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.
I sometimes think I would like to see those who worry so much about the precious lives of unborn babies be able to personally care for them.
Lukundoo-style.
(This is why whenever someone brings up the “Would you want superpowers” topic for discussion I tend to say “No.” I am vindictive and imaginative.)
There are naturally-colored/-flavored gumdrops, or at least fruit slices, out there. They’re quite good!
Why don’t they volunteer to provide free childcare to working mothers in their communities? There are plenty of people who have abortions because they’re afraid that they won’t be able to keep their heads above water financially once they have a kid, partly because childcare is so expensive. So, if you’re anti abortion because you actually love babies rather than because you hate people having sex that wasn’t pre-approved by you, set up some free childcare options in your community today.
I thought QFT was “Quit Fucking Talking”, which I guess means I’m profane & a bit rude in general. :/
Janet, I never thought of that one! My turn for a silly acronym admission:
For awhile, every time I saw WTF I read WWF and was wondering what the heck pandas had to do with anything. I asked that once, and the people I was hanging out with me gave me a funny look and corrected my acronym reading.
I then spent 10 minutes trying to figure it out…
World Taekwondo Federation
World Trade Federation
Want Tiny Frogs?
Why The Frown?
Wonderful Transformers Falling
What the Frisbee/Fudge/Frumpsicle
They were laughing at me for 10 minutes before someone caved and set me straight.
Sorry for jumping on the acronym derail.
I just didn’t want to have to type another rebuttal to the whole “Feminism is rejecting the TrueVirtuesAndValues of EssentialWomanhoodTM” and “But what about the unborn babies” stuff.
Nope. Can’t do that tonight. Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope.
An ex-colleagues mum didn’t understand FYI, and thought it stood for Fuck You Idiot.* That made for some confusing times until ex-colleague worked this out.
* Not sure if there is a comma. Tried a comma in two places, every combination works. Have no idea how to make this correctly grammatical.
Wait, does he think the ONLY work options outside of the home 200 years ago were going to war or mining? Because I’m pretty sure there were other occupations available. Not all the men were down mines or on battlefields.
I didn’t understand LOL at first. I’d only seen it in emails from a gf and thought it meant Lots of Love, or something along those lines.
And Hellkell already made that point! Sorry. And did I miss talk about abortion? I’m going to a protest on Wednesday to try to give people the right to an abortion in Ireland if they’re suicidal. We just about have a law saying they are available if the person’s life is in danger but apparently, “life in danger” doesn’t cover all the life-endangering things. Ireland – I both love and hate you so very much.
Actually, the protest is coming following a very particular case. I’ll post it for anyone who might want to know more about it. It’s cases like this that really bother me, especially when anti-choice types come out with the “culture of death” line. Major trigger warnings for talk of suicide, abortion (obviously) and I guess abuse, though there aren’t explicit details.
http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/health/i-am-afraid-ill-be-killed-abortion-case-woman-believed-her-life-was-in-danger-30513878.html
Avoid the comments section. I certainly am.
I’m late to the troll party, but I’d like to point out that all these people waxing nostalgic about pre-feminist olden days are often vague about the who, what and where specifics of when all this wonderfulness happened and was celebrated culture-wide, before feminists mucked everything up.
They seem to point to some sort of long-standing natural gender social order, “mutual symbiosis that existed for centuries”, but boy they sure love the modern nuclear family as the dominate, if not sole, viable financial social unit. News flash: this focus on nuclear families is very specific to more recent Western history. Then again, they clearly have zero interest in any history not involving industrialization and capitalism, aside from a simplistic psuedo-anthropology that functions as parables or origin stories of beloved eternal bio-truths.
Sociology is a real academic discipline, as is history, and people who can’t be bothered to even familiarize themselves with facts from a few of the better books directed at general audiences don’t deserve to be taken seriously when they make broad proclamations about how human society, outside of their personal perview, functions.
Look at the vapid research free original post, where the mister sees the modern office work world as the apparently shared common reality of all people everywhere now, and ye olde tyme as “200 years ago” (everywhere?) when women stayed home to “raise the family” while men had careers as mine toilers and battlefield casualties. I’m guessing he’s unfamiliar with the concept of family based economies, because he knows fuck all about history.
I assume he means “oppression” rather than “repression”, but his use of scare quotes leads me to believe he doesn’t take misogyny or women’s history all that seriously anyway.
His use of the phrase “throughout history” makes me hope he will consider changing his major, unless he just started college. Women’s history isn’t a big undifferentiated blob of “repression” and ahistorical gibber-gabber shouldn’t blow the mind of anyone with a real grasp and love of history.
@Pallygirl
I find this amusing because I’m a terrible person.
Calling modern young ladies “sexual receptacles” is a very polite way of calling them “cum dumps”, at least to me. I hate hate hate that ugly phrase and putting a polite spin on it doesn’t improve things.
The troll isn’t really selling me on the idea of anti-feminism helps women and feminism harms everyone.
Add me to the list of people who thought QFT was Quite Fuckin’ True
Brain bleach again, and the second one is of greater importance to the Aussies: http://gemmacorrell.tumblr.com/post/75887064992/via-four-eyes-comic-strip-on-gocomics-com
I knew someone who wanted to avoid using profanity on his blog. So instead of typing WTF, he would write “Wild Turkey Federation”.
On the subject of women working–one of my great grandmothers ended up as the head of her household because her husband wandered off for a night of drinking and never came back. She then rounded up her kids and possessions, loaded them all into a covered wagon, and took the Oregon Trail west–as a single mom–where she settled and ran a farm.
I’m not really seeing symbiosis or societal empathy there. Nothing about pioneering was easy or safe, not even as half of a married couple, and she did it on her own because it was her best chance at providing for her family.
With very few individual exceptions, women have always had to work very hard. Many of them could only eke out a living in cooperation with the societal ideals of male “protection”. And plenty others had to make do without even that.
(Also: I keep forgetting that WordPress comments don’t do well with em dashes. I apologize for the weird hyphenation in my previous comment — those are meant to be dashes.) :}
Healthy couples that function in a symbiotic fashion doesn’t necessarily equate to male breadwinner/female homemaker either. There are lots of happy, healthy couples in which both people work (sometimes they even work together, such as when they own a business, or a farm). Symbiosis doesn’t require one partner to be relegated to the role in which people like insanitybytes would like to paint as the only one that works for women.
(And, once again, I know this is going to be a shock to you, insanitybytes, so feel free to sit down, but gay people exist, and manage to form and maintain relationships just fine without defaulting to a division of labor premised on gender roles.)
A plague of Uggs
NOOOOOOOO
If we must have a plague of shoes I guess at least Uggs are mostly soft and lack any sharp bits. A bit heavy to have land on your head, though.
Yeah, raining Uggs is a scary thought.
I can’t wear the damn things, they don’t offer any support at all. Poop.
Obviously this was how apartheid worked. The fact that whites were conscipted to the army but blacks banned from it is obvious proof that the whites were ‘protecting’ the blacks. Ditto the huge unemployment among black people under apartheid – they were obviously just being ‘protected’ from the world of work that white people suffered through on their behalf.
Quite Fuckin’ True.
At its best, protecting someone without their agreement is patronizing and insulting – why would you insist on protecting someone who’s an adult human being capable of making their own decisions? Unless, of course, you don’t think they’re an adult human being capable of making their own decisions, in which case there is not much healthy companionship to be had from that relationship.
At its worst, it’s abusive bullying disguised as something well-meaning, aka evil and hypocritical behavior. No wonder the concept of “protecting” hits such a sensitive spot for the Abusers’ Lobby.
P.S.: Is it bad that the “I’m an antifeminist” comment in another thread almost made me start counting the days until insanitybytes would start spewing out terrible shit?