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.
@deniseelisa – true dat! Black men as a subset of men really don’t count!
You know, I get that this rant is about something other than empathy for women (loss of privilege anyone?), but it is really annoying that when there is a reason to be empathetic toward men (the death in Ferguson, Robin Williams’ suicide), they don’t show any empathy at all because of some other affiliation.
I can still remember the feeling of loss when the lead singer of INXS committed suicide or when Freddy Mercury died…. and that’s been a while! Empathy – you either have it or you don’t.
In fact, for the turn-of-the-20th-century robber barons and robber baron wannabes, having an ostentatiously useless and expensive wife was a status symbol. It meant you were so rich that you didn’t NEED the unpaid labour provided by your spouse, which everybody knew about but didn’t really acknowledge.
…The degree of craniorectal insertion they’ve collectively achieved is on the same or greater level as holocaust deniers.
I have a little story. My (now deceased) grandmother was a schoolteacher in a one-room schoolhouse in a small town in Missouri when she was a young woman. According to her sister and cousins, she was a highly intelligent woman, but back then, young women didn’t have a lot of career choices. One they did have was teaching school.
Grandmother taught school for approximately 6 years then suddenly stopped. “Why?” you may ask? Well, she got married to my grandfather, you see. Back then, when a woman married, it was considered proper for her to quit whatever silly little job she might have, like teaching.* I mean, it wasn’t like she was doing anything important, right? So ended my grandmother’s career. Could she have continued to teach? Yeah, in theory. I don’t think there were any laws against it, but if she would have tried, she would find that no one would hire such a scandalous woman as she to teach impressionable children. She should be at home, tending to her husband, as a godly woman should do, dagnabit!
So when I see MRAs say the shit they do about women in the workplace, I really want to upend a port-a-potty over their heads.
*I don’t know if this was common in other areas of the country, but it apparently happened in this area of the Midwest.
“As a history major…”
Speaking as someone who regularly marks undergrad history papers, I can just imagine the hot mess this clown would give me, considering that he finds the OP’s thesis mind-blowing. While new interpretations drive history as a discipline, they generally they need to be backed up with some kind of archival or oral evidence, which this argument isn’t. Women were hardly pampered on settler frontiers, they were expected not only handle domestic chores, cooking, having children, and look after children, they were also expected to help keep farms running, which is physically taxing work. Not just taking care of gardens, chickens, and cows but ploughing, harvesting, and threshing. Women were also well represented in early nineteenth-century factories, just look up the Lowell Mill Girls. Women worked hard in places like Canada, the U.S., and Australia.
My mother always claimed to be single when looking for jobs in the early 30s, because businesses didn’t want to hire married women. She had to ‘fess up — like many thousands (millions?) of other working women when Social Security came along and you had to tell the truth about your marital status to register for it.
@theladyzombie, Yes that was common out West too.
It’s still kind of true that women are expected to leave their jobs when they get married, even in the US. A young woman who gets married is expected by the business world to start having children shortly thereafter, which means maternity leave, and a lot of time off to take the kids to the doctor or scramble if daycare evaporates for the day, etc. Some companies will subtly force such women out.
“Women were hardly pampered on settler frontiers.” Many women didn’t mange to change out of their day clothes for a week or more because there was so much worth they could only afford to lie down for a few hours when the reached total exhaustion. There is a story about the Rosebrooks, the first settlers in the upper Connecticut Valley near present-day Colebrook, NH. Their cow wandered off across the Connecticut River (which is wide and shallow during the summer) and the woman had to lock her two-year-old in their cabin, throw the baby in a sling, and wade across the river to get the cow back. Just a little sliver of daily life.
One of the best things on this subject is Robert Frost’s poem “A Servant to Servants,” which is a monologue spoken by a severely overworked farm woman who suffers from severe depression.
@theladyzombie
Same for my grandmother. Before she was married she was a secretary. I have seen some of her shorthand books and they are sooooo cool! 🙂
However, when she got married she had to quit. I don’t know exactly what type of pressure it was though, but I do know that she didn’t have much choice.
This was Australia in the 40s and 50s.
My ex MIL was going to go to college on a scholarship, I *believe* this was the early to mid 1960’s.
Well, she got married. So the college withdrew the scholarship money.
My husband had maiden aunts who never married because they wanted to keep teaching. Teachers were often “spinsters”. They were sisters who lived together their whole lives. considering what being married in rural Kentucky might have meant for them, I’d say they made a wise choice.
If…women were never permitted to do dangerous roles, there would be no human race. The historical level of maternal deaths was about one in a hundred births. In maternity institutions, in the 1800s (which seems to be about when half of these guys are placing their theories), it was forty percent.
Forty percent!
And even if it did not directly kill you, it certainly led to the usual issues which were not as easy to deal with when you were also working to maintain a household.
Mostly I am reminded of an old Scottish book my partner has where the farmers are musing over a suitable wife for their sons, and listing the required attributes – looks came a long way down on the list compared to ‘able to lift a newborn calf up’ and ‘can run up and down the hills after a lost sheep’.
Empathy? Empathy kept women from pursuing an education, a career, vote, own property, etc. That’s…not empathy. I think the word they’re looking for is sexism.
But then, these guys wouldn’t know empathy if it bit them in the ass.
sparky: Empathy? Empathy kept women from pursuing an education, a career, vote, own property, etc.
Wait – whatever happened to “women are unfeeling heartless bitches”?
sparky
<Snooty>Weeeeell, if it bit them in the ass, it wouldn’t really be empthy…</Snooty>
Phoenician in a time of Romans
No, it’s men’s empathy for women. They feel soooo much empathy for women, they must prevent them from being touched by dangerous jobs and wars (in fantasy MRA history that is).
The stupidity and historical inaccuracy of the claims that women didn’t do difficult and dangerous has already been covered. So I’ll move on to the other false claim. That women and girls get tons of news coverage when they are killed and abducted.
That’s true. If they are white, attractive and middle or upper class. Preferably blonde. Then they’ll get plenty of coverage. Poor women? Women of color? Not so much.
I vividly remember that right around the time the murder of JonBenet Ramsey there was a little four year old black girl that was shot and killed while caught in the crossfire during a drive by in my metro area. I remember thinking that the little minute long blurb on the local news was all that child would get. Nobody would remember her name but the people who knew her. Yet JonBenet Ramsey was the lead news story for weeks, maybe months and people still remember her. Would that be the case if she was poor and black? Hell no.
Fuck these guys. Women and girls are killed or go missing without many people noticing or caring all the fucking time. Particularly those that are the descendants of the people (men and women, boys and girls) who built the US without any credit, recognition, payment or even choice in the matter. The white guy with the gun sure doesn’t look like the oppressed one in this picture.
Then there’s all the violence that happens to Native America women on reservations – some of it from outsiders that take advantage of jurisdictional issues to freely commit sex crimes against women- that goes mostly unremarked upon.
Also, how many sex workers are killed in this country without anyone giving a shit? I’m not sure anyone is even bothering to keep track.
This rant is getting long now so I’ll stop for a bit.
The level of empathy I feel coming off the MRA’s is… underwhelming.
Dudes, mining and military aren’t the only two dangerous fields. Try being a canary in the TNT factories during WW1 (not as cute and feathery as it sounds), childbirth prior to antibiotics and sterilization techniques, and…
There are a lot of dangerous jobs.
How the heck does empathy and wanting to protect people from danger make denying people the right to vote and own property make any sense?
“Here! Work with these toxic chemicals ’til your skin turns yellow, but don’t go getting any ideas about voting into your pretty little head.”
Also, can I second WWTH?
Same empathy that’s now taking the responsibility of managing their reproductive choices out of the hands of the women in the USA? So they don’t have to worry their pretty little heads about whether or not they’re doing the right thing using their health insurance to obtain contraception, or deciding if and when they want to have a family?
Strange, I’m not familiar with this alternate meaning of “empathy” to denote “self-serving idiocy spun to sugar-coat centuries of reducing women’s agency”.
These guys took Hamlet’s line “I am cruel only to be kind” just a LITTLE too seriously and globally, y’all.
I can’t wait to see this guy’s face when he gets an F or gets dropped out. “Feminist conspiracy!” He’ll be thinking.
It seems like “dangerous job” is defined by MRA as “any job that (we think) is done mostly by men that has a risk of death or injury”–which lets them ignore female-dominated fields as dangerous jobs. Like clothing manufacturing–besides the sweatshop conditions, sometimes the buildings collapse, like so: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324874204578441912031665482
Or sex work, which I don’t think anyone can dispute has a high risk of violence.
Or nursing, which–besides the violence–often requires lifting grown adults, exposure to bodily fluids, exposure to people with nasty infectious diseases.
Nail salons–there is a reason the workers wear masks.
Vet tech–you get bit. A lot.
Historically, both cooking and laundry were dangerous jobs almost exclusively done by women, with harsh chemicals, boiling water, and open flames (and dresses, which didn’t help).
Actually, in the US, most job-related mortality, especially for common jobs, comes from transportation–i.e., the most dangerous job in the US is driving for your job. (Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2013/08/22/americas-10-deadliest-jobs-2/) The second highest cause of mortality was violence.
Also, my job requires me to work with concentrated acids (in fairly large quantities, in a hood), a known carcinogen (in very low quantities, on the bench) and a suspected inhalation carcinogen (in medium quantities, and usually in a bio-safety cabinet). I wouldn’t classify it as particularly dangerous, though.
Actually, the only injury I’ve received on this job is ergonomic–something about pipetting in the biosafety cabinet (especially for several hours at a time in the first couple weeks of work) fucked my shoulder up so badly I spent all weekend with a heating pad on it. I only get twinges now, but goddamn it, that hurt. I think it was the confined space–I had to wrench my shoulder up to be able to use my elbow to get a full range of motion in the cabinet.