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.
Yup. People are just naturally terrible, nothing we can do about it, so stop objecting. Curious how this argument just happens to be mostly aimed at minorities, even when we point out that we’re disproportionately affected by the totally inherent and not-at-all culturally influenced terribleness of humanity. It’s almost like it’s a bullshit silencing tactic or something.
No, asshole, merely pointing out one’s demographic characteristics is not bigotry. Nor is pointing out how those characteristics might affect one’s experience of the world. Also, no, it’s not just as bad when you do it to white/male/hetero/otherwise privileged people.
You’re not ready for this class, kid. Go back and do your Feminism 101 prereq, then we can talk.
Everyone is terrible, so you should suffer in silence and not bother me. Real insight there, Che.
Wait, we’re no longer primates???!?!?!?
For my next phase, I would like to be a dolphin. Or a cat.
If we’re no longer primates, I suggest we throw in with the corvidae.
That’s the science fiction where the science doesn’t actually work. In other words he likes to make shit up.
thebeam:Reading the comments, I was surprised by the complete lack of respect being given to this woman based on the ‘what we all know is right’ argument. In science, it is often those that think differently without the same educational indoctrination that make the biggest steps forward.
Rubbish.
While it’s true that some people have made sudden insights, which seemed to leapfrog past their fellows, they are so rare as to be notable.* Secondarily, this not relevant to TB. Unless you intend to argue that she is correct; with supporting evidence, all this is is a plea to grant her credence because she’s a contrarian.
So cries for her credentials that entitle her to an opinion are ridiculous
If all she were doing were discussing a matter of opinion, no one would give a shit. What she is doing is making an argument of fact.
But consider this: around 30-40% of people bother to vote…perhaps in part due to not having had to do anything to earn it. Maybe if contribution was tied to citizenship it would be good a thing instead of a self-centred, entitled society where everyone looks out only for themselves and their immediate peer group.
Oh… I see you are a deep thinking realist. Tell me, Oh Sage!, who sets the criteria for “earning” the vote? What is going to make them be expansive? Because if history teaches us anything, it’s that people who have power want to restrict to people like themselves. Women did earn the vote, and they had to work for it harder than men did. Yep, not all[white] men in the US had the vote in 1800, they all did by 1860. They got it because other white men gave it to them (Out of venal interest. They wanted a larger voting base so they could squeeze other people [primarily Virginia planters from the Tidewater] out of primacy.
None of those men were whipped for saying “the vote ought to be expanded. None of them were committed to mental institutions. None of them were imprisoned, force fed; released when the publicity got bad, and arrested again for still insisting women were people just like men.
So… go on, tell us how you would make the hurdle needed to vote both high enough to make the franchise something everyone who had it used, and low enough to be inclusive enough to avoid an oligarchy.
As to what feminism has to do with femaleness… your implication that women don’t deserve the vote because unlike some mythical dude in the past they never had to “earn” the right to vote pretty much sums it up.
First off, I want to say, wow. I didn’t expect my opinions to be disregarded and then repeatedly attacked
Which is it? Were they disregarded? Or were they systematically attacked?
because I am a white heterosexual male
Can’t speak for anyone else, but I attacked them for being bog-standard, based on ignorance and fundamentally stupid. Your gender, and your color didn’t enter into it at all.
believe that all human beings are born equal and should be free to express their opinions without distinctions about race, religion, sexual orientation, sex, color, language, material wealth, age or status.
So far so good. I bet it’s the pesky details of your elaboration which I will have problems with:
My suggestions from considering Alison Tieman’s statement is a reflection of my belief that she is, as a human being, endowed with reason and conscience — and we should treat everyone in a spirit of brother/sisterhood.
Except for the part where she thinks we shouldn’t. But in the interest of fraternal affection and “reasonable” debate you intend to pretend her argument that we aren’t actually equal, and women should be oppressed is somehow an argument worthy of consideration.
Nope. She’s wrong, both on the merits, and in the terms of debate you established; i.e. people are all born equal and should be free.
Speaking of that how do you reconcile that with the idea that franchise ought to be limited, what with farragoes of nonsense like this:
–No. I was suggesting that Tieman made a point that all citizens should have to earn the right to vote through some form of service to the community. If the right to vote was earned in some way, then perhaps the vote would mean more to people and only selfless people who were serious about contributing to society would have the right to guide it. Should men just ‘get’ the right to vote…no. Only those who contribute to society…just like everybody else.
I will grant she made a point. Banal, stupid, and designed to create fundamental inequalities; which inequalities you are (for whatever reason) arguing to make greater than the one TB presents.
1: Your conclusion is based on an unprovable (i.e. people who have to “earn” something value it more. This is the question Heinlein proposes in Starship Troopers [which was supposed to be a juvenile, but the setting; and some of the subtext; e.g. women are entitled to be the equals of men, in all things, were seen as a bit beyond the scope of a book aimed at teens: I will point out TB doesn’t share this view).
2:You also argue this “Service” and vote limitation will make those who do vote more careful stewards. I suggest you look up the British term, “rotton borough” to see how this played out in a fairly recent era, in a country lauded for its democratic tradition. History is against you on this one.
*and many of those lauded for this are more in the way of misunderstandings. Yes, Pasteur was at odds with orthodoxy, but he wasn’t as far out from it as people like to say. Darwin was building on fifty years of people wrestling with the problem, and needed the works of Lyell, and Hutton and Malthus to bring it all together. The more revolutionary of the pair was Wallace; whom we tend to forget.
thebeam: I said, ‘primate phase’ — in reference to our species being primitive animals and not having achieved our full potential yet. I believe we are capable of evolving and far beyond our current condition.
So you don’t understand evolutionary theory, any more than you understand the taxonomic system. Got it.
What I have read in scientific journals (keep in mind that biology is not really my thing — I have more the theoretical physicist leanings), we are merely speculating by extrapolating upon observed chimpanzee and bonobo behaviours. And most chimps are assholes to each other.
Oh… I see, you don’t understand science. If you want a better grasp of human behavior, read the journals which are about human primates, as opposed to other primates.
Kim: I suspect baseball hat guy has read/watched Starship Troopers and not realised it was satire.
I don’t think it was satire, but it wasn’t meant to be seen as a functional model: and there are signs of strain in the system. It’s a thought problem, meant to encourage younger people (it was meant to be marketed to 16-21 year olds: that is people who were [at the time] not yet able to vote).
He was trying to get them thinking about what sort of citizen makes for a decent society. (and he had some very different ideas about that in his time. Part of the reason he didn’t get called back to active duty in the Navy in WW2 was his radical leftism in the ’30s).
It rather struck me more as a “I once read A Brief History of Time” type of a statement. I’d really like to hear how Mr. Theoretical Physics Leanings defines the term, though.
Damn… That was long. Shorter version: You’re wrong on the merits, you are wrong on the facts, your arguments are internally inconsistent and you don’t understand any of the science you made reference too (right down to not applying relevant references to your unsourced journal papers).
As interlocutors go… I’d say you could probably keep up with a high school freshman of the average sort.
This one stuck to the flounce. Gosh, maybe her took the hint and is reading up at feminist101.
His “I don’t know anything, but I’m going to pontificate anyway” attitude was, errr, funny.
I didn’t see a flounce, it’s possible he quit the field, but if he did it was a case of slinking away, not making a grand exit.
I did have to work. You see, despite my ‘privilege bias’ have not yet paid off my mortgage. :'( Unlike these guys: http://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/2014-11-04/cya
(check out the $ change previous day drop down) …as this is privilege.
Dude. You have the self-awareness of a brick. Do you honestly think you’re being clever?
TIL that you don’t have privilege until you have at least a billion in the bank.
Like a beam of forehead-born light he comes to spread wisdom to the lady masses! And then the masses take a nap, just like they did last time.
Ah, yes, because the random dropping of unrelated links proves…what exactly?
I think he should be banned for being boring. Get creative or get out, troll.
Awww c’mon! Don’t tell me you wouldn’t want to earn like those guys!
TIL also that privileged people don’t have any awareness of the privileges they have, but are acutely aware of the privileges they lack. Cis white men, for example, can reasonably expect to be able to go out in public without being groped or catcalled or raped, but don’t actually notice that this is not something everyone can claim. Not being a billionaire on the other hand: keenly aware.
Wait, no, actually I learned that a long time ago, but I just got more verification of it.
Imma just call him Forehead from now on. Forehead is a very confused fellow, and not very good at trolling. Forehead needs more training before he can match even the most tedious trolls of yore.
Dull as dishwater, this one. The troll of tedium – sadly a very common breed.
Actually, I would rather be able to do a take down like pecunium than earn like a billionaire. Guess my brain is just broken like that…