Our dear friend W.F. Price of The Spearhead celebrated Columbus Day yesterday with a post suggesting that “American girls” are too weak-minded to deserve college educations.
Price’s misogyny is nothing new, but what, you may wonder, is the connection to Columbus Day? Well, you see, Price ran across a column in the Daily Nebraskan by a female student named Shelby Fleig that was, well, rather critical of Mr. Columbus, pointing out, among other things, that he kidnapped and enslaved many of those he encountered in the Americas.
Fleig’s piece is a tad simplistic at times — at one point it says that when Columbus arrived in the Americas he encountered a “civilization close to 14,000 years old,” which is just plain wrong; there were people in the Americas around 14,000 years ago, but there were no civilizations anywhere on earth that far back. Still, the piece certainly reflects reality far more closely than anything you’ll find on The Spearhead on any given day.
To Price, though, the column is such an unpatriotic abomination that he considers it evidence that education is wasted on women. No, really.
Little Ms. Fleig certainly has it in for her forefathers, but is it really her fault? Probably not. She, like most other college girls, is simply parroting what’s been fed to her by her profs. Girls are good at that, which is why teachers like them so much — they’re easy.
If you’re the father of an American girl, is this really what you want your daughter to absorb over the course of four years? Does it add any value whatsoever to the family or to the nation?
I’m not sure what specifically Price is objecting to about Fleig’s account — aside from its mild profanity (the word “bullshit”) and its less-than-reverential tone towards an icon of American history. But he offers no rebuttal, perhaps because he really can’t. While Fleig may be a bit ahistorical in her judgment of Columbus, it’s a fact that he kidnapped and enslaved hundreds of natives and committed other atrocities. It’s a fact that he paved the way for conquest and genocide. History isn’t pretty.
But Price is only getting started, telling fathers of “American girls” that
Your money would be much better spent sending her to sewing or baking school. Let’s face it: Ms. Fleig isn’t going to discover the cure for cancer. Despite being an attractive young woman, she isn’t going to colonize Mars, either (at her size, she’d be too expensive to launch out of the Earth’s atmosphere).
Yep, he goes there. No manosphere screed is complete without a bit of gratuitous fat-shaming.
In all likelihood, the best she could hope for is a nonprofit or government job fully funded by her father’s and brother’s tax bills.
Because girls can’t handle real jobs. Because jobs at nonprofits or with the government aren’t real jobs. Because nonprofits are funded entirely by the government. And because only men pay taxes.
And yet she represents 60% of college students. What an enormous, unsustainable waste. It’s impolitic to point it out, but from a cost-benefit point of view, in most cases higher education is entirely wasted on women, and as in Ms. Fleig’s case is often counterproductive.
So that’s Price’s thoughtful and logical rebuttal to Fleig’s article: a post that addresses none of her arguments, posits the natural inferiority of women, and attacks her for her apparent weight.
Let’s see what the highly erudite Spearhead readers have to say about it in the comments.
Gender Foreigner suggests that women, born to obey, are simply obeying the wrong people:
Women don’t know how to think: they know how to obey. So, let’s tell them what to do. What they lack is MEN to obey instead of girls to obey. Barefoot, pregnant in the kitchen, obeying masculine will. As long as they do that they will feign civility.
Dire Badger, for his part, acknowledges that Columbus did a lot of terrible things, but argues that this doesn’t matter because reasons. He also uses profanity, though Price doesn’t step in to rebuke him for that.
[I]n the end, individual racial and cultural atrocities mean NOTHING the moment the last person that witnessed them dies…. but things like achievements in literature, art, science… the true immortality that keeps building as part of a cultural intellectual inheritance. The only meaning that such atrocities have is to teach us NOT TO DO THEM AGAIN. Anything else is beating the dead victim horse for no benefit whatsoever, and merely punishes the people that had NOTHING to do with the original atrocity.
In short, columbus opened up america for expansion. He sailed the ocean blue in a way that hadn’t been achieved for nearly 400 years since the vikings.
As for the rest? FUCK YOU. Get over it already, you pussy.
In a followup comment, he adds:
Columbus rediscovered America by a monumental navigational goofup… funny story… What he did afterwards doesn’t concern me except as an object lesson. I honor the accomplishment but have no reason to diminish it by sorrow over a bunch of people who would still be more than 400 years dead if Columbus had never existed.
Schlomo, meanwhile, is mad at Fleig for not blaming Columbus’ mom for the whole thing:
What irks me is that feminists constantly blame only men– and then mostly white men– for all evil in the world. They don’t look at women’s roles in raising boys to be exploiters; or in bedding “bad boys” (thus rewarding their brutality); or in serving as Nazi prison guards, etc.
White females helped run plantations in the Old South and ran them alone during the Civil War. Ergo, it’s a lie that gals are innately “better” than guys. After all, they became queens of men feminists now demonize… and sometimes were the evil-incarnate leaders of countries themselves.
Nowhere, of course, do feminists praise men for the creating the Magna Carta or washing machines or hi-fi systems. No kudos, either, for males who wiped out polio and provided potable water. Also, no credit for inventing penicillin or making cars safer. Always and everywhere feminists blame-blame-blame. You never hear them collectively apologize for THEIR shite, like their hysterical historical foresisters’ White Feather campaigns… or sleeping with the enemy.
Where is the condemnation of Sacagawea for helping Whitey conquer her “people”?
It’s like domestic violence: fembots never talk about the equal evil women do.
Wilson, meanwhile, decides that Fleig is the truly evil one, not Columbus, based on a bunch of TRUE FACTS about her he’s pulled from his own posterior:
Conquest through genocide is not actually immoral, since there is no “social contract” being violated, though the greed of it may be questionable. Fleig would support a genocide against whites, so she is in no position to judge anyway, and her motivations–spite, malice, nihilism, betrayal–are much more evil than Columbus’s straightforward and productive ambition
But Fleig does have one defender amongst the Spearhead regulars, a fella named Dragnet, who happily declares that “corn-fed” gals like her please his penis. No, really, that’s his argument.
Being from the Midwest myself, I find her buxom, corn-fed heft absolutely delightful. I have had more than a few liaisons with her similarly endowed Midwestern sisters–to this day my manhood rises in salute.
What I wouldn’t give for more women on the east coast to be built like Miss Fleig. There’s a well-built, fulsome hardiness to the women of the Midwest that you really don’t find out East. God bless them all.
Well, I’m glad these superior-brained, independent-minded men have put us all straight on these important historical issues.
Hey now, you can’t go around challenging the dominant narratives just because they don’t stand up to scrutiny! That’s activism!
But seriously, Yoyo, do you have a similar level of concern for the “traditional” disciplines like history and anthro that aren’t teaching women’s/LGBT/PoC perspectives? Or is it only the “identity” disciplines that need to ~teach the controversy~?
My biology and astronomy classes professors were obviously ~activists~ for not teaching creation “theory”.
I can see it being relevant in a historical sense, like how US history teachers will cover the various dehumanizing views on Native Americans and Africans in order to explain how the conquest, genocide, and slavery were justified. The history of anti-woman views and the later backlash against feminism are worth learning about – but NOT in a way that implies that they have equal merit, of course.
You’re the one who brought it up. Twice. And when someone takes a second to explain the details to someone else, it’s “off topic”. Even though, as you yourself noted earlier in this thread, off-topic is pretty much the topic on this blog.
No, not at all. They are valid perspectives. I just find it a bit weird to have entire departments dedicated to it. It’s a stupid opinion subject to change.
Creationism isn’t scientific. It could be talked about but dosent have the same merits.
I mean my opinion btw
Sorry I read that wrong, I think they should teach the narratives. In my experience at least they do.
Wah, someone mocked me on a blog specifically designed for mocking and snarking at misogyny (which “women’s studies lol, what a waste of time” is) so maybe I should just be anti-feminist?
This is why people mock you. And if you act like that they’re going to keep doing it, and not just here.
I wasn’t going to post anything else in this thread because I didn’t really want to fuel your last-word-itus, You, but here you are still going, so I suppose it won’t make a difference.
You’ve made it quite clear that this site is not for you. You don’t like the tone of the place and you don’t approve of what we do for fun and support. I think the site you are looking for is http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com. Please go there. The whole community here isn’t going to change in order to please you.
So much for that “read more, type less” advice.
You=Yoyo. Weird choice, autocorrect.
YOYO:
Look, I get it, you’re young. You see the snarking between feminists and MRAs and think:
“This isn’t helping! We need to fix these poor broken MRAs, then they might stop hating feminists, mocking them doesn’t help!”
The thing is:
People here have thought – Why do these guys turn out this way?
People here have thought – Is there anything we can do to change this?
But after a while you see that by and large these are not people who have had terrible life experiences, in fact the opposite is true.
The reason these people are so awful is because they HAVEN’T had terrible life experiences.
They’ve had a bit of a shitter of a relationship, often because they are narcissistic arseholes. That’s it!
Often it’s the very fact that they haven’t suffered that Is the problem. They are so brimmed full of privilege they actually think a messy divorce is a reason to hate all women
Fuck, wouldn’t it be lovely to have had so few problems that I can’t even recognise that I haven’t suffered!
Many people have had terrible problems, they do not necessarily become hateful fuckers on the internet. MRAs are hateful fuckers because that is what they are.
When we are young and naive probably the stupidest thing we do is assume that our thoughts have never been thought before. No other person has ever had the profound thought we have just had. Trust me, if you are young and just thought a thought, any thought, many, many people before you have thought it too!
This IS the Dunning-Kruger effect. Trust that perhaps people here are out of patience because they have already been through the thought processes you are just beginning.
People use humour here to make themselves feel better, cat videos help, in between all that people share links that educate.
Sometimes something is so depressing humour is the only way to deal. Also, it diffuses the anger a bit, people here are trying NOT to be angry, we might not always succeed, but in human growth terms humour and mocking is kinder and healthier for everybody, including the ‘poor’ MRAs.
Another problem when we are young is assuming that we understand why people do what they do.
I use humour to help me process, wallowing does not help us confront these idiots. And they DO need confronting, feminists tried to ignore this excrement for years but MRAS continued spouting their shit.
If there is nobody responding it gives the impression that what they are saying is maybe not so ridiculous.
Some young people think they are unique thinkers, so profound in their natural ability to understand the situation at a deeper level that any person who has come before must be told.
Some young people believe that if they can just get their point across it will change a persons stand forever, this is not true.
You are one of the ‘some’.
Also: listen to Hellkell!
After reading that back, nobody can accuse me of not putting enough ‘thought’ into that last comment! 🙂
We have multiple people here who have psychology degrees, and at least one practicing therapist that I’m aware of. Why oh why did none of those people consider the “hugs, not mockery” approach to MRAs?
Maybe they should go back to college and sit in on some 101 courses. Then they’d see the wisdom of Yoyo’s approach.
Also opheliamonarch is awesome and actually deserves a hug next time zie happens to want one.
Gender Studies programs cover many different topics because it is a program with many different types of classes involved. Gender Studies are not a single ideology as much as it is a way of analyzing the world. It’s more like here’s what some feminist believe, here’s what other feminist believe and here is the non feminist view point. Feminism is not one single theory but many different theories about many different topics. I would not be surprised if there was one or more classes about how gender affects the way people think about biology.
Also, don’t ALL majors have to take general requirements? So a Gender Studies major may in fact take a human biology course in order to graduate? (I know I did.)
My favorite part of that particular piece of babble was the implied assumption that human biology courses are going to contain “non and antifeminist views”.
Also human biology classes are apparently “repulsive”. Who knew? I guess maybe if you’re super squeamish…
Right. Cause ‘women are not biologically human’ is a valid scientific viewpoint that needs to be addressed in every biology course.
http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/4f/d1/23/4fd12379bb47d9acd05cd275250a2a39.jpg
Wait, are dog photos a sign that the commentariat here is unserious and not sympathetic enough to misogynists, or are they OK because at least they’re not cat photos?
*blushes, shuffles feet*
Aw-shucks CassandraSays, hugs are always welcome 🙂
Also, sorry Ally, meant to say hi earlier, got distracted by Yoyo 🙂
The armpit hair song, also awesome. I probably shouldn’t mention that I shave my pits though, in case the shock causes poor Yoyo’s head to explode.
(Not that I care, I just don’t want David to have to clean up the mess. Evil mean person who puts wannabe allies off feminism forever, remember?)
I do that AND wear makeup. Bad, bad feminist.
Clean up in aisle three! Wet clean up in aisle three!
For extra head-exploding lulz, what about if I mention that I’ve dated a couple of guys who shaved their pits in the summer, and rather liked it?
Wait, I got more brain-busting…
I don’t shave my pits but I do wear make up.
*Twilight Zone theme*
Personally I think everybody should shave their pits. It really doesn’t make sense for us to spend all that money on deodorants and ant-perspirants if we’re just going to have patches of bacteria-trapping hair there.
Last summer I was sitting in a cafe and I saw a really conventionally pretty young woman in a short, tight dress…with leg hair, and a big tattoo on one calf. And sparkly eyeshadow.
(Sorry, David. I am happy to provide a free mop if necessary.)
My husband shaves his pits pretty regularly, especially when it’s hot out. He says it makes him feel less sweaty and smelly. I certainly don’t mind his manscaping ways, though I’m pretty lax about hair removal myself, especially in the winter.
I actually consider Mr C’s manscaping ways a huge plus. My dislike of body hair is entirely gender-neutral.
(And is completely irrelevant to anyone who’s not having sex with me. See how easy that is to do, guys who complain endlessly about some women not shaving their pits/legs?)