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.
“What a bitter, jaded, pissant way to open an article. ”
Bitter, jaded and pissant describes everything GWW publishes very well.
“PROM3THEU5” seems angry.
RE: 10knives
children who hurt animals, set fires and wet the bed
O_o One of these things is not like the others… seriously, how does bladder control impact being cruel to others?
RE: Jenna McAdams
*snrk* Yes, and that’s totally how disability works too. I just lie in the street sobbing and nice agents from the government pick me up and deliver me to my new palace, where everything is taken care of for me. This is totally reality.
RE: Marie
Do trolls ever realize trans people exist? How can we answer Important Scientific Questions such as these without more input from our trolls?
Don’t look at me. I’m hoping I can make their brains explode. It works on zombies…
RE: Cassandrakitty
shouldn’t you logically also argue that we should all get extensive martial arts training and be issued guns and taught to use them at puberty?
Seeing as my relatives were raped as young children by their stepfather (who was a military man, and therefore trained in combat), that wouldn’t work either! Seriously, it’s like those rules are just bullshit stories people tell to make themselves feel better about not doing anything.
RE: PROM3THEU5
That straight up tells me you’re a whiny little jerkwad with a chip on their shoulder and an EXTREMELY overpowering agenda and so much hatred towards whoever this Karen character is that you’re blinded with seething distaste and hate.
Says the pain in the ass who just wandered in and readily admitted not knowing anything about anyone involved. We have a tags system, pal. USE THEM.
PROM3THEU5: “I know absolutely nothing about Karen Straughan and what she’s written, and absolutely nothing about Manboobz, David Futrelle, and what he’s written; but I did read the first sentence of an article and I feel that makes me eminently qualified to make snap judgements about all the above.”
LBT — that triad gets a lot of flack, in good part because of the bed wetting part — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macdonald_triad
What is correlated with later violent behavior is parental neglect and abuse, so being belittled for bed wetting may be retrospectively found among violent offenders. As a predictor of future behavior? No.
Animal cruelty once the kid is old enough to understand // particularly violent cruelty is definitely a big red flag though. Fire setting is so so — like, I’m a pyro but I set sinks on fire and fireplaces and such, not dangerous things, never have. I enjoy watching fire, not committing arson. Otoh, early childhood fire setting with disregard for potential harm isn’t a good sign.
The triad is pretty much useless in other words.
And the animal cruelty one just boils down to “people who do mean things will do other mean things.”
Yeah. And animal cruelty also can sometimes again be a warning for abuse or neglect, since uh, they may have learned that from somewhere. The bedwetting just seems odd to me is all. But then again, I’m not a criminal psychologist.
Could it be related to the same kind of weird Freudian ideas where not responding to toilet training readily enough is seen as an act of defiance towards the parents?
Only thing I’m finding is from Psychology Today.
It does seem that Freudian psychoanalysis was the basis for some of it. And it seems that research doesn’t really back it up.
http://m.psychologytoday.com/blog/witness/201205/homicidal-triad-predictor-violence-or-urban-myth
Whenever you find really dumb ideas that are related to psychology, it’s always a good idea to check and see if Freud was at least partly to blame.
How I wish it weren’t true, cassandrakitty. Then again, I do a similar thing with all the multi lit; you’d be astounded how much of the gold standard shit actually doesn’t have much (or any) research to back it up.
Oh, my university lectures on Freud were quite the eye-opening (and eyebrow raising) experience. The professor who specialized in Freud’s work was the weirdest person I ever encountered in an academic context. The enthusiasm with which he discussed the way children “manipulate” their parents via pooping, or not pooping, was rather disturbing.
And that was before we even got to penis envy and castration anxiety.
YUP. Ugh. And I’ve discovered with glee that I can deflate sciencetrolls’ sails by citing stats on integration. All this time, people act like it’s just a GIVEN that integration is the ideal solution to multi problems, and yet, I have not been able to find a single study with a large enough sample size that proves anything… unless it was people in one hospital run by the author. (And even then, I think the highest sample size I could find was 120.)
It can be fun to beat-down a scientroll with stats and studies.
Slightly OT, my sister has her BS in Psychology. While in college she joined a club for psychology students to debate/discuss ideas, anyhoo. The sweat shirts they made for the club had a smarmy picture of Freud smoking a cigar with the caption: “If it isn’t one thing, it’s your Mother.” I found it hilarious.
Reading Freud’s stuff always gives me that same slightly uncomfortable feeling that I’m being TMI’d at that Twilight does.
Oh my god, fromafar2013, that’s AWFUL. I’m ashamed I didn’t see it coming.
fromafar2013,
Aww…sweet. My hubby and his friends called their Pych study group Psycorp, a parody frat that celebrated unethical research. Their motto was, “We’ll make you fear the bunny”.
Fear the bunny? O_o
Poor little Albert.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment
The tldr version is that some professional douchebags conditioned a baby to cry when he spotted a white rat that he had previously shown no fear of. They discovered that he also cried around anything that sort of resembled a white rat, including fluffy bunnies because they had basically scarred him horribly.
QFT.
Worst book I ever read on Mr K was by a Freudian who felt that his doctor’s detailed (if patchy) diary made psychoanalysing him feasible. Freudian shitbag then went on to effectively blame a child subjected to physical and sexual abuse for not being Mr Perfect.
Freud should be locked in a room full of ferns, I swear, and his followers can go walk on legos.
a smarmy picture of Freud smoking a cigar with the caption: “If it isn’t one thing, it’s your Mother.”
Perfect!
This Dead Philosophers seems appropriate (NSFW).
Wire Mothers, that’s all I’ve got to say.
Oh, I can’t even read that. I know about that experiment and it makes me want to do horrible things to the creatures that ran it.
“If it isn’t one thing, it’s your Mother.”
With Freudians, your mother IS the One Thing. Everything Freudian boils down to sex, Mother, and Sex With Mother. Worst, most monotonous theory of everything EVER.