Carl Jung posited that human beings share a “collective unconscious” full of symbols and archetypes that populate our dreams and make regular guest appearances in our fairy tales and mythological sagas.
Return of Kings contributor Donovan Sharpe apparently believes that men share a collective scrotum.
In an execrable post on that execrable site earlier this week, Sharpe complained that
The National Football League recently helped women get a firmer grip on the scrotum of masculinity by hiring its first full-time female referee, Sarah Thomas.
Yes, that is an actual sentence that was written and posted online by an adult human being who believed it to be true.
As Sharpe sees it, having a single female referee for the sport of professional football threatens the symbolic balls of all men. Dismissing those unenlightened dudes who see the hiring of a female referee as no big deal or even (shudder!) a good thing, Sharpe warns that
hiring a female referee is the continuation of the NFL’s consistent support of the feminine imperative at the expense of both the athlete and the male spectator. …
One of the main objectives of feminism is giving women power over men. The ability to exercise power over men in a male-dominated sector is something feminists have drooled over for decades. Thomas’s hire is the crack in the door they need to eventually realize this dream.
Apparently Sharpe is unaware that there are women on the supreme court, in the Senate, running companies, offering opinions about video games … Oh, wait, he writes for Roosh’s terrible video game site too, so I’m guessing he probably knows about that last one.
Anyhoo, as he sees it, the hiring of Thomas opens the floodgates for other female referees with designs on the collective male scrotum, who will soon “have the capacity to exert dominance over men in the most physically demanding, testosterone-driven sport in the world” despite their allegedly obvious physical limitations.
Because, you know, there’s no possible way that she’s in good enough shape to be a referee, as everyone knows that
men are physically superior to women in every way. This is why 99.9% of employees on oil rigs, sewers, warehouses, etc. are men.
Yes, it’s true that there are small percentages of women in jobs they’ve been systematically excluded from for generations. Big surprise. And yes, while nearly 4% of those working on offshore oil rigs are women, only a handful work on the drill floor.
But, uh, warehouses? You really think they’re 99.9% male? Sorry to break it to you, fella, but 14% of warehouse workers are female already, and there’s no reason there couldn’t be a lot more. I briefly worked in a warehouse several decades ago, picking orders for distribution, and, yep, it’s true that everyone working on the floor was a dude. But not because the work we did was suited only to “physically superior” men. Probably the most common item I dealt with on a regular basis was the humble o-ring. I really didn’t tax myself physically lifting these:
I also once worked in a grocery store where one of my main duties was filling a giant freezer with boxes of frozen baked goods. They hired me because they wanted a large dude for the job, and I was in decent shape at the time. I worked my ass off, but my supervisor, a 5-foot-tall woman twice my age, could do the job probably three times faster than I could.
Sorry about the digression. Back to the biggest threat to the scrotum of masculinity since Katherine Heigl made that Funny or Die video about balls.
Sharpe also manages to get himself a bit worked up over the fact that he finds Ms. Thomas attractive.
Though the 41-year-old Thomas is well past the wall, it’s easy to see that she still retains some of the beauty she no doubt benefited from in her youth. …
Better looking girls have always lived better lives. Despite feminists’ efforts at social engineering, it will always be this way, and that’s perfectly okay. Crying their way into the boys’ club is no different because at the end of the day, feminists aren’t going to use trolls to infiltrate the almighty patriarchy (Billie Jean King notwithstanding) and neither are men.
Huh. I’m pretty sure that female pioneers like Sandra Day O’Connor or Janet Reno or Madeleine Albright didn’t get where they got by crying or fluttering their eyelashes at men.
For all his harrumphing, the only actual “harms” that Thomas’ hiring might inflict upon men and their collective scrotum that Sharpe can come up with are
- There are probably lots of dudes who are better referees than her that the NFL should have hired instead because, you know, men are pretty much always better than women
- She might make a bad call someday, thus doing a terrible injustice to some giant football-playing man.
Horrors! I was not aware that any referees ever made bad calls. The very notion makes me feel a bit faint. I may have to lie down for a while.
My first impression upon reading the post was, do referees have that much power over men in their day to day lives? I thought about it some more and wondered how a female referee could give women any kind of advantage since the players on the teams are all male. It’s not like there’s a female team where she could unfairly favor in her calls.
It seems that these dudebros’ problem is that they see the female referee somehow in opposition to all the men in the NFL (this still makes no sense because her calls will have to benefit one team and not the other). It’s bad that women have any authority at all.
Zoon, you make an interesting point. MRAs are losers and don’t have great accomplishments of their own they can get satisfaction from so they see themselves as being a part of “team Men.” In this way they can still see themselves as superior to women. It’s a cheap way to feed their own egos. Thanks for the insight.
There are some games where referees are right in the thick of it. Rugby’s a good example, sometimes you can barely see the ref in amongst the tangle of arms and legs. AFL umpires used to be like that, but the game at the elite level is now too fast and too demanding for just one to do the whole job for the whole length of the match. Now they have three field umpires as well as goal and line judges. Seeing as single field umpires run 10-15 kms during a match and line umpires run 12-20, fitness is a big issue.
@mildlymagnificent – Oh of course, I was in no way trying to downplay the athleticism required (even umpiring, which is relatively stationary, is no picnic). I was trying to point out that they’re not exactly telling people what to do; they’re neutrally observing and announcing which rules need to be applied.
“Better than Ayn Rand’s amphetamines, that’s for sure.”
The more I think about it, the more I realize that Balzac and Ayn Rand had a lot in common.
1. They both loved money and wrote about it extensively. Narratively they really liked to follow the money. Money is a character in both of their books, not just a force.
2. However, both of them were in narrow financial straits throughout most of their lives.
3. Ironically (also) they both came out of the same lower-middle-class peasanty stock that doesn’t trust banks and keeps its money rolled up in mattresses and buried in jars in the backyard.
4. And both of them looked it.
5. They both believed in the “superman” and wrote about him (although Balzac’s “superman” characters are less obviously the inheritors of the world than Rand’s are, and they’re much dodgier).
6. They were both logorrheic.
7. They were both amateurs of architecture.
8. They both believed in a sort of dialectical great chain of being whereby lesser human types become subsumed in greater human types and have to make way for them. That having been said, I don’t think either one of them were outright racists (because the deep misanthropy they shared would have prevented it). But they were both sexists and complete partisans of the endangered-but-triumphant male.
9. Both of them believed in a pyramid scheme of humanity, IOW. But their pyramids stacked up differently, mostly because Ayn Rand felt the need to make room for “superwoman” characters in her stories. There are no superwomen in Balzac (except for one constitutive exception) because his men are the superwomen — men are what women have to be overcome to produce. Balzac’s supermen are supermen — they’re what men have to be overcome to produce. Balzac’s sole superwoman is a character named “Seraphita” who seems to betoken a road-not-taken: a distant and/or alternative future populated by exalted (blonde) androgynes. Seraphita dies at the end of the book, after having vegetated in splendid listlessness during chapter after chapter, and after having implanted herself as an ideal in the young man who falls in love with her. She follows the usual Balzac pattern of a woman dying after some guy has decided she’s hot. All the same, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were to turn out that she provided part of the inspiration for the character of Dominique Francon.
10. Both Balzac and Ayn Rand were devouring, omnivorous readers.
11. They had both had a taste for the esoteric. Balzac’s novels are outright Rosicrucian and though Ayn Rand branded herself as a fierce rationalist, she makes esoteric references in all of her books (the references to Atlantis in Atlas Shrugged are hard to ignore).
12. So (short version) — if Balzac and Ayn Rand were to meet in the afterlife and compare notes, I bet he’d end up wanting some of her drugs. And I bet she’d split them with him, even though she was not a big fan of handouts and even though sharing was not her thing.
I’m always amazed at these big strong alpha males who scream and shit themselves because A WOMAN!!! A WOMAN WHERE THERE WAS NONE BEFORE!!!!!!!
kirbywarp: I think he’s saying that whatever evil feminist conspirators he thinks are behind this chose Sarah Thomas deliberately because she’s pretty (also implying she only got the job because of her looks). Because obviously the evil feminist cabal wouldn’t use an uggo to infiltrate sports. Billie Jean King is his example of an uggo lady who did make it into sports.
Yeah, Cyberwulf, exactly. And why do they think so poorly of men? Dudes can handle this. It’s not a big deal.
Why they insist on framing everything as some kind of massive war between men and women is beyond me. They always make men into slavering rape-beasts who can’t control themselves around women and men are so much better than that. Misandric creeps.
I’m not so sure she’d share, but I bet she’d sell. And probably mooch some coffee off him when he wasn’t looking.
From what I’ve read, Rand’s prescription drug was Nembutal, which is an amphetamine and a barbiturate combination. She started taking it while writing “Atlas Shrugged”*, and kept on until the early 1970s. The bizarre episode with Nathaniel Branden in the late 1960s takes on new significance in this context. I have yet to discover why a drug manufacturer would combine those two drugs.
*Which explains some things about that book, and I say that as someone who has read every page of it – even the goes on forever ‘your minds, your stupid, stupid minds!’ speech that almost everyone skims.
“I’m not so sure she’d share, but I bet she’d sell. And probably mooch some coffee off him when he wasn’t looking.”
Yep. And she’d be selling the drugs not for cash but on principle, because money isn’t an issue in the afterlife.
“A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.” — Honoré de Balzac
“have the capacity to exert dominance over men in the most physically demanding, testosterone-driven sport in the world”
Wait, so in US padded rugby the refs get to bust a player’s balls if they play foul? Wow so it IS a tough-guy sport after all!
@banana jackie cake
“I thought log throwing was the most physically demanding, testosterone-driven sport in the world?”
You’ve obviously never been the Phoenix Highland Games, which are the Womens’ World Championships in Highland Games. You should see those women throw that caber.
Also, Donovan Sharpe missed the news article that talks about Sarah Thomas working her way up to the NFL through refereeing in Pop Warner, grade school, high school, college, arena football?? Over a few decades????
Somebody tell him who Kim Winslow is.
(Maybe don’t mention the part where she’s not a very good ref, though)