So Cosmo ran a piece by Jill Filipovic on A Voice for Men’s phony WhiteRibbon site, and, as surely as winter follows fall, the AVFM comments brigade showed up to offer their unique brand of wisdom.
Take it away, Samuel Twain:
Now, before any MRAs reading this ask how I know that Mr. Twain isn’t just some troll with nothing to do with the Men’s Rights movement or AVFM, bla bla bla, well, as you can see, Cosmo uses Facebook for its comments. And following Mr. Twain’s comment back to his Facebook profile you can see that he regularly posts MRA propaganda and AVFM memes, is a member of a Facebook group called Men’s Human Rights Movement, and, oh yeah, his friends list is filled with AVFM staffers.
So yeah, MRAs, he’s one of yours.
HUMAN RIGHTS, YO!
Also: Twain’s totally mature comments are proof that the problem with internet toxicity really has very little to do with anonymity.
@Bina:
I think that what these guys mean with the “get a job” crap is that women should get the kinds of jobs that men WANT and NEED to see us in. You know, waitress, nurse, elementary school teacher, piano teacher, sex worker. Something that pays less, has little political power, and that men can pat us on the head for. Or wifey. That’s a good one. Anything in the service industries. But NEVER anything that pays well, confers a higher and more respected status and encourages our independence.
@ samantha – good point! Just want to add that nurse, although a traditional ‘female’ job, maybe doesn’t actually belong on the list, any more. Thanks to unions, nurses in unionised jurisdictions are actually paid very well, compared to other careers with comparable levels of education. Also, thanks to unions, we even have some political clout in certain places. Your actual point still stands, though, so I hope this objection isn’t taken as a derailing attempt on my part.
fuminists are golddiggers and can’t get by without using MENZ
hey guys I have an awesome idea why don’t we leech off a feminist organization’s name to get money
what no that’s not hypocritical at all what are you talking about
I think it’s interesting to note that a certain contingent of the “get a jobbers” are men who live off other women. (Sometimes their mothers.) And since they don’t have jobs themselves, but feel because they’re men, that they should, they resent having to rely on the women in their lives who do.
I only know a handful of women that don’t work. Every other person I know has a job and the married couples share all the domestic chores.
Of those that don’t work, a couple are retired now, but they did work their whole lives.
My cousin is one of the stay-at-home moms with a wealthy hubby, but she hardly sits around eating bonbons. She takes care of the house and three young kids, helps her dad with the mom who has Alzheimer’s, and volunteers at the school (the kids go to private school, and there is a discount for parents who volunteer). The decision for her to stay home was an economic one: it was cheaper than getting daycare for the little ones. She talks about maybe going back to work when they get older and she doesn’t need to do the volunteer stuff.
The one friend who fits the MRA-rage to a tee is one who is now divorced and gets a big alimony payment from the ex. The husband is now remarried to a younger woman (a woman he cheated on my friend with, btw), so I don’t think he’s gone full-on MRA (don’t know since I got disgusted with a lot of his behavior several years back and the rationalizations about how my friend is some awful demon spawn evil woman even though he dumped her). But, if one takes a dispassionate look at their history, one would see that she got pregnant sooner than they had planned, and they made the choice that she wouldn’t finish college so she could raise the children. Like with my cousin, this was cheaper than childcare. There are lots of sad twists, like one of the children is mentally ill (bipolar & borderline) and there was a huge adjustment period while they tried to get her treatment and meds and all that. There were suicide attempts, runaway attempts, and so much other totally not fun activities to deal with – which he shirked because he was working his high-powered job. Every time my friend has tried to finish her degree, the daughter has an episode. Eventually, my friend suffered exhaustion and it turns out she has depression issues. The ex couldn’t deal with the mentally ill daughter (who he declared was just acting out and needed discipline, blaming my friend, who herself was trying to get it together psychologically) and the depressed wife, so he cheated, then declared he needed “space to get his head together” and then said he wanted to end it.
There’s more to that story, but I think that friend totally earned her part of their money in that relationship. In fact, she still has to care for the mentally ill daughter, who is now in her late-20s, and because of various issues was unable to finish college, so she’s piecing together a living. My friend has found jobs here and there and has renters for her spare rooms. She’s hardly living it up, but I’m sure MRAs would say she as exploitative.
Any work that women do isn’t real work. You administer a charity for the blind? Pfft, probably just shuffle papers and gossip. The only real jobs are oil rig roughneck, coal miner, venture capitalist, and cowboy. If a woman does one of those she’s either an incompetent diversity hire or she slept her way there.
So, no evidence that women do work will refute the claim that women don’t do work. The fact that redpill theories are unfalsifiable means they’re extra true!
/sarcasm
Also astronaut, scientist, engineer, soldier, secret agent … no way a woman could do any of those!
Scarlettathena,
That sounds like a very tough situation. I wish your friend the best.
My guess is this person has not met very many feminists. I have never been supported by a man unless of course you count when I was a child and my parents supported me. Of course to this asshole that probably means that I was just born a Golddigger because you know… I was a kid and I need someonr to take care of me… And I couldn’t go out and get a job or prostitute myself when I was three…..but had I gotten a job or prostituted myself so that I could support myself when I was three then I would just be a whore. As the article asks… Is it ever okay to be a woman?
@samantha @grumpyold nurse I was a non-custodial mom for 7 years, my ex moved my kids to a bordering state and immediately quit his job. I paid child support of $750/month and provided health insurance for him and the kids, all the things these guys bitch about. This was late 80’s into the nineties, working as a nurse in community health, no big paycheck when you are grant funded for HIV/AIDS and breast cancer outreach. I can empathize with that perspective but not with the all or nothing nonsense.
Re: women doing nothing for men’s issues, I’d like to also mention the thousands of women, especially but not limited to nurses, who walked side by side and did a mountain of work in those early AIDs efforts. I was there, did what I could but many nurses around this country worked with men of all ages and definitions to create the environment we see today. That was the model for what you see in Breast Cancer now.
Newbie and glad to find you.
A nasty little historical trend regarding women working is that when a field dominated by women became very important it often was suddenly flooded by men. Computer programming is a good example, first it was mostly considered women’s work, but once it became clear computing is the closest thing science has to magic and would probably be the foundation of modern society for centuries to come, suddenly it was a field obviously suited to men.
My mother was an early computer programmer, trained by her company (there was no other way to learn back then). As the years went by, men got promoted, women’s careers mostly stagnated, then in the 70s we entered the age of mass layoffs for “business reason” and by the 1980s the early IT women had target circles on their backs.
They’re really swarming the comments of that article now. I like this one that unironically suggests women should be raising children, not working:
http://i.imgur.com/dzAAu7e.png
Whatever women do, it’s wrong!
Of course that leaves women who’re asexual/aromantic or infertile out in the cold, but I can’t really expect these people to remember that sort of thing. It’s only fucking obvious.
A story about how outdated Mr S Stain – sorry! Twain – actually is. During the Second World War in Britain men who could fly were the only ones allowed to fight. This made for a problem in delivering new and replacement aircraft to the air stations as there were too few men to go round. The problem was solved by allowing women to Join the Air Transport Auxiliary. The pilots of the ATA were asked to fly all types of aircraft; Spitfires and Hurricanes, Beauforts and Mosquitoes.
One day one of these brave women (the aircraft flew unarmed) was delivering a light bomber to a station when she was confronted on landing by a welcoming committee of middle ranking brass. She climbed out and walked over to them and asked to which hangar the aircraft should be delivered. She was informed that the officers would rather tell the pilot in person When she informed them that she was the pilot a junior was sent to search the aircraft for the “real” pilot. Red faces all round when the minion returned saying there was no other person in the aircraft even when hiding places were checked.
In other words these sort of attitudes towards women were outdated 70 years ago.
“Feminism is a Marxist based ideology nothing more. Nothing to do with getting equal rights it is about installing a Marxist society on all of us. If you think that is a good thing then i suggest you take a good look at other attempts to install Marxism onto any society. Start with Germany in the 1930’s then Russia 1950’s, then look at China and the horror inflicted there.”
Ignoring the “Feminism is Marxism!” idiocy for a moment, because I don’t have enough caffeine in me to deal with that, what is it with right-wingers and trying to historically revise the Nazis into communists? It’s not going to work.
@FaintPraise
Yep, no problem with complaining that women are all just dependent on men to a woman that is working, then admonishing them for the being too old and why don’t they just get drop out of the workforce and depend on a man? Don’t worry, if anyone had any doubt that no matter what you do as a woman you’ll be wrong and these guys will hate you for it, this would be a good example.
signed,
yet another breadwinner by a wide margin married lady
And “Russia 1950’s” is pretty mind-blowing too. Like, three decades to the left, buddy; you took a wrong turn at McCarthy.
Samuel Twain is right. Women don’t ever work. Remember? We learned that a couple months ago from the telemarketer who lamented that woman executives were always out of the office or on vacation when he called.
I’m reasonably confident that this guy’s real name is not Samuel Twain.
@jo
Trümmerfrau wasn’t an occupation, but rather a necessity. Remember that the majority of able-bodied men in Germany and Austria were imprisoned for between one and two years in various camps right after the war as a security measure, leaving no option other than calling the women out of the factories and into the streets for cleanup and reconstruction.
Which is why the period of the Trümmerfrauen ended in 1947, when the men returned home in singificant numbers.
This, to me, is one of the more confounding things falling out of the mouths of MRAs of various ilks. I see this a lot in comment sections; they describe a “feminism” that reads more like some throwback to what was expected of women in the 1950s, a la How to Marry Millionaire. It’s such a profoundly, even willfully confused rendering of what feminism strives toward, and they are so intractably married to that bizarre interpretation, that it comes close sometimes to smacking of quasi-sexual fantasy, as much MRA-speak does.
Not at all, GrumpyOldMan. I was thinking along the lines of women can be nurses, but doctors are men. I realize that that no longer is true, but the attitude still exists. 🙂