So I’ve been skimming through the mass of comments that the Daily Beast piece on the Men’s Rightsers now has trailing in its wake. So far I think this is my favorite exchange.
Yep, that’s DriverSuz — aka Suzanne McCarley, “Senior Editor” of A Voice for Men.
And yep, that’s Angry Harry, the fellow that many MRAs call “the father of the men’s rights movement.”
Some critics of this blog complain whenever I quote some crackpot commenter rather than one of the “big names” in the Men’s Rights movement. Sometimes, it turns out, the crackpot commenters ARE the “big names” in the Men’s Rights movement.
So… I should thank men for sustaining a society that left me one status above farm animals in the social hierarchy, because even though women were treated as property and not as full human beings, it’s better than nothing?
Wow. It’s like asking for a clean glass at a bar and having the bartender say, “How dare you! You’re lucky I didn’t just spill the drink on the floor for you to lap up, you ungrateful bitch.”
Actually it’s nothing like that, but you get the idea.
Oh snap! Also, this seems to ignore the integral role that women played in the development of agricu… Oops, there I go with my nuance again. Sorry.
menz, u are so kind
Digging beyond the bottom of the barrel, every day, is the MRM way!
Well, I suppose it’s a change from “We hunted the mammoth for you”.
“We didn’t put you in the battery farm…for you”
I am curious as to how AngryHarry thinks women can be bred like cattle, though. I mean, he does realise that women and men are the same speices, right?
Maybe AngryHarry has a fetish for having sex with cows and he was just replacing them with women in that scenario.
Sorry, that was too much.
Maybe he’s thinking that boys and girls could be separated at birth and raised differently (boys in houses, girls in pens). But if all the women are in pens who’s going to take care of the boys?
(Normally the answer would be “the men”, but remember that this is an MRA we’re talking about.)
That is kind of like saying though, “You’re lucky we didn’t make sex slaves out of you… oh, wait, we kind of did… and still do, or at least want to.”
“It’s not that we couldn’t have bred you in pens if we wanted to! We just decided not to. By which I mean that the farmer I floated this idea to looked at me blankly for a moment and then said ‘you don’t quite understand how this breeding thing works, do you?’.”
Forced gestation has never been a thing, apparently. Nor has it ever been widespread.
Harry sure takes his history notes well.
They make it sound as if the way women treated wasn’t patriarchal enough anyway. Why did women live in houses and not barns? To cook, clean, and raise children so the man didn’t have to. Why did she share his bed? So he could fuck her and stay warm. And so forth.
The point being that the way women were treated in such cultures and in such times were a reflection of what men wanted out of their women. It had little to do with compassion for women as a class that women were treated “better” than the chattel.
“You should just be grateful we didn’t treat you EVEN WORSE!”
Abusers’ lobby? Try actual abusers; the rhetoric is identical.
What on earth would it feel like to be a woman like Suzanne? How is a person like that happy?
Whenever someone refers to “their women” or “our women” it’s like fingernails across the blackboard of the mind for me.
Sorry Hyena, but back then they were property, so the possessive pronoun seemed appropriate. It’s good that this concept disturbs us though.
Agriculture exists because of women. If we depending on hunting as the sole source of nutrition humanity would have died out thousands of years ago.
Chew on that.
*if we depended
Maybe he’s thinking that boys and girls could be separated at birth and raised differently (boys in houses, girls in pens). But if all the women are in pens who’s going to take care of the boys?
There have been cultures which did something like that. Sparta comes to mind (at the age of eight members of the homoimoi class were taken to the barracks and separated from their families (though they did have some contact with their fathers/uncles/cousins. They also got to see their female relatives during religious/cultural festivals).
I’m pretty sure parts of Melanesia had societies for transitions, where men left family dwellings, and moved to “male houses”.
Of course the Spartans who lived in barracks (which they all had to do until they married, which wasn’t without permission, and not until they were at least 25) had to take care of themselves. They were also required, even after they were married, to spend some time in the barracks; and women weren’t permitted; so they had to do some of their own housework (though the presence of juniors,helots and members of the non-homomoimoi meant that older Spartans probably didn’t have to do all that much of their own cooking and cleaning; but they had to on the way up).
Ah, DriverSuz. The special-est snowflake in all of Special Snowflakedonia.
In her mind she’s like Tiffany Aching and one day Elam will make a billion snowflakes that all look just like her.
I did not know that when I was single in was living in a barnyard. I learned something.
Are these fucking people sniffing glue?
Hmm, I’ve got to clean my house this week.
It occurs to me that AngryHarry and driversuz may well be more misogynist than the average man throughout history. I can easily picture generations of men unto the founding of the World reading (or hearing) this and saying “What in the name of the Gods is wrong with you?” Just because the laws about what a man could get away with doing to his wife seem to have always been written by the hardest-hearted patriarchs with the greatest investment in making sure no one interfered with anyone else’s power, the concept of spousal abuse wasn’t invented in the Sixties.
Meanwhile, I note that AngryHarry neglects to mention that the “death” that men protected “their women” from was mostly other men.