So FeMRA videoblogger Karen “GirlWritesWhat” Straughan flapped her gums for nearly two hours the other night and sounds came out. This time she wasn’t sitting at her kitchen table blabbing to a webcam about female “hypoagency” and regurgitating misremembered factoids about bonobos but was speaking to an audience of mostly white dudes at Ryerson University in Toronto Canada.
I haven’t watched her performance — which is of course online as well — because life is short, and frankly I’d rather endure this for ten hours than subject myself to the tedious GWW for nearly two.
But I did take a look at a thread on the Men’s Rights subreddit started by a dude who hoped he and his fellow MRAs could have “a proper discussion about the talk, pros and cons, without descending into a circlejerk or a downvote party.” That’s right: he actually wanted GWW’s biggest fanboys to discuss her ideas (such as they are) on their merits.
This did not go over very well with the regulars, who jumped up to defend their favorite damsel in distress. ManUpManDown argued against the very notion of criticizing GWW, on the grounds of 1) her being supercool and 2) giving talks is hard:
Huh. But by NOT offering any criticism, aren’t you in fact treating her not as a writer or activist or, god forbid, a thinker, but precisely as a mascot?
Still, a few brave MRAs did bring up substantive critiques of her talk. For example, both 2095conash and memetherapy noted that she probably said “Right?” too often. Bluecharge, while proud of her performance, noted with brutal honesty that her “way of wrapping up points by saying ‘so there you go’ was a bit trite.”
So there you go.
Oh, I forgot to mention one dumb criticism some dumb guy made. GWW apparently suggested that if all the men in the world took three days off it would take three years to recover from the disaster that would ensue.
Essemd implied that this was a bit alarmist, arguing that if you gradually replaced men in the workforce with women — over the course of many years — it wouldn’t be the end of the world, because women could do these “men’s jobs” too. “[S]aying either gender is required because this and this job is mainly occupied by men or women is just false,” Essemd concluded.
Luckily there were a few real MRAs around to teach this fella a thing or two. Like Rikevo, who offered the powerful rebuttal that women can’t do shit:
Right?
And xNOM had a little list:
So there you go.
NOTE: I actually had that loop of “What is Love” on during most of the writing of this post. Hey, it’s a catchy song.
I wonder how much overlap there is between these “men run everything” Galt types and the “patriarchy is not real” types.
Why the hell would Karen Straughan be speaking in an academic setting?
Dudez get all uncomfortable at the thought of anyone offering constructive criticism of a woman’s public speaking work. Weird. It’s like they think women should be held to totally different standards, or something.
Amused that he left “no kids” off the “without men” list.
Well, we have those hypergamy-enabling sperm banks. They’ll keep us going for a while, at least.
Also amusing that he doesn’t realize that “no kids” actually would be “the end”.
David, I watched just a snippet of audience questions at the end of her ‘talk.’ He made the point that we live in a society where gender is constructed and she went on and babbled about genetic determinism. He called her on it but was quickly shut down by another CAFE rep who took over Karen’s mic.
She also said at one point in her ‘talk’ that we shouldn’t be concerned that there’s very little to no women in STEM and such because well, DUH! Wimmenz don’t like engineering because infant girls don’t stare a long time at a mechanical object like infant boys do.
DUH! The stupid. It hurts.
PS I informed OPIRG about the talk and informed them that protest wasn’t such a good idea for safety reasons and the effect it would have on MRA’s and the media. ie. getting them press.
They didn’t know about it and informed Ryerson SU, which I think was a good thing. I also emailed the president of Ryerson and told him about the security concerns. Let’s hope these Universities take some national action in Canada to rid their campuses of this misogyny. In my view, it’s a safety issue. Remember MR Edmonton following those women they labeled feminists in the night and then AVFM offering money to find out who they were? Not safe for Canadian campuses imho.
My favorite part was when they started talking about Attila Vinczer’s sob story about the time his 8th grader son was not allowed to hit back when a 1st grader feeeeeeeeeeeeeemale hit him. (After that, a feminist in the audience said maybe no one should hit anyone, and then good old Danny Boy shouted her down, saying “Feminists think it’s okay for women to hit men” or something to that effect.)
Anyway, when they’re discussing that in this thread, one mister says,
Wow, that’s a reasonable comment!
Cue a more upvoted response from an internet tough guy,
As much as I don’t like Straughan, I worry about what all her current fans are going to do to her when she inevitably does something they don’t like.
I swear to all holy fuck that woman is stuffed full of bullshit. And seriously, what kind of head-space to you have to be in to become that much of a quisling? It has to go beyond simple self-loathing.
You know, she could almost start her own cult at this point. She should go talk to her BFF Stephen Molyneux. Fuckwads.
@house mouse queen
What are we defining as ‘mechanical objects’? Because I”m just curious which ancedote with my stepsister I’d need to bring up to prove her wrong…
@cloudiah
I…bwuh? How can someone think it’s okay for a 13/14 yr old to hit a 6 yr old back?
RE: cloudiah
Ooh, tough guy so tough. I’ll bet he’s equally okay with someone getting the drop on him and sends him to the ER. Or draws a weapon. Doesn’t need a battle babysitter, after all.
I tried to find a write-up of the talk as no way am I sitting through her talking. While I didn’t find a neutral review, I did find this piece: http://rabble.ca:9880/blogs/bloggers/michael-laxer/2014/01/voice-mens-new-canadian-misogynist-campaign-cafe-and-ryerson-un
Ye gods. Shouldn’t a 13-year-old have learned that it’s wrong to hit people?
It’s not even that. They just want to be able to hit women with impunity. I hang out on ShitRedditSays and you wouldn’t believe how many douchebros/MRAs whine constantly about how it isn’t fair that they can’t beat the fuck out of a woman who slaps them or spits at them or just does something they don’t like. Equality donchaknow.
It would have been interesting if someone had made up and told a story about a 14 year old girl wanting to hit a 6 your old boy who had hit her, just to watch the hypocrisy play out.
I could have been useful like a man, but then I took an arrow in the knee (NSFW because of language):
List of perfect people, apparently:
* All men
* Girlwriteswhat
Also, ten hours of “What is Love?” is literally my favorite thing.
Help. I can’t parse Xnom’s last one.
“no kids. the end”
He could mean if women disappeared, there’d be no more kids.
He could mean kids are all women contribute to the world.
He could also incidentally be meaning that without kids, it’d be the end of the human race.
Well, Xnom, which one is it? Two of them are false, and the last one is an apocalyptic scenarion outside the bounds of the simulation (Not 3 years, total human exctinction in… 80?).
Insubstantial grammar makes mocking difficult. At least be clear about your misogynist ideas. It’s really all I ask!
Nope, all he means is that without women, there’d be no kids, and that’s the end of the list. Because giving birth is literally all women do.
Oh look, more transmisogyny in r/MensRights – courtesy of u/xNOM. I never expected that! Funny how the mods aren’t calling them out for being transmisogynistic.
I thought womenfolk were supposed to have long hair. My brain implodes.
Got to love all those “99.9999999999999%” factoids about men doing intellectually challenging work and women only pooping out kids. Was this taken from the year 1874? I went to a large public research university in the 80s and science faculty was maybe 15%-20% women. When I went back to grad school, it was about 1/3 in many science departments. And it’s still creeping closer to 50%. Once you start treating women as more than just incubators for kids they start to surprise you with all their sciencing and inventing and hard intellectual thinking. WHO KNEW??????
Also, I work in science. Two things:
1) Science is fucking collaborative. Really fucking collaborative. There are some fields where ten names on one paper is pretty damn normal, and that’s one paper. Not to mention the fact that most science is all about working off of what we already know–it isn’t like new ideas spring from nothing, especially when we’re talking about biology/medicine.
2) There are quite a few women in science–more in biology and chemistry than physics, true, but there are women in physics. Outside of researchers, scientific support staff are, in my experience, overwhelmingly women. You try running a lab without a stockroom manager*, safety officer, someone to maintain the cell culture room** etc. Nobody wants that. Administrative support staff are also overwhelmingly women, and someone has to do the payroll, or suddenly you won’t have any researchers.
* The chemistry stockroom manager quit mid-year once when I was in college (I heard rumors she was mistreated by some of the profs). The general chemistry lab had to rejigger the entire rest of the semester because the last couple of labs were absolutely not possible without her help. (Incidentally, the professor who ran that class was a woman.)
** I have no idea what her position is called, but I love her to bits. She deals with the biohazard waste so I don’t have to and makes sure we always have plenty of sterile pipets. I have enough repetitive manual labor in my job without dealing with that shit.
Beloved’s car had a flat a couple years ago. I changed it. With my penis.
They’ll probably do what all the FeMRAs minimize when it happens to another woman–get a shit ton of threats. I’d feel bad for her if she wasn’t so awful.