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.
Hi Guys,
I’ve been reading a lot lately and really appreciate all of your comments. You guys are so smart, empathetic, rational, and smart and I have learned a lot in this last while, while I’ve been lurking.
I just wanted to comment re: the backslide into hyper “masculinity”. And really, I think a lot of it has to do with the ease and prevalence of porn. And generally the hyper-sexualized world we live in. So, while I think there is a lot more acceptance of homosexual relationships (in the public sphere anyway) I think there’s a lot of men who desire to prove they have that machismo they see so much of. Particularly the “strong and virile” porn stars.
Sigh, there’s just so much wrong with the world out there.
G’night sparky!
And yeah, chalk it up to naive hope then.
As for 9/11 being the watershed moment, maybe? I mean, I was 16 at the time, so idk if it was just that I was old enough to understand politics, or they suddenly did actually shift. I certainly don’t remember the recruiters being nearly as pushy before the war though.
There was a noticeable upswing in racism after 9/11, but in terms of gender stuff, nope. I can remember noticing that there was more ambient misogyny floating around than there had been earlier by that point.
Or, actually, that’s too vague. There was a noticeable upswing in racism towards certain specific demographic groups. That was when the “most feared kind of foreigners” focus shifted towards anyone suspected of being Muslim in general, and Arabs and people from Pakistan in particular (with lots of spillover onto people who weren’t Muslim but looked to racists like they “should” be). One of my best buddies in San Francisco at the time was Indian (and Hindu, not that paranoid racists care) and noticed an immediate difference in how people reacted to her.
I could think of so, so many actually “misandrist” things I’ve read or heard lately… none of them from feminists.
And a disturbingly large portion would be from anti-feminists, MRAs or other not-feminists-at-all.
The article is a “warehouse” of quotes that “display” misandry, but Taylor wants you to see “the attitudes and worldviews behind them” so he “advocate(s) looking at this collection of quotes holistically where each quote is a part of a larger tapestry”. Is it misandry to point out that saying something exists and here’s a bunch of quotes about it isn’t an argument? Was Taylor so dedicated to avoiding academic misandry that he missed learning what a thesis and a hypothesis are?
Apparently arguments and thesis sentences are for girls, because this list of random quotes is destined for greatness:
Lastly, it bears mention that virtually nothing has been done prior to the publication of this post to take a substantial stand against misandry in academia by the academic community itself. The attitudes and worldviews expressed in more recent quotes bear continuity with those expressed in older ones, demonstrating that misandry in academia has not diminished over time, but rather has become the moral bedrock of an entrenched academic subculture.
Listing quotes from several different decades = historical method
As other people have pointed out, Taylor is beside himself over the scourge of “Rape Hysteria”. The first section, “Misandry via Rape Hysteria” goes on forever, but after 30 rape related quotes he realizes he needs at least one non-rape section. So he scrapes together 10 quotes not about rape in “Misandry: men are bad, useless, or disposable”, starting oddly with the Thatcher quote.
But did any other check this wacky one out?
– The Network of Enlightened Women (NeW), a traditionalist women’s college group, on their website
The quote is from a post by “Danielle”, who wonders if feminists and women who reject femininity by “drinking to excess, cussing, and hooking-up” have killed chivalry. She believes that chivalry reflects the natural state of gender relations, so if we ladies clean up our act, then maybe chivalry will spring back to life.
What is NeW’s Gentlemen’s Showcase? It a goofy contest run by the very goofy NeW, “the nation’s premier organization for culturally conservative women”. This Awesome Alternative to Feminism have TWENTY college chapters, it’s a veritable groundswell! I’m sure these gals are a blast at CPAC.
They had their National Conference at The
DouchebagHeritage Foundation with guests Christina Hoff Sommers, Monica Crowley and “the top women leaders in the conservative and liberty movement” (whom I’ve never heard of)!Their book list borders on parody, it has every anti-feminist book they could find on Amazon (Hoff Sommers! Phyllis Shlafly! A book about Phyllis Shlafly! Rick fucking Santorum!)
I’m over-sharing because (a) their website’s hilarious and (b) if Jonathan Taylor condemns these right-wingers, I wonder if they’re are any women not associated with AVFM that don’t make his shit list. The NeWs Blog rejects ‘the victim mentality’, denies there is a “war on women”, blames feminism for creating hook-up culture and protests V-Day/The Vagina Monologues for reducing women to a body part. So they do share Taylor’s hatred for feminism and disconnection from reality.
I wonder if he even noticed that not all of the quotes he’s using are from feminists.
Holy Crap, sorry about the endless post!
I want to argue against this so much. But I know I have no argument.
I has a sad.
This is why I have such huge issues with the idea that science can answer any question. I mean, beyond the obvious objection of “ok, scientifically speaking, which colour is superior: green or blue?”
I’m a fan of scientific answers, they’re useful and enlightening, but they’re not the be all and end all of question answering, and you need to be aware of the biases you have when going into the question. I mean, scientifically and rationally speaking, slavery is a really good economic model – you get high productivity for a low cost, allowing you to prosper. Hooray! But that falls to pieces as soon as you consider the non-scientific matter of the immorality of enslaving a human being.
Sometimes I wonder if that’s why there are some atheists who will agree that you can’t have morality without a god – that morality is a religious idea and not a rational one (and, incidentally, that Ayn Rand was sent from on high to enlighten the elites).
What? They’re from women! Isn’t that good enough?!
Oh, but “[they] don’t hate women – [they] hate feminists. Those are different things!”
I wonder if this particular backlash is partly scapegoating because of the recession we’re going through. Diversity’s all well and good when the dominant group is assured their dominance, but it’s PC gone amok when they start feeling the pinch.
Recessions do tend to bring the nastier elements of a society to the foreground. Not a huge surprise to see more “they’re taking our jobs!” stuff when people are feeling financially insecure.
At least “feminists are taking our jobs!” is a new spin, I guess.
I think there’s also a weird blend of entitlement and ego that plays into this as well.
Our society says explicit bigotry is bad, but it’s also filled with implicit/acceptable bigotry. If you’re privileged enough not to be a target, it’s easier to accept the implicit messages uncritically.
So when they, or something they love, is challenged on that socially acceptable bigotry, it comes up against their view of themselves as a good person. Instead, they lash out at those calling attention to it as being “oversensitive” or “professional victims”, and seek out others who will validate that view. In an environment of like-minded individuals, they’ll take on increasingly toxic views and actions, all the while claiming they aren’t bigoted at all. They just shift the definition of bigotry to exclude themselves.
Warning: This is somewhat incoherent. Sorry about that, still formulating my thoughts.
Over the last ten years, there have been a lot more positive portrayals of gay people in the media and public sphere. Ellen’s sitcom morphed only slightly when she came out. Movies like To Wong Foo Etc. Will & Grace. Gay friends of straight main characters became more common (although stayed pretty stereotypical). More celebrities have come out.
All of this contributes to many people realizing that Teh Ebul Gehs are really just people that they already know and like, and gay people going about their lives does not in any way negatively impact anyone else’s life.
A lot of studies (that I don’t have time to go tracking down right now, but just bear with me) have shown that the portrayal of positive images of women and minorities has a much bigger impact than lobbying or protests. Like, being exposed to examples of women and minorities portrayed as business or political executives, or star athletes, or winning science prizes or what have you, has a measurable effect on a person’s IAT scores (Implicit Association Test) when almost nothing else does.
Back in the late 60’s and early 70’s, feminists were fighting really hard for access to abortion, and people told stories about the consequences of not having access to legal, safe abortion. They weren’t pretty, but I think they were a big part of why abortion became legal.
I think that the mainstream people just stopped talking about feminist issues. Probably a large part of that was complacency, but I’ve heard a lot of young women say they’re not feminists, and it’s obvious to me that they have no idea what feminism is today, or why it’s needed.
Especially since 9/11, and the conservative attack on everyone who’s not a member of their club, there are a lot of things to talk about that seem more compelling than equal rights, like illegal wars, and ignoring war crimes, and starving children, and people shooting up schools, and the wild increase in deadly weather events that couldn’t possibly have anything to do with climate change, and the list goes on and on and on.
TL:DR — the public conversation has veered away from women’s issues in general.
No to mention their recent crack down on honey smugglers!
[block quote] Probably a large part of that was complacency, but I’ve heard a lot of young women say they’re not feminists, and it’s obvious to me that they have no idea what feminism is today, or why it’s needed.[/block quote]
This is a big part of it in my experience. Until college feminism was a purely historical term to me, and one that was painted with a lot of over-generalizations about radfems and strawmen. There was a sense that women legally could do anything a man could, so why would feminism even be a thing anymore.
Glad I grew out of that, even if it took a while and some bullshit from friends and family.
…damn, I bbcode’d.
Ignotussomnium: It was pretty much exactly the same for me.
@Shadow and Cassandra The thing is that women make a convenient industrial reserve army for capital, since they can be drawn into production when times are good and then made into a scapegoat when times are bad. This is one reason there’s so many conflicting views in the media about women and their role. On the one level they are convenient for capital as an reserve set of workers and a means to expand the economy as extra proletarians yet on another level they need to raise the next generation because if capital runs out of the working class it is in trouble.
Honestly, I think the racism of post 911 USA combined with the backlash against having a black president is emboldening the sexism because racists tend to be sexist, not because they are separate phenomena. Intersectionally, white men are getting re-balanced along two axes – race and gender – but they still hold the majority of positions of power, and so some of them are trying to use that power to consolidate their position as much as possible. There is class stuff there, too, but it seems to play into using overt vs covert racism/sexism to move the Overton Window? Dunno, my analysis is less clean with class.
The high contrast between states and rights in states based on current political affiliation is telling, I think, in terms of how this is playing out within the population of white men themselves.
Hmmm. This may be very garbled. Going to try to organize this thought:
What Shadow said about the recession combined with what leftwing fox said about implicit bigotry and what CassandrSays said about ambient misogyny. Second Wave feminists accomplished a lot. Really, it was a massive change, and it’s impressive. But it’s almost, people see those big changes, and think, well, women aren’t discriminated against! Women can do whatever they want! Same with POC and the Civil Rights Movement. Look, we have a black president! Racism is over! But even though some of the more overt stuff is gone, people don’t really see the ambient, implicit, background prejudice because it is ambient and implicit. And anyone who points it out is called a whiny “professional victim,” because it’s not overt. And people don’t understand how this kind of unexamined prejudice does impact people in much the same way that explicit prejudice does. In some ways it’s more insidious because people don’t see it.
And when you do have explicit racists and misogynists and homophobes and trans*phobes, they are considered outliers and radicals not to be taken seriously, and anyone who does take them seriously is just being over sensitive.
And nobody really cares anyway, because “we” have much bigger problems, like the economy and terrorism and “important” shit like that, so why are you whining when you really don’t have that bad? So it’s easier to dismiss the problems POC and women and the LGBTQ community face as unimportant.
And it almost like its hip to be prejudiced anymore, because being “politically correct” has become shorthand for “vapid bleeding heart over-sensitivity.”
So, maybe what I’m trying say is, a combination of complacency and backlash vitriol?
This is why I’ve come to appreciate the term “factual correctness.”
People can dismiss political correctness, because that’s all about dogma and enforcing ideas, but factual correctness? How can you dismiss factual correctness without coming across as if you’re all about dogma and enforcing ideas? Then you have to actually point out why it’s not factually accurate, and that means you have to investigate it, which means you find out that it is, in fact, factually correct.
(I separated out the link so that it would remain available in the blockquote for this reply.)
There are, however, dramatic shifts in three columns. “Protestant” drops since 2000–52% to 41%. The second is the boom of the non-denominational Christian column–from 2% up to 10%. And finally, we have a jump from 9% to 14% in the ‘None’ column.
What I suspect (and yes, this is very much me spitballing from an examination of those numbers) is not that “People are more accepting of homosexuality because they’re less religious,” but rather, “People are less religious because they are more accepting of homosexuality.” The biggest bleed-offs are from mainstream Protestantism and Catholocism–historically two of the biggest opponents of gay rights.
So as younger church members have grown up, and realized that Pastor Bob and Father Fred are telling them that Uncle Joe and his husband Jerry are going to burn in Hell, they don’t necessarily stop believing entirely (though likely, some do), but they DO decide to give Bob and Fred the heave-ho, because Uncles Joe and Jerry are freakin’ awesome. This leaves them in that non-denominational category. Still got faith, but they can’t find an existing theology that actually fits their beliefs about the fundamentals–ie, right and wrong.
Now, that said, there likely is some degree of spiral-effect; the children of these folks are still more likely to be gay-friendly, and probably still more of them will drift into the “None” column, simply because they aren’t getting that Sunday school reinforcement of the faith.
Freemage:
Sorry, it just doesn’t add up. Sure, there’s a 5% rise in the “none” category between 2001 and 2012, but in the same range the gay acceptance numbers jump 13% for under-55s and a whole 19% among over-55s. So a good two-thirds of the rise in acceptance must be among people who consider themselves religious.
Even if we add that entire non-specific Christian change (6%) in there as well, we’re still only at 11% and a good bit shy…but assuming movement from Protestant to non-specific Christian is correlated with greater acceptance of homosexuality is very dodgy, given that the Protestant category includes a bunch of large gay-friendly denominations (Episcopalians, Presbyterians, us good-guy Lutherans) and the non-specific category includes groups like Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mennonites, and Eastern Orthodox.
I’d also expect a more marked decrease from the Catholic column, the biggest single gay-unfriendly denomination, but the 2% decrease we see is pretty much insignificant, especially since it’s part of a much longer trend.
QFT and don’t I wish some people could get that little fact hammered into their heads!
Haven’t read all the comments so I don’t know if everyone’s seen the “rebuttal” over at A Voice for Male Students (Trigger Warning: images of lynching)
http://www.avoiceformalestudents.com/david-futrelle-co-all-in-a-tizzy-as-avfms-exposes-misandry-avfms-dissects-their-obtuseness/
It’s just so damn nonsensical.