Listening in on conversations amongst Men’s Rights Activists is often like taking a brief journey into an alternate universe, where cats are dogs and water is dry and men are the most oppressed creatures on planet earth.
Over in the Men’s Rights subreddit the other day, some of the regulars seem to have just discovered a famous feminist quotation, a paraphrase of something Margaret Atwood once wrote:
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.
A number of the Men’s Rights Redditors were indignant that anyone could possibly suggest that women have more to fear from men than the other way around. And so, collectively, they came up with a rebuttal of sorts.
OneBigCosmicHorror began by suggesting that the real fear men have of women is much more primal:
Ah, but isn’t being laughed at basically the same as castration?
Indigoanasazi explained:
Oh, you silly ladies with your fears of being killed by men. We men face an even greater peril — the ever-present threat of laugh-castration!
You’ve now got me thinking of Mr Miyagi in The Karate Kid II : “For one with no forgiveness in heart, humiliation worse than death.”
A lesson the MRAs have apparently taken a bit too literally…
So what they’re saying is, the quote is super wrong, but also it is exactly right, because a lady embarrassing you is the same as having your genitals removed?
So many ironies that escape these men. They don’t seem to realize that it’s the cushy lives they lead that afford them the luxury of sitting around on their over privileged asses and whine about how tough their life is. Their over privileged, North American lives wouldn’t even be possible without the presence of working women.
When the MRM says “Men have to fight to be considered men”, they don’t mean fighting for their lives.
So social humiliation (or rather, pathetic insecurities about it) is worse than the fear of actually being murdered?
Figures.
I don’t know what’s worse, their leaps in “logic” here or the idea that all men truly fear that what women will do to them is cut off their junk.
So, um, maybe that thing where manhood is socially constructed to be about status and dominance is kind of a problem? And maybe we should change that? You know, like feminists have been saying since the 60s?
That would be a nice change. The whole macho masculinity thing that has existed for so many years is frankly tiresome. As a man, I’ve never grasped it, to be honest.
Talk about sharp wit. I propose we call this Laughstration.
As I recall, elsewhere in that same thread they wax on about how any woman who fears male violence is simply hysterical and neurotic. Such a human rights movement.
I would say it was funny how often they attribute to feminism problems that are actually more closely linked to anti-feminist movements, but then again they attribute everything they don’t like to feminism.
Men afraid of being figuratively castrated by humiliation is worse than women being afraid of being literally murdered.
…but they aren’t misogynists. Heavens no. /s
Every time I read their fucking gross attempts at constructing gender equivalencies between things that are not equivalent at all, I’m reminded of Warren “for a man, paying to be rejected can feel just like rape” Farrell. Walking over all the bricks in Legoland (separately) still wouldn’t be punishment enough for being such a huge asswipe as these fuckers.
Also, I don’t get their castration obsession. Is the feminist-owned media hushing up all the numerous cases of castration performed by SPINSTERS with box-cutters? I must be super privileged* to have never been threatened with castration by random women, nor seen such a thing happen to anyone else.
*I am, but for different reasons than OneBigCosmicHorror claims.
Because men actually physically harming women is unheard of, but women castrating men is so commonplace?
Dammit, Taitaisanchez, I came in here precisely to make that same joke. *pouts*
Okay, that’s enough of that. Hm… This would explain why they got so upset about the Confused Cats blog, though–it was a very successful way to laugh at them. So many metaphorical balls, metaphorically lopped off and tossed into the metaphorical trash. Good times, good times.
yeah, is this a common fear for the misters? I wonder if there are any numbers available on men castrated by women versus women killed by men.
As an interesting aside, well interesting to me anyways, I’ve never been afraid I was about to be physically castrated while asking a woman on date, despite generally being attracted to athletic woman who would probably physically have a decent chance of being physically capable of the act. Oddly enough I’ve also spent my entire life as a giant doofus and thus frequently being laughed seems to have somehow left me with functioning genitals. Guess I must be somehow castration proof. Maybe I can build a superhero identity around that.
ratzilla: I do half-recall hearing about some studies that showed that the two most common nightmares among men regarding women were either castration scenarios or cannibalism scenarios. That said, I can’t recall ever actually finding either concern worth spending time thinking about, even during the height of the Lorena Bobbit media frenzy.
But wait…I thought the ultimate goal of the womenz was to steal men’s precious bodily fluids so that men would be permanently enslaved by being forced to pay child support or to drive kids to soccer practice. Can’t do that with a gelding.
So confused.
Maybe you harvest the sperm first, prior to the castration. Proper planning is important.
According to the FBI, from 1993 to 2007, about 1500 women a year are killed by intimate male partners, compared with a little over 500 men a year killed by female partners. So, it’s about a 3:1 ratio and has been pretty consistently over the years.
Like most violent crime statistics, both the absolute number and the rate appear to be declining. Anyone who claims that crime is rampant in the US is either grossly misinformed or is lying. There’s no third option.
The number of castrations performed criminally by women against men is so rare that no statistics are kept. But given the ENORMOUS media attention that attends them, it’s probably safe to say that it happens about once every 3 years or so in the US, Canada, UK, and western Europe combined. Usually as a punishment for the man sleeping with someone else.
Safe to say that your lifetime risk of castration if you’re a serially monogamous male is about the same as your lifetime risk of being eaten by a great white shark while being run over by a road grader.
Is this something that they’re actually worried about? I don’t think I’ve ever thought about being castrated, like ever in my life. Now I think about it, the idea of losing my balls is pretty traumatic, but not drastically more so than, say, losing a limb. If, in some nightmare scenario, someone gave me the choice, it’d probably be a toss-up between my balls and my right arm.
But maybe this is because the feminised society in which I live has conditioned me to not value the immense power and manly virtue contained mostly within my balls. Yeah, I think that’s it.
I don’t think they’re entirely off base, actually, in arguing that being laughed at is a form of social castration for many men. I’ve experienced situations with men more than once in which even just generally laughing in their presence caused them to assume that I was mocking them, and there are widespread taboos about women’s laughter. Witness the b.s. in Turkey recently, where an official declared in a speech that women should not be laughing in public and that chaste women didn’t do such things. Witness young women the world over who cover their mouths with their hands as soon as they crack a smile, much less actually laugh. Witness members of my own family being embarrassed by my laughing at any volume louder than a kitten’s sneeze in public.
Where these guys are very much wrong is in their contention that men fear women’s laughter because women are socially more powerful than men. Men, in fact, fear women’s laughter because women are socially LESS powerful than men and considered lesser beings. To be laughed at by a “lesser being” is humiliating, from the pervasive mindset that posits men as basically superior and bases men’s sense of masculinity on an appearance of possessing unyielding strength and commanding universal respect.
In other words, Atwood is absolutely correct. In the patriarchy, a woman laughing at a man is an unforgiveable act of aggression, because she is asserting her ability to see men as human beings, rather than gods. MRAs live in a fun-house world in which this “aggression” doesn’t spring from humiliation, but is rather part of their experience as victims of a world in which women are their social superiors. It’s more than a little ironic that these are the same guys who rail against feminism for instilling a “victim mentality” in women.
Yeah, getting shot down in flames by an attractive woman hurts. I assume that sleeping with an attractive man and then having him try to get away as fast as he can afterwards hurts a woman just as much if not more. So we go home, lick our wounds, and get back in the game until we find somebody where there’s a mutual attraction. This is called life. There is no sulking in life — not if you want to have a real relationship.
Kevin K: Actually, even the few “wife’s revenge for cheating” stories weren’t actual castration–instead, it’s often a story about the woman taking advantage of a nap to apply some superglue, usually in a creative fashion. Is it wrong, and likely very painful to deal with? Yes. Is it humiliating? Probably. Is it castration? Nope, but the boyos most likely do not see it that way–ANYTHING that impugns the peen is just as bad as dipping it into a blender, apparently.