The MRAs have a new list! A list of evil, man-hating quotations, that is. This list, put together by A Voice for Male Students, has a rather pretentious title: “The language of misandry in academia: a collection of quotes by faculty members, students, and administrators.”
And it comes with a rather high-minded introduction by list-collator Jonathan Taylor, declaring that
misandry in academia is not merely a collection of infrequent and disassociated anomalies arising from individuals uninfluenced by supportive or acquiescent peer groups. On the contrary, it is culturally pervasive in academia in a way that cannot be reasonably characterized as incidental or coincidental.
Indeed, Taylor hopes that his list will be
a useful resource for those new to men’s issues in academia. It should also be useful to advocates as a “go-to” resource for identifying and referring others the kind of hostile learning environment that has become pervasive in certain academic circles.
Given all this, you might expect his list of quotes to be a little more carefully vetted than the typical cut-and-pasted lists of Terrible Feminist Quotes that are passed around on the internet by antifeminists. You may recall that when I and a few others fact-checked one of these lists a while back we discovered that many of the quotes were either taken out of context in a misleading way, or made up, or taken from fictional works. Or were from people no one had ever heard of an who might not have been feminists at all.
Even a quick glance at Taylor’s list reveals that it has a lot in common with these lists: alongside a number of quotations from well-known radical feminists like Catharine MacKinnon and Mary Daly, he includes quotes from little-known academics and an assortment of random student activists, one of them identified only as “Ginny.” How typical are any of these views in academia? Taylor makes no attempt to find out.
The list doesn’t confine itself to feminists, quoting from one “traditionalist women’s college group” and even from Margaret Thatcher.
And many of the quotes are scanty — simple one liners — which leads me to wonder if there is anything in the context that makes these sometimes shocking quotations a bit less shocking.
Still others aren’t actually “misandrist” at all.
I don’t have the time or the energy to fact-check all of these quotes — nor do I have access to the academic journals many of them came from.
But several of them grabbed my attention, and I was able to track down the original quotes in context — only to discover that Taylor’s abridged quotes completely distort their original meanings.
Let’s start with this truncated quote from Marilyn French:
“As long as some men use physical force to subjugate females, all men need not. The knowledge that some men do suffices to threaten all women. He can beat or kill the woman he claims to love; he can rape women…he can sexually molest his daughters… THE VAST MAJORITY OF MEN IN THE WORLD DO ONE OR MORE OF THE ABOVE.”
– Dr. Marilyn French, The War Against Women, p. 182, her emphasis.
This seems shocking: Is French really suggesting that the vast majority of men either beat, rape, or kill women and/or molest their own daughters?
Actually, no. Those little ellipses in the quote are a clue that there’s more to the story here. When you look at what French actually wrote, you can see that her claims are not actually shocking at all. Here’s the original quote, which you can find for yourself by looking up the book on Amazon and going to page 182 of the preview available on the site.
As you can see, French’s argument is completely different from what the truncated quote would suggest. But quoting a feminist suggesting that the majority of men might “treat women disrespectfully” isn’t very exciting, is it? Let’s pretend she said something hair-raising instead!
It’s clear that Taylor didn’t get the quote from French’s book directly; when I searched for the quote online, I found the exact same truncated version, with the same ellipses and the same CAPITAL LETTERS on an assortment of right-wing and antifeminist sites, in one case attributed to the wrong book by French. Clearly he got the quote from one of these sites — Conservapedia, perhaps? — and didn’t bother to spend five minutes trying to fact-check it as I did. It’s also pretty clear that whoever edited the original quote down did so in a deliberate attempt to misrepresent what French said.
The next bit of fact-checking was a bit more straightforward, because this time Taylor provided a clickable link to the source on Google Books. Here’s the quote:
“Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.”
– Dr. Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified, p. 82.
Curious about the context, I clicked on the link and saw that she was defining rape in this way as a sort of thought experiment rather than as a legal category:
While this is not quite as dramatic a misrepresentation as the chopped-up French quote, the context here changes the meaning of the quote quite dramatically.
One more quote in the list caught my eye:
Consent as ideology cannot be distinguished from habitual acquiescence, assent, silent dissent, submission, or even enforced submission. Unless refusal or consent or withdrawal of consent are real possibilities, we can no longer speak of ‘consent’ in any genuine sense.
– Dr. Carol Pateman, “Women and Consent,” Political Theory, vol. 8, p. 149.
I’m not going to bother to fact-check this one, because, well, this argument is completely reasonable: if a person cannot say “no,” or cannot withdraw consent, then we really aren’t talking about genuine consent at all, are we?
Taylor claims to be fighting “misandry” in the academy. It looks to me — in these examples, at least — like he’s fighting against straw feminists and a meaningful notion of consent.
I work in academia. As much as MRAs want to whine and complain otherwise, it’s a lot more hostile to women here than it is to men. And that goes doubly so for those who aren’t cisgendered or don’t comfortably fit the binary. Universities are still boys’ clubs, as are most academic conferences and the editorial staff of academic journals. Even when academia is self-aware of its chauvinism and seeks to remedy the situation it’s still much harder for young women to become prominent in pretty much any field.
Also, I was sexually assaulted at an academic conference, so I think the sexist attitudes toward women trump whatever pity party MRAs want to have about obscure and harmless quotes that some woman said once in some out of print book.
Even if you countered every quote, John has already pretty much made up his mind about the whole thing. To him, misandry in acadamia is not quotes but an experience, albeit an experience pretty much made up. He even explicitely states that denial of misandry in acadamia is rampant as well, giving him an out against any criticism of his list.
This is a dude who cannot differentiate between criticism of male-dominated acadamia from the bottom and oppression of men from the top.
Kirby is exactly right. This is a textbook example of confirmation bias. This misguided person made up his mind about there being a bias against men in academia (pretty laughable conclusion if you’re even remotely familiar with gender bias in academia, as Esled pointed out), and then went searching for information to back up his assertion. The French quote taken out of context either implies that he didn’t even bother reading the full quote or he read it, decided it didn’t fit the narrative, and went ahead and ellipse’d out the stuff that would undermine his preconceived notions.
Ironically (?), this kind of shoddy work would likely get him a less than impressive grade if it were in an academic work. I can imagine him getting a C and then convincing himself his professor hates men.
@eseldbosustow, Sorry that you were assaulted. Seems to be something that happens a lot at conferences, and it sucks.
Hey, kirbywarp, nice to “see” you.
I’m bored at the airport on my way to Texas. Sadly, I don’t have my laptop, or I’d help with the fact-checking.
This quote really isn’t problematic at all if you consider what she meant by “normal.” Judging by what she said in the book “I Never Called It Rape,” she says similar things but also emphasizes the fact that it’s only normal according to society, not normal in the sense that almost all guys do it.
How is that quote unreasonable in any way?
Again, this quote makes sense. In a rape culture, the very notion of consent is either ignored or questioned.
Obviously true because a woman could be coerced into saying “yes.”
Also reasonable. Society’s attitudes towards consent are different when it comes to rape. The author probably thinks this quote implies that all sex is rape, but I can’t see that.
Believing sexual assault victims in a culture in which most sexual assault victims aren’t believed is MISANDRY apparently.
I don’t know if “mini-rapes” is an appropriate term since it might trivialize rape, but this is otherwise not a problematic quote at all.
I disagree with Kimmel, but this quote isn’t biased against men unless you think that men are oppressed by sexism.
There are some problematic quotes in that list for sure, but the above quotes I’ve selected shows that this author’s views are shit.
Noooooo not the blockquote monster! X_X
Misandry in academia? Please…Until men are constantly complaining about not being able to attend seminars because they have to pick the kid up from school & the Uni won’t provide childcare, or their clothing choices are openly discussed by colleagues, or they are routinely talked over at meetings and passed over for tenure, or are seen as a “special interest group” instead of as half the population, or see their own history and experiences being portrayed as variants of “real” history and experience, and men raising children is seen as a real detriment to their productivity, then they need to STFU. Academia is still a dudebro entrenched industry, and anyone trying to pretend it isn’t is willfully ignorant of the gross realities.
I can see some problematic quotes for sure, but overall the list is shit. And the fact that it cites Christina Hoff Sommers is telling.
Hopefully anti-feminists will quit seeing her as the ‘acceptable’ feminist. Then they may stop using ‘equity’ and ‘gender’ feminism as if it’s a thing (one can dream).
Hey, but at least there’s a disclaimer!
What baffles me is why, having said that the quotes are all independently verifiable (and ostensibly going through the effort to find the sources and all), you can still check the actual quotes to find out that chunks of them mean different things than you’d assume.
Puzzling. Don’t often meet people who go “Here is my official position, and here is all the evidence I have used to support it with. You’ll notice most of the evidence points to me being wrong. So, shall we discuss so-and-so…?”
Given the choice of quotes, AV4MS seems to not have a problem with anti-male bias, but rather with anti-rapist bias. Hmm.
Well, this is…sadness-inducing.
The quotes Ally S highlighted above: The only way I could see someone finding a lot of those objectionable is if the person actually believes that men not having absolute control and use of a woman’s body at all times is hateful towards men. Particularly that one about the wolf-whistles and unwanted touching (and I agree calling them “mini-rapes” is not a good choice of words); why is it that women are expected to be open to unwanted touching? Why is so wrong when women say no? This pretty basic boundaries and bodily integrity we’re talking about here.
I just don’t understand. You don’t touch someone who doesn’t want to be touched. This is not a difficult concept. This is not a grey area. This is pretty damn simple. Why would anyone be against that?
Oh yeah, because they’re assholes.
@ sparky
I think what makes them angry is related to McKinnon’s thought experiment. When she wrote that the cultural idea of what rape was didn’t really take women’s subjective feelings about whether or not they’d been violated into account at all. Now, to a certain extent, it does. MRAs find this outrageous and think it’s a form of bigotry against men. That this is an unreasonable position does not, unfortunately, mean that it is not their position.
Fibinachi, interesting that he provides that “you can check the context yourself” disclaimer, because in the case of the French quote, he clearly did not check the quote himself — it’s literally cut and pasted from one of these other sites.
I’d say even at liberal schools like the one I went too there is sexism.
My economics professor had to talk to the class about not saying sexist jokes because my peers were doing so.
I dropped out of anime club because every show had tons of fan service and my suggestion that we should vary our anime watching was met with hostility.
There are plenty of little examples about sexism in the college system (referring to the US). And I must confess I was shocked out how many sexual predators I met while in college.
Just read over the list and I am still rolling my eyes as I write, so pardon me if this is full of typos, but–
Never mind Obama’s praise upon her death, I have never considered Margaret Thatcher a feminist icon: quite the opposite in fact. She was an icon of unbridled capitalism and selfishness, perhaps.
Germaine Greer, are you kidding? The Female Eunuch made a splash in its day (forty years ago) but how many feminists take her seriously nowadays? As for her influence in academia, last I heard, she had been booted out of her temporary faculty gig for being virulently transphobic.
I seriously doubt too many feminists outside my generation (i.e., under sixty) have even heard of Marilyn French, never mind the quote was totally mangled and taken completely out of context.
Why couldn’t they compile a list of people who are relevant — that is contributing to the ongoing feminist dialogue?
This is what makes these guys so tiresome. They’re too stupid and lazy to even put up a good fight against feminism.
Also, while I hesitate to claim that teaching in a community college qualifies as working “in academia,” I must echo Eseld’s experience: it’s still a good old white boys’ world, for the most part where men are much more likely to win tenure or be promoted to administrative positions, and where woman do most of the grunt work of teaching.
Well, duh, Katz. It’s TOTALLY the same thing. But, you know, femi-nazis (aka all women everywhere) are evil for assuming all men are rapists.
[quote]Boys in a ‘crisis’? in my grandmother’s day, only men could vote. When I was a girl, only boys could play sports. In the Roman Catholic Church, only men can be priests. In certain societies today and throughout history, girls can’t attend school, and women can’t work or show their faces in public. In China, girl babies are discarded because boys are favored.
“In America, glass ceilings block females from access to power, money and leadership. On playgrounds, a common taunt among boys falls along these lines: ‘You cry/act/talk/throw like a girl.’ So for the fraction of a nanosecond in human history that boys are perceived to be on the short end of the stick compared with girls, you call this a ‘crisis’? C’mon, guys. You take a turn at second-class status for once.”[/quote]
The last line of this is bolded in the list, but come on! it reads like she’s obviously being flippant not serious.
In what world did Thatcher actually do stuff to help women as a whole? In what way could a woman who presided over a cabinet with a bunch of men in it be considered misandrist?
Why couldn’t they compile a list of people who are relevant — that is contributing to the ongoing feminist dialogue?
Because that would require studying feminist thinking, engaging it critically and coming to a reasoned position.
Which is not what the are about.
Comes down to the same-old with AVfM, doesn’t it? Women are not to define rape or consent; men are.
CassandraSays: Yes.
And that makes them bad people.
That is all.
I’ve actually seen MRAs ask why women should get to decide what rape is (in a context in which it’s clear that they mean women being raped by men) and why men’s opinions aren’t being taken into account.
Do we do that for any other crime? No, we do not.
This is ridiculous, both the premise–that there’s a misandry problem in academia–and the purple prose.
Jonathan is a crap writer and an even worse thinker. I’m guessing the closest he’s been to academia is driving by a college that one time.
La Strega: community college totally counts.
@Cassandrasays
You don’t think folks accused of murder should get to define what murder is?
“I think its only murder if you are decapitated with an ax. All I did was stab them with a knife a few times not the same thing at all officer”