Scenes from yesterday’s anti-Roosh, anti-rape rallies. With bonus Jemaine Clement

I never understood that “generation” talk. It’s such an arbitrary, generalising category that at any given time usually only ever describes a very small set of stereotypically white, middle class people.

That’s a very good point, Bernardo, and I was definitely playing into that. I will try to keep that in mind for future.

@ Bernardo

Speaking of generational issues, one of my mates gives himself away by referring to The Pink Floyd.

Of course! How else to distinguish them from the other Floyds??

I didn’t think you were criticizing me, Bernardo, but your thoughts were valuable to me all the same 🙂 I’m happy for an opportunity to unpack my own assumptions.

That was their original name.

What? I DID NOT KNOW THAT. It’s such a small thing but that is straight up blowing my mind.

One particularly asinine aspect of the Rooshie’s remarks that I thought warranted more than an eyeroll, because it’s frequently repeated by rape-culture apologists:

By attempting to teach men not to rape, what we have actually done is teach women not to care about being raped, not to protect themselves from easily preventable acts, and not to take responsibility for their actions. At the same time, we don’t hesitate to blame men for bad things that happen to them (if right now you walked into a dangerous ghetto and got robbed, you would be called an idiot and no one would say “teach ghetto kids not to steal”).

Bypassing the awkward fact that in fact we DO “teach kids” everywhere not to steal, the glaring flaw in this “argument” is that it’s attempting to equate the risks of an abnormally dangerous environment with the experience of everyday life.

Roosh and his ilk think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect women to deal with the same levels of fear and caution anytime and anywhere they might possibly encounter a man as we would expect men to deal with when going into a dangerous ghetto.

Avoiding specific neighborhoods which are known to be exceptionally dangerous, because normal society’s system of law and social contract has broken down in them, is NOT the same thing as having to take special precautions for one’s safety in every situation where one’s alone with a man. That false equivalence has the effect of normalizing forms of crime and predation that specifically affect women as something to be routinely expected from everyday life even in otherwise normally functioning societies. That’s what rape culture is.

@ viscaria

Gabba Gabba Hey (Jude) 😉

http://www.reverb-series.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/beatles-hamburg3.jpg

@ Orion

Seig mir den Weg sum Siel:

EJ,
I’m fine with men being in FA, and although I’m no expert on the movement, even though it seems to be mostly made up of women, I’ve never seen anything that suggests men are unwelcome.

What I’m not okay with is the suggestion that it’s the job of feminists to create a fat acceptance for men. There’s no reason they can’t do it themselves. I’m also not okay with the suggestion that if we don’t do all of men’s emotional work and advocacy for them, we should expect them to want to rape, harass or kill us.

Roosh’s ‘press conference’ is as pathetic as one would expect. One highlight (and the best part): he asks a journalist “Do you even lift?”

Lindy West’s article was published early yesterday and the comment section was quickly closed (at 56 comments, if I recall) because of the deluge of misogynists. I see it is reopened now (maybe The Guardian got jealous of Raw Story where the piece drew a yuuuge crowd? 😉 ). Whatever the reason, the new comments are, um, interesting. The one just left by “Klarisa Lieb” may just be from Roosh himself.

I think the “generation talk” was a form of ageism-reinforced defense of status quo. It was the way old (straight cis white) men expressed:

– HA! Look at all those younglings, trying to make things different. Well, the abusive environment they are facing at all times will eventually break them, like it did to us! haha!

I get the impression that “generation-shaming” got more and more bitter, the more options the younger get. It also became more superficial.

A few generations ago it was “common knowledge” that “you climb on the horse (politics) from the left side, but you climb down the right”, like all progressive “kids” would eventually grow into conservatives.

As the cultural shell that kept their worldview together is falling to pieces, they need to point at smaller, sillier things that are simply different, because those which may produce a meaningful political or social change are already part of the regular political agenda.

So, old people (but especially guys) are left with “grown up politics” which include left AND right (and everything between/outsied of them), and can only criticize the way young people dress or the music they listen to -which they did before, but the “haha, we’ve went through the whole left-to-right lane and so will everybody else” that made them feel truly superior is long gone by now.

I think the problem is a lot of guys and girls on the Intertoobs were raised by overprotective moms who didn’t let them play sports or get summer jobs because they were so pweshus. … If you have real friends you see the world differently.

@Owen McLovely – the following may read as an attack. I hope it doesn’t! Let me present a possible expansion of your thoughts.

All of these points are unsupported brown facts (i.e. they come from a butt). They feel right to some people, which is usually a good indication that they’re not right. Actually true things are awkward and weird and take some getting used to. This one:

– Blames a woman – check!
– Blames a woman for sentimentality and emotions over hard discipline – check!
– Blames counter-cultural movements (no sportsball! computer nerds!) – check!

The above are feel-good things that make it easier to believe that the opinion is true – confirmation bias in action (Any conclusion which assigns responsibility to someone other than the speaker does this. To avoid, don’t assign responsibility outside of yourself.). Here are some related things to think about:

– Many kids are teased and abused mercilessly by other kids, and this can be especially agonizing when referring to the sportsball. For many people, this results in nothing but anxiety and unhappiness when doing group-based physical activities. There are strong reasons – good reasons – to avoid these activities for these people. However, they learn teamwork in other ways. Humans are social. Organizing into groups is natural. Social skills develop regardless of the sportsball, honest.

– Discipline and sentimentality are not opposites. Good parenting has both. Your claim that moms (and apparently not dads?) are “overprotective” is unsupported. Citation please.

– When we were growing up and computers with internet was becoming a Thing, our parents had no idea what the hell was about to happen. They did the best they could with the knowledge they had at the time (in general). As a personal anecdote, I’ve found the people who are internet-savvy and connected to be far more empathetic, gentle, and open than those who aren’t. It’s the guys in my life who are all about the sportsball teams that are aggressively masculine, libertarian and judgmental.

Our opinions tend to say less about the world than they do about ourselves. Again – I don’t want to be accusatory with this post! But please, look at your opinions and ask yourself what they say about you.

Sincerely,

– a middle aged, unsporty, sentimental, virgin data scientist who is absolutely fine with all of that

@Bina

Einstein performed thought experiments but, unlike Roosh, he actually understood the nature of what he was experimenting on, and so could draw conclusions that reflected reality; of course we all know that reality is not Rooshs major priority.