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.
“It’s not arson if you threw the firebomb from a distance! This means that I’m not in trouble, right?”
Drunk driving – “Look, officer, I don’t feel drunk, so you can’t arrest me. I know that I drove into a wall and then puked on your shoes but I feel fine, so you can’t charge me with anything. The wall didn’t mind.”
Just remember folks, the murderer, arsonist and drunk driver are all men. Because it’s about time women took responsibility for their actions, amirite?
It is indeed about time that women took responsibility for men’s actions. Their unwillingness to do so to date proves that they shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
Heheh I was thinking of the MRA trope about women taking responsibility for their own actions, but it’s even more appropriate that way, because women being responsible for men’s actions is their underlying (barely under the surface and quite visible) meaning, of course.
Oh noes, the blockquote monster ate Unimaginative!
@kittehserf
“because women being responsible for men’s actions is their underlying (barely under the surface and quite visible) meaning, of course.”
Yes, and not only: women are also responsible for their LACK of action. Like it’s my fault, as a woman, that I haven’t created shelters for men. What a bunch of spoiled, entitled babies!(Suddenly I have a very disturbing image of Paul Elam in a diaper, wailing furiously).
In another thread someone helpfully reminded me that the term for this is “regression”. Be my mommy, every woman in the world, or I’ll firebomb courthouses and shoot women in gyms.
In NYC we do that if the crime is committed with a vehicle: run a stop sign and hit a kid… “No criminal intent”.
Run down a pedestrian, and back up to see what it was you hit, “no criminal intent”.
Jump the curb, hit half a dozen teens coming home from school, “no criminal intent”.
Yeah, I’m a bit touchy about the fact that each year about ~150-200 people are fatally injured by people in cars and fewer than 10 of them are charged with anything more than misdemeanor traffic violation (and the general reaction is, “oh my, how terrible the driver must feel).
They say the car is king in Calif, but it’s got nothing on NYC.
/rant
Argh. I just went through a couple of those quotes to find the sources and read them and aw, aw. My brain hurts now.
Why provide links to actual source you didn’t read, specifically point out where the quotes you are taking come from, when the quotes you are taking have been stripped out of meaningful context that invalidates the meaning you ascribe to them?
I cannot imagine a more useless, pointless experiment in futility. This is a genius level amount of sheer, utter focused pointlessness. Watching paint dry is a more reasonable use of time. I can’t wrap my head around the levels of willful, deliberate, meaningful obfuscation it takes to get to this point.
Hah! I laugh in your face, block quotes! In fact, I’ll do it again:
Doesn’t that image exist somewhere on the internets? I have that same image in my head, with the Manboobz header above it.
Just like the picture sidestinkappleeye did during our JohntheOtter poster blitz!
(I think the pic of Elam in his high chair came from one of David’s posts, but I can’t recall where. Anyway that otter is so cute.)
::hands Fibinachi headache pills::
Thank you. It’s probably better just to let go.
Probably. You don’t want to end up in hospital, after all.
Ah, I see your problem, you were expecting them to be honest and for the quotes they mined to make sense. Never a good idea, that.
It is a great illustration of how internet-based the whole MRA thing is though. What, go pick up an actual book and check the quotes? Perish the thought.
(I think they may actually be allergic to libraries, especially given how many are run by women.)
Community college definitely counts as academia.
This dude has probably never been inside one.
Thanks for the link to Paul Elam in a high chair. Now I’ll never get that image out of my head…
It’s still less scary than just an ordinary shot of Elam …
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/articles/070617/25gender.htm
Just sharing about college
http://spp.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/12/20/1948550612469038.abstract
High-chair Elam is less alarming than usual in that he isn’t making rage face.
I haven’t even made it through the first block quote, but…
In what universe do these people exist? Misandry? In academia? In what universe? Will I complete this article with my head, and the delicious brains contained within, unexploded? My flabber has been thoroughly ghasted.
@Athywren: “My flabber has been thoroughly ghasted.” Hee! Stealing that posthaste, if you don’t mind.
So I’ll admit that I feel uncomfortable with some things second wave feminists have said and how they tend to generalize about men (in addition to all the other issues with second wave feminism). I actually have a book by Andrea Dworkin and while some of the things about objectification and beauty ring true, a lot of it is just too extreme and did not resonate at all with me so I couldn’t finish it.
That being said, it’s amazing how MRAs take issues with these things when they frequently make offensive and generalizing statements about feminists, women (and how they use the two interchangeably.)
One thing I notice though is the things I’ve read from second wave feminists don’t imply that rape and violence is something that is natural in men. I have, on the other hand, seen plenty from either MRAs or or other manosphere dudes about supposed “female nature” like hypergamy, irrationality, supposed in group bias, etc. This seems a lot more problematic (and history proves it) that when one group is painted as naturally inferior or bad, then the other group must subjugate them in order to gain control so the “bad” group doesn’t get out of line.
So while some of the sentiment from some second wave feminists is not exactly nice or fair to men as a group and that in itself is wrong, I’ve never heard them say men are inherently evil and actually talk seriously about subjugating them and about removing their rights, whereas MRAs and manosphere guys have actually argued that women voting destroyed society and that women being educated is futile. What I’ve gotten from feminism overall though, is that once women are given equal rights and respect, sexist and misogynist ideas about women will start to dissolve, and I think this is slowly happening. The manosphere does not reflect the opinions of all men. It does show the difference though in how feminism and MRAs approach rights and gender relations. MRAs seem to think women just are and can’t change, feminists seem to think men (and women) can change.
I prefer to stick with the group of people who think we are not constricted by biology and can change for the better.