Butt Seriously: The Men's Rights Movement is as ridiculous as The Onion's fake political cartoons

Hey, my niece gave my dad a smoking lecture when she was about 7 or 8, and my dad has been cigarette-free for more than 10 years as a result. I bow to the power of kids!

ceebarks, now you just need to fix it so your mother and grandmother use a Bad Word in front of the kid. She’ll probably need smelling salts afterward. 😉

This all reminds me of the ep of New Tricks where they had a swear box that disappears at the end of the story. “What happened to it?” “This is a police station. Somebody nicked it.”

When I was 5 they were already doing anti drug talks at school. Soon after, I ran inside from the yard and told my mom I saw my dad doing cocaine. She went outside to investigate. He was smoking a cigarette. All I knew was that coke is white and so were the cigarettes so I made an assumption.

@kitteh

I wasn’t there, but I believe the lecture concluded with, “I’d really like for you to be alive when I graduate from high-school, Grandpa.” That was super-effective.

ceebarks, now you just need to fix it so your mother and grandmother use a Bad Word in front of the kid. She’ll probably need smelling salts afterward. 😉

I would need smelling salts after that! I’d be bowled over to even hear my grandma say so much as “crap” or “heck.” “Shoooooot” is about as profane as it gets there. 🙂

My mom’s dad died before I was born of lung cancer, so no smoking for either of my parents. I think all my other grandparents did and quit. I think by the time I got to high school, marijuana was more popular than cigarettes.

Speaking of which, I found this in the local Barnes and Noble in Washington:

http://imgur.com/53ZPW8q

Check out the section title.

PoM, she sure knew how to make her point!

ceebarks, LOL, I suspected that might be the case about your mother and grandmother.

Regional gardening, eh? That’s … different.

My guess would be prurient interest, as gross as that is.

Yeah, that would be my first one, too. It fits the general pattern of grossness and creepiness around him, for sure.

There was one aspect of sexual “liberation” beginning in the 70s which advanced the view that all of us who’d grown up in the repressive, inhibited 50s would have been a lot better off if childhood sexuality had been encouraged rather than suppressed and punished. Which led to a some pretty nasty family and “communal” sexual behaviours in some families and communities which were, for the most part, abusive and/or exploitive by any standards, 1950s and 21st century both, even though different language and concepts would be applied.

Yipp. They kept the abusive/exploitive dynamics of the old patriarchy intact, even as they were trying to detonate the nuclear family. Speaks volumes as to their real motives there. Reminds me of a German news article I translated for my blog, on a prominent Green politician who’d admitted to sexually abusing at least one kid at a radical “non-hierarchical” Kindergarten, back in those all-excusing “different times”. Of course, he didn’t see what he did as abusive at all, because the kid was supposedly the aggressor, and that it was just a fun “game”. (Ow, there go my eyes, rolling out of my head again…)

He actually had the chance, given the evidence he’d accumulated, to show that these ideas of encouraging overt sensuality and actual sexual interaction between adults and children within households were not only incorrect but damaging. Damaging the chances of a happy, uninhibited adult sexual life for the women (and men) affected by abuse during childhood. But he himself demonstrated instead the limitations of faulty sexual attitudes and beliefs by ignoring the realities he was presented with and using even-more-warped-than-usual Freudian style dismissal of women’s reports of their own experiences in order to hold onto the ideas he’d started out with.

And that’s what’s most disgusting and reprehensible about all this. Instead of issuing a retraction and admitting he’d subscribed to some messed-up ideas that he now regretted, and denouncing that sort of thing after realizing it was unhealthy, he retrenched…when he wasn’t burying it all, hoping that people had forgotten. A pity for him that somebody kept and saved the evidence. For those scratching their heads at his dumbfuckery and grossness, this is just more evidence that he really is put out that he can’t just have sex with any young female that he wants, without pesky legal interference or boner-wilting complaints from the victims. And that their being under-age and/or a blood relative isn’t an automatic no-go for him.

Didn’t he retract/repent of most of his weird incest writing later in life? Or did I make that up?

And the thing is, as those of us who can remember the 70s at all can attest, there was a lot of that shit going around, so there were lots of people saying deeply awful things about childhood and sexuality, but most of the people who said those things will now admit that they were wrong. Not this guy, though! This guy thinks that the fact that society eventually moved beyond that moment in history is a bad thing, and that what should have happened is that the sexualization of children and their exploitation by adults should have become more normalized, and would have done so if it wasn’t for those meddling feminists.

(He’s kind of right about the last part. Everyone else, take a moment to thank the Second Wave feminists who contributed to getting that shit shut down.)

Actually, I’ve never thought of it in exactly these terms, but the contradiction goes way deeper than the one sentence. You shouldn’t be able to believe both that “women as a class have a *unique* sexual power over men, which is not reciprocal.” and “women are choosing to pursue ‘bad boys’ even when said bad boys exploit them and don’t have their best interests at heart.”

Like… that’s a clear-cut example of men exercising the exact kind of sexual power that Dr. Farrell is so concerned about.

interestingly, that’s not necessarily what Farrell argues. The argument is that women do indeed have special sexual power over all men, yes. However, he argues that they use this power to make men conform to the expected male role of protection, provision and procreation – the usual 3 P hogwash.

Now hold on to your minds, this is where it gets funky.

Specifically abusive men, his argument is actually that abusive people are good protectors – they can offer more “Protection” than someone less abusive, because someone less abusive would be less inclined to fight someone else physically / some other reason a woman just intuitively knows. So women like that, and keep returning to it, because the protectors are like monarchs in that even if they sometimes abuse their power, that’s just the sort of risk you have to take if you want to be protected.

No, that is the argument as presented. The abuse is a bug of a functional system, and is really just a risk that sometimes happen, and anyhow, it’s their own fault because they’re forcing men to conform to the role of protector and if you grant someone sovereign authority to protect you like, say, a king, you are more protected but you might also get abused.

I admit to being really confused.

Don’t leaders often manipulate their way into power? Yes. And people manipulate their leaders by choosing leaders who tell them what they want to hear.

So in this analogy, the people = women who want men to protect them, and the leaders = the men who are manipulated into protecting women by women telling them what they want to hear.

The Aryans were willing to make someone chancellor in exchange for being told they weren’t doing as well as the Jews because the Jews were oppressing them. A young man named Adolf spoke to the Aryan fear of taking personal responsibility.

So now “the Aryans” = women and Adolf Hitler = men? Did WTF really just compare men to Hitler?

He was soon rewarded. If the pay is good enough, the prostitute will appear.

Did WTF really just compare men to prostitutes?

This is some serious business misandry.

I’m guessing the point is that women = Nazis who’re scapegoating some men for reasons? This is going to end up tying back into Farrell’s love of pedophilia again, isn’t it?