So Amanda Marcotte has some thoughts on Sunshine Mary’s post about feminism allegedly reducing women to nothing more than sex objects:
Why should women want the attention of men who see them as nothing more than unpaid servants and semen toilets? …
The alternative to having a hateful misogynist around who expects you to clean up after him, accept his ranting about how women are a repulsive subhuman class whose only purpose is service to men, and to masturbate him without any hope of sexual pleasure yourself is simple: Not being with such a man. As many feminists can tell you, there’s a really pleasant alternative: Men who like women and like to hang out with us and aren’t just tolerating us in exchange for sex and housework.
But what if, as manosphere men (and antifeminist women like Sunshine Mary) like to gloat, you can’t find a man?
Being alone is better than being with a man who thinks you’re part of a degraded class put here to serve him. No matter how much misogynists may rant, they can’t get around this inherent problem in their philosophy, which is that “alone” is always a superior alternative to their company.
Sunshine Mary has responded with a post that basically argues, well, but men don’t like you, you fat slutty feminists — take that!
One of the core pillars of feminism seems to be trying to control how men think about women. We want to be seen as smart, so by fiat order we’ll command men to see us as equally intelligent. We want to be seen as having the ability to be sexually promiscuous, so we’ll command men to hold a positive opinion of sluttery. We want to be seen as beautiful at 200 pounds, so we’ll command men to find us hot despite our obesity.
But it doesn’t work. Men don’t like slutty women for anything other than sex, as the last comment thread here rather conclusively proved. Men don’t find fat women attractive. Men don’t like bitchy, loud-mouthed mannish feminists. Men don’t care about women’s supposed careers. All the commands in the world will only cause men to keep their opinions quiet, but it does not change those opinions. All the attempts in the world at resocializing men to like what feminism has turned women into will always fail because it works against the natural order of things.
Now this is just nonsensical and, you know, not true for all but a backwards and rather assholish subset of men. But it’s what follows that’s really chilling — not chilling because it reflects reality, but chilling because it suggests how punitive and self-hating Sunshine Mary’s philosophy really is.
She argues that feminists find the Manosphere “scary” because manosphere misogynists won’t do what feminists want them to do.
It is scary to imagine that men will stop doing what they are told by women to do. It is scary to feminists in particular because, instead of being dependent on one man like I am, they are dependent on men as a group to fund them.
Men pay the majority of taxes in the United States. Without men’s taxes, student financial aid for Women’s Studies degrees will dry up. Without men’s taxes, baby mamas will starve. Without men financing it, women who are being placed into corporate leadership simply as a response to affirmative action and who then quit these jobs after a year to write tear-filled articles in the Atlantic about work-life balance, demanding even more subsidies from men to ensure that women never need to suffer the consequences for their stupid choices, will cease. I only have to manage my husband’s opinion of me in order to secure his provisioning; feminists have to control all men’s opinions of them in order to secure their provisioning.
Yep, that’s right. Sunshine Mary believes that women are incapable of taking care of themselves and so must depend, essentially, on appeasing men in order to survive. She thinks she’s lucky because she only has to appease one man, while women who actually, you know, earn a living have to appease all men. Because they’re not really earning a living. They’re just playing at earning a living because the men of the world are nice enough to humor them.
But don’t make the men mad, Sunshine Mary warns, because then you’re screwed!
And she seems rather pleased that she can make this threat from what she percieves as her position of relative security.
How fucked up is that?
@kittehserf
That would be the worship of the Three Goddesses, yeah? Din, Farore, and Nayru? I’m going by the emblem on the side of the pillar.
No idea, karalora, I was just looking for a cat on a pillar! 😀
@kitteh
Yes– I’ll never read anything by Kate Bolick again without thinking of it.
(sorry, Ms Bolick)
@kittehserf
Legend of Zelda reference, sorry. 😛
I like how she makes it sound like writing tear-filled stories in the Atlantic is something every single female business executive does after they quit their jobs after a year (which is also something every single one of them does). There’s a lot of sad feminist article writers in the middle of the ocean. At least they have each other for company.
One wonders why she doesn’t have an interest in “provisioning” herself, if men are so unstable.
Karalora — my thoughts exactly! (Better actually, I was failing at remembering their names)
On topic…dafuq? No, really, what is this shit? Feminists have to stop demanding men respect them
as peopledespite them being sluts, or thosesmall children of single mothersbaby mamas (and thus, one can assume, their kids) will starve? Yeah, wanted to be treated like people will totally make it the fault of female feminists when small children starve. Totally Christian that.David, you misspelt perceive.
Oh and men pay most of the taxes (in the US, of course, cuz we’re the only country)?
Can anyone say wage gap?
Those kinds of articles are coldly calculated to be linkbait, imo. The article in the NYT that came out awhile back about “The opt out generation wants back in” was like that too. Gives bored 45 year old housewives and frazzled 45 year old corporate types something reassuringly familiar to argue about on facebook, I guess. Just trot out all your old cliches about womanhood and have at it; you don’t even really have to read the damn thing if you’re not up for it.
Meantime, the story bears only the vaguest resemblance to the kinds of choices what, >85 percent of Americans face.
Oh man, my husband must secretly not love me because I’m a fat, loud-mouthed, “bitchy,” mannish feminist! … Even though he flew across the continent just to meet me, stayed with me through depressive episodes, proposed to me, married me, makes me tasty Italian foods, drove crosscountry with me, and is sponsoring me to immigrate to the country in which he lives (Canada, btw, the most hellish place on Earth for menz)… Huh. It’s almost like he actually does love me!
But nooooo, that’s impossible.
Sidenote: As a fat woman, I can assure you that fat women can be totally hot and desirable, at least based on the number of people I’ve had to turn away.
Also, her sentence structure makes me dizzy.
Paging Pierre…
dear david, frankly feminism has created more strife between the sexes than it has resolved, however, the mean-spiritedness – cat jokes and such – over at the antifeminist sites, is nauseating. worst of all, is when they, at the same time, name the Name of Christ.
Cat jokes??
I’ve never ventured to her site before. After an attempt to read a random post made blood pour from my eyes, I decided to limit my interaction to perusing the handy “complete article list by title”.
Hard to pick a favorite, but I settled on a tie between “Modern women are whore-ible: Mother’s Day edition” or “Eldersluts and Spinsters: the end result of the female fantasy of marrying “three days after turning 30″. Eldersluts? She writes for The Onion, right?
While just about everything I’ve read makes my mind reel, I more put off by her sincere use of the term “rationalization hamster” then her tendency to call most women whores. I can’t say why.
She also seems to relish any chance to read and gloat about the struggles, difficulties or suffering of any woman other than herself. Is that where sunshine comes from?
Lol, susanbotchie, the only reason there’s more strife than before is that you can’t have strife when one party is completely crushed under the other’s boot.
Mary’s posts always make me sad. Her concept of humans is so depressing. Women are worthless leeches whose only choice is which man to suck the lifeblood from, men are constantly angry animals, and every relationship is a loveless exchange of goods and services.
You try to tell her that most folks are awesome and she should probably just stop hanging around people who suck, she sticks her fingers in her ears and goes LA LA LA. I dunno. I guess she must get something out of it.
Also? The IRS data she links to reports that in 2009 men paid about $3.4 billion in taxes and women paid about $2.2 billion. So, yeah, men pay more taxes because they have more money, but to present it as men’s taxes funding ALL THE THINGS is just a wee bit disingenuous.
Sunshine Mary: Being fat and slutty and smart is bad because men won’t like you.
Marcotte & Other Feminists: Yeah well we wouldn’t want misogynist men to like us anyway. Better off alone than with that.
Sunshine Mary: Yeah but, MEN WON’T LIKE YOU!!
It really is like talking to a wall…Sunshine Mary seems absolutely incapable of wrapping her head around the idea that feminist women don’t consider the opinions of men (particularly misogynist men) top priority. And equally, she seems incapable of even conceiving of men out there who aren’t misogynist…it’s like she doesn’t believe there are men out there who genuinely like feminist women.
Makes you glad she doesn’t write about kids much, doesn’t it?
So, thanks to feminism, the difference between gap between the amount that men and women pay in taxes keeps getting narrower and narrower.
I thought feminism was all about big daddy guvmint and making men pay for everything?
More than that, she doesn’t think there are men who like women at all, just men who tolerate the existence of sufficiently meek women so they have something to fuck and don’t have to do their own laundry.
Tw: rape and DV
I’m so bummed out by all the strife that exists between men and women because of feminism. All I have to going to now is the cold, shallow scrap of comfort that is it no longer legal in Canada for my future husband (should I marry a man) to rape me. Really sucks about the strife thing though.
Um, yeah. Did susanbotchie’s comment make sense to anyone? Because reading it multiple times still left me going “buh, what?”.
No . . . cat jokes that name the name of Christ aren’t what I see as one of the big problems of the manosphere . . . but I appreciate the different perspective.
What I got was that causing strife between men and women is bad, but swearing is even worse? If that’s not it I got nothing.