove it. Anyone could state something confidently. Here, let me try:
It is a well-known fact that there are alligators in the New York sewers. David Attenborough went on an expedition to investigate the sewer alligators in 2006. His team estimated 200-400 individuals, mainly in the Bronx and Queens, with population dwindling to the south. They also discovered that the alligators had been able to develop high intelligence thanks to their hospitable climate and steady food supply. They showed an ability to use simple tools and seemed to have developed the rudiments of a spoken language. The magnitude of their sophistication was only realized when they set an ambush that led to the death of two cameramen and the loss of nearly all their footage. Only a few blurry sequences survived, which is why Attenborough’s planned documentary, “The Life of Alligators,” never made it to the screen.
Asher: From what I’ve noticed I am the only one who has consistently stuck to addressing the specific claims and arguments of others. Everyone else has engaged in various speculations about myself or argument by insinuation
Liar. I’ve not insinuated at all. I’ve made a couple of “conjectures” (to borrow a phrase) about your experience; based on the available evidence from your comments.
But I’ve stuck to what you’ve said. I’ve not said, for example, that “you hate humanity” (which you did, and it was speculative, unless you can show me some correspondence in which LBT said that).
I am the *only* one in this conversation who has been consistently intellectually honest.
Bullshit. You keep one standard for yourself (if/then comparisons are ok FOR YOU, but clearly limited comparisons of like behavior are off limits for us; because you get your knicker in twist that one evil group, acts like a (clearly defined as such) evil subset.
So you can’t even be honest about what you’ve done; which is evident in the written record here.
. I wasn’t attempting to draw out a logically necessary inference so the comment wasn’t frallacious.
Than what is your purpose, if it’s not to “draw out logically necessary inference”?
I confess, I did gloss (assuming a greatet intellect than appears now to have been warranted). Fallacies are only intellectually dishonest if made intentionally.
P1: The Fallacy had been previously pointed out to you.
P2: You repeated it.
C: You knowingly used a fallacy.
So, Why should we trust you about anything you’ve said?
Ok, now that that’s out of my system. In what fucking world does identifying as one thing mean all other identities for that category of thing are BAD?
How the eff did you manage to get this mess out of my original comment? I am pointing out that there’s nothing inherently bad about excluding via identify and that it’s a natural human function. BTW, I don’t regard leftism, as an identity, as inherently bad. There is no a priori standard for a “bad” identity and the “badness” of an identity is simply the product of contingent sentiment, which can change.