Pity the poor MRA meme-makers. It’s hard for them to find real-world images to illustrate their deeply held belief that women in general (and feminists in particular) secretly or not-so-secretly run the world.
Indeed, there seems to be a lot of photographic evidence that supports a rather different conclusion about women and power. Do women run the US congress? Nope.
The Supreme Court? Nope. (Dudes circled for easy reference.)
Corporate Boards of Directors? Nope and nope and nope and nope and nope and nope.
Happily for MRAs there are still some options left – like stock photos.
The word of stock photos is a strange one indeed, one filled with women laughing alone with salad and cheering themselves while crouched on scales in their underwear.
Oh, and did I mention that stock photo sites like to make their pics of women sexxxxayy? And that they seem to have the same confusion between sexy and sexist as Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap?
Indeed, when Cate Savilla of Buzzfeed recently tried some common female-centric search terms on stock photo sites, these were some of the weirdly sexualized pictures that showed up in the results.
Bingo!
Apparently a lot of guys imagine feminism as some kind of session with a dominatrix. Never mind that in the real world, men getting trod upon on by women in high heels often pay quite handsomely for the experience. No, in the minds of the world’s MRAs this is a perfect image to represent the jackbooted high heeled stormtroopers of feminazi-ism.
Attach a vaguely threatening caption, and the URL for A Voice for Men, and you’ve got yourself a meme!
H/T — MUH Men’s Rights Activism and Philip Rose
UPDATE: I just realized that I featured this meme before. Well, the post still stands.
@Dvarghundspossen:
Good point, not all body changes would be treated the same by the medical system. I guess the rest of my point stands that I think the only thing that would be lost in this world to trans folks is the label “man” or “woman.” That label matters a lot because society forces it to matter.
I guess some people, when they think of a genderless society, think that trans folks only transition because society puts such a heavy emphasis on gender labels and those folks don’t identify with the one they were assigned? And so if labels didn’t exist transition would never happen and trans folks would be hunky-dory with their bodies as is? As if literally the only reason you’d want a penis is because you internally identify as a “man” and society beats into your head that a “man” has a penis?
I don’t think it’d work that way. From what I’ve randomly picked up from the scientific literature, the brain expects certain sexual parts the same way it expects a limb that isn’t there anymore. That brand of body dysphoria would exist even if there were no social expectations as to what parts you “should” have. It just wouldn’t have the baggage of gender attached to it.
Yeah, privilege is a shades of gray thing and may vary depending on context. And many privileges depend on how other people perceive you, regardless of what you really are. Regardless of your ancestry, you may have white privilege in one place and be the victim of racism in another place, for instance. Same with male privilege; large chunks of that privilege package depends on whether people perceive you as a “regular man” (rather than “strange trans person” OR “woman”) or not. I agree that it’s possible for a trans person to be perceived as “a regular man” and be handed male privilege, regardless of their actual identity.
But that still doesn’t mean that there’s anything magical about being born with a penis, that any particular privilege comes with that. For instance, I have a friend who’s a trans man, and he simply looks like your average white middle-class middle-aged man. Obvs lots of privilege comes with that, and he’s the first to point that out. If he talks, people automatically assume that he’s fairly smart and competent, and listens to him in a way they won’t normally listen to women, for instance. And he’s not particularly likely to get raped, or suffer sexual harassment. According to the “being born with a penis”=”male privilege” theory, it’s inexplicable how he can have all this male privilege, since he wasn’t born with one. But having this kind of privilege – being perceived as competent, being listened to, low rape risk and so on depends neither on who you are deep inside nor on what genitals you had when you were born – it depends on how people perceive you.
Likewise, if people perceive you either as “woman” or as “strange trans person”, you don’t get handed the privileges I described above, no matter how much penis you had when you were born.
Uhhh… I don’t agree.
Look, we all live in a patriarchal society. We ALL have internalized misogyny baked into us from the day we are born. Some of us are further along the unpacking process than others but no one is fully unpacked and enlightened like the Buddha, NO ONE. Whether or not we are cis or trans is an irrelevant distinction to make in this case. You are blaming a handful of women’s internalized misogyny on their transgender identity, and it makes me crinkle my nose in distaste.
No one is using the misogyny of the Honey Badgers to discredit other cis women’s experiences or opinions, are they?
RE:kirbey
I think some people assume that transwomen only want to transition because of something shallow, like “gee, I liked playing with Barbies as a child; holy shit I must really be a woman!” Which is a stupid POV, activities are so not gendered, but our dumb society genders them. So if we stop making some things “male” and some thing “female” and just made everything “human”, then the people who felt out of place for not fitting in would stop feeling the need to shove themselves under a label.
However, I have a hard time believing that transitioning is ever as shallow as saying “Gee, I really liked playing with Barbies!” That POV just sounds so hateful towards transpeople to me.
Of course, I don’t really know what it’s like to feel like to want to transition, so this is just my CIS privilege talking.
Exactly! Actually, I’ve met lots of feminists who believe what you describe here – feminists who don’t wanna shut trans people out of feminism, because they see them as poor victims of the system, but they still believe that no one would have body dysphoria if society wasn’t sexist.
Your last paragraph is what I referred to when I wrote about some body dysphoria probably having a neurological basis. That science is, from what I understand, fairly recent though. And I believe that in the society we do have with all its emphasis on gender, body dysphoria can probably have loads of different causes. I have this slight dysphoria myself, which isn’t all that serious… But I do feel much more comfortable in my body the less slender-hour-glass-shaped and the more V-shaped I can make it. This has nothing to do with society’s beauty ideals, because I always thought that I was good-looking in a sort of objective way. It’s just that I don’t feel quite at home in a slender hour-glass-shape, because it’s just… too feminine. I feel more at home in a slightly bulkier V-shape. However, in my own case, I think this is probably all tangled up with my complicated relationship with my mum and dad, and how I’ve always identified more with my dad. I probably wouldn’t feel this way in a genderless society. Then again, I have trans friends who’ve described this terribly strong feeling of having a body that’s weird and even alien, and it seems likely that this phenomenon would exist even if society had no genders; that it’s more of a biological thing.
Seconding this. Also, there are spaces on the internet where the normal rules of society ends up being a bit reversed. Like, there are social justice places where people really do enter into some sort of oppression olympics, and try to use “hey, I belong to an oppressed group!” as an argument all the time. It can get comical, sometimes. Like, person A tells person B “stop disagreeing with me and check your white privilege!” and then person B goes “well how about you check your maleprivilege! I may be white but you’re a man!” and then A yells back “well I’m poorer than you, you middleclass asshole!” and so on, and the position of being trans can obvs be thrown into the mix as well.
I’ve seen some pretty nasty people use their trans status in this way, and when they found out that they were shouting at another trans person rather than a person with cis privilege, they ended up going “well, you have internalized transphobia and that’s why you disagree with me!”. Although, the people I’ve personally seen doing this were AFAB genderqueers, so their behaviour really had zero to do with male privilege. It’s just a certain kind of really toxic internet culture. I believe there’s no way to really deal with this, except by leaving spaces where everyone behaves like that.
Hey, guys and ladies and assorted folks of varying genders? A word of caution about a mistake I’ve made a lot:
While some stuff on this thread may be a fun thought experiment to some, for others it is a real life experience. Can we try to be careful about not running roughshod over that? Don’t know if it’s gotten to that point yet, but it feels like it could easily go there.
Also, re: whoever it was that said transwomen need to unpack male priviledge and the stuff they were taught as boys…
…please don’t do that, here.
A lot of those folks don’t think of themselves as socialized as boys, because a lot of them feel like it was noticed they weren’t typical boyish early on, and a lot of transwomen faced a lot of coercive patriarchical stuff early on to ‘correct’ their feminine behavior.
I’m not saying transwomen can’t be misogynistic or can’t be strangely fixated on wearing their posterior like a hat, because they really, really can be…
… But I’d be really, really careful about blaming that on ‘their male priviledge’.
But really, can we just not do this again?
Flying mouse
I’m fine thanks
Buttercup
I sure do wish we had feminist sports and teams including green buckets 🙁
And everything you said to Dolores, seriously ‘this’ so many ‘this’
Since we are talking about Trans I thought I share this with everyone
http://assignedmale.tumblr.com/post/97385408302/emergency-webcomic-about-a-transgender-girl
It’s a comic about trans, intersex and gender issues in our society. I really like it. It helped me understand despite my ‘condition’ I suggest everyone to go read it.
@ Dvärghundspossen
Ugh, I’ve seen things like that too, especially on Tumblr, mostly cause that’s where I spend a good bit of time. Though I’ve seen a few trolls here pull that card too. It’s like a weird twist on the argument from authority fallacy. Being a member of an oppressed group makes you automatically an authority on the experiences of all members of all oppressed groups everywhere??? Wut?
Someone possibly new to a particular topic will be excited and eager to share their (not yet fully formed?) opinions, and inadvertently(?) step on someone’s toes. Said offended parties will try to correct the offending party, sometimes inadvertently(?) stepping on different toes themselves. Regardless, if the response to the correction is defensive, there is more toe stepping all around, and sometimes a third party will roll in with a steamroller for everyone’s toes to get crushed.
In the end, it’s a downward spiral of toe stepping badness. Everyone feels offended and hurt, no one learns anything. The Oppression Olympics: Where everyone looses equally!
I think all we can do as individuals is to call out toe steppers as matter-of-factly as possible, and double check our own words and actions so that if we turn out to be a toe stepper we can apologize and move on.
Re: Contra i don’t think that trans people got the typical CIS boy socialization, either. That doesn’t mean that they automatically picked up nothing, or that they automatically got socialized exactly as CIS girls would have, either. It’s more of a mixed bag, is my point.
However, I’ve been asked to stop, so stop I will. Some of this is just me trying to work things out, myself. I certainly don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
THIS: 🙂
Also, to note, I don’t say privilege is only about how people perceive you. I explicitly said that a good chunk of the male privilege package depends on how people perceive you, which is a far cry from saying that all privilege is only about how people perceive you. But yeah, agree, we shouldn’t do this shit again.
Plus, it’s really hard to objectively judge exactly in what way other people are being assholes, because the way you perceive them will strongly impact how you interpret that assholishness. Case in point; when I was much younger, and *blush* occasionally a bit assholish to other people, perhaps to women in particular (internalized misogyny hey!) it did happen once that a whole bunch of people at an internet forum became convinced that I was a man (I am, in fact, a cis, or, eh, cisish at least, woman – born with a vagina and so on). And then everyone wondered why they didn’t realize this from day one since the assholish behaviour that I had displayed was so obviously that of a man’s. So.
Better not speculate at all about how a certain person was socialized, what kind of socialization they internalized and so on. There are assholes. There are assholes in all groups. Period.
Exactly. Seems like we just did?
@ contrapangloss
N’th-ing the ever loving crap out of your comment. Thanks. And on that note, I’m going to bow out and go have lunch.
@Fruitloopsie
Reading it now!
For anyone wanting to avoid the Thread o’ Doom stuff, zeedok has left a drive-by distraction on the previous page.
Its relevance to the OP. What do you understand “hypergamy” to mean?
No, they show men in positions of power.
Which women? How many have you asked?
So the dastardly feeeemale plan is… to make life easier for men, then marry men in the hope of getting a little bit back?
@ Newt
Nice catch. I missed it!
Since I’m waiting for my food, I’ll do a quick FTFY.
Before: “All these photographs show men as providers, which is exactly how women want them to be. The indoctrination starts early – women as primary nurturers raise their sons to be that way.”
FIXED: “All these photographs show men as providers, which is exactly how the patriarchy wants them to be. The indoctrination starts early – women who have bought into the patriarchal model raise their sons to be that way.”
Yes. I wish to come back and tell you that this is an excellent point. I very much have unconcious baggage to unpack here as well. Excellent point.
I was more responding to what I saw as a sweeping generalizition that transwomen can literally *never* have male privilege, however this is not the place for this discussion. Sorry for any toes I stepped on. May I ask if there is anywhere that I can learn more about these issues? I see someone posted a comic up above, any other suggestions? 🙂
Weird dichotomy there between “new” and “controversial”. Apparently, because MRA:s have been using the term over and over again for quite a lot of years, it has now, magically, become an uncontroversial fact that women love nothing more than giving most power and money to men in the hope that some of it will trickle back to them.
Not as such, but I think it’s generally a good thing, if you don’t have friends from group X with whom you’re close enough for them to talk about really personal experiences, to read intimate and personal blogs written by a variety of members from group X. At least I think I’ve learned some interesting stuff about experiences from groups with whom I normally don’t have that close an interaction with through blog-reading…
I want to repeat the point about how this discussion isn’t merely hypothetical. I think one of the issues that has caused problems in the past is that people have put forth hypothetical situations, or used actual events that they themselves did not experience as evidence for their viewpoint, and people who have actually experienced these things feel like their experiences are being coopted or invalidated.
It’s something that gets brought up when MRA trolls come in and make comments about sexual assault, or “women want X” or whatever, but it also happened in the Thread of Doom in an environment where it became very very difficult for people with certain kinds of experiences to come forward.
I guess what I’m saying is that it’s important to keep in mind that if you’re talking about something that did or could happen to somebody, or making a vague comment about whatever group, it’s extremely likely (especially on the internet, and even more especially in a community like this one) that somebody who has had that experience or who is part of that group is in the audience.
Sorry, no… I wish I had, but the blogs I come up with are all written in Swedish, and chances are you don’t read Swedish. 🙂
I guess if this place goes back to being more trans friendly you can learn a lot by just hanging around here? We used to have lots of trans people here. LBT is trans anyway, and Argenti. Maybe more will drop in.
Plus, mrex, blockquotes work like this: You write when you begin blockquoting, and then you write when you finish blockquoting. 🙂