Sometimes posts by Men’s Rights Activists seem like transmissions from some alternate universe, a Bizarro world that bears a superficial resemblance to our own but where everything is backwards and upside down.
Take a recent post on A Voice for Men by FeMRA Diana Davison with the seemingly innocuous title “Women don’t own sex.” Ostensibly a response to a piece about rape in the Irish Times, the piece contains a series of bizarre assertions about relations between men and women that Davison apparently thinks she can use as proof that, despite all evidence to the contrary, it’s really women, not men, who run the world. And that men only commit crimes in order to make women happy.
Let’s go through her, um, argument:
Though men appear to rule the world, that is because women treat them like gophers: Go get me stuff.
Really? Perhaps on Real Housewives, but I’m pretty sure most women in the world don’t actually live like the Real Housewives do. Nor do they particularly want to.
A man’s worth in our world is not assessed on how much wealth he possesses, it is based on the level of happiness of his woman.
Really? Here’s Forbes’ list of the 71 most powerful people in the world — most of them, of course, men. You will notice that “the level of happiness of his woman” is not one of the criteria used to determine who gets on the list or not. Barack Obama is the top name on the list; his “woman” outearned him for years until his books took off. The Pope is #5. He doesn’t have a woman, at least as far as I know. Going down the list you will see powerful man after powerful man, none of whom are judged at all by how much stuff they buy their “women.”
But no: in MRA-world men are helpless creatures who exist only to give stuff to women– and who are sometimes even forced into a life of crime to fulfill the feminine need for more and more stuff!
Why do men commit crimes? I’ll posit this: because they need more stuff to make a woman happy or because they have been rejected by a woman shaming them for not being good enough and feel they have nothing left to lose. Committing a crime has a penalty. They need a reason to risk that penalty. It’s going to be primal. Think… think… are you with me?
Uh, no?
MRAs complain endlessly about how women need to “take responsibility” for this and that — which mainly seems to mean that they should sit still while men call them sluts for having sex like men do — but in MRA world men are never, ever, ever responsible for anything they do. There’s always a woman to blame.
Hell, even if a dude rapes a woman who’s sleeping in a bed beside him, he’s not to blame, because in Diana Davison’s bizarro universe lying in a man’s bed automatically overrides the necessity for him to obtain consent before having sex with you.
Men have every right to believe that a woman sleeping in the bed next to them is going to be happily awoken [by sex]. If you don’t want sex, don’t sleep in their fucking bed.
So if you’re a married woman, or you live with a guy, and you share the same bed, apparently he has the right to have sex with you any time you’re asleep in that bed. No matter what. In Diana Davison’s world, no means no, but sleeping in bed means yes. And if you don’t like it, ladies — that’s your own damn fault! Go sleep on the couch. (Or does that make you fair game too?)
Davison then turns to the power of metaphor to clinch her case that women are to blame for everything:
The man is the head of the house but the woman is the neck and she can turn the head any way she wants.
This may be the strangest metaphor I’ve run across in weeks, and as a regular reader of manosphere blogs I’m used to some pretty strange metaphors.
Speaking of which:
Feminists claim that men objectify women but it’s women who think that men are just walking, magical penises and that the penis has the mystical quality of getting them stuff.
I don’t really have anything to say to this stupidity, but I would like to share with you some of what I found when I searched YouTube for the phrase “walking penis.” As you might imagine, a lot of what follows is probably sort of NSFW, unless you work in a sex-toy recycling facility, so view with appropriate care.
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Hm… There are a lot of people who do have a reaction to cilantro, but it’s usually pretty consistent. What’s in the soba salad?
I think the cilantro thing is actually a genetic difference. IIRC, some people have a similar thing with asparagus.
Chicken, shredded carrots, chilli* garlic sauce, white rice vinegar, soy sauce, peanut or sesame oil, black peppercorns* (for cooking the chicken). Sometimes I make it with basil instead but he seems to like bother versions about equally.
* For the sake of kittehs I suggest an alternate label of “evil bringers of extreme pain” for these ingredients.
Oh, also green and red onions, and chopped peanuts, though I leave those out for parties where I’m not sure if someone might be allergic.
Oh, bother. XD
That sounds good. Now I’m hungry.
I have a cat asleep and drooling on my thigh. I can’t go to sleep.
She’s so cute.
Take this basic recipe, adapt it to the tastes of whoever is present. It’s super easy! I use 2-3 times as much dressing as they recommend because I think soba tastes better if it’s more coated.
http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/peanut-chicken-soba-salad-10000000630100/
Tigger always falls adorably asleep on me when it is time to make lunch.
I NEED TO GO TO SLEEP, EARLY MEETING TOMORROW, AND I HAVE 2 CATS ASLEEP ON ME. Hazel on the left of me, Buster to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with you.
I can tell you about my own weird “feminists are mean to me when I open doors for them” moment.
“I still use the word sometimes to mean basically “snarky with extra bite”,”
There’s a line in Bloodlines that’s basically Damsel, I still think you’re a bitch, but in a good way. Because yeah, do not fucking cross her (FTR, I like her, and Nines’s line about being “stuck between a rock and a son of a bitch”) It’s really too bad they both have the connotation (and the son of a bitch in question is Prince Pain in the Ass, so yeah)
And now I really am going to bed, I swear!
LBT, I’ll be up around ten, I’m setting myself an alarm. Though this is assuming that I don’t get woken up sooner as a side effect of being on the couch!
I’d you move the cats, they will probably grouch for a minute but then they will fall asleep again. Cats are very good at falling asleep.
I got on a very full bus; at each stop, the driver had to remind people to move to the back to let more people on. I was near the front. At my stop, a few people got off; one of whom was a woman, I’m guessing in her 50s, with a rolling suitcase. A young man asked if she needed help — it was crowded, and the suitcase, while on wheels, looked heavy. She said very abruptly, “No, I don’t need your help.” Then got off on her own, and barely made her connecting bus.
I suspect she didn’t want help because she (a) didn’t need help, and (b) didn’t want any delays.
I also suspect the young man who offered to help might post to r/mr about the angry feminist who spit on him when he held a door open for her.
Obviously you know your cats better than me >.> but that’s what mine would do.
One of the cats has moved herself, and now I am going to move the other and say good night.
They’re getting along again now, but not sleeping all embracing. I hope they get back to embracing, but I’ll take getting along!
Profession – cat
Skills – being cute, chasing moving objects, sleeping a lot
Oh man, soba. That’s one of those foods that I invariably find myself pounding like it’s the last food on earth.
Have you had the kind where it’s served cold and you dip it in a hot broth? Awesome.
I’m one of very few people I’ve encountered, offline or online, who dislikes mint. I can handle it in toothpaste, but that’s pretty much it. It is an abomination.
I’m pretty much obsessed with all things minty.
Don’t worry, this is the last comment I’m making.
I know who I am, & I’m not an internally misogynistic person. I’m also not ableist in the least. I am actually very careful with my words, & only call people things if they truly deserve to be called those words. & I never never, never call anyone anything insulting just because of who they are as a person – their race, nationality, gender, sex, disability, sexual orientation etc. etc. etc. & I never use epithets – real epithets. I only comment on behavior & opinions.
But I said something the was disagreeable to this community, something that I don’t think was wrong. That woman deserved to be called those things because of her behavior & opinions. Just as much as any man would deserve to be called the same things for stating the same views as she did. But my own opinions are offensive to you all, so I won’t be bothering any of you here anymore.
“But this particular person really deserves gendered insults!” is not a very good response to “that is a gendered insult”.
Tristan, Kitteh didn’t even call you ableist – she just said that ableist terms are problematic as well. Nor was there any accusation of you being a misogynist. We merely said that the word “bitch” is misogynistic and can’t be used in a way that isn’t. And that’s because the meaning of the word is inherently sexist.
Just because you don’t intend to demean women when you use that word doesn’t mean that the word somehow loses its own misogynistic connotations. Intent doesn’t determine the meanings that words convey. I personally believe you when you say that you don’t intend to be sexist, racist, ableist, etc. – really, I’m personally giving you the benefit of doubt – but I still think your word choice was problematic. And given the prevalence of misogynists who use those words themselves, it’s quite fair for other folks to call you misogynistic for that word usage since your attempt to use the word “bitch” in a gender-neutral way is an exception rather than the norm.
If you’re going to leave, fine. But I hope that you sincerely re-examine your language choices and see how, even when you don’t intend to be a bigot, you can still perpetuate bigotry through language. You might find this link insightful: http://www.shakesville.com/2007/11/on-bitch-and-other-misogynist-language.html
Gods above and below save me from, “I’m not prejudiced, and I’m smart, so everything I say SHOULD be above reproach.”
Ignoring the flounce for a moment, it’s really not at all unusual for people to use words that have unfortunate connotations and not really think about it, just because almost everyone uses those words and most people haven’t really thought about it much. Another gendered term that I used to use a lot and use much less since the implications were pointed out to me is “drama queen”. I still use that term sometimes, mostly because I’m not thinking, but I’m aware that there are issues with it, and I’m not going to get all spiky and defensive if someone calls me on it. There’s a lot of middle ground between “uses terms, doesn’t care if they have problems or not” and “never uses terms, paragon of ideological purity”. But “yeah well some people deserve those words” is really never a good or thoughtful response.
Win! 😀
When I read “soba salad” it translated for a moment as sober salad and I wondered what a drunk salad might be.
Then again, I’m not sure I’d want to know.
cloudiah, I know you’ve gone to bed, just want to say I’m glad Hazel and Buster are getting along again. Maybe they realised it’s more important to join forces to Inconvenience the Human than to squabble.
Ally – well said, seconding all of it.