This blog gets a lot of drive-by commenters, usually hostile, who drop one comment and then vanish, never to return. A lot of these comments are insults and one-liners, but a good number of these one-shot numbers, apparently seeking to maximize the impact of their one bit of input on this blog, deposit mini-manifestos setting forth their grand visions of what Men’s Rights stands for, why feminism is evil, or whatever it is that has them most riled up that day.
The most recent of these manifesto-droppers was a self-described Man Going His Own Way called Disgruntled, who set forth at some length his own rather punitive version of gender equality. It’s a rather revealing document, so I thought I would share it with you all.
Disgruntled started off by declaring that
I … demand increased equality among the 2 main genders and whatever additional gender-types have entered the fray
But his vision of equality is a rather blinkered one, to say the least. He singles out three areas in which men fare worse than women, and demands not that the suffering of men be alleviated — but that the suffering of women be ratcheted up to meet that of men’s.
He starts off with a reasonable enough request, one that is in fact supported by most feminists:
One demand I have is that females in the USA be required by law, as males are, to sign up for the military draft and to be subject to a draft if enacted.
Indeed, when Selective Service registration was reinstated in 1981, the National Organization for Women sued to include women. And given that women can now officially serve in combat in the armed forces, it seems likely that women will be included in registration as a matter of course.
Not that this is really much of a live issue, since the draft itself is dead and isn’t going to be resurrected in the forseeable future.
But Disgruntled’s next demand shows what his real agenda is:
To achieve parity I want the vast majority of draftees to be females until a general equality is attained with the numbers of dead and maimed males from past wars. To ease the determination I would start with World War 1.
That’s right: Disgruntled is calling for a government-sponsored lady-killing operation, one which would mean the death of hundreds of thousands of women, because women weren’t dying in combat during a period when they weren’t allowed to serve in combat.
Indeed, during World War I, when Disgruntled begins his program, they weren’t allowed to vote.
He’s not the only MRA to feel this way; A Voice for Men has advanced a similarly punitive, if less drastic, “solution” to gender inequality in the armed forces.
I should note that the period that Disgruntled is trying to make up for, the twentieth century and early twenty-first, was a century of mass carnage. The United States managed to escape the worst of that carnage; while we were involved in numerous wars and other military operations, no wars were fought on US soil.
This may have given Americans — and American MRAs in particular — a rather skewed vision of what war is. The vast majority of American casualties in twentieth (and twenty-first) century wars have been military personnel — that is, they’ve been overwhelmingly male.
But in fact, in most wars, civilians (male and female, adults and children) make up roughly half of all casualties, some dying as a direct result of military actions and some as the result of disease and famine. In World War II, last century’s bloodiest war, possibly as many as 2/3 of the total casualties were civilian. Men don’t have a monopoly on suffering in wartime.
After a brief mention of criminal sentencing disparities, Disgruntled moves on to another topic that is a favorite of MRAs:
Another life aspect is the woeful number of males maimed or dying performing the tasks that keep the USA operating on a daily basis. As a society we must do all we can to get females employed in those high-risk jobs that traditionally have high injury/death rates.
Again: the solution is for more women to die!
Interestingly enough, though MRAs talk about “getting” women into these professions all the time, the women who have tried to enter professions like coal mining have faced massive resistance, not from feminists trying to protect them from dangerous “male” jobs but from management — and the men in these jobs themselves. Women coal miners not only face the dangers of the job, but open hostility and sexual harassment from their male co-workers as well.
Now, a real men’s movement — one interested in actually helping men and not just in attacking women or gleefully imagining them getting their comeuppance by dying in war or in a mine collapse — would look at the reports of (mostly) men dying in accidents on the job and would, you know, ACTUALLY TRY TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT UNSAFE WORKING CONDITIONS.
It seems weird to have to point out that generally speaking real activists try to do something about the issues they care about, but in all my reading of the manosphere over the last few years I have not once seen any MRA actually attempt to examine why there are so many workplace deaths, much less ask what can be done about it.
Sure, MRAs complain about workplace deaths all the time, but simply as “proof” that men are the “disposible sex” and that women are a bunch of spoiled brats. Or, like Disgruntled, they use it as an excuse for elaborate fantasies of what Michael Kimmel calls “restorative, retaliatory” violence.
Do you want to know why there are so many workplace deaths?
Maybe it’s because companies that put workers at risk with serious violations of safety regulations get only a slap on the wrist from OSHA? The typical OSHA fine for a serious violation is $1700. Even if someone dies as a result of this violation, the maximum fine is only $7000.
Maybe it’s because so many employers put temporary workers in dangerous situations with inadequate training?
Maybe it’s because so many employers don’t give a shit about immigrant workers? As one recent report on preventable death in the workplace (from which I cribbed the above points) notes:
While the overall U.S. fatality rates for workers have gradually decreased over time (though they are still too high), the fatality rate for immigrant workers has increased at an alarming rate.
When you start looking into the details, you discover that workplace deaths happen for some pretty predictable reasons: companies try to cut costs by cutting corners, and regulators (deeply intwined with the industries they regulate) look the other way. And so workers — particularly more vulnerable workers like immigrants, temp workers, and young workers — pay the price, sometimes literally with their lives.
It’s a labor issue. A class issue. A race issue. And insofar as it’s a gender issue, it’s not feminists or “cultural misandry” that is to blame, but rather a patriarchal narrative that suggests that macho men don’t need to worry about following the rules (even if those rules are designed to protect your life), that stoic men shouldn’t complain about rough conditions at work.
How do you organize to fight this? You don’t yell about the “death professions” on the internet. You don’t fantasize about how great it would be if more women died in coal mines. You actually research the issue rather than reciting MRA slogans. You contact the people who are already working on the issue — mostly labor activists — and ask how to help.
And that’s the problem here. MRAs don’t want to help. They want to rage against women.
And so comfortable middle-class MRAs, whose jobs are as about as dangerous as the lives of my (indoor) cats, appropriate the real suffering of vulnerable poor and working-class men as an excuse to yell at women online and fantasize about their deaths — all while doing precisely zilch to help the men they claim to care so much about.
Hell of a civil rights movement you’ve got there.
@fromafar thanks for the link, and that is an awesome cover. I’ve just bought the Kindle version ($3.19USD so should still be under $4 for me)
and a shout out to @Ally S too for the second recommendation on the book.
I shall savour it once I have cleared a bit of a backlog of reading – studying, and working 4 days a week, isn’t that conducive to reading for pleasure. 🙁
Yes, and you know what’ll happen to them, don’t you? They’ll end up SPINSTERS!
kitt33, the stuff you’ve been writing is not even wrong. Take a remedial course in phylosophy before you go around thinking JRPG villain monologues are a good starting point for a discussion about ethics.
Here’s a feminist hero for you (don’t hurt hurt your hands from all the applauding):
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/4949555/Harriet-Harman-under-attack-over-bid-to-water-down-child-pornography-law.html
Have a great day 😀
Oh God, not that old chestnut again.
As it happens, I disagree with quite a few of the positions taken up by the National Council for Civil Liberties (which is what the article is really about), but if you read the article (which, although published in a newspaper that’s strongly ideologically opposed to Harriet Harman’s views, is nonetheless reasonably balanced, despite the blatant smear-by-association), she is/was not calling for the legalization of child pornography – by which she means actual pornography, featuring children in unambiguously abusive situations.
The debate in question happened in 1978, when the government was about to pass the Protection of Children Act, one of the toughest bits of anti-child porn legislation in the western world. It’s so tough that it’s created major headaches for a great many people in the cultural sector, notably the British Board of Film Censors (as was), because the law didn’t provide a contextual loophole (in a way that the British Obscene Publications Act famously does, with its “artistic merit” defense). As a result, even highly distinguished Cannes and Oscar-winning films like The Tin Drum had to be censored, despite the fact that the 12-year-old lead actor was constantly under the supervision of at least one of his parents and the makers made every effort to ensure that he wasn’t exposed to anything that he shouldn’t have been.
Now I don’t think something like the “artistic merit” defense should apply in situations where children were unambiguously exploited – the law rightly regards this as a crime being committed (and any film or video record as a recording of said crime). But the NCCL’s point was that by allowing no wiggle room at all, you create situations where you can’t even take photographs of uncomplicatedly naked children without people suspecting motives that might well not exist.
This recommendation in particular:
…seems to me to be plain common sense. In fact, it would be nice if Facebook had applied similar judgement when a friend of mine got her account summarily shut down for posting a genuinely cute (and not even fully naked) picture of one of her sons exclusively to her immediate social circle, although I agree that this kind of assessment is very very hard indeed to calibrate if you don’t actually know the people concerned.
Mejas said:
“Yes, we’re trying to bring about the rapture so we can all go to Heaven. Come now, Lord Jesus!”
What on earth are you talking about? Did you bother to read the rest of the conversation?
Hell, current child porn laws in many countries also target works that don’t involve real children at all, or, in case of Australia, adults who happen to be small and slender.
Hey assholes, this vid effectively rebuts feminism in its entirety and that in just a few minutes:
Sorry if logic is so upsetting to you. You can always call it misogyny 😉
Have a great day.
That was logic?
Kitt, are you having trouble following this conversation? Because you can’t seem to scrounge up a video that relates to the actual topic at hand.
Hint: The topic is “Killing lots of people is wrong.”
I can’t stand hearing anti-feminists talk, so I checked out the transcript instead:
The author has no understanding of equality of opportunity. Equality of opportunity is a model of egalitarianism that centers around removing social, political, and economic disadvantages so that everyone has the same opportunities in life as everyone else to the greatest degree possible.
Example of equality of opportunity: men are generally more likely to be fit for the military than women because of the average advantage in physical strength that men have, but there should be nothing stopping women from joining the military anyway if they qualify.
And about advantageous environments in which some people grow up – all that matters under a system of equal opportunity is that no one who strives for the same advantages is prevented from doing so. Whether someone children grow up richer, healthier, etc. is irrelevant. Leveling the playing field is not necessarily about making everyone equal from the start.
Nor is “central planning” a requirement for equal opportunity. This is an overly reductive understanding of how equality is maintained. The author would do well to read up on socialist ideas; he seems to be repeating the same old anti-socialist nonsense which not even liberal capitalists would agree with.
You can go ahead and stop being a smug, ignorant dipshit now.
To kitt33’s credit, the video criticizes the notion of equality of opportunity, which I mentioned in response to his assertion that killing everyone is in-line with egalitarianism. The only problem is that both he and the author are full of shit.
What egalitarian ideals will never be reached? DAMN! I guess we should just ignore social injustice ’cause wtf does it matter? Life is shit, just accept it everyone.
Hey asshole, that “vid” rebuts NOTHING. Your arguments are all invalid. You are an idiot.
Have a nice day!*
*Means fall face down naked on all the Legos, assbarnacle.
Btw, did you guys know that saying men are more intelligent than women, is not misogyny?
Well, now you do 😉
…
Oh, so you think it’s not true? Then your contention with it is that it’s false and not misogynist. There is literally no indication of like or dislike contained in that statement. None whatsoever. Sorry to disappoint you there. 😀
People can and often do very much love intellectual inferiors (children,pets etc).
Saying men are physically stronger than women is not misogyny either, right? Oh, wait, in this nuthouse one can never know for sure if there aren’t some particularly messed up examples who actually believe that. I mean, hey, if Newton wrote rape manuals, then ANYTHING is possible with you lot.
I’ll let you get back to your wanking party now. Cheerio ^^
Why do all the MRA’s who come on here seem to have some sort of weird fetish? First there was Mikey with his weird feminist dommes spanking him with Dworkin’s books fetish and now this person who seems to love fantasizing about us wanking…
It turns out that something can be false and misogynist, amazingly.
It can be misogynistic depending on the context of that statement. It’s almost as if context is important or something.
Consciously held antipathy against women is not the only form of misogyny. Also, such statements almost always serve as the basis for misogynistic views, whether those statements are inherently misogynistic or not. Sorry to disappoint you there!!!
You can also “love” someone and still see them as subhuman and less worthy and competent. Funny how things work.
Tempted to explain Venn diagrams to Kitt33. Decides can’t be arsed.
Well, obviously you’re not racist if you would take good care of your black person, like a dog.
When did it become factual that men are smarter than women? In what conditions? Some men are smarter than some women. That’s not misogyny. Men are smarter than women though? This is a factual statement based on…. what?
Wait, how does one even quantify intelligence? Even better, how does one define intelligence? Is it an inherent quality? Can it be cultivated? Is it easier to cultivate in some than others? Does that make them more intelligent?
One doesn’t actively have to hate women to be a misogynist. Merely regarding them as unequal to men is enough. Being full of shitty bio-theories about them will also do. And justifying their treatment as lesser-thans is a nice touch, too.
Perhaps Kitt33 means the British definition of “smart”? So nattier, better and more smartly dressed and presenting. Could zie be talking about “peacocking”? ‘cos zer words have meanings but the sentences make no sense…
*sigh* I can explain the men are smarter thing. On the absolute upper end of the IQ curve there comes a point where you’ll find only men. There are about a billion problems with this though, first off being that for the parts of the gendered curves that most people fall under, they overlap dramatically (that is, on average, there’s no difference). Some more, in no particular order:
1) we’re talking easily 30 points above what any standardized test measures (average range is 80~120, MENSA material starts in the 130s depending on the test — we’re talking over 160 here)
1b) it’s moot at that point anyways, debating which über genius is more of an uber genius is just dumb
2) it is basically a list of uber genius, retroactively determined, more or less. So the sexism in STEM fields and the science Nobel prizes? Well ladies, that’s
because you have lower IQswhy the upper upper absolute UPPER end of the IQ curve is all men.3) dear gods are IQ tests biased, they’ve gotten better, but they were made by white men with some $$ for men like them.
Semi-related, the guy who invented the very first IQ test, I pity him. He was trying to devise a test to see which students needed extra help in which areas, it quickly became a tool for eugenics. Damned thing had such noble beginnings and fell so fast and so far.