The Paris attacks have inspired cartoonist and opinion-haver Scott Adams to reflect on some of the true injustices in the world today.
Specifically, the fact that in the United States, men often pay for dates, yet cannot have sex with women without getting their permission first.
In a blog post that is incoherent even by his standards, Adams compares the male-dominated societies of the Middle East with what he describes as “female-dominated countries” like the US.
In his mind, American men live in a matriarchal dystopia in which women force men to pay for dinner and open car doors for them:
When I go to dinner, I expect the server to take my date’s order first. I expect the server to deliver her meal first. I expect to pay the check. I expect to be the designated driver, or at least manage the transportation for the evening. And on the way out, I will hold the door for her, then open the door to the car.
Weird, because I’ve literally never had a date like that. And even if all this were true, as a general thing, it wouldn’t be proof that the US is “female-dominated.” Chivalry is part of patriarchy, not proof of matriarchy.
When we get home, access to sex is strictly controlled by the woman.
Er, dude, that’s how sex works. Both sex partners have to agree to it, otherwise it’s rape. And men have veto power when it comes to sex just like women do. Women aren’t allowed to force themselves on unwilling partners any more than men are.
If the woman has additional preferences in terms of temperature, beverages, and whatnot, the man generally complies. If I fall in love and want to propose, I am expected to do so on my knees, to set the tone for the rest of the marriage.
What a romantic fellow, proposing to a woman even though she’s some kind of spoiled princess who has preferences about room temperature and refuses to have sex when she doesn’t want to have sex.
Also, Adams wants everyone to know that when he talks over women in meetings, it’s not that he’s a sexist, it’s just that women talk too much.
Women have made an issue of the fact that men talk over women in meetings. In my experience, that’s true. But for full context, I interrupt anyone who talks too long without adding enough value. If most of my victims turn out to be women, I am still assumed to be the problem in this situation, not the talkers.
But really, the problem is that ladies just won’t shut up amirite fellas high five!
The alternative interpretation of the situation – that women are more verbal than men – is never discussed as a contributing factor to interruptions. Can you imagine a situation where – on average – the people who talk the most do NOT get interrupted the most?
Uh, yes. Because that’s not just a hypothetical “situation.” It’s the way the world actually works.
I don’t know if the amount of talking each person does is related to the amount of interrupting they experience, or if there is a gender difference to it, but it seems like a reasonable hypothesis.
Unfortunately for Adams, this is a hypothesis that’s been repeatedly disproved. Men talk more than women in meetings, yet are more likely to interrupt women than women are to interrupt them.
Weird how Adams, who thinks of himself as a rational sciencey guy, didn’t even bother to do the 30 seconds of Googling that would have shown that his “reasonable hypothesis” was a crock.
Speaking of weirdness, Adams goes on to suggest that he might turn to terrorism if no one gives him a hug. Literally.
So if you are wondering how men become cold-blooded killers, it isn’t religion that is doing it. If you put me in that situation, I can say with confidence I would sign up for suicide bomb duty. And I’m not even a believer. Men like hugging better than they like killing. But if you take away my access to hugging, I will probably start killing, just to feel something. I’m designed that way. I’m a normal boy. And I make no apology for it.
NOTE TO SELF: Do not invite Scott Adams to any party without also inviting this dude:
Or maybe don’t invite Adams to any parties at all.
*Sigh.* My comment starts on the 2nd paragraph.
Oh, sweetie. 🙁 Gender presentation doesn’t equal your gender. If you don’t feel male, you aren’t male and people should respect that.
There’s a whole slew of gender idenities out there and many, many pronouns, and you don’t have to have dysphoria to be trans. Just take a look at some links I’m putting here so you can check them out.
The thing about gender is that it’s not just “I know I’m cis” or “I know I’m trans”.
The narrative that cis people eat up is that trans people “always knew” when they were trans, but that’s not the case. Some people don’t realize they aren’t cis (like myself; I didn’t know I was experiencing dysphoria, just body image issues and the debunked penis envy which, yeah, lol, right “debunked” sure, I thought); some people may also feel cis their entire life but then, suddenly, they don’t feel cis anymore; some people may have geninuely always knew they were trans but that isn’t the case.
You aren’t coopting anyone’s experiences because everyone’s experience with their gender is different. You aren’t being disrespectful to anyone. The “q” is LGBTQIA+ is for “questioning” because we know there isn’t a “you are” or “you aren’t” out there. (Well, at least the ones that aren’t white and cis.)
Hell, even if you are cis, you can still play around with different pronouns and stuff, because the gender system we have is shit. It can only allow the most definitive genders and such genders can only be expressed a certain way or else you aren’t “truely” that gender. PFFFFFFT! That shit is fucking stupid. That is the most fucking stupidest of shit. How the fuck are people only suppose to fit into one or the other? How does ANYTHING fit into one thing or another? There’s a billion fucking shades of red out there – and there’s a name for all of them. Crimson, burgandy, cherry, brick, scarlet, ruby, sangria, red-violet – fucking violet is ALREADY red AND blue but there’s still room for more red in violet and still have it not be too red to be just red or too blue to be violet! There’s one red and then just one blue! FUCKING COLORS ARE GODDAMN COMPLICATED AND VARIED JUST LIKE GODDAMN HUMAN BEINGS WHICH IS WHY THE LGBTQIA+ FLAG IS A GODDAMN FUCKING RAINBOW!
JUST GODDAMN EVERYONE SMASH THE BINARY ALREADY FUCK ARRRRGH!
http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/mad.gif
Oh, and ANOTHER thing about colors? There’s, like, a billion different burgundies, a billion different crimsons, a billion different rubies – just fucking google any of those colors and fucking see how many goddamn fucking burgundies are out there. And, you know what? They’re still all goddamn burgundy!
There’s no one shade of anything!
(Bleep) Scott Adams and the horse he rode in on. Today I’ve officially lost my last iota of respect for him as a person or cartoonist.
@Pandapool
You are great and everything you say is right. 🙂 Made my eyes a tiny bit wet too. Smash the binary, that would be amazing.
I get what you say about gender presentation =/= gender. What I really mean is am I in a mental space where I want to talk about this stuff in rt right now? What are my pros and cons for this scenario? I’m not sure.
I really appreciate your comments.
http://49.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdyjne3kmb1qbm555o1_500.gif
http://49.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdyjne3kmb1qbm555o2_500.gif
There are few comments here that I’m not sure are serious or sarcasm. Anyway love those gifs, Kats. They’re fabulous.
@dhag85
As far as I know, there’s not “real time” to think about your gender. You can just be stuck, assigned this label you do not agree with and makes you uncomfortable; you go through a quite possibly long, arduous task of going label to label, feeling like you’re getting closer but still not close enough (until you find one, IF you find one); or you do your best to just separate yourself from what’s happening, numbing yourself from feeling “off” in a world that wants you to be this thing that you’re not (which is bad).
And, if you want, I can give you a list of pros and cons of being trans. There’s some nice big pros but I’d say the cons outweigh them, TBH. You aren’t trans to be special, that’s for sure. :/
@katz what is that from ?!!!
regarding the door thing, a few years back I decided to start opening doors for men.
Yeeesh, the looks of anger and disgust and hesitstion and downright refusals! You would think I was forcing them to walk across a puddle of vomit.
Yeah, after that I stopped even entertaining the possibility that that chilvary crap is about manners.
To broadly paraphrase a comic called Preacher, these courtesies are something men do to poorly compensate women for being “left out of the fun”.
regarding gender, the focus on binary identies gave me trouble for way too long. Trans people shouldnt have to feel forced into one of two categories. Smash.
further thought on gender, for me personally passing as cis of wither gender has never been possible. Others declared me queer in one way or another even when I tried my hardest to conform to one gender or the other until I just said fuck it all. So being queer was never a choice, just relaxing and owning it. 😉
jdcinsf | November 23, 2015 at 8:43 am
Wait! That’s not the party-line! Adams was “only joking!” So sayeth Daniel Webstrom.
You might want to show Daniel the error of their ways, jdcinsf.
Hug me or I’ll kill you. Right-o. From the mouths of the oppressed.
It’s from The Gender Box.
Scott Adams is replying to posts, most of it doesn’t make sense. What a douche, I am so dissapoint
No, no, you don’t understand. Adams is joking and should in no way be held accountable for the words he says, but everything he says is also true.
@Katz thank you I am very excited to watch this
Also just so you know, a man making comments about how women owe him sex or he might terrorize people is a funny joke but also true, however a woman making any sort of joke pointing out sexism is misandry and LIES!!
the comments under Adam’s rant include men literally saying women are worthless aside from baby-machining.
Finally, someone puts into words the MRA definition for satire. Thanks Katz!
@katz @throwaway Ah yes, one of those ‘jokes’. The ones where you joke by by saying things that are completely consistent with all your other views, in a completely serious tone, with no suggestion whatsoever of the fact that you are ‘joking’ until after someone gets mad at you. Of course. MRAs seem to do that one a lot.
Also as long as we’re talking about pronouns and gender binaries, I’m fine with she or they pronouns. I’m… probably somewhere on the femme side of genderfluid, but I don’t really talk about it much because, a little like dhag’s situation, nobody is ever going to read me as anything other than a woman, I don’t plan on transitioning (I’m not a man, and I don’t think T would be helpful for me in dysphoria terms) and I don’t want to weird my family out with it. I don’t even know if that makes me trans or cis (or neither?) but I worry that I’m appropriating trans stuff and I really don’t want to do that. Anyway, either ‘they’ or ‘she’ is fine with me.
(But, yeah, dhag, if you ever wanted to use different pronouns here then for one I’d totally use whatever pronouns you’d prefer.)
It’s that whole magic-words mentality. They heard a feminist one time say “Katie wants us to kill all men, amirite? JK” and no one got mad, so now they think if they add “joking” to the end of anything they say, no one is allowed to be mad about it.
If Adam’s fans can’t even agree on whether or not that blog post was a joke or whether it was serious and had many good points, why the fuck should any of us give Adams the benefit of the doubt that there was no misogynistic intent in it? Obviously his readers have reasons to suspect this was completely serious. So why shouldn’t his critics believe the same?
@Pandapool
I didn’t mean to say there’s a “real time” to think about my gender. I do think about it often. I just meant to make a distinction between openly discussing those thoughts with an internet community, and discussing them with people in my everyday meatspace life. One seems a lot easier than the other, that’s all.
I for one would certainly like to hear more about your experiences and insights, even if as you hint they might not be entirely uplifting. It would still be useful, I’m sure.
@dhag
Oh, yes, I see now. I don’t talk about anything LGBT+ wise outside of the internet. I don’t live where I can talk to someone about myself that way. The only person I’m out to IRL is someone I met online and a fellow trans person. I wouldn’t be comfortable just telling people I know unless I’m 100% certain that they support the LGBT+ community, wouldn’t treat me differently (excluding the changing of pronouns and names), and wouldn’t out me to people I know.
Both my friend and I don’t live in a very trans friendly place and I’m so lucky to have met him, you don’t even know. He’s just an all-around cinnamon roll. I need to give him a big hug the next time I see him.
Anyway, considering my brief time in the trans community, these are what I consider the pros and cons.
Take consideration I’m speaking about my own experiences and observations. I am not talking about the experiences of all trans people. If the other trans peeps here wanna chip in their experiences, please do, because the only person I can speak for about trans experiences is myself.
Pros:
-You get to be apart of a community with similar experience to yours who you can talk about these with
-You can play around and get a more solid grasp of your identity
-It’s amazing when people use your REAL pronouns and names; although it could be weird at first (because you’re not use to it) but when I hear people call me Kirby and use he/they now it’s great (it’s even a little sneaky because Kirby has been an actual family nickname of mine since I was a baby and I’m very happy with the name)
-You get respect and acceptance and not considered “weird” or “vying for attention” because people understand and are super supportive
-You’re being true to yourself and it’s amazing to be able to relax and not worry about being this or doing this or dressing this way or people telling you to act or dress a certain way and just embracing yourself and it’s great
Cons:
-Near goddamn everything TBH
-You will likely not get validation and respect from cis people you know. They might ignore what you say they should call you and instead call you by your birth name and assigned gender at birth
-People will likely not understand the experiences you’re going through and won’t want to, especially if you’re not apart of the binary (either cis or trans man or woman), if you’re a PoC, if you’re not straight, or disabled in any way. This may even come from other trans and gay people
-Some of the white and cis lesbian and gay part of the community are trying to distance themselves from the trans part of the community since marriage equality was passed in the US, meaning that we likely won’t be getting as much support as we gave the L and G part of the community
-Caitlyn Jenner is the face of the trans community right now. She’s white, rich and Republican (she’s against gay marriage but, I think, she herself only likes women??). This is bad.
-There’s also Laverne Cox and Chaz Bono but you don’t hear about them at all.
-There’s no real visibility for trans men out there, let alone visibility for trans people who are not apart of the binary. Most people write off trans men as butch lesbians
-Cis “allies” have this narrative about us and will gatekeep; they will either try to say you can be trans man or trans woman but the gender you “think” you are is wrong.
-There are trans people called “truscum” out there who think you can’t be trans without dysphoria (which is wrong) and while being trans themselves also think you can either be trans man or trans woman and think you have a “made up” gender
-There are people out that that are trying to get rid of gender altogether. They will throw trans men and trans women under the bus because we “hold up” gender stereotypes while ignoring the fact that 9/10 times a trans man or trans woman is “stereotypically” manly or womanly because otherwise they aren’t thought as “true trans” in the eyes of the community AND they’re trying their best to pass because if you even hint that you might not have been assigned at birth the gender you’re presenting as, cis people will disrespect you at least and kill you at worst
There’s a lot more cons but I’m making myself sad TBH.
I open doors for men all the time. Sometimes they look surprised, sometimes confused, occasionally grateful, but I’ve never gotten a rude comment on it.