In a recent post, dotty reactionary antifeminist Sunshine Mary offers her thoughts on an idea that has become something of a cliche in the Manosphere, and which she agrees with roughly one thousand percent: that “[r]egardless of what feminism may purport to be about, the result of feminism is that women have been reduced to being nothing but sex objects.”
What on earth is she talking about? She quotes one of her readers, someone called Just Saying, explaining the peculiar logic behind this assertion in a little more detail:
Feminists lost long ago. Men are in control – at least the ones that understand. We get to call the shots – now instead of being able to keep house, have children, and cook (very, very few women can cook these days) women are ONLY sex-objects. It is the only thing they have to offer to a man, that will get a man’s attention and to hold it for a while. And we don’t have to marry them to get it …
Feminism has brought about all of the things they say they hate – women today only bring sex to the equation. So I have to thank Feminism – I doubt that young women would be as skilled, or as open to oral sex, anal sex, and every other type of sex, without it. And for that, I say, “Thank you Feminism.” If there were a patriarchy, I doubt they could have ever come up with something as beneficial to men. No one would have believed women were that dumb.
The Sunshiny One uses this as a starting point for a bizarre post purporting to show that “feminism has also reduced many women to being childless careerists who must purchase other women’s reproductive capabilities.”
But let’s forget about Mary for now and take a somewhat deeper look at this whole “feminism reduces women to sex objects” argument — which only makes sense if, like Just Saying, you define the worth of women as consisting only of 1) sex and 2) “housewifely duties” like cooking, cleaning, and bearing children.
If you simply ignore all of a woman’s other abilities and accomplishments, and basically her humanity, well, I suppose you could say that the worth of a woman with no interest in cooking, cleaning, or children was “reduced” to sex.
But what a strange way to look at the world, to base your judgement of a person’s worth on a small subset of human interests and abilities and to condemn them if they aren’t enthusiastic experts in these pursuits. You might as well go around dismissing everyone who’s not a proficient accordion player.
The other strange thing about Just Saying’s argument is that it doesn’t even make sense on its own terms; it requires a willful blindness as to how the world works these days. Women make up roughly half the workforce today. Yet babies are still being born and raised. Meals are still getting cooked. Homes are still getting cleaned. It may not always be a wife in a traditional marriage doing all the cooking and cleaning and baby-raising, but couples — and single parents — are making the arrangements they need to in order to get all these things done.
So is the “feminism reduces women to nothing more than sex objects” simply an indication that certain kinds of men — and women — have a hard time recognizing women as full human beings?
Well, to some degree. But I’m pretty sure that even the most backwards thinking misogynists of the manosphere recognize that there’s more to women than cooking, cleaning, baby-making, and sex.
No, I think their attempts to reduce women to these things stem from their own defensiveness over the gains of women — and not just in the workforce, and in politics, and the wider culture.
Consider how Just Saying describes the sex-having women of today. They’re no shrinking violets. They’re not passive receptacles. They’re “skilled … open to oral sex, anal sex, and every other type of sex.”
In other words, they’re women with sexual agency. They’re women who are engaging in sex for their own pleasure, for their own reasons — not simply as a lure to capture a man to marry.
And I think this makes a lot of men deeply uneasy — especially the sorts of men who inhabit the manosphere. That’s why so many of them are so quick to shout “slut” at the very same women they’re so obsessed with pursuing.
That’s why, when they’re lucky enough to find a woman who’s enthusiastically in charge of her own sexuality, they have to pretend to themselves that sex is all she has.
I’m going to be giggling at that all day. 😀
Everything else aside, would “unmarried women” include women who’re engaged? Cuz this seems like a dual punishment of single mothers (welfare queens) and premarital sex.
She may want to review Solomon if she thinks “take the baby away no matter what” is all that Christian.
Of course, that just makes it a win-win as far as she’s concerned…
Speaking of sex! I have at least one cory fry!! They’re under a cm, and I only spotted the one cuz itty bitty fishie right against the “glass” (plastic) but yep, hatching occurred!!
As far as I can tell, this hasn’t really been addressed yet, so I’mma just get all up in here and say that this isn’t fucking true. At all.
The majority of research on the effects of divorce/single parenting on children is actually really flawed, both because it doesn’t take into account the fact that children with parents in an acrimonious marriage actually have poorer outcomes than children whose parents were in an acrimonious marriage but divorced, and because it fails to take into account the increased workload and decreased financial/time resources of a single parent household — the problem there isn’t the divorce/single parenting per se, but rather that our society functions in such a way as to actively punish single parenting, especially single mothering.
AFAIK, there is absolutely no research that indelibly proves that divorce or single parenting is always a bad thing, a lot of research that suggests that a lot of the problems associated with single parenting are societal-level issues rather than personal failings of single parents or whatever, and a good bit of research that shows that children benefit greatly from divorce when the pre-divorce situation was unstable, abusive, or just really loud and angry.
Just wanted to get that out there.
The question wasn’t who could do the role, it was who deserved the role.
I just wanted to leave a comment about the whole “Are Hispanics white?” thing. The answer is some are, some aren’t. Think of Cameron Diaz as a famous person of Hispanic descent who is also white (or at least appears that way). There are also Hispanics of indigenous, black and European descent (some of whom consider themselves white, some who don’t). Hispanic is an ethnic designation that just means that the person’s family or country of origin has connections (especially linguistic ones) with Spain or Portugal; that’s pretty much all of Central and South America, some parts of Africa, families in the US, etc.
Even white supremacists can’t really agree. I’ve known some who consider Spanish people white, and some who consider them non-white. I’ve even known a Hispanic white supremacist, for that matter.
Also, keep in mind that not all racists are white supremacists (although all white supremacists are obviously racists). Racism can also manifest as well-meaning ignorance and stereotyping. SSM’s “Hispanics are white, aren’t they?” is rather telling, IMO, especially because anyone with an ounce of awareness would realize that many Hispanics actually usually *aren’t* considered white in the US.
Also, disclaimer: this is all US-centric, since I understand that’s where SSM is from as well. “Hispanic” as an ethnic category is I think pretty US-specific, and it isn’t widely used and/or has different meanings elsewhere.
And whether they’re white or not is really water under the bridge because if Sunshine Mary really didn’t care about their ethnicity, she wouldn’t have mentioned it.
@katz, for sure. I mostly posted that because it’s something I have to explain kind of often so I can do it quite easily, and there seemed to be some confusion in the comments here as well. 🙂
@augg, you’re a lot more willing to give her the benefit of the doubt than I am. Her first comment on the subject sounded pretty racist to me, and then the backpedaling just confirmed it. I don’t think she’s a white supremacist, but there definitely seemed to be some racist thinking there.
Because rasists move their goalposts all the time. They need people to hate on. If there are people with, say, black hair and dark-brown skin around, the racists are happy to hate on them. But if everyone has pretty fair skin, the rasists will find some other ground for hate – suddenly having black hair is enough. That’s pretty much how it works.
I have a a colleague who’s mum is Swedish and father Greek. He has naturally black hair inherited from his father. He also grew up in a place where literally everyone was white by most racists’ standards, but he was picked on for being not-properly-white because of his black hair.
Sorry, whose. I keep mixing up who’s and whose, and you’re and your… embarrassing…
Oh for fuck’s sake. ONE STORY in the Atlantic about a woman pontificating that she’s not really sure she ever quite figured out what she was looking for (and that she was largely willing to accept that that likely meant she was never going to find it) does not a slew of sad STORIES make. Either learn to plural or start citing other similar articles. More articles in the Atlantic don’t just magically appear every time you use the plural in reference to ONE article in an attempt to try to make your point sound more legit. And ONE story written by ONE woman does not speak for all of U.S. womankind.
Aside from that, I am sick to the teeth of that article being used as “proof” of supposed universal feminist unhappiness. It’s been a while since I’ve read it (unlike Mary, I’m sure, who likely reads it every day with her morning coffee in order to feel better because at least someone out there is presumably more miserable than she is) but I didn’t even take it as all that SAD necessarily per se and more just the author’s own observations and examinations of life. It’s only Saddest Article in all of Saddington if you view marriage (and only the hetero, cis kind) as most importantist thing ever for EVERYONE and singleness as some kind of moral failing.
Obviously it’s Saddest Article in all of Saddington for Mary because somehow people not choosing to the same things with their life that she has chosen to do with hers, creates in her a deep insecurity. But to me, Mary’s constant search for validation and need to decry everyone else as miserable in an attempt to distract her from her own misery is the really sad story.
My first reaction to “sad stories in the Atlantic” was “well, obviously it’s hard to find a husband in the middle of an ocean.”
/contributingnothing
My first reaction to hearing about that story was “one person couldn’t find an appropriate husband – so?”. Maybe this is a sign that feminism has turned me into a cold-hearted manifestation of pure evil, or maybe that one person’s lack of a partner just isn’t all that important.
Sunshine Mary sounds remarkably like the anti-feminists of 30-40 years ago, particularly working class women for whom a life of keeping house & raising children was a welcome escape from low-paid, low-status, sometimes unhealthy or dangerous drudgery. I suppose I ought to be more sympathetic, but after enduring (& still enduring) the well-intentioned ignorance, lack of imagination, insensitivity, envy, resentment, etc. from such women in my own family–it’s a real temptation not to hit ’em in the face with a cream pie.
auggz –
Except she’s one of those fuckwits who think “the world” is bounded by two mythological countries: Canada to the north and Mexico to the south, and two endless oceans, the Atlantic and Pacific (broadly speaking). The world, where everyone speaks Amurrican, or should.
ostara –
For “everyone” read “every woman”. It’s never quite the same imperative for dudes to marry. They’re not throwing away their lives or being immoral or having the insolence to do other stuff if they don’t. If anything, they’re being let down by those evil feminist
penguinewhores.Sad stories in the Atlantic:
Tragic bluefin tells: “I dated a whole school of salmon but none of them wanted to marry me!”
What a nasty, cynical way of framing adoption, surrogacy, and egg donation. But then again, she seems to reduce all human relationships to simplistic transactions. In her world, aren’t all reproductive capabilities purchased?
Aparently it hasn’t occurred to her that besides sex and casseroles, women might have other assets like love, kindness, wisdom, empathy, emotional intimacy, and support to offer a partner. And vice versa. That, not sandwich-making abilities, is what gets the two of you through the hard times. The fact that some women are having a hard time finding these qualities in a partner is not a failing of feminism.
She seems like one of those fake self-appointed Christians who use Jesus as a cudgel to beat other people with so she can feel superior. She’s exactly who Jesus was talking about in the gospel of Matthew: many people who go around saying “Lord, Lord” will be mighty surprised come Judgment Day, when Jesus tells them “Depart from me, I never knew you”.
You too?!? I figured it was just me and my thing for fishies (I have at least one cory fry btw!)
Now that I think about it, being married to an MRA would be kind of like living with a great white shark. It may be just swimming around harmlessly now, but you’re never going to be able to figure out when it might decide that you’d make a tasty snack.
I’d take a great white over an MRA any day.
Funnily you should say that – I just saw a video on weather.com about the big one they just caught and tagged off the coast of Aussieland. I would make a joke about never wanting to live there, but since I live in one of the other two hotspots (seriously, you can see the Farralon Islands from Ocean Beach in San Francisco on a clear day), that would be a little silly.
PS Argenti congrats on the new fishy babies.
I drew a sad story in the Atlantic.
Awww poor fishie!
Congratulations on your cory baby, Argenti!