Feminist activist Grace Mann murdered; blogger blames her death on feminist jokes about misandry

@weirwoodtreehugger

“Ugh. Such stupidity. Women fearing men isn’t like white people ascribing criminality to black people in order to keep a white privileged status quo in place. Women fearing men is more analogous to black people fearing the police.”

This is the whole problem with conflating race, class, and sex. If you thought this way, you would understand nothing about our history or the present. In a class domination relationship, one class dominates the other without reciprocity.

This is true, in a strict binary system.

So for instance, blacks were legitimately dominated as a class. In that scenario, did black ideas about whiteness shape white identity? Of course not. But white ideas about blackness absolutely shaped black identity, and this was the cultural component of that domination.

You realize this isn’t true, though? Right? Black ideas about whiteness whould shape “White” identity, because the ideas of what blacks shouldn’t do would filter back and be – incidentally – part of what whites “Should” do, because, obviously, they’re doing it to *not be blacks*

The world isn’t a strict binary system with no influence where one order dictates down. The people “on top” are shaped just as much by what the people below them assume they won’t do, or they need to do to not be the people below them.

But the sexes aren’t classes.

Good, I prefer classless RPGS. Wait.

Each class (or race for that matter) has a male and female half.

No. Each grouping that includes people have a male and a female half (unless your class group is “Everyone over 50 who isn’t female”).

Men are not a class and women are not a class, the ruling class is half female and half male.

Does the phrase: “The sex class” ring any bells to you?

The men in that class are socialized in a ruling class culture, half of which is female. Black ideas about whiteness in a class domination relationship do not shape white identity,

Yes it does. Black ideas about what whiteness is shapes whiteness because whiteness is doing what blacks don’t do. What blacks do is what whites don’t do. That’s what makes racism so insidious, exactly because it’s not always one class oppressing another class with conscious vicious evil. Why does a general ride a horse but not walk beside the troops? Because every soldier expects the general to ride the horse, and would be upset if he did not. Why do white people rule over black people and lash them in the fields? Because its what they do, and what’s the white man’s right but also because all the black people are in the fields and they expect every white person they meet to rule over them and lash out, so no one gets a chance to break the systemic problem.

but women’s ideas about maleness absolutely shape male identity. It is arguably the most important social force which does.

Inthusfar as you define “maleness” as defined by women– wait, you just did. Sorry.

There is even an argument to be made that masculinity doesn’t belong to men to define or redefine, but that it was only ever a reflection of women’s or their family’s expectations of mates. In any case, it’s clear that men do not exist in a social vacuum, but that their identities are formed in a social landscape that women provide for them and vice versa.

Yes. This is called human relations 101. People exist with other people. No man is an island. We are all links in the chain of humanity, etc, etc. But by fucking defintion, maleness is what men do. No more, no less. So if male-ness is defined by what women want men to do, then femaleness is defined by what men want women to do, so it curves back around because all the women are doing what all the men want are doing what all the women want are doing what all the men want are doing what all the women want are doing what all the men want BAM HUMAN SOCIAL RELATIONS in a giant interlocking web of people pressing at other people and being defined in turn by their definitions of other people.

So let’s talk about the “status quo” given that we have to consider that ruling class women are just that, the female half of a ruling class. Which status quo are we referring to? The one in which racist white men imagine themselves as the protectors of damseled white women and use this as a pretext to demonize their racial and class enemies by painting them as potential raping monsters? That status quo?

Sub-classifications, dude. Learn to love them. It works in taxonomy, it works socialism, it works in capitalism, it works everywhere. Nuance. The ruling class is more than one thing and the ruled class is more than one thing and women is more than one thing and men is more than one thing.

And did you say police? That’s amazing in a country in which the sentencing disparity between the genders is six times that of the disparity between the races.

Huh, weird. Almost as if men and women could be modelled as two distinct classes with their own individual cultural and social problems, influencing each other.

And in a country that, with only 5% of the world’s population, incarcerates 25% of the world’s prisoners. You have to be kidding me. Let’s be clear about who the police, the defenders of the “status quo,” will be coercing, let’s be clear about who the demonized other will be. Hint: it’s not women.

Wait – the disparity between genders is six times that of race, so the status quo is the white ruling classes of men and women oppressing the black oppressed classes, which shows us that most poor black men go to prison, but sex isn’t a seperate class so black men have nothing to fear from the police?

Your logic is… it’s kind of off.

By the logic of intersectional theory which would show us, rightly, that the problems that lower class women face are, in many instances, faced by all women, even if it is to a lesser degree for ruling class women, we would have to conclude that the same demonization we reserve for black men would, in many instances, also be reserved for all men, even if it is to lesser degrees, yeah?

Well, we can’t, because women aren’t a seperate class so the problems one women face is faced by all women, eternally, equally, and there is no difference between individual situations. Or wait. Hang on. If the problems the lower class women face is shared by upper class women, across the economic divide that almost seems to hint that women can be modelled as a unique class in society with their with problems and vagaries of fate to contend with, problems that CIRCUMVENT economic demarcations, power classifications and other divisions of class. And the same would go for men!

oh god! Men and women are seperate classes in society with their own share of unique problems influencing each other back and forth like the ideas of which is part is in a binary system is defined by what the other part isn’t!

Let me make it simple for you: We are not hunter gatherers. We live in a stratified social system. Power in a society does not go to the one with the stronger body, but to the one who has the public perception of moral rectitude. Dick Cheney was a fat old man with a heart condition, yet nobody would argue he was “powerless” as vice president. Power goes to those on whose behalf men in uniforms are empowered to coerce others. That is most certainly not men.

Oh god, I see the light, men and women can sometimes be modelled as seperate classes across economic boundaries so they face unique personal problems that aren’t related to their actual poverty or wealth status, but their sex and gender. And we can reliably expect certain things from these indicators!

I shall call this theory feminism, in honor of the fact that its the idea that women across poverty-lines might share problems that inspired in me this great idea! And I shall create a framework of theories to expound on the problems faced by the seperate classes of men and women, and I will call it “women’s studies” and “Men’s studies”

and I’ll also go back in time 70 years and write up the longer theoretical framework in a series of books under various pseudonyms spanning what I will refer to was “waves”
—-

Jesus christ what the fuck was that? I think my brain just broke a little there. Men and women aren’t seperate classes because the ruling classes 50 / 50 so that means maleness is defined by women so men have no power in society because their moral rectitude is held in mistrust, and so this must mean that feminist who demonize male sexuality are evil and like lynch-mobs, making men and women seperate classes with men suffering more?

Uhm.

Can you repeat that? That’s some kinks in that theory.

@mayimoktoo

Eh, I’ve just been skimming them so I can post a funny gifs that kinda correspond.

http://i.giphy.com/EY9lb0xY0OnPq.gif

Ahhh, what a lovely and nuanced argument Divided Line makes!

I mean, clearly making threatening statements about feminists on an online and anonyous message board means absolutely nothing, and were probably just made up by 14 year old yahoos who were thousands of miles away at the time, even if a person who was part of the threatened feminist group is LITERALLY MURDERED.

But HOLY SHIT GUYS YOU CAN’T TALK ABOUT A PURPOSEFULLY OFFENSIVE RUGBY CHAT AND CONNECT IT TO AN ATMOSPHERE OF HOSTILITY AND VIOLENCE TOWARDS WOMEN ON AN ONLINE AND ANONYMOUS MESSAGE BOARD. THAT’S FORMING A LYNCH MOB, DON’T YOU KNOW?!??!!!11?!

And also chanting about dead women is no harmful in the least, even if a woman is murdered, but calling men who chant about dead women misogynist is TOTALLY harmful and life-ruining!

It is true that lots of power is wielded by defining what is righteous and true, but it can’t have much to do with how men and women behave with each other because women aren’t a seperate class so women as a class cannot possibly be wielding any kind of power that helps shape society.

Men and women aren’t classes after all.

( :b )

Banana
Thank you for the gifs 🙂

Ah, actually that is a good point. Thank you Divided Line.

If we ascribe ulterior motives and evil intent to everyone, and take everything they do as further evidence of their evil intent that is generally a bad thing that twists even innocous things into mockeries and makes evil of bad jokes and atrocities of puns.

And I don’t believe they’re necrophiles or rapists either. Few people are, and it’s obviously just a silly chant.

So why on Gods’ Green Earth didn’t you lead with this entirely reasonable point instead of spending two pages going ever which way, hinting people were irrational and weird, and getting things completely wrong about people’s arguments?

Dude, man, no point in all that.

( And we can still point out that some things are in extremely poor taste precisely because it’s necrophilic and misogynistic while having a good conversation where no one insults anyone else! )

But I have to admit there’s a bit of a flaw in this theory.

We cannot, after all be

trusting them to be human beings and rational moral agents.

Because men and women aren’t separate classes, so speaking of “men” as a classing of people with a certain set of behaviour is entirely impossible.

Buh-bye Divided Line. Try to stick the flounce, eh? And let the door hit you on the way out.

Not to diminish the sheer awfulness of the current blight, but I am somehow reminded of a recent mansplaining bloviator and herder of teal deers. He employed the Argument from Authority, using Aristotle as his source, to convince us that human nature is eternal and unchanging. DL has a similar difficulty with the idea that we actually understand what he’s saying – we don’t agree and are trying to explain why, but the basic concept seems to elude him.

It’s a problem that men would choose to bond with each other over a chant about rape though. I can’t imagine bonding with my friends over a chant about raping men. It seems like these chants go one way. Now, I wonder why would that be?

@fruitloopsie

http://i.giphy.com/10IIs7CN98Skw0.gif

Snuffy
Yeah pretty much
Woman: “I got rape and death threats and my friend is dead because she said ‘no’ to a guy”
Man: “I got called a misognist”

And a GIF for the Dark Lord:

http://media.giphy.com/media/MUeQeEQaDCjE4/giphy.gif