So over on the MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) subreddit, the regulars are discussing the various ways they’re oppressed by a Nike-sponsored women-only nighttime 10k run called “We Own the Night.” Basically, it’s Take Back the Night with running, and Nike.
Well, a guy who calls himself “DegradedSerf” is having none of it. Because lesbianism? And a lack of women in the stage-construction business?
The two things I wanted to point out are the obvious lesbian connotations, there are DJs and dancing and what not until late, women only on a massive scale, and the fact that although the theme is claiming public spaces at night for females, I worked on assembling and deassembling all the stages, lighting, etc. etc. and there were no women working on the whole site.
You know, I hate to tell you this, fella, but there are places where there is lesbian dancing and “what not until late” every single night of the week. Also karaoke, sometimes. Google “lesbian bars.”
So anyway, “We Own the Night” is a sign of the End Times for normal manly men.
If you combine it with the slutwalk phenomenon now women have more rights and privileges than ever before and now a feature of the political and cultural landscape is these mass, semi-sexual, female only (eunuchs sometimes tolerated) demonstrations that public space, (physical and psychological) belongs to women and they intend to make it inimical to males and no expression of masculinity will be tolerated.
DegradedSerf’s lament about the slut walks inspired this little exchange:
![Nicholas_ 5 points 1 day ago Knowing the fact that slut walks exist make me wish I didn't live on this planet anymore. permalinkembedsavereportgive goldreply [–]RecQuery 1 point 5 hours ago I sometimes wish we could go live in a colony somewhere just to show the world what things would be like without us. Even if you don't engage you're still supporting society by being there.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/slutwalkconvo.png?resize=471%2C244&ssl=1)
Huh. I’ll admit, there are a number of things that sometimes cause me to think I don’t want to live on this planet any more. You know, like genocide, rape as a weapon of war, the millions of people on earth who are living in extreme poverty, that sort of thing.
This guy is driven to existential despair by … women protesting rape.
I also wonder if other causes are taken to task for not advocating for all causes/groups the way feminists are.
What kills my soul is that activists must be perfect all down the line to be worth hearing. Suffragettes aligned with racists; civil rights with communists. But the people in power doing destruction aren’t held to those role model standards.
Criminal activities are not limited to rape and only at night. Or only women victims. Men can stage their own take back the night. There’s no law against it.
@PPT
Screw you, Toast article author.
That Toast article is misleading and ridiculously wrong about the relationship between female Suffragists, abolitionists and African American rights activists. The author only only provides two quotes, without citations, from each woman with zero analysis. So obviously this article shouldn’t be referenced, or even taken seriously, by anyone who actually cares about history.
She finds one quote she doesn’t like and suddenly Susan B Anthony life-long work to end slavery and grant African Americans full rights is thrown out the window? Growing up in a family of Abolitionists, Anthony was already involved with the anti-slavery movement as a teenager, before she got involved with the women’s rights movement. Anthony and other members of her family aided the Underground Railroad. She became a member of The American Antislavery Society in 1856. Anthony adopted the slogan, “No compromise with slaveholders. Immediate and Unconditional Emancipation”.
Frederick Douglass and Anthony were close friends and allies for decades. Douglass spoke at the First Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls in 1848. In 1866 Douglass, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, founded the American Equal Rights Association, an organization that demanded universal suffrage.
There was a rift between suffragettes and African American rights activists over the ratification of 15th Amendment, because it only gave voting rights to all males over the age of 21. Anthony didn’t support the ratification of the an amendment that didn’t offer universal suffrage to all Americans. Douglass remained a supportive of universal suffrage, but tried to convince Anthony to support the 15th Amendment despite women being excluded. You know who agreed with Anthony and disagreed with Douglass? Sojourner Truth. (1)
The author should have at least read Anthony’s Wikipedia entry before blindly hating on one of the greatest champions of rights of African Americans rights before labeling her as a “white supremacist”.
(2)
(1) http://www.womeninworldhistory.com/TWR-16.html
(2)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_B._Anthony
My rant continues…
The use of the Elizabeth Cady Stanton quote is also misleading to the point of intellectual dishonesty.
Laura Clay was typical Southern Democrat in the post-Reconstruction America, so she talked about state’s rights and championed white supremacy. So the author pegged Clay right.
Rebecca Ann Latimer Felton was a former slave owner and, like Clay, was another Southern Democrat white supremacist.
Francis Willard did feud with Ida B Wells but a more complicated case. The Toast article doesn’t mention that she feuded with Wells when she was the president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), an Evangelical group focused on prohibition, not women’s rights. According to Wikipedia, WCTU did have black members and eventually spoke out against lynching. I personally don’t know anything about Willard what I just read in Wikipedia, so I don’t know how bad or good she was on racial issues. Since the Toast article uses a quote from her Wikipedia, the author may be as ignorant about Willard as I am.
I don’t have time to discuss Carrie Chapman Catt, but like many in the Progressive movement at the time, she believed in pseudo-scientific eugenics theories that often were used to justify racism.
Sorry about the choppy grammar in my posts, I was in a bit of a hurry.
makingfitzcarraldo-“I also wonder if other causes are taken to task for not advocating for all causes/groups the way feminists are”
That is what really pisses me off, too. Feminism is vilified as being ‘sexist’ for not spending an equal amount of time on men’s (the privileged group) issues as much as it does for women’s (disadvantaged group) issues. I don’t get this. No other movement in history had to extend it’s focus on the privileged group, ever. The civil rights movement is not expected solve the issues of white people, the LGBT movement is not expected to focus on straight people, so why is feminism expected to focus on men? Men’s issues are considered in feminism in a variety different ways (campaigning against circumcision, helping male victims of domestic violence, breaking strict gender roles so women can actually work and helping to ease the pressure on men to meet unable standards of masculinity, etc) and men can be feminists. However, women’s issues are its primary focus. Also, MRAs, etc, call feminism sexist and hypocritical because they are too lazy to get off their butts and do something for male issues, they expect feminists to do it for them! Also feminism can not be equally focused on male issues anyway, because one movement can only do so much. Also, there would be a whole bunch of women arrogantly speaking on the behalf of men about issues they have no experience with. There would be a whole lot of womensplaining. Here are some excerpts from a great article on this subject.
‘Feminists are Sexist:Should feminists have to spend exactly half their time, energy, and resources working on behalf of men to be taken seriously? Catherine Redfern thinks not.’
http://www.thefword.org.uk/features/2003/09/feminists_are_sexist
Yay!! Block quote worked! Take that, Block Quote Mammoth!!!
brooked-That’s ok! It very informative. 😀 I really hate how anti-feminists try to rewrite history and deliberately take things out of context in an attempt to vilify feminism. >:-(
makingfitzcarraldo-I know, it sucks. What makes it even worse is that they do this to excuse the toxicity of their own ‘movement’.
@bryce there’s also something about ‘taking back the night’ where it’s important that men have no or extremely low-key presence because it’s often seen as quite acceptable for women to be out at night as long as they’re under the protection of a male chaperone. If women are taking back the night with a cadre of men taking point, it’s not really taking back the night.
I don’t think it’s wrong to find it a bit odd though. And on the face of it, it can sometimes seem counter-intuitive to fight for equality through an exclusionary mechanism that wouldn’t be acceptable if the boot was on the other gender. I don’t always feel comfortable with it, but I can see why many people feel it’s necessary. BTW, I think you’ve gotten a bad rap in this thread and had some undeserved unpleasantness heaped on you.
Bryce not only wants to be front-and-center at women’s events, he insists on being front-and-center when discussing them.
Seriously, Bryce, is there no end to your sense of entitlement? You can’t even let women talk about an event without making the discussion all about your feelings and opinions?
Bryce is one of those anti-feminists men who can’t stand not being the centre of attention.
I sometimes wonder if these men who are constantly concern trolling about how women are not building enough bridges to men are similarly concern trolling at men about how they are not building enough bridges to women.
Somehow I doubt Bryce does that. Somehow I have the suspicion that he expects women to do all the bridge-building work while men just do their own thing. Because, y’know, men and men’s actions are normal and fine, but women and women’s actions are abnormal and need to be reconciled to the normality that is the male human.
So, wacky coincidence: I, also, sometimes wish MGTOWs would all go live in a colony, so we could find out what life would be like without them.
I wish that alot, actually.
It’s not undeserved. He’s been dumping this same crap on every second thread for a month or two. We’re just tired of it.
As for historical feminism and racism… Of course many of the suffragettes were far from perfect, but that was a hundred years ago. It’s no more fair to judge modern intersectional feminists by the actions of the racist suffragettes than it is to judge the modern Democrats by the actions of the pre-Southern Strategy Democrats. So much has changed since then.
(Of course, I still fully support WoC who prefer womanism, etc. Even though anti-intersectional types are a rightfully-shunned minority nowadays, they unfortunately still exist.)
… I’m getting serious deja vu from writing this post. o~O?
Yeah, rugbyogi, Bryce starts something like this one more or less every thread that he comments on.
@rugbyyogi
Thanks. David, Paradoxical Intention and you have a point about men’s presence being at best irrelevant as far as the symbolic meaning is concerned.
*sigh*
This guy. He keeps using those words, but I don’t think they mean what he thinks they mean.
The ability to attend an event is not a “right” or a “privilege” in any grand human-rights context. It’s not like the government has set up regular women-only events. There aren’t any new rights signed into law that women have now, or any privileges on a national scale that the government is enforcing.
It’s literally just an event that allows women to enjoy a “physical and psychological” public space that they’ve been practically excluded from.
This was a fun comment.
I.. erm… huh. I… agree with you? I think? MGTOW certainly is a demonstration that something has failed, though i think he gender-swapped the rest of the comment by accident. Even in the last sentence, “whenever woman tries to detach himself…”
Freudian slip, trolling, or brief spark of enlightment in a dark sea of cluelessness? You decide!
And he’s ignoring our concerns about this and pretending like it isn’t a pattern and that he hasn’t been asked to knock it off several times. Like every thread is a clean slate and we’ll just forget about it.
Anyway, it’s bad enough that women have historically (and are often still) expected to take a backseat to men in mixed gender social justice movements such as civil rights, LGTQ, and labor, we’re also expected to take the backseat in feminism? Fuck no. We go out of our way to explain how feminism can have benefits for men too. We do this constantly, and it’s not helping to fix the stereotype that we’re man haters out for female supremacy. I agree with the second to last paragraph of the essay misseb posted about why that is. I’m kind of over assuring men that patriarchy hurts men too and therefore feminism helps them. At least on the internet. It might be different it was a man I knew personally who I was reasonably certain was in good faith and just ill informed.
Dudes whining on the internet about feminism daring to be about women though? They can fuck right off. I’m not their mommy and I don’t need to coddle them. If they turn against feminism because they aren’t coddled and fawned over at every turn and because they don’t get to control every conversation, they were never interested in being an ally in the first place.
Feminism doesn’t have to apologize for being about women. Our impulse to apologize and the expectation that we should is part of patriarchy.
@SFHC
I wish it were only century-old history and that it were only a few bad apples. When black women are marginalized and belittled within the movement in so many ways, when the treatment of WOC is premised so often on exoticization and white savior complex… #notallfeminists, of course, but I think the problem is a little more widespread and systematic than that.
@brooked
*nod nod* Thank you for the videos. They make up, somewhat, for finding out that there’s now a urology clinic where I once shot pool at The Otherside. (“Google Street Views: Helping ensure you really can’t go home again since 2007!”)
As an aside, does anyone know who I’m supposed to see about getting my feminism checks? Katie, I guess?
The CIA gives us the checks, actually.
I thought we were cultural Marxists. Doesn’t that mean it would be either the International Jewish Conspiracy or the KGB?
I have to agree with PPT. Feminism as a whole still has some work to do where it comes to being about all women. There are a lot of feminists who are doing this work right now and that’s awesome, but the journey isn’t complete by a long shot.