I sometimes make fun of Men’s Rights activists for their assorted misunderstandings of feminism. But this guy gets it! I’ve never seen the essence of feminism distilled into a comic as ably as this.
It brings back memories of the first time I read Andrea Dworkin’s classic “Intercourse: You’re Not Getting Any Unless You Pay for My Dinner.”
Found on the Men’s Rights subreddit, with 100 upvotes.
H/T — r/againstmensrights
NOTE: POST CONTAINS SARCASM
Oh god WWTH, that last comment of his where he straight up blames “the liberal media” for people wanting to side with rape victims and not wanting to stray because “they’ll be accused of victim blaming ARGLEBARGLE”.
It’s so painfully obvious it hurts.
@Nick
Oh God, the whole GTA tantrum was so astronomically stupid I think it shaved a year off my life. Like, Australia does have a very real problem with video game censorship, with the R18+ rating only being added in ’13, R18+ games still being heavily edited and more games being banned every year… And they completely ignored all that in favour of throwing a hissy fit at a pair of private businesses.
…
It’s like they took aim at the biggest, glowiest target they could find, and somehow shot the empty tin can 200 metres directly behind them.
@NickNameNick: Brilliant. I was reading the last page of comments and thinking I wanted to say something to Cassie Devereaux to counter that nonsense, but you did do far more eloquently than I would have. Especially with the movie criticism parallel; I had just been thinking of that when I read your post.
There is nothing tenable about that position. It dictates that a person isn’t ALLOWED to be critical of a piece of art – anything, a webcomic, TV episode, painting, whatever – without tracking down the creator(s) and having a nice long chat about their intentions. Not only is that simply not doable for obvious reasons, but it’s also irrelevant. “But I didn’t MEAN for it to be sexist” is an oft-employed defense of sexist works; it really doesn’t matter. The creator’s intention doesn’t change the result. A work can be sexist (or racist or etc) even if the creator had no conscious intention to make it so.
I have no doubt that Joss Whedon and others who wrote/produced Avengers 2 weren’t actively thinking to themselves “Hm, this Black Widow… she really was too good in the first movie. Better find some way to make her character less interesting. Oh, I’ll write her into a pointless, implausible love story that undermines her agency and reaffirms to everyone how important it is that she’s a sexy lady that a man could fall for, while simultaneously equating the inability to become pregnant with being an inhuman monster! Yeah, that ought to do it.” Yet, whatever their intentions were, that’s exactly what the movie did in the end.
I have REALLY noticed this more and more the deeper I get in exploring social justice issues. Anti-feminists/MRAs/”anti-SJWs” and so forth are the most likely to accuse their opponents of being “oversensitive” and tell them to “calm down!”, while at the same time they are the most easily offended, most ego-fragile people on this whole fucking planet.
“Don’t be so sensitive, it was just a joke! Rape is a legit topic! Dark humor!”
*feminist makes a joke about misandry*
“Screw you bitch! This is why I hate feminists!”
“Don’t be so sensitive! Slavery was centuries ago! We can joke about it!”
*black person makes a joke about white people*
“Reverse racist! Don’t fight fire with fire! YOU’RE THER REAL RACIST”
etc. It’s rather incredible.
… Which, thinking for a second, does seem extremely familiar.
*cough*#GAMERGATE IGNORING IGN’S PAID REVIEWS IN FAVOUR OF VIOLENTLY ABUSING RANDOM WOMEN*cough*
A second, 32 minutes, whatever.
What made it even more absurd is how much credit they gave this online petition, as if they were threatening the retailers at gun-point or something, instead of assuming – as many other sensible people would – they didn’t want to upset and lose any customers.
The weird part? Most of the people complaining about this weren’t from Australia or lived there – they were from the United States and completely unaffected by it. Of all the things happening in other countries to become aggrieved over, they chose one of the most pointless and least important issue that had no negative effect on anyone other. No one suffered because they couldn’t get a goddamn videogame at an Australian Target or WalMart.
It’s telling though, isn’t it? That they’ll deny and dismiss concerns about harassment and sexist discrimination, as well as racism, but will explode like a volcano in hearing a game won’t be sold at certain stores in Australia. Talk about not having your priorities straight…
…I wish we could edit posts…
I meant “most pointless and least important issues that had no negative effect on anyone either.”
It’s a really lazy tactic by anti-critics to claim that because the creator might be a decent person, it’d be “mean” to criticize their work – but that only makes sense if the criticism lies entirely on who the creator is and not what they created. So far, observations about the cartoonist here have been based on his work as well as the fact many of them acts as polemics. To say we’re judging him “unfairly” involves consciously ignoring the actual content.
Then there’s the fact many creators already use their work as a soap-box (Trey Parker and Matt Stone did with South Park, often to its detriment) and thus are putting their views out there to be seen. So, at that point, why is it “unfair” to presume the creator’s sentiments are echoed in their work?
There was a great article on Cracked.com that rightfully pointed out that, for all his progressive credentials, Whedon’s portrayal of women can often be backwards:
http://www.cracked.com/article/166_5-reasons-it-sucks-being-joss-whedon-fan/
There were so many issues I had with the movie that, honestly, I could spend hours on it. To make my overall point as brief as possible: were it not for Daredevil – I’d of sworn off anything made by Marvel Studios. That said: I ended up enjoying Ant-Man despite being horribly flawed, because it at least does more creative things more than anything in Age of Ultron (specifically how the shrinking/growing mechanics worked and applied to action scenes, the fight in the bedroom of Scott Lang’s daughter being a great example – still could’ve done without the racial stereotypes and lack of decent characterization for female cast members though).
Plus, memory has a funny way of making them reinterpret events. The more self-involved a person is – the more inaccurate their memories of the event are. Mostly as a defense mechanism to convince themselves that they are somehow a good person, even when saying or doing horrible things, and act as if they are “misunderstood” by everyone else.
I’ve known people who had a meltdown online and yet, a day or two after they’ve calmed down, their recollections always end up coming to the conclusion that they were level-headed and that everyone else was unreasonable. It’s not surprising these are the same individuals who obsessively use the term “objective” without understanding its actual meaning, erroneously applying it to their personal position on an issue.
But that’s what happens when you live in an intellectual bubble: you can’t allow yourself to be wrong, ever, and conflate subjective opinion with fact – even when continuously disproven by others with piles of evidence. I had a former friend who acted “skeptical” about rape statistics and kept making appeals to ignorance, which myself and others informed him about how they are compiled and analyzed, yet acted as if no one provided substantial proof and got obnoxiously petulant when called out on his dismissiveness. He then started making rape jokes to mock anyone who disagreed with him, I said “fuck this shit”, and unfriended him.
@ nicknamenick
Your post has just highlighted something I’d not noticed before.
It’s interesting that the types of people you identify always use the phrase “reverse racism”.
That would seem to be an implicit acknowledgement that racism generally works one way i.e. That the default position for racism is it’s something white people do to black people.
If, as they argue, the situation is just as bad for white people then shouldn’t they just call it “racism”?
Ironically they seem to be adopting the “prejudice + power” definition for racism generally and arguing what they claim to experience is different and a special case.
That neckline is all over the place. Wouldn’t you be ashamed to draw something so inconsistent, even if you were happy with what it said? I mean I’ve trashed pictures with less internal errors :p
@Alan
I always thought reverse racism mentioned you gave privates to one person because of past racism, vs normal racism where you take it away from someone based on being racist. Or in other words if you have a normal level of how you tract people, racism is worse and reverse is better then the base line.
I haven’t had the chance to read all the comments yet so apologies if I’m repeating anyone else, but when I reflect on my dating experiences who pays the bill isn’t quite so black and white. Most of the first dates that took place at a restaurant the guy did in fact pay the bill, most first dates at a coffee shop I usually paid for both of us. That being said, usually only the first one or two dates were at a restaurant, after that we would just stay at my house (because that’s where my kiddos beds were) and I would make dinner for us (with groceries I had purchased) and we’d watch television and chat. I love those dates actually, way more intimate and relaxing. Looking back I’ve spent a lot of money on the guys that I’ve dated, I can’t think of one time that a guy I was dating offered to help buy groceries even when eating the majority of his meals at my house. I’m not complaining, to me restaurants are a treat, not something I want to do on a daily basis. I just wanted to point out that my anecdotal experience has been that I actually spent a lot more time and money on dating than the guys I dated. Is my experience unusual or is this a pretty typical pattern?
Thank you EVERYONE!!!! who chipped in with your comments on the ‘conversation of doom’ I’d been having with some people (as to whether we’re still friends, it’s a bit Shroedingers at the moment). And an especially thanks to Paradoxy and Kestrel, I appreciate re-visiting those experiences can’t have been pleasant.
I took back some of the points you raised. I can’t say they were necessarily all taken on board. Still some disquieting scepticism about Chrissie’s experience, but I did get this from the main protagonist:
And if you knew the person that’s a pretty amazing statement.
Oh, spoke to soon, just got this (after I’d recommended Paradoxy’s reading list)
I will read the stuff. And a lot of victims and victim support groups share my stance on this so do not give me that shit.
I cannot take any more of your sanctimonious, finger pointing bullshit on this, Alan. I sometimes welcome your different perspective but here you have just been beyond the pale and I don’t know why I tolerated you for so long. .
Stay out of my way for a while
Ah well
This is an interesting piece relating to the costuming of physically powerful female characters. Also I love Brienne’s character in GOT, especially in the books.
http://www.upworthy.com/the-star-wars-facebook-page-just-replied-obviously-and-correctly-to-a-sexist-comment?c=pop
@katz,
This pushes my buttons! I am a researcher with an artificial intelligence research group, and I’ve encounter this sort of, uh, weird priority all the time. Malevolent AI is already here, and it’s not going to turn the planet into grey-goo – it’s already giving us heart attacks with endless automated twitter notifications and google alerts and whatnot.
A social justice background to this weirdly ties back into the Men’s Rights knobheads. I apologize for disgorging! The “Effective Altruism” stuff that’s discussed in your article was originally outlined by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Rationalwiki link including the original LessWrong post
Yudkowsky is one of those people who’s very smart, but far too convinced of his own brilliance, so has a lot of large blind spots. One of the leaders of the Dark Enlightenment nonsense, and his philosophy is very much read by Rooshites, MRAs, etc. Effective Altruism basically says “do the most good you can, doing the thing that you do best.” So if you earn a lot of money as a lawyer, then don’t go donate time at a shelter – do lawyering, and use the money you earn from those hours to pay for charity work. Don’t just pay for someone else to spend their time at a shelter, though – spend it to make the most good you can. Save the rainforest or something.
Sounds reasonable on paper, but of course it doesn’t map well to the real world. How can they tell what’s actually going to do the most good, especially if they’re not doing the charity themselves? How much of that money gets sucked up in administration cost? How much ‘good’ are you getting per dollar? In the end, most of this “effective altruism” stuff gets gobbled up in silly projects, like Yudkowsky’s own “save teh world from skary AI monsters” stuff, or administration costs for corrupt megacharities, etc. In the end it’s to make the libertarian reactionaries feel like they’re being good and charitable while funding their cool tech projects and not getting their hands dirty in an urban garden somewhere.
More personally, Yudkowsky makes me very, very sad. He does have some brilliant ideas, and I’m still convinced that some of them are vital to the development of clear-thinking. The irony i feel on reading him now is positively incandescent – he has written piles of posts about the value of self doubt and of being willing to question ones’ core beliefs… and has somehow become one of the cornerstones of Men’s Rights ‘rationality’.
Then again, he also wrote a short sci-fi story where, “to distinguish the human civilization from ours as being slightly weird,” he threw in a line or two stating that rape was legal and considered a normal part of sexuality. Sigh.
Anyways, sorry for the diatribe – something i feel strongly about I guess!
Ah yes, good old Yudkowsky. Pierre encountered his people once.
And that’s the main objection that article brought up; since they’re insisting on turning an unmeasurable thing into an analytical equation, it’s essentially just a navel-gazing exercise where they create post-hoc justifications for what they wanted to do anyway, based on dubious assumptions about the relative values of This Versus That. (And why are these guys all utilitarians, anyway?)
aaahahaha, ahmigah, I hadn’t seen that one. Amazing.
Y’see (let me splain it for you), believing in morality is silly and primitive, ’cause the universe is just math, so morality is math. And you can’t math unmath’y things like duties or rights or justice, so the only real morality is, like, adding hedons. ’cause that’s mathy, so it must be true. Nevermind that we can’t actually calculate what a hedon is or turn happiness into numbers, I’m sure some man will come along and build a super-intelligent hypercomputer what can do the maths, and we won’t have to worry about it.
Until then, just fill in the numbers that you think are right! Only if you’re a super-rational dude, though, not some sort of plebian or woman or something. Leave the math to the math experts. ’cause we’re the math experts, and everything is math, so… so just do what we say, okay? We’re right, honest. It’s too complicated to explain if you don’t just get it.
(snark got away from me there, sorry)
http://41.media.tumblr.com/c9b2bfbb2ecd907e83b430076ab63ed7/tumblr_nn3263ueEk1s7vs1qo1_500.jpg
Oh look, they’re evolving.
http://41.media.tumblr.com/28aebcdc384c829746abb249b7378f17/tumblr_inline_nn5scnQaIi1qcjqew_500.jpg
If your “friend” wasn’t avoiding you for now, I’d tell you to relay the idea that just because some victims and victim support groups agree with them, it doesn’t mean that they get to speak for everyone, nor does it mean that everyone else agrees, nor does it mean that they’re somehow “right” in this situation.
You have far more patience than I do, Alan. I’d have already told them to fuck right off.
Oh it’s ok, he’s told me to fuck off.
It’s funny how I’ve sort of picked up the language from here. I did find his original post troubling but I couldn’t articulate what was bugging me at first. Then it hit me, he was effectively calling out a woman for not responding to her rape in a way he felt appropriate.
Weirdly, when I tried to explain how it might be ok for a woman to criticise but not a man by analogy to it being ok for him to have an opinion on policing and race but not ok to call out a black guy for not agreeing, he understood that but said the rape thing was different.
We’ve had quite a few ‘male tears’ because he found your comments insulting, also, you’re wrong 🙂
http://www.asicentral.com/images/blogs/grumpy-good.jpg
Of course the rape thing is “different”, because he’s in the right, according to himself, and will do anything to stay there.
Aw, poor bby doesn’t want to let an actual rape victim tell him that he’s wrong~
Tell him to keep crying so I can fill up my bathtub.
http://i.imgur.com/KlqCWzu.jpg
I guess the complainer thinks something like this would be more appropriate maybe?
http://www.daz3d.com/star-girls-trooper-for-genesis-2-female-s-and-v4
http://41.media.tumblr.com/c9b2bfbb2ecd907e83b430076ab63ed7/tumblr_nn3263ueEk1s7vs1qo1_500.jpg
http://38.media.tumblr.com/4768d03932f51fd94fc94d60d5c81e14/tumblr_nepfkemd3X1rl6c79o1_400.gif
Huh, that’s weird.
I’ve dated a few feminists in my time, and they were all totally fine with splitting things 50/50, or taking it in turns to pay for things. Most of the time, they were the ones who suggested it.
Crap. I’ve been paying for my own dinner all this time….