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!
Also, just FYI, not all men have social anxiety, and social anxiety of the diagnosable kind is not what was being referred to in the OP.
Just stop with yes, but.
It is kind of funny how this thread is turning into an illustration of the problem David was trying to point out, huh?
Phoenician in a time of Romans,
Oh god. I know that joke.
Are we going to do “the poor dears have social anxiety” thing now?
I sincerely don’t see why those two issues are inherently connected, but I can see that you do, and I’m sorry for offending you. It was not my intent, and it was entirely a function of my ignorance of your perspective.
And I also apologize for my phrasing of my initial point; I recognize that it can easily be read as passive-aggressive or trying to dodge responsibility rather than expressing my perspective literally (i.e. that I didn’t see those two issues as inherently connected).
My apology is sincere, and I do hope that you will take it as such.
Wait, this thread isn’t about harassment at conventions.
I give up. You guys have fun, I’m going to go make some tea instead.
Dear god, I hope no one thinks I’m trying to defend MRAs in any way shape or form.
Me when strangers try to strike up conversations with me:
http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkfgs4fhu41qj43juo1_400.gif
MRAs, no. Common misogynistic cultural tropes, yes.
Obviously, men buy into the masculinity business to different extents. I was an adopted child; THAT was never a problem, but I couldn’t help but compare myself to my father, who was very strong and had been a college football player, while I was was skinny, unathletic, and wore glasses from the age of 8. Also he was a politician, extremely gregarious, and I was painfully shy. HE never showed any signs of looking down on me for my lack of masculinity, but my peers sure let me know about it. And in middle school, one of the teachers explained the concept of Caspar Milquetoast by using me as his example. In my postgraduate year at prep school, I won two Senior Superlatives: Most Afraid of Girls and Last to Get Married. (I was in fact one of the first members of my class to get married, which might imply that I was not sufficiently afraid of girls after all.) Things like that don’t do much for a dude’s self-image. The biggest thing that changed things was that in college I ran across Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which proves in great detail that femininity is a social construct, not the essential nature of women — and if femininity is a social construct, so is masculinity. That realization made me feel a lot better, and finding a woman willing to marry me, being tough enough mentally to survive a year and a half in prison, and becoming a successful hiking trip leader fixed a lot of my remaining insecurity. But I still remember how it was back when …
Cassandrakitty’s categorization of MRAs seems pretty sound to me, with the note that the members of group A (middle-aged divorced men) were probably almost all left by their wives, who probably made some fairly sharp comments on their way out the door. It was not just that they lost ownership of their wives, but that they were mostly likely confronted with an extensive dissertation on the subject of their failings as husbands (i.e., men). As to group B, the young guys who are socially awkward and view themselves as unattractive to women (and who fail to understand that it is their attitude toward women and not their physical or other attributes that makes them unattractive), for many that is a stage that they have to go through on the way to growing up. The danger is that they will become so poisoned by the MRA echo chamber crap that they will get stuck in those attitudes more or less permanently. The worst case is that a few might become the next Elliott Rodgers — although I’m not sure whether he was so much influenced by the PUAhate group or just seized on their rhetoric to explain his pre-existing emotional issues — and anything that helps someone like that focus his rage on actual people is a bad thing. (I found WHTM during an attempt to try to figure out what the hell was going on with Rodger.)
Cassandrakitty: As to your father (who is a year younger than I am), I would guess that whatever insecurity he might have acquired in his youth (which may have been a relatively small dose) was probably repaired by a combination of successes in life, and by the fact that most people learn to become more accepting of themselves as they pass along through adulthood. You know him as what he became, not what he might have been in early adulthood. I think that is generally at least as true of women as it is of men — that the insecurity tends to decrease with age. The problem is that adolescence is tough, and there are casualties, and then some men never have enough little victories to compensate.
Gaebolga,
I don’t think that’s what you’re intending to do, but cassandrakitty is right. Maybe just think through what you wrote and you’ll see it.
No sarcasm or offense intended, but which tropes do you mean?
@ lea
I’m totally cool with strangers talking to me in a non-sexual way, but if they approach and rapidly initiate a more sexualized conversation?
More women appear to suffer from social fears than men, so that side of things is BS:
Behind a paywall: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0887618511001411
Also seems to be behind a paywall: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9653680
So women are more socially anxious than men, and also at greater risk of being killed by the opposite sex.
Can we end this “discussion” now? Please?
Lea,
All I can come up with is the construction of my phrase “Not in any way like being afraid for one’s life, of course, but …” as a backhanded way of linking two things.
The reason I included that phrase was because – in light of the subject matter of this thread – it seemed inappropriate to ignore the fact that women’s concerns about being killed are not even in the same league as any insecurities most men feel about approaching women. It’s because they’re so drastically different in magnitude that I don’t see the inherent connection ( beyond the fact that they both involve interacting with the opposite gender).
Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could have expressed that point better? Again, I’m not trying to be sarcastic or passive aggressive with this, and I apologize if it’s coming off that way.
Oooo, the invisibility cloak from Harry Potter would be great. I need one of those.
…or we could just drop the whole thing.
Actually my dad was only 24 when I was born, so I remember him as a young man, and know people who knew him when he was even younger. He’s always been pretty indifferent to all the “you must prove your manliness” stuff.
Adolescence is tough for everyone, not just boys. Many girls spend most of their adolescence feeling like they have a target with “please feel free to creep on me, random older men” glued to their back, and very few make it through that stage without suffering some form of sexual assault.
Yep.
Gaebolga ,
Thank you.
OK, this is all I have the patience for. The connection isn’t between women’s experiences and men’s experiences, it’s between the stuff the guys David quoted are saying and the stuff you were saying. Yours was expressed more politely and with less implied violence than theirs, but the underlying framing is eerily similar.
Which is why most feminists are really damn tired of having this conversation.
Sometimes I’m actually sorta almost-but-not-really glad the M so-called RM exists, because they say shit like the stuff David quoted, which demonstrate the deep-seated misogyny and sexism that feminism fights.
I mean at least there’s somewhere you can point to where this shit is being said outright, you know? You don’t just have to make a case for it based on inference. It’s blatant. Men believe shit like what indigoanasazi said. And that such fears trump women’s fears of bodily harm.
gaaaahh. I can’t even.
Gaebolga: It’s about context. An innocuous statement in one context can become a charged and potentially harmful statement in another. If the context is a discussion about how folks are trying to create a false equivalence (or even invert the very obvious ‘badness’ ratio) between two things, then statements about how bad the lesser-bad thing is are still going to come across as attempting to re-argue the point.
One good cue–if you really need to include a qualifying clause, it’s very likely that you’re trying to introduce a statement that, on some level, doesn’t belong in this particular conversation.
Context-breaching is a big, big part of male privilege as a whole. It crops up in a whole host of discussions like this, where men will hop in with true, innocuous statements that still have the effect of derailing the original conversation’s thrust. It isn’t always necessary to bring up every fact, especially those not actually in contention. Remembering that will help you better mesh with the community here.
(There’s an inverse of this situation that is equally disruptive–I usually call it The Worst Thing In the World Fallacy. Basically, when the base conversation is about something bad, the disruptive poster says, “Well, yes, that’s bad, but why talk about that when there’s this other thing that’s even worse?” In both cases, the poster comes across as attempting to control the conversation and minimize the core topic. You’re saying that wasn’t your intent, and seem sincere, to the extent that internet judgement is possible. Believe me, I haven’t always been very good on this one myself, and it was this place, in particular, that helped me get better. So I hope you stick around and work on it.)