Happy Valentine’s Day, gynocrats!.
Over on A Voice for Male Students, the always-reasonable and never-hysterical Jonathan Taylor celebrates this day of candies and flowers and irritating Kay Jewelry commercials with a lovely little piece entitled “The gynocentrism of Valentine’s Day, and the spoiled princess mentality.”
In it, he takes aim at a holiday he sees as rewarding the sort of woman who behaves like a “privileged princess who didn’t get her pony when she was five.”
His proof of this “gynocentrism?” The custom graphics on Google’s home page today, which I have screencapped and pasted in above.
At first glance, this all seems very innocent. We all remember these adorably crappy candies with the little messages on them. But Taylor is able to discern its insidious deeper meaning in their words:
The inclusion of the “Mr. Right” heart may seem like a small thing, but it is also rather telling, especially coming from the #1 website in the world. Women have expectations and standards. Where are men’s expectations and standards?
We aren’t told about them. Unlike “Mr. Right,” the phrase “Ms. Right” isn’t used in common parlance. The very incidence of men having standards for women is often regarded as sexist, even if they are entirely reasonable – such as not being so fat that you are diabetic by the time you are 35 and bedridden by the time you are 55.
In the age of Feminism, the only people women “answer to” are themselves.
Now that I’ve taken a closer look at Google’s message, I think that Mr. Taylor is if anything understating its creepy gynocentric intent. Take a look again at the first two candies.
CRUSH MR. RIGHT
Clearly this is an invitation to murder. Nay, to MAN GENOCIDE.
FIRST KISS 4EVER YOURS
… because if he is dead, your first kiss will make him — or at least his corpse — forever yours.
PUPPY LOVE
Of course if he is dead, he will not be able to fulfill his normal sexual functions. So Google seems to be recommending bestiality.
BLIND DATE
And then, to cover up your crimes, it suggests that you blind all of your future dates so they can’t see the corpse you’ve got stashed in the spare bedroom. (You may also need to do something about their sense of smell.)
Has the true ugliness of this gynocentric holiday ever been more nakedly displayed?
—
Just in case anyone missed it, this post is almost entirely made up of
… except for the bit about Kay Jewelry ads, which really are irritating.
Well, that’s too bad. None of these men are forced to be in relationships in which that’s the dynamic and there are lots of people who wouldn’t put them in that position. They can leave those relationships any time they want.
Still shit-all to do with feminism but whatevs.
Corporations like Hallmark, De Beers, etc. are all run by men. Don’t anyone tell me THEY are in on some kind of feminist-materialist conspiracy to get men to buy unnecessary stuff for women…
Sam can’t even keep track of the arguments he’s made himself, no wonder the rest of the conversation is sailing right over his empty little head.
It’s why they come across as trolls even when they insist that they’re looking for a sincere debate – it’s hard to have a debate when one of the participants is arguing with themselves, rather than anyone else who’s actually in the (virtual) room.
“it’s like sam thinks that women don’t have any expectations placed on them in response for the gift thing? And when people try to bring it up and point out that no, people who adhere to the “man buys gifts aways” view in hetero relations generally also adhere to “woman responds to gifts with sex” view, we’re sexist for bringing it up? What?”
But the end result is the same, isn’t it? “Traditional Valentine’s Days expectations are shit”. Which, yes, some people here have agreed with. Support for the holiday still seems to be very high here. And yes, those traditional expectations are rather a result of remaining patriarchical structures rather than any gynocentrism, but eh, it involves sexism either way.
Eh… I suppose, let’s just agree that using Valentine’s Day, a holiday indeed manufactured by companied run by men, as an example for a supposed gynocentrist conspiracy in modern society is simply very stupid, heh.
Generally, Octo, you’ll find people here are pro-choice. We tend to think that people should be able to choose to celebrate or ignore Valentine’s Day in whatever way they want. As long as that choice doesn’t harm anyone else, that is. With no toxic gender-biased obligations and with no judgement for not choosing to do what we might individually prefer.
@Octo Way to grok the point of the original post finally.
Speaking of people who come across as trolls even if that might not be their intention…
Oh FFS, Sam can’t even read basic research correctly. In a survey conducted in 1992* and somewhat repeated** 1993 (they pooled data from two years, they shouldn’t have done that as it wasn’t their design protocol), which surveyed male undergraduates***, six of the questions were open-ended.
The arse-pluck that Sam used in his comment above related to the first *open-ended* question.
Basic research protocol: don’t analyse qualitative questions using a quantitative framework. You also don’t generalise from a subpopulation to the overall population. Sam, that’s what you did. You fucking fail at research interpretation.
* so the relevance of 1992 and 1993 to 2014 is…?
** they surveyed using a different timeframe and it is not clear that their sample selection was the same as in 1992
*** not a representative sample of the American male population
Sam may be our dimmest troll yet. I picture his head as a hollowed-out space full of packing peanuts.
This is sort of paradigmatic of MRA/Feminist interweb arguments. There’s a traditional thing, in this case the gender roles of manprovider womanpassivesexrewarder as instantiated in VD. Both MRAs and Feminists don’t like it. Feminists don’t like it because it gets in the way of a genuinely reciprocal relationship and turns human interaction into a commercial transaction. MRAs don’t like it because they think men are getting short changed in the human-interaction-as-commercial-transcation. MRAs also are unable to understand the simple fact that feminists don’t like said thing, because their understanding of “feminist” is “advocates for women getting the upper hand in commercial transactions.”
Also, that first question was: “What do you believe is the purpose of Valentine’s Day?”
So they weren’t asking the undergraduates their own views about the day, they were asking, basically, “why does this day exist”?
So the “obligation”* answers, taking these into context with the question asked, strongly suggests that the respondents were saying that the point of the day was to introduce obligation in men.
It’s also an exceedingly stupidly worded question, as not everyone may have interpreted the question that way. There is no evidence that the researchers cognitively tested the questions before they surveyed (which indicates they didn’t cognitively test, as normally researchers put this detail into the methodology section when it’s done).
*description of a response category post hoc constructed by the researchers, as per this type of normal qualitative analysis.
Also that MRAs are unable to distinguish “feminist” from “woman who’s doing something I don’t like”, even when there’s tons of feminist writing that should make the distinction rather clear.
@zoon: And that in turn portrays the problem with the MRA crowd in general very well. Because the talking points they bring up sometimes do have merit. Patriarchic sexism does end up hurting men, too, after all, so there are instances in society where men get the short shift. Now, if MRAs actually took these issues they bring up seriously, they could be a valid companion movement to feminism in order to tackle gender inequalities in society. They could even be the very same movement!
But alas, in truth, the MRAs don’t care about these issues and merely bring them up as rhetorical points against feminism. Or against women in general. Or to complain that they don’t get any, feeling obliged to it. This Valentine Day’s piece is indeed just an example of that, I suppose…
Err. Entitled, I mean. Not obliged. Oops.
@Octo, I’m not convinced that you’re not a troll. The MRAs:
– don’t do any actual, you know, activism for men that might address the issues that men have (e.g. lack of domestic abuse safe houses)
– bring up those issues in order to attack feminists (irrespective of gender), so don’t really act like they are particularly interested in the issues other than as a dog whistle
– MRAs don’t care about most men anyways (white + cis is a small category of men compared to all the other groups) and don’t care about males as a while (e.g. they have trans-phobia)
So nope, no common ground between MRAs and feminists.
Uh. Your second point is the very thing I said. And I suppose your first point, too, kinda.
There is no common ground between actually existing MRAs and feminism. But what I meant is that if MRA were to actually be like it portraits itself in its own propaganda (as is commonly mocked here, the ‘human rights movement of the 21st century’), then it would in fact ironically be a natural companion to feminism.
Anyway, my point was exactly that the MRAs don’t practice what they preach and that they use their supposed grievances merely as talking points against feminism. So why do you this very same point as argument against what I’ve said?
@Octo – We talk about that ALL THE TIME here. So, again, what response is it that you’re looking for?
I know, CL. Can you imagine that with that comment I for once was not looking for an argument? 😉
I’m staying out of this because I think I’ve been the official “cliquey” meany-pants often enough recently, but good luck, KiwiGirl and CL! Sending you both virtual refreshments now.
Because you say “Because the talking points they bring up sometimes do have merit” and completely ignore the reasons why they’re using those talking points. Their points that have merit are also twisted, like their “concern” about males being sexually assaulted (a valid concern) but then they focus on female assaulters only. Or that because there are some false rape complaints by females, then juries should let off all rapists. You don’t seem to be looking at the entire context of their points, or you are purposefully ignoring it.
A stopped clock is correct twice a day (once if it’s a 24-hour one). But it would be bad if a person relied on that clock because its time information sometimes has merit, instead of either fixing or abandoning that clock. And that badness would be multiplied if the person with the stopped clock convinced others to rely on that clock and ignore all other clocks.
I… what? Look at the second paragraph in that post, the conclusion of it: I expressively said the MRAs merely use those points as arguments against feminism, and don’t truly care about them. How can you then say I ignore that? ***That was my entire point!***
And feminism doesn’t need MRAs to actually be like feminists, because we already have feminism. If MRAs were just like feminists, then they would be feminists by definition.
/headdesk
@Octo seriously, do you want a cookie or something? Here, here’s a cookie. Good for you, ok?
Well, it would be kind of cool if they included a “Ms. Right” candy too, though I supposed a “Mx. Right” candy would be cooler still…
Or forego the binary-prefixed ones altogether and stick with the ones that could apply universally (“Puppy Luv”, “4Ever Yours” etc.) So I suppose this is one of those instances where I could agree, but for entirely different reasons.
As for my issues with Kay Jewelers/diamond industry, it would be such a tome and a digression that I’ll save it for somewhere else.
Meh. We’re a little more Lupercalia than V-day anyhow.
I never spoke about needs. And I concluded the first paragraph with: “They could even be the same movement” (i.e., if MRAs actually took their talking points seriously, they’d be on the same side as feminists).
You seem to try very hard to make my post look like MRA propaganda or whatever. Even though I explicitly accused them of hypocrisy, among other things. I don’t quite get that.