I don’t often write about Alison Tieman – the eccentric FeMRA videoblogger known better as Typhon Blue – in large part because, well, have you ever watched one of her videos? Her arguments and assertions bear so little relation to what the rest of us know as reality it’s as if she lives in some weird inverted world of her own making.
It’s rather difficult to address the arguments of someone when virtually everything she says is wrong – logically, historically, morally – in some fundamental way.
But I’m going to have a go at her latest video anyway, because, well, it’s only 4 minutes long, which will make unpacking its fractal wrongness a little less of a daunting task. Also, there’s a kitty in it.
In the video, Tieman, in the guise of “Professor Hamster,” makes the startling claim that Women’s Suffrage was “Feminism’s first act of female supremacy.”
How, you might wonder, does equality at the ballot box count as “female supremacy?”
Well, according to Tieman – one of A Voice for Men’s self-proclaimed Honey Badgers – it’s because women (at least in the US) don’t have to register for the draft.
This is an old argument of hers, based on the strange belief that voting rights for men in the United States are contingent on them signing up for selective service, something that’s not, you know, true. She seems to be confusing the United States with the fictional universe of Starship Troopers, in which “Service Guarantees Citizenship.”
In any case, because suffragettes didn’t demand to be drafted when they demanded the vote their demand, Tieman concludes that they weren’t seeking equality but supremacy.
Never mind that at the time the notion of women being drafted would have struck the general public as absurd.
Never mind that when draft registration was being considered for reinstatement in 1981, the National Organization for Women sued to have registration expanded to women as well, because not requiring women to register would relegate them “to second-class citizenship by exclusion from a fundamental obligation of citizenship,” as the New York Times summarized their position.
Ultimately, over NOW’s objections, the Supreme Court ruled that registration could be restricted to men only. The all-male Supreme Court; the court didn’t get its first female Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, until later that year.
For all of the hullabaloo, the requirement that men register for the draft is an essentially meaningless “obligation.” The draft is a dead issue in the US, about as likely to be revived as Jarts.
Tieman goes on to note that “female suffrage enabled women to vote for wars that only men had to fight in.” In fact, as anyone who’s paid any attention to real world politics knows well, women are consistently less likely than men to support war.
Tieman’s arguments about women’s suffrage are just bizarre. It’s when she starts talking about the civil rights movement that she moves beyond bizarre to offensive.
Throughout the video, she contrasts what she sees as the good and humble civil rights movement with the “privileged” and “entitled” suffragettes; it’s a strange and backwards argument, at odds with historical reality, and one that insults not only the suffragettes but our greatest civil rights heroes as well. “During the civil rights movement,” she proclaims,
black moderates believed that black people needed to EARN their civil rights. Extremists at the time believed that blacks people should receive their rights by virtue of being human beings. …
Minorities felt they had to earn their rights and often had to make enormous sacrifices in war prior to even having their requests for rights considered reasonable. Women felt they were simply owed. …
Minorities approached suffrage from the usual mentality of people who are actually oppressed: We have to earn everything, including citizenship rights. Whereas women approached the issue of suffrage from a mentality of privilege and entitlement: We are owed our rights.
Where even to start with this jumble of wrongness?
Let’s start with her most basic misapprehension, that human rights are something that have to be earned. In fact, the basic premise of human rights is that we have certain rights because we are human beings. This isn’t entitlement or extremism; it is the fundamental basis of democracy.
You would think that someone who calls herself a Men’s Human Rights Activist would have a better understanding of the rudiments of human rights.
In the Declaration of Independence, you may recall, Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed “that all men are … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” He didn’t say they had to earn these rights; he said that they were born with them.
Granted, it took quite some time before this sentiment applied not only to white men but also to women and African-Americans, but this had nothing to do with anyone “earning” rights; it had to do with the fact that some human beings were seen as more human than others.
When Martin Luther King made his case for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, he harked back explicitly to Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence. In his most famous speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington in 1963, he declared
In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. …
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
This was not the first time he had made this argument. In a 1957 speech also delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he declared that
The denial of this sacred right [to vote] is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic traditions and its is democracy turned upside down.
So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote I do not possess myself. I cannot make up my mind — it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen, observing the laws I have helped to enact — I can only submit to the edict of others.
It’s our humanity, not a signature on a selective service registration form, that entitles all of us to the right to vote.
If the Men’s Rights Movement wants to campaign to end selective service registration, go for it. Just don’t pretend that this has anything to do with the right to vote. Or that demanding basic human rights is a sign of “entitlement,” much less “female supremacy.”
Also, maybe lose the stupid hat?
Below, a song that kept popping into my head as I tried to make sense of Tieman’s most peculiar views. Well, the chorus anyway; the rest of the lyrics don’t really fit.
Yep.
This non-response biases exist today as far as I know from most current systems ( or maybe worse)
Nope. The people who choose not to vote are choosing. They still have the option. The people excluded because the sampling methods can’t include them are not opting out, they were never in.
It’s a very different reason for not participating.
Further, without a completely open, and completely current, source code their wouldn’t be a way to be sure the people runnint the program hadn’t intentionally left a group out (say urban black voters), and so forced a skew.
Why the fuck is this even worth discussion? Just Asking Questions? Nice little mind game hypotheticals about things that hurt real people in the real world, but never the questioner? What’s fucking interesting about something so bleeding obvious as stating that denying people a voice in their own futures is a bad thing?
Not to mention that elections happen at all levels on the same day and the same ballot–I can vote for president, state-level officials and propositions, and city-level bonds and officers all on the same ballot. It isn’t worth sampling for small populations, and if you are having the whole city/town/whateverthefuck voting about city councilors and tax proposals, counting all their votes for president much more work at all.
Before you even get to the logistics, you’d have to decide along which axes to sample. Location, age, race, and gender are all obvious, but you could still create a really biased sample that way. Are you going to also sample by sexual orientation? Religion? Marital status? Education level? Criminal history? Income? Depending on the particular election, there might be any number of factors that would make the sample unfair if not accounted for.
But this is all moot because the point of democracy is that you yourself get a say, rather than someone else on your behalf.
Yes, this entire discussion kind of pissed me off, as may or may not be obvious. Non-response is, indeed, a problem that introduces bias into normal elections, but a sampled election has this problem plus a few more. Completely excluding some people from the sample because you cannot find them is a bias that all sampling methods experience, and the fact that these excluded persons are typically the most poor and least powerful is frankly fatal to talacaris’s position. It makes me fucking furious whenever someone tells me that the poor and powerless aren’t worth anybody’s time and it’s perfectly fine to just silence them entirely.
So, good job, talacaris. You made me seriously angry with your uninformed bullshit. I hope you had fun.
talacaris: The root problem s no system is perfect, BUT, any system which excludes people is worse. There is no way to limit the franchise (even one such as you seem to be proposing in which no one is by default assumed to be ineligible) which doesn’t remove some people from the pool.
And that means their voice is lost. Which means their concerns are lost.
Yes, people may remove themselves from the pool. OK, they CHOSE to make their concerns a lower priority for the body politic.
But, and it’s a big thing, taking someone out of the pool is an active decision. It means those people CAN’T have their concerns heard. And it means that, as time goes by, they lose out more and more, because no one will hear about those concerns. It excludes them from the social contract.
And really, elections aren’t that expensive. In terms of money for one person to spend… sure. But not in terms of money for an entire group to spend. Only in times of “austerity” where the people presently in power have an agenda to push is the cost of an election the sort of thing which is going to be touted as, “excessive”. Tax cuts in Wisconsin cost the state more than the election did. Even the 300 million Schwartzegger spent on the special election he felt he needed to have was pennies to the overall state budget.
You didn’t hear Christie complaining about the cost of a special election for Lautenberg’s seat, even though it was only a month or so before the general election; and it wasn’t required to have an earlier one. Nope…. he wanted people who were going to be enthused for Booker to not be in the polls for the governor’s race, because (even though his victory was certain) it probably would have reduced his margin of victory.
So the issue with elections isn’t cost… it’s who votes.
Hmm… Seems that the conversation has moved on. Hope I’m not too off-topic with the pic I made re: orcs and wargis (thanks, katz!).
And let’s hope this link thing works:
http://s1375.photobucket.com/user/Anarchonist/media/001_zpsa8a4cb40.jpg.html
This may be just me, but I’d much rather look at the wargis than the frustrating and rather pointless conversation that was happening.
There aremany good reasons to not have that system.
That is certainly not a good thing and a very good reason not to have that system.
I’m not sure I agree with this.In some places there are things like spreading deliberate misinformation about voting in marginalized communities, striking migrants out of rolls based on a perceived lack being settled in that location, restrictive demands on documentation when voting, and lack of practical access to polling and many more. I would say that this is a de facto exclusion from the pool.
Count me in the “I’d rather look at Wargies” club.
When you learn something new, often it’s tempting to think “oooh, but if I apply sampling/evolution like so, I could solve/explain this thing!”
If you don’t think about it more, those ideas can linger.
But, usually those ideas aren’t the best, because a more detailed analysis often shows hidden flaws like what other folks have mentioned in the thread.
Stats is awesome. Sampling is awesome. But, there’s a reason we vote instead of just letting Gallup (and other sampling pollsters) call it from their sampling.
Anarchonist, those Wargies are so cute!
I meant, many peoplehave presented clear arguments why that system is really bad. That exclusion seems worse the more I think about it.
Thanks to everyone!
talacaris: they CHOSE to make their concerns a
I’m not sure I agree with this.In some places there are things like spreading deliberate misinformation about voting in marginalized communities, striking migrants out of rolls based on a perceived lack being settled in that location, restrictive demands on documentation when voting, and lack of practical access to polling and many more. I would say that this is a de facto exclusion from the pool.
And what you would say is wrong. The examples you give are attempts at the active supression of votes, precisely because one group feels it is likely to suffer dimishment of power if another group gets to make its concerns part of the discussion. It’s not the same. Yes, one group is trying to exclude the other, but the other has means to combat the exclusion.
But the system in your hypothetical doesn’t provide the means. An excluded group won’t know it’s being excluded. Which means their is a quiet legitimation of their marginalisation; becuase the presumption is the sample being polled includes representation of their demographic.
It’s why, for all it’s flaws, universal suffrage is the best system we have, and why there are so many who oppose it.
The fact that the all male supreme court opted not to force women to sign up with selective service is proof of the way that institutions run by men defer to women.
And no, signing up for selective service is NOT a moot point. I had to sign up for it when I was a teenager, if you don’t, then you are cut off from basic government social services, from the possibility of receiving federal aid in college.
I had no choice, and I was very aware that the SS was a violation of my own bodily autonomy, as well as my right to make moral determinations for myself. When the government threatens the right to abortion in any way, it’s seen as an attack on women. When the government forces boys to sign away tour lives, it’s not seen as a problem.
Not being a man, you don’t understand the stress of being treated as disposable your entire life. You have institutions like the supreme court looking out for you. You can expect even male dominated social structures to look out for your interests.
No one is looking out for us, except perhaps people like Alison Tieman.
Or it could be that, yaknow, historically, women have been considered to week and fragile for military service. Especially since keeping women out of combat is a right-wing position in the U.S.
No, it doesn’t. It shows that misogyny cuts both ways. Has it occurred to you that more women being able to join the military without being raped by fellow soldiers or denied advancement would decrease the odds of the draft being used?
The draft should absolutely be abolished. Women have been anti-draft and anti-war protesters. The ERA would have included women in the draft and was supported by feminists, not anti-feminists.
The draft hasn’t been used in over 40 years, whereas women’s bodily autonomy is under constant attack. Feminists advocate for women to have access to military careers.
Learn some facts about history and about the systematic oppression of women before you attempt to speak to it.
David Futrelle is a man. There are lots of men on this board. You’re being stupid by assuming that everyone who disagrees with you on the internet must be other than a man.
Also, stop asking women to stop fighting for their rights as if if somehow prevents you from having yours. This is not an either/or situation.
Oh, bullshit. So many women are murdered by men each year that it isn’t even considered news.
A mansplainer that can’t even spell his own username and is comparing something that hasn’t been relevant since Vietnam to abortion? Brilliant.
The suffragettes lobbied for a universal draft that would have included women and the Supreme Court denied their request because “Fragile wimminz” – that’s the opposite of men deferring to women, that’s men telling women what they can and can’t do.
Fuckwit.
Funny story, we were just talking about sexual assault in a non-necro’d thread. Nothing says disposable like having someone else decide that their right to get off trumps your right to not be abused.
And, what’s the conviction rate for sexual assault? Spousal asault?
As for selective service, I think that’s BS (that you have to do it, I mean, not that you don’t like it). However, I don’t live in the US, and I’m not a citizen, so I can’t really address the US’s barbaric military policies.
And what practical help has AVFM offered male survivors of sexual assault, or domestic violence, or veterans, or homeless men? As far as I can tell, AVFM’s activism consists of woman bashing. Personally, I think men deserve better.
Attacking reproductive rights is treating women as disposable. Anti choicers see women as incubators, not humans. Just look at the recent cases in Texas and Ireland with pregnant brain dead women being kept on life support against the will of their families and their own stated wishes.
Another way women are disposable is the way we are constantly being objectified. Pretty much every time you turn on the television you can see it.
Also, capitalism treats everyone but the top .001% as disposable regardless of gender.
Troll is also forgetting the impact war has on female civilians. There’s a long history of conquerors raping their way through the lands they’ve taken. The bible even says that if God worshippers conquer a non God worshipping village, they have the right to rape and forcibly marry the local virgin girls.
@NoYourHistory:
Funny story. Even at the tender age of 18 (or 19, or whenever the hell I eventually signed up), I realized that signing up for ss was a relic, and that was less than a decade ago (when the threat of the War On Terror was still going strong). Every time the subject of a draft has come up, practically the entire nation has spoken against it. It’s silly that they try to force you to sign up by hinging government benefits on it, but the actual signing does nothing. Soon it probably won’t even exist. This is pretty much the definition of a moot point, and yet feminists still argue that if men are forced to sign up then women should be forced to as well.
Because it’s never acted upon, and it never will be acted upon. Every time the government tries to act on it by even hinting at the possibility of a draft, the idea is immediately shot down. That’s why it isn’t seen as a problem.
I am a man, and I completely don’t understand your stress of being treated as disposable. At all. In the slightest. This idea is so foreign to me that I can’t help but think that you all are just making it up. To me, it looks like a persecution complex that can only be developed if you live your life in a vacuum consisting solely of people telling you that you are considered disposable, but never actually living that experience.
If anything, your feelings of disposability are a mish-mash of privilege, ignorance, and a couple examples of toxic masculinity.
You, as a man, don’t get laws like anti-discrimination laws because the law already supports you. You, as a man, don’t get special medical initiatives because male bodies were the subject of the majority of medical research history. You, as a man, don’t get “male dominated social structures” looking out for you because you are part of those structures, and they already look out for their own first.
The extent to which men have been expected to be strong, emotionless, and solely supportive of their loved ones is exactly the extent to which toxic masculinity has harmed them. These gender roles, the ones that are wrapped up in your perverse idea of male disposability, are exactly the gender roles that feminists have been fighting against for decades.
Society has been looking out for you all your life. I quote the OP:
Yes, “men” didn’t literally mean only males, but this was a document produced by men to create a government of men using the word “men” because men were the default, and non-men were lumped in with them. It took effort to rewrite many laws to say “person” instead of “man” just to make it clear that it wasn’t just men that were protected.
You, in complaining about how you aren’t loved because there isn’t something like a “Violence Against Men Act,” are essentially a child upset that your sick sibling is getting extra stuff, except that even actual children realize that would be petty.