It’s the eternal question: do misogynists spend their entire lives looking for excuses to get mad at women, or are they so naturally enraged by any evidence of female autonomy that they can’t help but erupt in rage over the tiniest of things?
We may never know the answer to that question. What we do know: almost anything can provoke them, no matter how trivial it is, no matter how misguided their anger might seem to anyone who doesn’t actually, you know, hate women. Let’s look at some of the latest things to cause women-haters to lose their shit.
1) British tennis champ Andy Murray’s announcement this week that he was hiring former female tennis champion Amélie Mauresmo as his coach. Even though she’s, you know, a lady.
On Twitter, as Buzzfeed has chronicled, some have taken exception to Mauresmo’s status as a non-man.
https://twitter.com/zainmohammed786/status/475642785979449344
https://twitter.com/ollieman_95/status/475620687391260672
Others have suggested that maybe she’s more of a man than him – ho ho!
Amelie mauresmo to be andy murray's new tennis coach! About sums him up he plays like a woman only she's more man than he'll ever be.
— Paul Kemp (@53pkempy) June 8, 2014
Why it would matter to any of these people just whom someone who is not them wants as his coach remains unclear.
2) An article on the Huffington Post noting that on D-Day, one woman – war correspondent Martha Gellhorn – accompanied the 150,000 men who stormed the beaches.
It’s an interesting story: all the female correspondents who requested spots on the boats were turned down, so she ended up sneaking her way into the invasion by hiding in a ship’s bathroom.
But over on the A Voice for Men forums, someone called Humansplaining w/ Jarred is outraged that “Feminists can’t even let Men have D-DAY for themselves!”
Here we are on the 70th anniversary of a watershed moment in one of the bloodiest wars in human history, where thousands of men selflessly gave their lives, and some Feminist feels the need to devote an entire article to the fact that there was also ONE woman involved! There you go, it’s official – the ratio of worth from women to men, is 1:150,000. Those two are completely equal in the eyes of many Feminists, apparently. You can spend all your time relaying the experiences of that one female in great detail, without even the slightest nod to the individual experiences of those 150,000 other human beings that were involved, many of whom perished in the process. Because VAGINA.
Yep. That’s right. Telling the story of one woman on D-Day is an attack on all the men involved. Hell, let’s take that further. Any story told about any individual person involved in a collective effort should be considered a grave insult to all the others. Saving Private Ryan is an insult to all soldiers who weren’t Private Ryan!
3) LEGO is launching a new series of scientist minifigures – only this time, they’re women!
On the Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them) website, British MRA and would-be politician Mike Buchanan sniffs that this move by LEGO belongs in the
‘You couldn’t make this s*** up!’ file. Doubtless it will sell well to hatchet-faced mothers determined to quash any signs of femininity in their unfortunate daughters.
Apparently acknowledging the existence of female scientists is somehow an injustice to men and boys?
4) Older women sometimes have sex with younger men.
There’s a certain kind of man who likes to loudly declare just which women – or categories of women – he “wouldn’t bang.” Our old friend Heartiste – the white-nationalist, purple-prose-writing pickup guru – is a member of a slightly smaller subgroup: he gets angry when other men have sex with the women he’s declared unsuitable, a group which apparently includes all but 0.1% of women his age and older.
In a recent post, Heartiste lambastes the dating site CougarLife.com as a symptom of our “rapid cultural collapse.” Its crime? Matching up “mangy cougars” and their “dusty muffs” with “inexperienced younger men hauling a knapsack of blue balls.”
While Heartiste directs most of his hate at the so-called cougars themselves – for the crime of having sex while female and forty plus – he’s indignant that younger men, in his mind, allow themselves to resort to
the shabby hole of a bottom shelf jezebel to alleviate your incel. … a tepid squirt of pallid pleasure in exchange for your dignity and psychologically distressing confirmation that this is the best you might ever do.
Apparently the idea that a younger man and an older women might actually enjoy having sex with one another is too much for his fragile misogynist mind to take.
Indeed, it’s hard not to wonder if Heartiste actually likes sex at all – or if his own alleged lovemaking prowess extends much beyond a “tepid squirt.” This, after all, is a guy who thinks going down on a woman is “beta,” because burying your face in what he calls that “fetid, humid mess” is sort of icky, and might lead her to think that you think she’s hot.
And last but not least:
5) Some people are trying to get colleges to take rape more seriously.
In a column in the Washington Post, George Will sniffs that colleges, by addressing what he calls “the supposed campus epidemic of rape” are bestowing upon “’sexual assault’ victims” a “coveted status that confers privileges,” thus encouraging others to jump aboard the victimhood express.
Others have already torn apart Will’s argument pretty thoroughly. So I’ll just note one not-so-little irony: the headline for Will’s column, as it ran in the Post, was “Colleges become the victims of progressivism.”
Why is it that the people who most loudly condemn the supposed “cult of victimhood” are the first to claim that they’re the ones who are really being victimized – by “progressives,” by feminists, by female tennis coaches, by stories about women in war, by LEGO figurines of female scientists, by women they don’t like having consensual sex, by anti-rape activists trying to create a climate in which more than 12% of rape survivors on campuses feel safe enough to report their rapes?
Cassandra,
Legos weren’t gendered in my day. I had a little plastic suitcase with plain rectangular legos in primary and neutral colors. I used to like making robots out of them.
Oh, and Mikey? When ranting about the grants that those uppity wimminz is getting, it’s really fucking gauche to site your own sad-as blog.
Heartiste’s whole deal seems to be that sex is only Alpha if the woman you had sex at (“with” really doesn’t seem appropriate in terms of what he’s describing) leaves the encounter feeling vaguely humiliated and kind of wishing it hadn’t happened. Why he thinks that this kink of his is universal remains a mystery.
^cite and sad-ass. Reading MRA tears makes you dumber. Trufax.
I’m sure Mike is going to win so many elections with his anti Lego platform. That’s certainly the most important political issue facing the UK.
@ wwth
Those were the Legos I had too. There were little Lego people, but I don’t recall them being particularly manly.
So… two seconds on google, and wallah! Loads of super-cool women in science.
http://discovermagazine.com/2002/nov/feat50
Wow, google. Much strenuous. I see why Mike chose to type a really long blog response about what a meany David is for not agreeing with him about women and science not being good together, instead of googling to see if women and science actually did good things together.
Googling is so hard!
God i forgot the last time i heard the words “social engineer”. Its like a nostalgic trip to my high school junior year with my shitty History teacher
…I don’t understand… what about when you want more sex? Maybe this is Beta, but I like that cushy setup where you’ve got someone who wants to have sex with you? Multiple times? In different rooms!? With the lights on?!? And kissing!?!? I like the kissing part a lot.
Also, just because why the hell not? Lego porn.
http://www.mommyish.com/2014/02/07/lego-porn/
Wow, and Ally Fogg cut Mike’s political platform to pieces: http://freethoughtblogs.com/hetpat/2013/10/13/the-stupid-the-hypocritical-and-the-downright-evil-a-response-to-justice-4-men-and-boys/
Mike, if Ally disagrees with you, then you are doing something super duper extraordinarily wrong.
rtanen, thanks for illustrating my point. Modern era? Marie Curie died in 1934, Rosalind Franklin in 1958. Franklin was a famously difficult woman to get on with, and didn’t like to collaborate with colleagues. She believed DNA is a triple helix, then Crick & Watson (possibly both men?) worked out it’s a double helix. Grace Hopper was born 108 years ago. Seriously, are these your best shots for ‘famous female scientists in the modern era’? Embarrassing…
But Athywren, is she crying during/afterwards? Or did she seem to be…sit down if you need to, readers, I know this may be a traumatic thought…enjoying herself as much as you were? If so I’m sorry to break this to you, but you’re just never going to be an Alpha.
Depends on the discipline. In geology, the accepted practice is to only give initials for first and middle names in order to reduce the possibility of implicit or explicit sexism harming the paper’s chances of publication or poor reception.
Gosh, a lady scientist 80 years ago was difficult to get along with! That’s it, we better cut all grant funding to women in science now.
Given that Ally Fogg generally wouldn’t recognize misogyny if it walked up and bit him on the bum, our friend Mikey may have been overdoing his just a smidge.
Anita Sarkeesian has a nice two-parter about LEGO marketing:
http://www.feministfrequency.com/2012/01/lego-gender-part-1-lego-friends/
http://www.feministfrequency.com/2012/02/lego-gender-part-2-the-boys-club/
Indeed, they used to be a gender-neutral toy, but at some point the marketing was split so that only boys were encouraged to build and be original, while girls went to the ice cream parlor.
Sad. I used to try to build dinosaurs out of mine.
The D-Day thing pisses me off the most. It was men who banned women from the military, men who prevented them from serving in combat roles for the longest time, and men who started most of history’s wars in the first place, but…. MISANDRY!
A woman discovered that HIV causes AIDS. Francois Barre-Sinoussi. http://www.theguardian.com/society/gallery/2011/mar/09/scientific-breakthroughs-by-women#/?picture=372440484&index=1
I’m sure all the men who have HIV are quite angry at the misandry of this woman that made a discovery which eventually led to the treatments for HIV we have today. If only this awful woman had stayed in the kitchen where she belongs and waited for a man with his manlySTEMmanliness to discover it! I’m sure the patients wouldn’t have minded the delay. It’s much more important that we get justice for men and boys who resent a level playing field.
Goodall.
I love that lady.
aaaaaand, refer to link in last post These ladies should totally get kudos and name recognition. How is bringing light to a screeching halt not ridiculously cool. Or being the leading expert on mad cow disease, and prions.
pallygirl, thanks for the link to the Ally Fogg piece. We had a link to it for MONTHS – if a ‘Guardian’ writer savages us, we know we’re on the right track. One of his excellent recent piece, in which – if memory serves right – he has some remarks on Mr F’s remarks on the ‘Mankind Initiative’ video, now watched by about 6.9 million people:
http://j4mb.wordpress.com/2014/06/03/ally-fogg-on-mark-brooks-mankind-initiative-polly-neate-womens-aid-david-futrelle/
We’ve challenged many prominent feminists (including Julie Bindel, Caroline Criado-Perez, Kat Banyard…) to retract lies and demonstrably misleading statements, and none ever has. The latest is the refusal of Polly Neate, CEO of Women’s Aid, to retract SEVEN lies / misleading statements made by a WA spokeswoman:
http://j4mb.wordpress.com/womens-aid-our-public-challenge-of-polly-neate-ceo/
Perhaps MR F could persuade Ms Neate to act honourably? I won’t hold my breath.
WWTH, a woman also decoded the genome of HIV, allowing for us to actually test for it.
Flossie Wong-Staal: Google her. Really awesome lady.
Also, “famous” is a good criteria by which to judge the success of a pop star or an actor, but a scientist? Really?
Mikey B’s really trying to drum up traffic for his blog.
It’s kinda pathetic and transparent.