A tiny group of gallant men (and “their women”) go underground to fight the evil gynocratic overlords. Is this the plot of a terrible dystopian potboiler from 1971, or a description of how most MRAs see themselves, and the world, today?
Turns out it’s both. I found this pic in the Blue Pill subreddit, and now I really, really want to read this book.
Here’s a book review from someone who did.
Whoever mentioned “The Last Eagle Scout”: I googled it and now I need to see this movie. It looks hilarious!
Kittehs,
Yeah, that European nobility is what what misters are trying to mimic when they pull that “milady” foolishness.
Skye,
Probably has something to do with that awful “rationalization hamster” idea, but I’ve never seen it referred to as something one does to another person.
Bon, you still need to shut up.
Kittehs,
It’s almost like our extensive community involvement is part of the reason we were selected as mods!
Sure. But he was white and male. If he’d been black and female, would he have lucked into university, even given how brilliant he was? That’s what I mean.
I once saw a documentary about Thomas Jefferson, and it included the letter he wrote as his wife was dying, and it’s so touching and sad, and I was tearing up. Then I remembered that Jefferson was a slaveholder, and I wondered how many of the people he enslaved had equally tender moments that we just don’t remember because he kept them in the garage and didn’t teach them to write.
My answer is that there’s no objective answer to this kind of question. There’s no answer “out there” waiting for a scientific discovery. There are objective answers for science to discover as to whether, e.g., the water molecules making up the ocean merely move up and down or horisontally as well when there are waves, but there’s no objective answer as to whether wave A and wave B are “really” the same wave or not. It depends on what’s the most fruitful way to talk about the subject.
And I’d say there’s an important analogy to the mind, or to persons, here.
Regarding the issue of men being needed, here is my effort at mansplaining: The idea of sexual relationships being based on mutual caring, shared interests, and companionship is a relatively recent phenomenon. Traditionally marriage has been an economic relationship between a job-doing man and a domestic-worker woman. In that context marriage becomes a sort of contact in which the man provides financial support, physical protection, and sperm in exchange for domestic labor and sex. Several of the paired heterosexual women on this blog have discussed what makes them love their mates, and I can’t recall that any of them has ever mentioned valuing financial support, physical protection, or sperm.
However, for a man raised in a traditional manner (which means he has been trained to suppress his emotions and undervalue the less tangible reasons that a woman might want to be with him), it is easy to believe that a woman who does not want or need those three things would have no need at all for a man and would therefore have no reason to want to care* for him. (* obviously including fuck) If you carry this logic another step toward total absurdity, you can make it seem reasonable that a woman might want to get her financial support from a “beta” male but her sperm from an “alpha” male (physical protection now being performed, however poorly, mostly by the police). This sort of logic seems to appeal most to severely emotionally truncated men who look at women primarily or only as a source of fucking, and have no clue as to what a woman might actually want from a relationship. Since they look at whatever “game” they play as only a way to get laid, they assume that women use sex in an equal but opposite manner as just one of their “cuntish wiles” to get what THEY want. (I love that phrase.)
The MRA tends to attract middle-aged men who have been unsuccessful in relationships and young men who are emotionally immature and/or truncated (usually both), who have not recognized that their inability to form strong emotional bonds with women is the cause of their inability to get laid as frequently as they think they deserve. The underside of a feeling of entitlement is that if you have done what you were taught that women wanted but have been unable to figure out what some particular woman might really want, the conclusion you might draw is that your lack of success with women shows that you have somehow failed to be enough of a man to cash in your entitlement; the next step is to blame, not your personal failings, but an evil cabal of feminists who have badgered and perverted all the good woman, and lash out at them. What they do not seem to see (which seems all too obvious to me) is that if you despise women and want them only for sex, most women will be able to pick that up, and unless a woman is desperately horny, drunk, or has very low self-esteem to the point of being happy that any man wants her, she is unlikely to generate an amorous mood. So the more angry a man gets about not getting laid, the less likely it is that he will get laid. You can see where that goes. I really pity the MRA-MGTOW types because I think they are victims of the emotional repression that society has traditionally tried to impose on men; to the extent that men accept that traditional repression, they become more unsuited to the sort of relationship that more and more women are looking for these days.
On the supposition that Policy is a woman too, it’s amazing how much we can make our hamsters do in the way of philosophizing, dontcha think? 😛
contract, not contact. And I thought I proofread this. My eyes are getting old.
Very true indeed! I don’t dispute that. Still, he’s pretty much the only Big Famous Philosopher I can recall who was at least from a working-class family.
Also, on the point of sexism and racism, people at this blog have pointed out before that Kant believed that women and POC:s were less smart than white men, which is true. But he should at least have credit for the fact that he didn’t believe that you have the right to oppress other people just because they’re less smart than you.
I don’t have anything to say on the topic of cats waking me up, because I have a fan on while I sleep and my cat loathes it.
However, I am trying to cross-stitch today and kitty has decided that this design lacks that all-important “cat hair” effect, and is attempting to rectify that deficiency.
I had no idea you two were enforcing a strict 30%-of-all-posts-must-be-Kittehs-or-emilygoddess rule. I thought you just liked hanging out here! That must be exhausting for you.
@Dvärghundspossen
Yes, I would agree with that 100%. I’m not really trying to convince you that my view is the correct view. It’s correct to me, or at least the me that exists at this moment. The me that will exist next year (assuming that there is one) may no longer believe that. LOL
I’m queer, and mad. I’ll go along with whatever gender assumption you wish to make about me. I respect that pronouns and gendering matter a lot to some people, but I am not one of those people.
RE: the necessity of men
Men are just as unnecessary as women for human reproduction. A fertile trans woman capable of producing sperm and a fertile cis woman can have a child of their own, and neither person is male. The claim that men have any intrinsic social necessity implies that patriarchal structures are permanent.
Sorry, I may have taken the topic way too literally. X_X Ignore me…
Just catching up with the comments here
@schwadevivre
I thought of the worm that turned too.
Diana Dors and that woman from the shake n vac advert stand out.
Even as a child I remember thinking how petty it was,women only starting to get a leg up the ladder and it makes some men start imagining dystopian futures where men are treated just like women were treated.
@ Bon o bolishus
The Mods are quite a new thing and were chosen because they are regular commenter’s .
As for the rest of what you said.Why don’t you do something that has never been attempted by any troll coming to this site.Read what this site is about and perhaps a few posts before offering your opinion about what this site is turning into.
Genedaniell3, I can see the point you are trying to make about what those individuals believe. At the same time, it seems a terribly depressing way to look at the world and at relationships. Another commenter stated it before (more eloquently), but I’d much rather be in a relationship with someone who truly wanted to be with me than in one with someone who tolerated my presence because of necessity.
I’m kind of the same way. I usually label myself cis-woman, but that’s more of a political statement than an identity statement… Like, I have all the cis privileges, so makes sense to say that I’m cis. But it doesn’t bother me at all if someone thinks that I’m a man (although it does bother me if someone begins to question my gender in a transphobic way, which has happened sometimes – transphobia and general rudeness irks me, although someone merely perceiving me as male or as “I’m not sure” does not).
Yeah, that’s true.
This also ties in with the big “master argument” from conservatives here who wanted to preserve forced sterilization of trans people – if there are fertile trans people out there, then a man might get pregnant! The very thought of pregnant men scares the shit out of conservatives here (funnily enough they seem less bothered by the idea of women making others pregnant).
****TRIGGER WARNING FOR ABORTION, SPONTANEOUS AND OTHERWISE****
Re abortion stopping an anti-choice person being born, spontaneous abortions way outnumber the human-performed abortions. Some occur so early that the female may not realise she was pregnant and miscarried. All those “potential people” didn’t “get a chance” either, but you don’t hear the anti-choice people carrying on about them.
It’s almost like it only matters when the female makes the decision rather than “nature”.
Not necessarily. Once industrialization happened, this was true in upper and middle class households. In poor families women and children frequently worked outside the home. In agrarian cultures both men and women did farm work.
I agree that marriage for love is a luxury that only became common recently (although I wouldn’t be surprised if marriage for love was more common than people assume) just not with the notion that the Leave it to Beaver family dynamic was the way things always were.
@Pallygirl: I know a professor at our department has mentioned that he’s tried to put that argument to anti-choice-people: If abortion really means that someone dies, then shouldn’t we spend loads of resources on preventing all these spontaneous miscarriages, since they are, according to anti-choice-theory, the equivalent of a wide-spread baby calamity that just kills off millions of babies all the time? But no, apparently we ought not to do that, although he’s said he’s never heard a good reason why not. (You may of course argue that there’s a difference between actions and omissions, and that it’s worse to kill someone than not to rescue someone. But even if we accept this the point stands; if there were some kind of disease that killed off gallons of already born children we’d put loads of resources into combating that disease, and if you accept that fetuses are babies and abortion is murder, you must accept that spontaneous miscarriages are morally equivalent to such a disease.)
Pallygirl, also for all those who claim a person exists at the moment of creation, most treat a woman who miscarried differently than one whose child was stillborn or died in infancy. They aren’t any funerals that I know of for a miscarriage at 6 months (arbitrary number). It’s almost as if they don’t really believe a fetus is the same as a baby.
Policy of Madness, your comments remind me of when I (tried to) read Godel,Escher,Bach. Hofstadter’s argument is, apparently, that consciousness is an emergent property of the CNS. The continuity of memory creates the illusion that we are the same people we were a decade ago, despite a lack of objective evidence to support that.
That book is similar to knitting for me, in that I’m uncomfortable with what not understanding it says about me.
Regarding the neverborn issue, there’s a line in one of Lord Dunsany’s Pegana tales that applies. Mung, the God of Death, reminds a mortal that the forty million years of nonexistence preceding his birth did not bother him at all, and the forty million years following his death will bother him just as little.
Can we pretty-please keep in mind that for some women, miscarriages are incredibly painful, emotionally? It just feels like we’re taking this a little too lightly.
For society as a whole, yes, we treat miscarriages differently than SIDS and suchlike. But for people who are really trying to have kids, knowing they miscarried can be just as awful as loosing a kid during childbirth or to SIDS.
Well, sometimes there are, because if it was a wanted baby a miscarriage can be a very sad thing. But clearly it’s not truly equivalent; people say things like “We have three children; we would have had four but we had a miscarriage,” when they wouldn’t say “we would have had four but one passed away,” they would say “we had four but one passed away.” Even pro-lifers, in practical terms, have that sense of potentiality.
The miscarriage thing was a total 😯 moment for me. Yes, if you ask pro-lifers if miscarriage is a tragedy, they’ll say yes. But I’ve never seen them do activism for miscarriage, not once. If fetuses were really people, it should be like the March of Dimes times a million.
@cassandrakitty: I just can’t get inside the heads of people who’re self-centered enough to do the whole “what if precious special me had never been born? what if the world didn’t need me?” thing. They’re like aliens, I can’t figure out how to communicate with them, and something about them makes me really uncomfortable.
Depending on how long our mothers breastfed, each of us represents AT LEAST 12 and probably far more potential OTHER pregnancies “aborted”. Twelve little ghosts following each of us around – if you buy into the fundie Christian crap.
Try hanging that on them the next time they spout this rhetoric.
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to treat miscarriage lightly by my remark or to minimize anyone’s pain.