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.
dustedeste– Risk is my middle name! Mild-mannered housewife by day, evil acronym defiler by night!
Eeek! 12, all by your lonesome? No, not safe at all, for anybody.
My grandmother had Alzheimers, and she could literally drink herself to death with water due to congestive heart failure and cardio-renal failure. Basically, if she had too much water, it kept her already damaged heart from beating, and if she didn’t have enough, it damaged her kidneys, and there was no happy medium. She was also mobile to the very end. You see where this is going…
I always wondered how many waitresses thought we were sadists when we stopped them refilling her water at restaurants–probably not the ones who saw us carry her out to take to the emergency room.
Probably already been said (I confess! I’m posting before reading 102 comments) but I guess all those Factory Acts and Mining Acts were aimed at totally imaginary women and children working in factories and mines in the early 19th century.
“When men are kidnapped, we hear silence”?
Really? Do these people read the news? The Canadian embassy has had pieces run on it by every newspaper and news website in my city once every few weeks covering the clusterfuck of dual citizen journalists suffering from kidnappings and unlawful detentions, only one of which is a woman.
And the notion that men are expendable (therefore amusing to see injured) certainly isn’t coming from people interested in dismantling obstructive gender roles.
It’s too bad I’m late to the party, but everything I would’ve said to insanitybytes has been said. Must be that feminist hivemind imposing reality… or something…
@AllyS Lesbians, and probably gay men too, are often ignored in “symbiosis” models. For convenience, I would assume, since our success stories can’t be explained by their theory. We’re like the strings in string theory.
Certainly there has been a good deal to criticize in the feminist movement in the past. Certainly it has been less than totally inclusive in the past. But the answer to that is to encourage previously under-represented groups of women (and men) to take an active role and increase their influence in feminism. If the message to housewives, non-college educated women, poor women, and women of color is “stay away from feminism, it is not for you,” then feminism will never become more inclusive.
“When men are kidnapped, we hear silence”?
/sarcasm on
As a great example of the silence and doing nothing, exhibit A: the 52 Americans held hostage in Iran in 1979-1981. Clearly it was because 2 of the hostages were women (see http://www.aarp.org/politics-society/history/info-01-2011/iranian_hostage_kathryn_koob.html for the gender breakdown) that the US negotiated (see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2009/11/30-years-after-the-hostage-crisis.html)
And there was no airtime on that hostage-taking, apart from all about the womenz.
/sarcasm off
You know, insanitybytes, there are feminists who’re WOC, who’re working class, and who’re based outside the Anglosphere and the Euro zone. Lots of them, in fact. They don’t appear on American TV because almost nobody who’s not white and privileged gets to appear on American TV. That’s not a feminism problem, it’s an American media problem.
The fact that you are apparently not aware of all the many feminists who’re not white, or who’re working class, or who’re based in India or the Middle East or South America or Asia, though? That’s on you. You should know about those women, but I guess you’re just too damn lazy to go find any activist work that isn’t spoonfed to you by the media.
Checkmate, anti-feminist asshole.
insanitybytes has said before zie’s not a feminist, and now is keen to demonstrate it.
And of course the US is the entire world, isn’t it.
How ’bout you fuck yourself instead of pretending that working-class non-USian feminists don’t exist, eh?
Or how about telling me what my plumber grandfather was protecting my grandmother from? How did getting her pregnant at least ten times protect her? How did he protect her from the sheer exhausting drudgery of running a house in 1930s Australia, with no electricity, hand-washing that huge family’s clothes in a copper, cooking all the meals on an old range, keeping hens and three milking cows and never doing a thing himself because that wasn’t the man’s role?
In short: protection from other men, fuckwit. As in, a protection racket.
Thread: am I the only one thinking Quite Fucking True needs to be said by Stephen Fry?
Kittehserf: Probably already been said (I confess! I’m posting before reading 102 comments) but I guess all those Factory Acts and Mining Acts were aimed at totally imaginary women and children working in factories and mines in the early 19th century.
Imagine how much worse the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire would have been if five sixths of those killed hadn’t been “financially protected”…
These women are apparently not feminists.
@kittehserf– Everything needs to be said by Stephen Fry. But I’m biased like that.
Hey, can somebody Tweet it at him? Please, Mr. Fry, for the good of the internet and humanity in general, we NEED this soundbite.
insanitybytes2
I really hate the passivity of this. As if men being “in a position of protecting women” is without a cause. There were no laws preventing women from owning property or become financially secure herself. No social and legal conventions preventing women from protecting herself. It just happened!
Women were forced into a situation that required “protection.” You can’t just claim it’s symbiotic when women didn’t have a choice. Any benefit women got out that relationship is artificial.
Also Pallygirl, I read some of that page of insanitybytes2’s blog you linked to. Wow, I had to stop at her wistfully remembering back when women were the gatekeepers of sex.
LOL, insanitybytes blog. She and Sunshine Mary should be friends.
cassandra: it’s very LOLworthy and sciency.
When you “protect” me against my will, you’re not protecting me. You’re abusing me. Like literally.
All hail the truthiness. There’s nothing as revolutionary as worshiping traditional gender roles.
I wonder if she can see Russia from her house?
I mean, if she wants to live like that then hey, cool, whatever. But wait! Is that an attempt to impose her morality and ideas about what’s right for other people on them? Funny, I thought it was only feminists who did that.
Given that the link I did showed how she’s anti-abortion, she’s not just trying to impose her perceptions of reality on others, she’s also trying to impose her view of what medical procedures should be given to women.
Fuck off away from my, and others’, healthcare options.
For starters, here he is saying “I like titties.”
I find it legitmately triggering when people (especially men) say things about all men being benevolent protectors of women. Because that exact same excuse was used on me to justify all of the domestic abuse (physical, sexual, and emotional) I endured at the hands of men, the only difference being that it was also transmisogynistic. I was silenced and treated like an object, no matter how obvious it was that I was traumatized and distressed. So this argument is really personal to me. I’m sorry if I came off as really angry.
hellkell, yup, and she’s probably a part-time turkey farmer as well.
@katz– My life is now complete. Thank you for that!
@AllyS– I don’t know you personally but that won’t stop me from giving you internet hugs. *hugs* I’m sorry you had to endure such terrible things.