Oh dear. Some very confused dudes on the A Voice for Men Forums are angry at the Huffington Post for suggesting that Confused Cats Against Feminism might just be a parody of Women Against Feminism.
A guy calling himself Humansplaining w/ Jarred starts off the thread — titled “HuffPo tries – and fails – to politicize ‘Cats Against Feminism'” — with this little rant. (I’ve bolded some of the especially silly stuff.)
So, being that ‘Women Against Feminism’ is an internet phenomenon, through Tumblr as well as Twitter, the internet inevitably took this thread in the direction it takes EVERYTHING nowadays – cats.
If you read through all the ‘Cats Against Feminism’ memes, you’ll notice that they pretty much all revolve around, well…CATS. Go figure, huh? References to food, tuna, shedding, and biting predominate these posts. The references to ‘Feminism’ are basically incidental, since this is just piggy-backing on the viral success of ‘Women Against Feminism’. Those posting these memes never really express whether they are in favor of, or against Feminism. It’s clearly not meant to appeal to EITHER side of the issue. Rather, it’s simply a silly meme meant to produce a few chuckles for ANYONE that happens to run across them. Just like every other stupid cat meme on the internet, of which there must literally be TRILLIONS.
But HuffPo apparently sees things differently …
You know what? I think those CATS are smarter than the people at Huffpo that produced this article. THEY think that Feminism is a stupid and pointless human concept, and they wish you’d stop talking about it and fighting amongst each other, because they need you to FEED them!
Seriously HuffPo, learn to take a joke, and give the ideology a rest for 5 FUCKING SECONDS already.Because the cats are laughing at YOU now…
AVFM forum dudes, I hate to break it to you, but the cats aren’t laughing at the Huffington Post. They’re laughing at you.
Maybe I need to start up a new blog: Confused Cats Confused by Confused Cats Against Feminism.
@niall
Both of your examples are absurdly wrong. I’ll look up sources if you want, but something like 20% of women in the US have been raped, as opposed to about 3-4% of men. And yes, the definition includes being forced to penetrate.
On the domestic violence side, things are more complicated because men and women are abused and abuse differently, statistically speaking. Women are more likely to experience domestic abuse, women are more likely to use some sort of weapon, but I haven’t seen a clear breakdown of things like when a spouse reacts physically to pschological abuse. It’s safe to say, however, that women experience the worse end of the stick, especially when you talk about countries other than the US.
By the way, here’s the description of the Istanbul Convention. Bolding is mine.
Not just Dworkin. I don’t keep up with academic feminist stuff, so I really can’t remember the last time I saw any marxist/communist/anarchist feminist writing.
(I presume there must be some, but it doesn’t come to my attention. One daughter was involved with Australia’s Green Left a few years ago. Even they didn’t do anything along the lines of class struggle redefined/realigned along patriarchal principles. They just advertised the usual IWD events and participated in anything and everything at all left wingish, occasionally that happened to be a feminist issue.)
That’s an interesting article in niall’s comment. The point was supposed to be that women will become less represented as media moves to exclusively online platforms, right? This was coupled with an implication that society already focuses too much on women’s issues?
So why would someone support this idea with a link to a study saying that the reason more men are engaged with political discourse is possibly due to a dearth of coverage for women in contemporary print and broadcast media?
All right, Imma take my childish psuedo-feminism and my kids to an art museum. Everyone have a lovely day!
It’s pretty funny to claim that you’re all about the equality and then cackle like a comic book villain about the idea of women being underrepresented in the comments in some online media spaces.
Hmmm…As a Brit something about Niall’s comment hit me as a bit fishy. Ah here it is:
Now, the reason that looked funny was because goes against all data i’ve seen on the subject. Indeed, according to the British Crime survey in 2010, men account for just over 1/4 of domestic violence victims. Now that is terrible, because all domestic violence is terrible, but that is very far from being a roughly equal rate of violence.
But far worse really about your comment is the idea that men who are being abused are being victimised by feminists. That is worse because not only is it false, it utterly denies the real cause that is preventing abused men from getting the resources they need which is toxic masculinity. Such men are told to ‘man up’ or called weak, because men of course are supposed to be stronger and dominant in the eyes of many. Male abuse victims do not fit in society’s tight gender guidelines. That is the opposite of feminism. It is feminism which says male abuse victims must be able to come forward without being ridiculed, because feminism is about equality.
As for the Istanbul Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence. Now I don’t know about you Niall, but I would actually quite like to combat violence against women and domestic violence. I thought it was received wisdom that these were bad things. Maybe there is something I missed, but this convention to me is about creating a pan-european legal framework against domestic violence to ensure all member states meet a minimum standard and that havens for abusers do not exist. Similar frameworks exist for a great number of other things such as pension funds and electronic identification. Could you please point to Misandry behind this legislation because I seem to have missed it.
As for your issues facing men, well, you do realise unmarried men means unmarried women as well right? The European gender balance is pretty much 50:50 and polygamy is generally illegal. As for the rest, everything apart from education is down to a culture which says men aren’t supposed to talk about their emotions (suicide), are strong so don’t need support (DV shelters and support) and toxic masculinity encouraging men in violence and crime (life expectancy and sentencing). Family courts and paternity laws are not an issue at least in the UK.
Women meanwhile still face (according to all government statistics) a much greater chance of rape and domestic violence, and still are an incredible minority in the upper echelons of law, industry and government. I know you would like to pretend this isn’t important, but it kind of is. If not, please explain how a society favouring or treating women equally ends up with this result?
Essentially Niall, you are full of bull
Also, can somebody point me to one of these radical feminists running Feminism’s media campaign? For all my time on the internet, and indeed in the real world I’ve yet to meet one.
Kirbywarp – the part you highlighted, was inserted AFTERWARDS by the EU because some EU countries refused to ratify it as it stood. It has no legal standing and is merely a recommendation. But already 13 have signed it, and more are lined up to do so.
And please do look up the stats on rape and domestic violence. Gender violence is gender blind and symmetric. Men and women are equally likely to assault each other – this is well established all across the western world where peer reviewed research is available on the topic.
Women are more likely to suffer severe domestic abuse.
When you look up the stats on rape, be sure to include available info on prison rapes in the US too. That dramatically changes the landscape.
@Sparky. Yes I do know what radical feminism is. I have a degree in Social Sciences. I’ve met plenty, and continue to meet many.
Guess again, Joe. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/sep/05/men-victims-domestic-violence
40%
I look forward to Niall’s explanation of how prison rape contributes to gender symmetric violence, given the fact that prisons tend to be gender segregated.
@Flying mouse.
The point is, men and men’s issues are not represented in the first place very often. Yet, men make up the majority of readers on sites. When men begin to demand articles and coverage of issues affecting them, there will be absolutely no option for the news sites to follow suit.
cassandra – where did I say prison rape contributes to gender symmetric violence?
Instead of purposely misquoting me, why not at least acknowledge that men face serious problems too?
Aw, now he thinks nobody’s scroll button is working.
@niall:
Source?
Also, the convention itself has no legal standing save for voluntarily agreeing to abide by it. The recommendation is just as binding as the rest. You claimed that the convention explicitly excluded men, I’ve shown how it does the opposite.
Only one study I know of claims this, and it has been pretty thouroughly criticized. Here’s a sort of “official” take on it. Scroll down or search for the line “Some studies have concluded that men and women are equally likely to perpetrate domestic violence.”
I can’t find great sources, but one place I found stated that around 20% of men in prisons suffer sexual assault, and the statistics for women vary considerably, sometimes as high as 25% (1 in 4). So it looks like it’s pretty conceivable that among prison populations, rape is common for both genders.
But you can’t compare those stats to the stats of non-incarcerated people. Prisoners are treated (unjustly) harshely because they are supposedly the worst of the worst. People turn a blind eye to violence against inmates all the damn time. While rape outside of prison is related to gender and the relative power in society, rape inside prison is more related to the prison/warden dynamic and the powerlessness of prisoners, no matter what gender.
Prison rape is certainly an admirable thing to fight against, and both feminists and non-feminists have been working towards reducing it. But you cannot lump together prison rape and rape outside of prison, the situations and motivating factors are too different.
@Joe. Of course I wanted women protected from DV, who do you think I am? A woman hater?
If you’re too blind to see or acknowledge that I also want men included in that law, that’s your problem buddy.
Magic 8-ball says “this is a joke, right?”.
MRAs spout the same handful of statistics so indiscriminately that they get confused when they actually make a point. Then they accuse you of “misquoting” them.
But men also make up the majority of law makers and political leaders. If men with political power aren’t using their power to work on men’s issues, isn’t that the fault of said men?
It’s kind of like splatterpainting, isn’t it? Just throw the same stuff at the virtual wall over and over again and hope people find it more impressive than they did the last time.
Niall, I’m Nthing the request that you name the supposed radical feminists that are at the forefront of the modern feminist movement. If it’s such a problem as you claim, you should have no trouble providing citations.
Wait, is that cat wearing a tartan tie? Bless you, cat with tie, for making up for Niall’s presence in this thread.
Here, niall, I’m feeling generous today. I’ve taken out some of your post in the middle so that the points are even closer to each other, in case you find it to difficult to follow your own logic over the course of four sentences.
Yes, thank you for that Contrapangloss. That was actually pretty damn cool.
To a certain extent for the worth of the word “acknowledged”, I’m still somewhat baffled by my fancy, upbeat, focused European peers who had a long, long, long discussion about how stating that a group of political activists agreed with aims of “feminism” was “polarizing an issue” and that they should have used “egalitarianism” instead because “feminism naturally assumes that men are in a superior position” and there’s been some fun stuff in the media about people and sexism and so on. But yeah, women can vote! We won! Go home.
Sounds like most general theories I know. Economics does that, physics does that, capitalism does that, communism does that, feminism does that…
Who are these undercover radicals who have taken over the movement and become overt, dangerous influences calling for the feminiziation of boys, the destruction of football leagues and the slow and dreadful suffocation of any man past the age of 25 who isn’t sporting a sixpack, a rugged handsome look and a giant bank account?
Because when you say that you support both MRA and feminism, what you are saying is that the kind of people who call for the dreadful suffocation of any women past the age of 25 who isn’t beautiful, willing and able to perform sexual acts on the drop of a dime is as a legitimate political platform as the notion that gender based discrimination is bad.
Which ones? I want to know which ones, because if that is actually the case, I’d want to know, so I could take steps to argue against this.
After the recent EU elections, there are also surprising amount of right wing groups working throughout every country to push through laws. There are also left wing groups working throughout these countries to push through their laws. Making it sound as if a giant matriarchical conspiracy of isolated feminist cells are insidiously attempting to manipulate the political process of the European Union isn’t really that levelheaded.
Also, this might be a bit of a strange question: Why is the Istanbul Convention being gynocentric a bad thing?
http://www.coe.int/t/dghl/standardsetting/convention-violence/convention/Convention%20210%20English.pdf
The convention is a resolution focused towards reducing the impact of domestic violence on women. If it wasn’t gynocentric, it’d be a mite odd. Speaking as someone who read, wrote and otherwise interacted with the EU style of resolutions for years (Model United Nations Debating, natch), the fact that the pre-ample states:
Recognising that women and girls are exposed to a higher risk of gender‐based violence
than men;
Recognising that domestic violence affects women disproportionately, and that men may
also be victims of domestic violence;
Recognising that children are victims of domestic violence, including as witnesses of
violence in the family;
Aspiring to create a Europe free from violence against women and domestic violence
is just a longer way of writing “Violence is bad, and we know this is a problem”. EU resolutions get verbose like that.
Anyway! There is an easy way to answer the question of exclusionary practices. Every convention is required by law to state to what scope it hopes to wield it’s influence, so we simply have to look up the scope measurement of this Istanbul Convention.
Until sexism is over, feminism hasn’t achieved its goals. Being able to vote and own property was the beginning, not the end.
Feminism does help men because men’s issues are caused by the patriarchy. It’s not feminists who insist on rigid gender roles. Like men being strong and unemotional all the time. It’s not feminists who mock boys who’ve been statutory raped by women or call them lucky. It’s not feminists who start wars. It’s not (USian) feminists who created the war on drugs and decided to mass incarcerate poor men of color (and BTW it is inappropriate for middle and upper class white men to appropriate that issue). It’s not feminists who fight against workplace safety regulations. All of the above has been done by patriarchal men. If you won’t to fix any of these problems, seeing feminism as the enemy will only hurt, not help your cause. If you’re just trying to justify your misogyny, anti-feminism is for you!
That being said, why should feminism focus on men? It isn’t for men. Men were never the oppressed class and are not now. As a white person I don’t expect anti-racism movements to focus on me. As a cis hetero person I don’t expect LGBTQ movements to focus on me. How much of an entitled asshole do you have to be to expect feminism to make itself about you? How dare you?
Recent citation needed.
What a fucking shock that you didn’t listen earlier when others have pointed out that there’s been backlash against feminism this whole time.
You think women against feminism is a new thing? It isn’t.
http://www.ultimatehistoryproject.com/womens-anti-suffrage-movement.html
Oh, and stop claiming you aren’t an MRA. You’re spewing all their talking points. Including the BS about Pizzey’s dog. Even she admits she has no evidence feminists did anything to her dog.
You aren’t the first troll claiming to be neutral but who just happens to think we’re so mean and awful. We see through it. You aren’t half as clever as you think you are.
Well, maybe not calling for exactly, because I’d prefer for everyone to be themselves and for a thousand glorious flowers to bloom and blah blah, but if we’re talking in favor of…
OK, fine, I admit it. It was me. I am the super seekrit undercover radfem who has taken over Europe for the purpose making boys more femmey.
Woah, that is one hell of a borked blockquote.
Sorry everyone.