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.
Nature made you that way, and we can’t try to change it, because that would be buying in to all that lefty nonsense about socialization.
Athywren – the real joke with that “false accusation = man’s life is ruined” scenario is that it’s so. fucking. unlikely. that any man will have his life ruined by it. How many of the tiny minority of actual rapists who get arrested, let alone tried, have their lives ruined? Not bloody many. Nothing like the trauma inflicted on so many victims. Look at that utter shit Adrian Bailey: not imprisoned for life until his multiple rapes escalated to raping and murdering Jill Meagher a year ago.
Fuck the idea that being accused of rape equals ruining a man’s life.
Also, I’m kinda bemused by the whole “rape fantasies are a thing!” quote. Uh, yeah. Last I heard, they were common. The problem comes when people can’t differentiate between fantasy and reality, not that they have fantasies at all.
IT WAS ON OPEN LIBRARY? Goddamn, I tried everything else. I have a comment in moderation over there with the actual quotes without context stripped out from the first 14 of the quotes. I had to give up on that one, because I couldn’t get access to Against Rape to check myself. Drat.
If we *are* taking potshots at the lacklustre nature of the links, I’ll link it here. Beware, your eyes’ll glaze over and your head will droop.
—
The quoted sections of text in this have some flaws. I have attempted to format and point those out. I would appreciate, and urge, any reader taking the time to actually read this article for quotes about misandry in academia to make use of the corrected, actual quotes.
You have stripped out the initial sentence, which reads: “”To use the word carefully would be to be careful for the sake of the violator, and the survivors don’t care a hoot about him.”, explaining that Dr. Catherine Comins position isn’t one of “Suckit, males”, but “Being careful with the word rape also means being careful with the person who did the raping”.
Her position and idea, as quoted, is still stupifiyingly odd, something that same article calls out in the very next sentence:
“Taken to extremes, there is an ugly element of vengeance at work here. Rape , is an abuse of power. But so are false accusations of rape, and to suggest that men whose reputations are destroyed might benefit because it will make them more sensitive is an attitude that is sure to backfire on women who are seeking justice for all victims. On campuses where the issue is most inflamed, male students are outraged that their names can be scrawled on a bathroom-wall list of rapists and they have no chance to tell their side of the story.”
Odd choice of quote. Why? I found these more meaningful myself:
“”It’s the man’s penis that is doing the raping, and ultimately he’s responsible for where he puts it.” ( Clinical psychologist Mary P. Koss)
Or
” You can’t solve society’s ills by making everything a crime… “That comes out of the sense of overprotection of women, and in the long run that is going to be harmful to us.””
(Albuquerque attorney Nancy Hollander)
Yeah. And that same person has a history of making inane statements. Here’s another choice quote, from 2005: “”the criminal justice system is not the sole arbiter of truth.”
I found that at this article –http://www.newshounds.us/2005/06/14/guilty_despite_having_been_adjudged_not_guilty.php
Odd how people with a grudge will keep making the same statements about things they have a grudge against. Murphy’s beef ain’t men, Murphy has a problem with the concept of basic due process and justice.
This is from the same Time article. The descriptive paragraph before the quote explains the reasoning behind the quote. Why did you strip that out? It reads:
“In her view, rape is a subjective term, one that women must use to draw attention to other, nonviolent, even nonsexual forms of oppression.”
So Ginny does not have a problem with all men everywhere, Ginny has a problem with expressing herself without using trite metaphors and odd analogues, whatever else kind of wonderful person she might be.
Why did you leave out the text bit explaining that?
Incidentally, the article also reads: “The school administration considers the display “inappropriate” and an error in judgment, Mr. King said, but the case also raises thorny issues about free speech.”, so the misandric atmosphere you are insinuating exists at Maryland with this quote is the same terrible, anti-male place where the… administration points out what an utterly terrible idea this all was?
… Yes? I’m sorry, but I fail to find why this quote was included in a compiliation of quotes on misandry in academia. It’s neither targeted specifically at men, referencing a state of affairs where men are evil, or even saying anything particularly outrageous. Rape is problematic, and completely clear lines are hard to establish.
The actual quote, from the actual book, available on Google Books, also emphasizes this fact, because it reads as follows:
“… [Interviewee:] “I remember an occasion where he wouldn’t let me get up, and he was very strong. He pulled my arms above my head, I didn’t put up much of a struggle. I mean I wouldn’t have seen that as rape because I associated rape with strangers, dark, night and struggle. I didn’t put up much of a struggle, but I didn’t want to, so in a sense that was rape, yes. …
The examples demonstrate that many women experience non-consensual sex which neither they nor the law and, even more unlikely, the man, define as rape. Women do, however, feel abused by such experiences and a number of women recalled short-term and long-term effects that were similar to those experienced by women who defined their experiences as rape at the time. There is no clear distinction, therefore, between consensual sex and rape, but a continuum of pressure, threat, coercion and force. The concept of a continuum validates the sense of abuse women feel when they do not freely consent to sex and takes account of the fact that women may not define their experience at the time or over time as rape”
QUOTE END.
The book is worth reading, and can be found here: http://books.google.dk/books?id=JzOjULuUDBYC&pg=PA327&lpg=PA327&dq=liz+kelly+Hidden+Gender+of+law&source=bl&ots=TXSPrOqpP7&sig=mHVMZHQW3I4eDUHKZ2YzOMmTyUQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=0Nt2UrazOdOw4QTCpoDQAw&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=liz%20kelly%20Hidden%20Gender%20of%20law&f=false
Against Rape is a book from 1974.
No comments but that one, really. Kind of odd you didn’t include the year of publication.
The full quote reads:
“And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual, it may be mainly a quantative difference. For the existence of rape as an index to masculinity is not entirely metaphorical. Though this measure of masculinity seems to be more publicly exhibited among “Bad boys” or aging bikers who practice sexual initiation through group rape, in fact, “good boys” engage in the same rites to prove their manhood. In Stockton…. Bachelor party last summer…. Young man about to be married… A woman was hired to dance “topless”…. The bridgegroom-to-be dragged the woman into the bedroom… As the woman described, “I tried to keep him away—told him of my Herpes Genitalis, et cetera, but he couldn’t face the guys if he didn’t screw me”. After the bridegroom had finished raping the woman and returned with her to the party, far from chastising him, his friends heckled the woman and covered her with wine….
… “The leader of the male group… apparently precipitated and maintained the activity, despite misgivings, because of a need to fulfill the role that the other two men had assigned to him”…
… Thus it becomes clear that not only does our culture teach men the rudiments of rape, but society, or more specifically other men, encourage the practice of it”.
Fucking terrible story!
Did you read your own links before quoting from them? This isn’t “All men rape”, this is, again, “Rape exists as a thing that can be difficult to describe yet practiced under many different circumstances”
See? People even say that, and write about it, and think so too, because as an actual point of fucking fact, describing rape as “A continuum of pressures” makes a lot of sense. Sorry for swearing just then, but I’m not used to people providing quotes from linked sources yet have the quotes say the opposite of what they’re claimed to say.
The actual quote reads:
“Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated. You might think that’s too broad. I’m not talking about sending all you men to jail for that. I’m talking about attempting to change the nature of relations between women and men by having women ask ourselves, “Did I feel violated”? To me, part of the culture of sexual inequality that makes women not report rape is that the definition of rape is not based on our sense of our violation”.
Someone specifically says she doesn’t want to send all men to jail, and you still use it as an example of academic misandry?
… Sorry, I don’t find other people’s inability to express themselves without hyperbolic exaggeration a good reason to look for misandric connotations in academic literature. Rape is not a gendered crime, so unless you are insinuating somehow that a female student wearing a short skirt thinking being given a compliment is somehow the same as falsely accusing someone of rape or raping a topless dancer (as per the actual “professional rapist” quote), then I don’t see what this quote from The Female Fear, or the story with it, is doing here.
This is that continuum thing again. What is the problem with it? Okay, wait, I think I get it – you bolded the later, so you assume that means someone can invoke a false accusation against someone else at any time later on. That’s not actually what Liz Kelly means by that, it’s that traumatic experiences in the moment can be rationalized by a host of different excuses (“This isn’t that bad”, to pick just fucking one).
The actual quote, which you host on your website, reads:
“For Pineau (1989: 217-243), a woman, particularly a young woman or teenager, may consent
to sex she does not want because of peer expectations that she be sexually active, or because
she cannot bring herself to hurt her partner’s pride … In all the above hypothetical cases,
there is no free consent. Can we not, therefore, conclude that general consent sometimes
equals rape because of the harms that it brings to the consenting woman? These harms
include the loss of the sense of selfhood, for by consenting to sex which is not pleasurable;
the woman is using her body to further the interests of her man, thereby treating herself as a
means to that men’s ends.
Consenting to sex which is not pleasurable threatens our self assertion, that is, the ‘psychic
connection ‘… between pleasure, desire and motivation is weakened (Pineau 1989). Loss of
integrity also follows when the woman succumbs to ‘hedonic lies’ by claiming to have
enjoyed the sex (Pineau 1989). Free consent means a woman is having sex for its own sake,
without any strings attached and the sex is both desirable and pleasurable. It is because of the
harms associated with general consent which disqualifies it as a good criterion for
establishing whether or not a person has been raped. Pineau probably needs to clarify the
distinctions between general consent and free consent in order to make a good argument. ”
… Did you read this? You’re hosting it. The link leads to a pdf you have uploaded to your website. But you still got the quote wrong, and use it to support rape hysteria, when what it really says is that “Free consent” is a meaningless term when that consent isn’t free because you’re pressured into consenting.
The actual quote reads:
“Considering rape as violence not sex evades, at the moment it seems most to confront, the issue of who controls women’s sexuality and the dominance/ submission dynamic that has defined it. When sex is violent, women may have lost control over what is done to them, but absence of force does not ensure the presence of that control. Nor, under conditions of male dominance, does the presence of force make an interaction nonsexual. If sex is normally something men do to women, the issue is less whether there was force than whether consent is a meaningful concept”
… If someone tells you to say yes, or they will shoot you, is you saying yes still consent? Obviously not. The book itself is on Google Books, and good reading.http://books.google.dk/books?id=Shn5xHywtHIC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
How in the name of anything holy you care to name is this rape hysteria, let alone misandric, or even unreasonable? It’s the same as the quote from Catherine Mackinnon – If I tell you to say yes, or I’ll shoot you, you saying yes is not in any way a meaningful matter of consent. Why is this here?
… Again?
“Heads, I win, tails, you lose” is not a meaningful game nor a model for consenting to anything. This isn’t rape hysteria or mania or misandry, this is basic logic. I’m not even going to bother getting the full quotes, because what’d the point be?
… The level of half-measured quotations and outright obfuscation in this list is staggering. I was going to go through the other quotes because I assumed you were collecting all of these in good faith, and merely quoting from out of date sources, but that’s obviously a pointless exercise.
Have a great day.
You know what? I’m not going to label any feminist who questions exactly how meaningful consent is in a patriarchy as misandrist, especially if they were writing in a time and place where spousal rape wasn’t a crime–and even now, with the conviction rates for rape so low, I’m not sure we can treat it as if it is illegal even now. If there is no legal backup for a woman’s “no”, how can you be sure what she means by “yes”?
But it feels real bad, Kitteh, it’s like… it’s really mean and stuff… and you don’t know how that feels! Because… because women don’t feel! Not like how men feel! I mean, not really – how could they? They’re all different and stuff…
(To my shame, I did once think like that…….. in my defence, I was about five, but I’m still pretty ashamed of it.)
“Head I win, tails you lose” is the whole thing, though. MRAs both deny that men as a group have power over women as a group, and seek to reinforce that power at all times. We are allowed neither to consent (sluts!) nor to refuse consent (misandry! Ball-breaking! False accusations! Frigid b*tches!). The rules are what any given misogynist wants them to be at any given moment. The idea of women having any agency, any independence, is outrageous to them, so yes, they are going to object to any suggestions of rape culture being a thing, or any similar discussions.
I know, Athywren, because we
fascistswimminz are MEEEAAN meanies!You’ll all be sickened to know that NWOSlave is over spouting his “men only rape women because they tempt us with their bodies and stuff” shit to great approval over on the Spreadhead.
On a thread about the sexual abuse of children. 0_o
Colour me surprise, Slavey hasn’t changed a bit.
I guess all that tempting includes eleven-year-olds in slutty mcslutster capri pants.
PS how’s Austin? You out of the airport yet? Smooth flight ‘n all?
I bet neuroticbeagle found this AGES ago, but here’s a pic of David.
http://www.ufunk.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/cat-man.jpg
@Jayem
Go ahead!
…but I expect to see royalties, damn it!! 😛
Yup, it turns out it cost me two hours – not the half hour I originally claimed – to find it, but it was worth it because I’d never heard of Open Library before, and now I think it’ll be my first stop when I have to search for context in books.
Speaking of two hours to check a single quotemine it occurs to me that this kind of thing is a modified gish gallop. You’ve got the whole “it takes them two minutes to say it, and you two hours to refute it” thing, but there’s also the element of source fatigue. You can only get so far before you just have to do something other than trawl for full quotes, and then they can fall back on all the ones you didn’t refute. It’s utterly disgusting that any of these people call themselves skeptics and claim a greater affinity for logic than us when they pull these dishonest stunts.
My mummy made me clean my room once! It was awful! You have no idea!
AND I had to put away my toys!!
MISANDRY!!!
…some people are lucky that I’m not really gifted with the power of pyrokinesis. Things would go *fwoosh* and they would be very upset – though warm!
@cassandra says
“There’s also the fact that a lot of the stuff written then doesn’t resonate now because those women changed the culture they were writing about, and those of us who’re younger didn’t have to grow up in quite the same the world that they described.”
As second waver who was there, thank you, and you are welcome.
There was a lot of feminist writing that bothered me at the time, even more that I am uncomfortable with now. But at the time, it was helpful to a lot of women and men both who were new to questioning the system we were raised in. We have come a long way because of (and a little inspire of) who we were then.
Here ya go.
@Kitteh
Merci, mon ami. Je l’apprécie. :3
Ya welcome! 🙂
@ babsbeaty
I feel like there’s a tendency for a lot of younger feminists to dismiss the Second Wave as if it was nothing but the gender essentialist stuff, and didn’t accomplish anything, and it makes me sad as much as angry, because it seems like a lot of it is entangled with the general cultural tendency to dismiss older women as irrelevant and want them to be invisible, which is sexist to the core.
@babsbeaty,
I took a woman’s history class in college (it was great. There were six students). One of the things we did was watch this “news” show from the 1960s which was all about the male newsanchors trying to figure out what the hell was going on with women that they’d suddenly decided that they didn’t just want to be wives and mothers and clearly not getting it. They showed like ten minutes of Helen Gurley Brown doing business on the phone because… I don’t know. Maybe they thought it was weird. All the other students and I were all like “WTF? Is this a parody,” and the professor (who was an older woman–maybe in her sixties?) told us that no, it was not, that that level of naked contempt for women was perfectly permissible back then.
So I thank my foremothers for the strides they made.
In other news, my grandmother thinks that I should “put down my cats and my knitting” and read Lean In, which has made her wish she was starting her career about now. I am in fact working full-time in science research, so…
The cats and knitting are my hobbies. So is Nanowrimo, so I better get back to that.
Also, when my dad went to college, the physics building had no women’s bathrooms. Good luck finding anyone willing to major in something where they can’t even use the bathroom between classes without going into another building.
I got a circulating email a few years ago that listed a bunch of things that women (in the words of the email, “your mother”) didn’t have access to or had to put up with, dating back to not very freaking long ago. I’ll see if I can dig it out at work tomorrow. It boggled my mind.
Can you imagine not being permitted by the bank to have a credit card in your own name without your husband’s written permission?
In fact, the final nail in the coffin of my (older) friend’s marriage was that her husband cleaned out her personal bank account to gamble, in about 1980. She pointed out to the bank that his name was nowhere on that account, it was in her name only. They pointed out that he was her husband. O.o
There weren’t any womens bathrooms in the congressional office buildings either. I don’t know if they still have to go through some guys office to use the one and only designated womens room these days, but I suspect they do.
Not caught up but wanted to say that I turned 18 right after the turn on the century and I can’t belief wtf is happening either.
So, Argenti and I are about 12 years apart, and I think Quackers is around the same age as Argenti? And we all have a sense that things have changed since we were teenagers. Which makes me wonder when exactly the backsliding on gender issues started.
What’s interesting is that even though every poll shows that younger people are far more reasonable and nonchalant about gay issues I feel like the whole defensive masculinity thing has gotten worse too. Backlash explains why, but what I find hard to understand is how that can coincide with most young people having pretty reasonable ideas about gay men, far more so than my generation does on the whole, whereas I feel like my generation actually has less toxic ideas about what it means to be a man.
By which I mean, historically homophobia has been heavily associated with very rigid ideas about masculinity, so it’s weird and interesting to see a generation of people who’re totally OK with homosexuality but have rigid ideas about masculinity. It’s a break in the historical pattern.