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 thinks radical feminism is mainstream? Yeah…no.
Just for a laugh – Niall, please define what you think radical feminism means, and how it’s different from liberal feminism or cultural feminism.
Hey all, pretty sure Niall is treating domestic violence and prison rape as two separate issues. He’s borking them horribly, but I didn’t read it as him saying that prison rape accounted for symmetry in domestic violence. They were two separate points.
@Fibinachi:
That was pretty impressive. But yeah, the argument that that this particular resolution is too focused on women is like complaining that feminism is too focused on women’s issues. There is an imbalance, they want to address one side of that imbalance. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with that unless it was actively preventing issues on the side from being addressed as well.
And still Niall is wrong about the resolution only applying to women.
Having a degree in social science doesn’t mean you know what radical feminism is, niall. So far what you are describing as radical feminism sounds nothing like what I’ve ever read about it.
If you asked people who complain about radical feminism who someone like Twisty Faster is, they’d have no idea what you were talking about. There are real radical feminists out there, but those are not the radical feminists that anti-feminists complain about. To them, feminism is radical.
I have a feeling niall is one of those types who thinks that Anita Sarkeesian gently pointing out that sometimes video games can be sexist is somehow extremist and radical.
What I want to know is, if that’s radical, then what’s regular feminism?
@Kirby
http://www.unric.org/en/violence-against-women/27000-13-countries-sign-new-convention-in-istanbul
If he’s claiming that rape is gender symmetrical (which he is) then he can’t include prison rape, though, since that’s not being done to men by women. Let’s not pretend that it isn’t obvious how precisely he was trying to muddy the waters and hope nobody would notice there.
I really have seen dudes describe Jessica Valenti as a radical feminist. It was pretty funny.
@niall:
No, I mean a source for your claim that the recommendation language was added in only after some countries refused to sign on.
@cassandrakitty:
Yeah, he could be trying to muddy the waters with rape. Hell, just trying to lump prison rape with other forms of rape is evidence. I just don’t think he’s saying prison rape affects domestic violence symmetry and statistics. He could believe that for all I know, but I don’t think he was saying it.
What was that about men being victimized equally to women?
MRAs love to ignore that fact that women face serious domestic violence more than men. They like to draw false equivalencies between being slapped and being murdered or severely beaten. Obviously slapping your partner is still wrong and I’m all for victims of less severe physical abuse being able to get help regardless of their gender.
They also forget that some men were abused by their male partners. http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/lgbt/news/2011/06/14/9850/domestic-violence-in-the-lgbt-community/
MRAs spend all their time trying to prove that women are bad. In doing so they miss out on helping a segment of the male population that is in real need.
I didn’t suggest that he was trying to conflate domestic violence and rape, so I’m not quite seeing what your point is.
@cassandrakitty:
Found out what was going on. Back when you said this:
Both I and Niall thought you were saying “gender symmetric domestic violence,” because Niall used the word “symmetric” to describe domestic violence. I just got confused. My bad.
Ah, that makes more sense. Niall is pretty dim but I was assuming that even he realizes that rape and domestic violence are separate issues. Why he thought that sneaking the prison rape stats into a conversation about how women rape men just as much as men rape women (um, no) would work remains unclear, but I’m pretty sure that was his intention.
(Which he’ll deny, of course.)
Not to nitpick, but he used the term “symmetric” to describe gender violence, not domestic violence. He was applying symmetry to all forms of assault. Whether or not he meant to is a different issue.
@weirwoodtreehugger:
They also take societal pressures on men, like shaming them for coming forward about being abused or rape, and assume that its feminists that do the shaming. Cause anything bad happening to men must be because of feminists, right? Then they have to do this mental gymnastic to figure out “how” women are doing such dastardly things, and decide that advocating for women must be disenfranchising men.
Oops, italics fail.
@bunnybunny:
Good catch. I may be a god of commenting, lord over the block-quote monster, but apparently I still need practice getting the quote right. 🙂
@Kirby http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/21/us-more-men-raped-than-women
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-13/politics/raise-the-crime-rate/
“In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women”
No matter what way any of you whingers look at it, men face the same problems.
Still, no one on this thread that I’ve seen has acknowledged that. Seems many are in denial, or actively choose to conflate unrelated nonsense and throw insults.
Is there anyone on this site that will acknowledge men face more problems that women in US society – by a long shot.
Yeah, that too. Not sure why kirby thought that part was referring just to domestic violence.
Ooh, I taught him a new word!
On the plus side, meltdown seems to be imminent. Perhaps it will be more entertaining than he has been thus far.
I like how quickly that escalated from, “WAH, no one will admit men have problems!” to “BTW men have more problems than women too actually, sniff.”
You’re making the mistake of thinking I’m blaming feminism for all men’s woes. I’m not. Nor have I at any point on this thread. My comments have been fair and measured and I’ve made no personal attacks on anyone that didn’t attack me first.
Keep it up, whingers! He’s gonna pop soon.