I was going to write up something today about International Men’s Day, the me-too what-about-the-menz holiday that’s so meaningless that even Men’s Rights activists can barely remember to celebrate it. Do we really need a day to “celebrate [the] achievements and contributions” of men? Don’t we get quite a lot of that already? Do we need a day given over to “highlighting the discrimination against [men]” as if this is really a thing?
But then I discovered that today was also World Toilet Day, and realized it was probably more worthwhile to promote this event, as the lack of toilets and proper sanitation — a widespread problem in parts of the developing world, particularly in south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa — can have devastating public health consequences.
Some disturbing facts, from the UN, which I clipped from this CNN story:
- 2.5 billion people — one in three people in the world — do not have a toilet or access to sustainable sanitation
- Diarrheal diseases are the second most common cause of death in young children in developing countries
- They kill more than HIV/AIDS, malaria and measles combined
Learn more at the official website. Also, Al Jazeera has a useful infographic.
And just a note to the MRAs who have somehow concluded from this post that I am comparing men or men’s issues to toilets (!?), let me try to make my point very clear: I am contrasting a sharply focused activist campaign aimed at a very real problem — lack of toilets and proper sanitation in large parts of the developing world — with large consequences — disease and death, of adults and children alike — with a badly thought out International Men’s Day that seems largely driven by jealousy that “women get a day so why can’t we have one too.”
How halfassed is International Men’s Day? Here’s a screenshot of the International Men’s Day website’s “resources” page.
Generally speaking, you would expect a “resources” page to list facts and figures and possibly link to relevant other groups. All you get at the International Men’s Day site are some posters made from stock photos.
What I found on the site’s “about” page was much more troubling. The site was put online by a group called the Dads4Kids Fatherhood Foundation, working with the founder of International Men’s Day, Dr Jerome Teelucksingh. The Dads4Kids Fatherhood Foundation, as I discovered with a bit of Googling, turns out to be a virulently homophobic and transphobic organization that is also behind a site called Gendermatters.com. A quasi-manifesto on the site titled 21 Reasons Why Gender Matters asserts, among other things, that:
Transsexuality signals a deceptively fierce disorder. Elective castration, mastectomy, hysterectomy, etc., are futile non-solutions. The cruel, permanent disfigurement of so-called gender reassignment is not the answer. Transsexuals need psychological and spiritual insight that frees them to celebrate the chromosomes they received at conception.
So, yeah, a halfassed men’s “day” that’s associated with transphobic assholes. Not exactly a winning combination.
Look, if you’re concerned about making a difference in the lives of men, pick the issue that matters most to you, and work on that. If you want to increase funding for prostate cancer research, work on that. If you want to raise money to help male victims of domestic violence, work on that. Actually do the hard work of activism. Don’t just have yourself a “day” and pretend that it means something.
EDIT: Rewrote part of the first paragraph and added all the stuff after the Al Jazeera link to clarify the point of this post, because clearly some people have missed the point entirely.
IP check on aisle 9, IP check on aisle 9 please!
I’m fuming, but have about 15 tabs open for Borg stuff, so I’m good. Thanks 🙂
CassandraSays – At this point I’m just going to declare my eyeballs lost. Damn it, I LIKED those eyes too.
Okay, Moma Sita, knock it off. You’re wearing out your welcome really fast with this ranting. You’re sounding like a sockpuppet now, blathering about “classic Cassandra” and going into a meltdown. My goodwill toward a newbie just evaporated, and I wasn’t going to comment further on this thread because I don’t feel qualified to talk about racism, never having experienced it and not necessarily seeing it as those who have, do.
Hey, I wonder if when we get our eyeballs back we can all trade for a while. It would be like wearing color contacts, but cheaper.
Who ever gets mine will want my glasses too. Though, idk, it’s weird seeing the world without frames around it, maybe I’ll keep mine. (Nobody trade with pecunium, I’m not sure he could find his feet without his glasses, well, ok, he could, but they’d be pinkish splotches on the floor)
Well, presuming that I could find my eyeballs, sure. Does anyone want to borrow dark brown eyes? I’ve always been curious about green ones.
alice,
‘Tone’ on the internet? Dont even try to gaslight your post to weasel out of it!Are you a newbie poster-cuz ‘tone’ has no place on the internet? Don’t hide behind ‘tone,’ or ‘context,’ how else could this be taken:
“The fact that the implication is that if a white woman gets raped, it’s a black or Latino dude’s fault (Asian men are sexless, remember) and there’s a need for punishment? But no one cares if other races get raped because lolsavage?”
I never said that and to take such a broad interpretation of my post is extremely lacking in critical thinking processes, comprehension and indulges in some major erroneous presumptions. I guess merely mentioning the issues women who are white have to deal with while abroad gets one classified as being racist (ie thinking that if a white woman is raped its a Black or latinos fault) and that I don’t care if other races are raped (wink* its not good to use the phrasing ‘get’ raped as its victim blaming like you did).
“Dude. First off, I’m not white. I’m not an idiot, I know other races can be raped. I’m not a fucking self-hating Asian”
Not a guy Alice, thanks for presuming I’m a guy by default. Gawd you just keep digging yourself deeper. Also I never wrote that other races/ethnicities cant be raped it was how other races/ethnicities will rape based on race and/or stereotypes revolving around a specific race, ie white women as promiscuous and sexually permissive and the specific issues women who are white have to deal with in other countries because of it. What in the world would that have to do with being self-hating Asian? Thanks for making blogs an extremely anti-social place to discuss ideas! I mean, really how different are you from the MRA trolls and bully’s you all claim to oppose?
Lets see you keep digging yourself deeper alice…..
Seriously kitteh, who the hell designated you the owner of this blog? Why am I ‘guest?’ Get off your perch. Why don’t you allow Cassandra and alice and me to debate this issue we have and stay out of it. They left offensive posts and were dealing with it. Back off.
We have troll liftoff!
Also my eyes are brown too so no point trading with Alice. I always wanted to see what grey eyes would look like, so if anyone is interested…
Didn’t we have someone freak out about how being called “dude” implied male gender? Like, idk, Karin maybe?
Moma Sita — go fucking google “tone troll”.
Alice — well, they’re hazel, but mostly green, so I guess if you can loan yours with a pair of mock glasses so I can keep my framed view of the world I’d let you borrow mine.
Hey, Kittehs, I found you a new perch.
Cassandra — my ex-FWB might be able to oblige you.
Argenti,
“Yeah, it’s Cassandra’s reading that’s the problem, that’s why all four of us thought you said the same thing and kitteh offered that maybe it was just bad wording. You should’ve gone with “whoops, apparently it was”
(Thanks Cassandra, he hit my you do not go after my friends button)”
Not a guy. That’s for being a sexist. Yeah, guess you all have the same problem. That doesn’t objectively prove that it wasn’t a reading comprehension problem just that ignorant people think alike. No, I’m not capitulating just to make peace with a bunch of assholes. YOU should’ve gone back, took two seconds to bother reading and understanding and realized YOU were in the wrong. Why should I have to capitulate to a bunch of cliquish internet trolls who think they fucking own this entire blog? The hypocrisy is astounding! You rant about bullying, trolling but you are no different. Kitteh suggested it was glitch because he’s friends with you all and wanted to pander to your fragile pathetic egos .
argenti,
Go fucking google reading comprehension and critical thinking skills.
Cassandra/alice,
Actually this would be racism or stereotypes about a white woman. So intersectionality would be white skin and gender. Also, again, not the 50’s you have plenty of white people who are minorities in city’s. Your version of intersectionality is immature.
“Poll time! Trolling or just stupid? I was initially thinking just stupid, but I’m starting to lean towards trolling”
Now Cassandra do you think stupid is an ableist word? Also anyone with basic reading comprehension skills can go back and read your posts and realize you were the one who made the mistake and are the ‘stupid’ one.
“”Kitteh suggested it was glitch because he’s friends with you all and wanted to pander to your fragile pathetic egos .
So much fail, so few words!
And it’s always precious when I get told to google two things no one with any knowledge of me has ever once questioned.
Pro tip – the angry rants are funnier if you read them while listening to super chirpy, happy music.
Ok, who spiked the wheaties? What the FUCK is Moma Sita’s problem?
argenti,
““Those people”? You mean those savages who can’t control themselves around sexualized blondes?Really, the AIDS bit could well have been just a error in wording, you fix it and move on. But rape riots because of how “they” react to blondes?OT — that bit about homeless female soldiers falls under the category of “things I’ve asked pecunium to write about when he gets a chance”…silly busy, Mr. Mango is.”
Yes, rapists are indeed savages. And what do you mean by sexualized blondes? That sounds like you’re victim-blaming. I wrote that they were stereotyped as being sexually permissive and promiscuous. No, the AIDs bit wasnt an erros in wording. Heteros are the population who have the majority of the AIDs population and my point was that just because they face specific issues we dont have a heteros day. Rape riots A. exist and yes B. they have happened to white people because of stereotypes regarding white people. Get out from under your little rock and learn to take rape and the voices of rape victims seriously. Learn to put the issues above your petty problems. Seriously argenti, drop the attitude, you don’t fucking own this blog nor are you the designator of this blog as to what and what cannot be said. Just because you can get your viper cliques to act in a unisoned herd mind to try and drown out a differing voice and what was said doesn’t mean it’ll work. Get the fuck over yourself.
You can’t see this, but I’m facepalming right now.
Let me make this clear right now:
1. The original post that you decided to rant to me about? That was sarcasm. I was responding to Cassandra because your post had racist implications, and I have no qualms about directly calling out what implications are. In fact, if it wasn’t clear by that post (note I was using something called “question marks”, and prefacing it with “the implication that […]”), it would have been clear by the follow up post. The fact that you don’t understand context doesn’t matter.
2. I refer to EVERYONE as “dude”. This is my gender-neutral term for telling someone off when I’m trying to be nice. If I wanted to be mean and condescending, I would have used “sweetie”, as I do when referring to the trolls.
3. Had you realized the fact that my first post was sarcastic, you would have ALSO noted that I actually know what the statistics are. And I know that people of other races can rape too, that white people can rape and that other races can be raped.
4. Your original post said this:
“Not necessarily. In many parts of the world especially blond white women are heavily objectified. They have had rape riots happen in places in which they’ve seen blond women. The blond woman is stereotyped in a lot of cultures as being the ubiquitous American and they stereotype American women as being very sexually permissive.”
Emphasis mine.
Your post basically othered non-white people as savages who only rape white women. You then added that it’s because apparently “they” see white women as “permissive” and essentially willing, as if people who aren’t white are sexless, unkinky, and ultimately are horny sex machines needing only a white woman to overload their circuits and rape someone.
This is what I, and others, found offensive, and we called you out on it. The fact that you absolutely refused to acknowledge “hey, maybe I fucked up”, and instead went on the attack to discredit CassandraSays and me says a lot more about you than about us.
5. This place is not a safe place. Nor is it a place where bigotry, intended or not, will go unchallenged. If you want to be coddled and told that your opinion is important and always right, go somewhere else. Coddling your massive ego because you can’t accept that your opinion could be bonehead wrong is not going to happen here.
6. You need to stop expecting that everyone will always laude you for your opinions, no matter how wrong/offensive your opinions are. This is real life. No one gets a free pass just because they call themselves feminists or whatever. Everything will be up for critique and if people find fault with your argument, they will say so. To expect otherwise is childish and immature, and I suggest you stop fantasizing applause right now.
Quick, where’s katz? This conversation definitely needs an illustration of a herd of snakes line dancing.
Ooh, that perch looks comfy! Also that kitty looks like Mr Jimmjams Hadji.
Alice, I have green eyes, want to swap?
And LOL at the “don’t assume I’m a bloke, that’s sexist” being quickly followed by misgendering me.
Guess what, Moma Sita: I’ve been a regular here for a year or more; Cassandra and Argenti have been here longer, and Alice is a proven decent person. You’re losing your shit in a spectacular fashion, and you call them trolls?
I’m also laughing my head off at the idea that Cassandra has a delicate ego that needs me to prop it up.
(Cassandra, want a lace-trimmed, lavender-scented handkerchief? I know you must be shedding ladylike tears by this point.)