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?
Are he and Tom Martin related by any chance?
My husband’s (he’s semi-retired now, but was a research scientist at the GM R & D center) science hero(ine) is Alice Hamilton, the mother of industrial hygiene (my husband’s field–basically occupational health). He was thrilled when we went to Mackinac Island (Michigan) and we found the cottage her family used to occupy every summer. He talked to the current owners and it was like a big birthday present or something. He is also a huge fan of Barbara McClintock, a Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine. In addition, he’s a fan of Rachel Carson and Lisa Meitner (slighted by the Nobel committee even though she collaborated with Otto Hahn in work on nuclear fission), There’s a woman who did groundbreaking work in hydraulics at her kitchen table and who didn’t get credit for it until late–I don’t recall her name but my husband is always bringing her up–she had a male friend present her papers because she knew she’d be dismissed by reason of being female. He also knows of many, many women scientists that I’m not recalling now in the fog of having a respiratory infection. He encouraged our daughter not to be afraid of science and math and she is now a biostatistician with several papers on which she is an author. If we don’t know women scientists’ names, it’s because they’ve been buried in a patriarchal culture’s habit of erasing women.
Men barred women from the military? Okey-dokey. They also bar them from doing all the low-paid dangerous jobs which mean that men account for 98% of workplace-related deaths. Of course women would prefer to work in front line roles and in mine clearance, rather than being (say) nurses or PAs. Hahahahahahaha
Cassandrakitty, a better criteria would be ‘Most cited’ in other peer reviewed lit.
The only problem with that though, is it’d unfairly bias the famous-ness towards the more active fields, which isn’t all that fair, really.
Oh, dear. A woman was difficult to get along with. Worst thing ever to dudes like Mikey.
Mikey, do you really think you could even get elected dog catcher?
Mike, I’m a volunteer EMT and scene support firefighter, looking to get a fire-1 certification in the spring, who just graduated with STEM degrees and had mostly women as professors.
I regret to inform you that you’re cracking me up right now. However, I’ve been needing the laugh, so thanks!
Elizabeth Loftus – hugely influential work in memory
Jocelyn Bell Burnell – discovered pulsars
Virginia Apgar – invented the Apgar scoring system for babies
Jane Goodall – chimpanzees researcher
Fabiola Gianotti – leads the team working on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN
I’ve given some examples across a number of fields. We could go on.
Actually Peter Andrew Nolan too, they also seem to spring from the same gene pool or something. Similar rhetorical styles, tendency to try to drum up business for their blogs, and they all kind of look alike. Maybe there’s a production line somewhere in Dorset or something.
Mike, again I ask, why are judging scientists by how famous they are? Do contributions by women not count if they don’t make her famous? Could it be that the media only decides to turn male scientists into rock stars?
Carolyn Shoemaker was one of the astronomers who discovered the Shoemaker-Levy comet.
Or in a field in Hampshire, even.
(Mikey is boring me so badly that I’ve resorted to spot-the-song-reference.)
My mom was an industrial hygienist! Does your husband have a bunch of great gory stories? My mom had a case where a guy got eaten by a wood chipper, like Fargo except for real.
I love that Mike’s only citations for how women are terrible and can’t science is own blog.
1/10 would not click on link.
British MRAs seem to be their own special class of bugfuck.
At least my link proved definitively that you can in fact use Lego to make porn. Stupid Lego porn link is thus 100% more convincing and relevant than anything Mikey’s come up with so far.
@katz — he’s got a few, yeah. Mostly he worked on health issues rather than safety issues, though. Some of the worst safety issues had to do with confined space, ugh.
@ hellkell
They’re always the sort who write tedious letters to their local paper too. Indignant of Chelmsford strikes again (and again and again).
As far as I know, hatchet-faced is (thinly disguised) code for ugly, not Jewish.
This Buchanan wodge is a piece of doesn’t -quite -work, isn’t he? It’s as if he just cannot disguise his glee at being talked about. Dance for us, chew toy. Dance harder.
@ Robert
Were you around for Tom Martin? It really does seem to be a type.
Look at the large number of female astronomers that are notable enough to get a Wikipedia page. That’s just one field.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Women_astronomers
I would have loved having this as a space obsessed child.
So here’s Michael Buchanan, moving the goalposts again and then wondering why we don’t buy his arguments. Apparently, the 20th century isn’t modern. Tell that to any historians of your choosing, Michael, and see what they say. Really: go ahead. Pretty certain you won’t find any of them saying that “modern” refers to only the last 50 years or 15 minutes or whatever it is you’ve now decided it means. And you can’t find anything dismissive to say about Marie Curie, so you go the route of calling Grace Hopper an “embarrassing” choice because she thought DNA was a triple-helix structure. Apparently, being the first person ever to realize that it was a helical structure at all isn’t nearly good enough to meet your bar. Ohhhkay. Then you simply choose to ignore that quite a few other women in science have been named here, presumably because you’re tired of coming up with excuses for why they don’t qualify as either “famous” enough or “modern” enough for you. I can see why: you’re really having to bend your arguments into some serious logic pretzels there.
Ha, if the misters are out there taking Fartiste’s advice not to go downtown, I am not surprised they can’t keep a relationship going long, especially combined with all the drama and insecurity and other associated bullshiat they bring to the table. Sheesh.
This comment reminded me of the way MRAs always act like they care about women picking “bad boys” by acting like they are giving women helpful advice.
Also legos are only for boys? Will douchebros ever realized how brainwashed they are by gender? Sources point to no so those doods can go step on a 1000 legos!
Speaking of industrial hygiene, my mother’s program used to admit exactly two women every year, like clockwork.
Then the director retired and admissions immediately shot up to fifty-fifty.
Turns out that applications had been fifty-fifty all along, but the director had a personal policy of only admitting two women per year.
This is relevant to the question of why there are fewer famous women scientists.
By Mikey’s logic Descartes is discredited because he thought human behavior was controlled by animal spirits running through the body. I guess Isaac Newton’s contributions don’t count because he was a weirdo and obsessed with finding Bible code evidence for the end of the rule.
Wow. My feeble ladybrainz can do MRA logic too! What a proud day!