Once upon a time, you may recall, women were denied the right to vote, couldn’t own property, were prevented from having careers of their own. Well, it turns out that all of these pesky “restrictions” weren’t really restrictions at all! They were protections that men provided women out of the goodness of their hearts. Men protected women from the terrible burdens of voting and property-owning and so forth, because they just cared about women so much.
Or at least that’s what a lot of Men’s Rights Activists seem to think, judging from this highly edifying discussion in the Men’s Rights subreddit.
![rogersmith25 325 points 1 day ago As I read /r/mensrights[1] more and more, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that the primary female privilege is empathy. If a woman or girl is hurt, people care. If women are kidnapped, there is international media attention. If women are killed, their deaths are highlighted. If there is a conflict between a man and a woman, then people will jump in to defend the woman. If women are under-represented in an area, people want to take action to make things "equal". If a man is hurt, it's funny. If men are kidnapped, we hear silence. If men are killed, their deaths are glossed over. If there is a conflict between a man and a woman, people will attack the man. If men are under-represented in an area, the president will call it a "victory" (as he did regarding the female majority in colleges). Basically, people are programmed to have more empathy for women than men. 200 years ago, that empathy manifested itself in keeping women safe from harm by having them stay home to raise the family rather than die on battlefields or toil in mines. It was empathy not misogyny that kept women from having careers. Present-day, work is safe in offices, so today we have campaigns for women to earn more money and yet have more "balanced" lives where they can both raise a family and earn an "equal" career and, in other words, "have it all". permalink save report give gold reply [–]sierranevadamike 82 points 23 hours ago wow... as a history major, I never looked at the "repression" of women throughout history as empathy rather than misogyny. I NEVER considered this option.. blew my mind.. thank you](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/empathy1.png?resize=567%2C594&ssl=1)
It wasn’t just sierranevadamike who was “blown away” by rogersmith25’s comment: the Men’s Rights mods were so impressed that they reposted it and pinned it as the top post in their subreddit.
Apparently every day is “Opposite Day” on the Men’s Rights subreddit.
EDIT: Here, courtesy of Cloudiah, some more pictures of girls and women protected from that big nasty world out there.
@Tessa:
HTML is supposed to be dedicated to the form of the page, whereas CSS is supposed to be dedicated towards the style. Different style pages might want to emphasize text in different ways, so it’s better to mark the content as “emphasized” rather than directly saying it should be in italics. <strong> works in a similar way with bold text.
OT:
I have put off learning coding for too long. I’ve got to get better at this.
To Pintrest!
*”gallops” away banging coconuts*
I can code em to emphasize in different ways while i is always italics. The most common ways em is used is actually used to bold fairly often.
@Phoenician in a time of Romans
I’m not going to argue with you. I’m really not in the mood for arguing about capitalism right now. Feel free to discuss it with someone else here, but not me.
Dear MRAs, Let women protect men for a little while.
Yeah, I was wondering if that history major who was impressed by the White Man’s Burden argument against women’s rights was planning to drop out of college himself. He’s so oppressed right now, spending his days reading books and going to classes and making fatuous posts on the Internet, exactly the kind of hard work women used to be so kindly protected from. I’m worried for his poor overheated little brain.
Lea: Of all the things you could have commented on, you thought Ally’s politics were the most pressing issue that needed to be argued about?
I’m not arguing. I’m just pointing out that for a certain range of tasks, bureaucracy is teh best solution people seem to have come up with so far. People like to reflexively put it down without considering what it DOES do well.
Quoted For Fucking Truth. Systems have to be run by people. Complex systems need to be learned and administered full time, not by (presumably) volunteers doing it from the goodness of their hearts. They require rules and guidelines. That means – gasp – bureaucracy!
Bina:
Perfect. XD
I admit to not having the highest opinion of bureaucracy right now, seeing as how the state has fucking dropped the ball multiple times on my disability, my food stamps, AND my health insurance now. Seriously, I can’t buy a fucking loaf of bread without having to spend half an hour on hold, getting to some difficult part of time, and filling out a bunch of forms.
Most recently: they now have us down as two separate but identical people with two different health insurances (insert multi joke here), and if I bring their attention to it, they’ll axe the healthcare I actually USE. Because BUREAUCRACY! And then I wouldn’t be able to change the remaining healthcare back to the one I use until November. Which means no shrink appointments except what I pay out of pocket!
Fortunately, their own bureaucracy fail saved me: their system was down, and so they requested I call them back to tell them about the error so they can take away my needed healthcare. HAHAHA NOPE.
RE: hellkell
Not ot mention that “culture of death” is a favorite phrase of anit-abortionists in general.
I honestly wish we DID have more of a culture of death. It’d mean I could actually talk about my end-of-life plans without taboo. (Yeah, I know, I’m only twenty-six, but honestly, considering my life recently, I think it’s totally reasonable to want to plan to take matters of my existence into my own hands when it comes to healthcare bills I’d never be able to pay. I sure as hell ain’t going down like my grandfather!)
RE: insanitybytes22
So when a man protects me “against my will”, that is abuse and oppression, but when the Gov pays for bc, welfare, food stamps, medicaid, that isn’t?
I’m sorry, I didn’t realize the government forced you to use any of those things! I also didn’t realize that you are legally obligated to pay taxes for those things, when in fact plenty of people use vows of poverty to try and avoid that.
I’ve never been punched, raped, or threatened by my food stamps. So your comparison makes absolutely no fucking sense. Also, I’m a gay disabled man. Where on earth will I find someone to “protect” me, if these social programs don’t exist? (And if you say family or private charities, I will LAUGH.)
Gotta point out that if someone considers themselves to be a communist they probably shouldn’t be arguing that capitalism is bad partly because bureaucracy, given that communist states have historically tended to have massive bureaucracies.
(Inserts about a billion jokes about the most popular word in the vocabulary of anyone who worked for the communist-era Russian government being “nyet” here.)
LBT: I hear you. Oregon legalized assisted suicide a few back.
Also from a Gen X perspective I wish insanitybytes had chosen a different nym, because every time I read it I expect someone to start singing My Shirona.
Or that horrifically catchy Lisa Loeb song.
Great, I just earwormed myself.
Thanks for showing the link below with the pictures of the little girls, goes to show how women had no rights, made shit money, still took care of the babies, all while working as hard as men. I remember reading about how owners of garment factories would pay female workers by the garment, but would pay make workers by the hour. So the men could take their time while the women would have to hurry and make as many garments as possible, and still only end up with a fraction of the money the men made. Yea. Some protection.
Sorry about that.
Eh, it’s better than trying to figure out how you’d get services in a classless society with no bureaucracy.
RE: hellkell
Oregon legalized assisted suicide a few back.
I remember that! I listened to the debate on NPR in my crawlspace under the eaves! I voted yes for the one in MA, but it didn’t pass. I’d rather NOT have to depend on an understanding doctor to control our end-of-life plans, myself.
Thanks for the donotlink to IB’s* website where I found this gem of hers in response to a comment:
I find it darkly amusing that patronizing people who are wrong, who are corrected by multiple commenters with multiple examples, accuse those commenters of being patronizing. At least I know she read the comments here, even though she didn’t address them, because of the turnip reference.
IB, how brave and honest you are for running back to your blog and claiming superior intellect and victory when you repeatedly got your arse handed to you on a plate here. Nothing you have alleged here has held up under scrutiny, and you were posting comments that were offensive – people were telling you this. That means you are a troll.
* that acronym conjures up Irritable Bowel for me. I will continue to use it.
As a Blackadder fan I am deeply offended by her attempting to associate herself with turnips. Baldrick deserves better.
Easy solution? Stop acting like one.
Easy solution? Stop acting like one.
Is this intentionally a way back-handed way of calling a commenter an able-ist slur without using the slur itself?
I’d be more inclined to treat insanitybytes22 seriously if she showed an actual understanding of what disability, medicaid, food stamps, etc. mean to actual poor people, and showed an understanding of feminism.
My favorite feminist writers: bell hooks, Janet Mock, and Kate Bornstein. Two of the three have done sex work, at least one has dealt with homelessness, none of the three were brought up wealthy and none of them are wealthy now, far as I know. Bornstein can be fail at race shit, but Mock and hooks both talk about race and class, and Mock and Bornstein both talk about trans stuff.
And best of all, ALL of them are goddamn accessible, because I really dislike the obscenely over-academic gender theory crap. (LOOKING AT YOU JUDITH BUTLER.)
@Michael: the turnip truck reference on this blog was:
IB (chuckle) was the one that added the moron reference in the comment on her blog.
No. I was quoting, or is that not OK with you?
“Minimum bribe level?”
“One turnip… oh wait, I don’t want to price myself out of the market.”
(Should we call IB’s cowardly retreat as “struggling back on the turnip truck?”)