Men’s Rights Activists and other antifeminists love playing “gotcha” — demanding answers to questions designed to make feminists look hypocritical or illogical or just plain dumb.
Trouble is, despite their fondness for the “gotcha” game, most MRAs and antifeminists just aren’t very good at it. Their questions, often based on gross misunderstandings, tend to reveal less about the alleged hypocrisies of feminists than they reveal about their own profound ignorance of feminism.
Let’s take a look at a few of these failed gotcha memes, collected from a couple of antifeminst Facebook pages and elsewhere online and making use of the popular philosoraptor meme template
Well, that would be because women have been systematically oppressed for thousands of years; in order to get to equality, we need to focus on the things that have held women back. It’s the same reason that the civil rights movement fought for the rights of black people instead of white people.
If you think it’s wrong to call oneself a feminist instead of a humanist or equalist or whatever, why do you support something called the Men’s Rights movement?
Uh, because fighting for the “rights” of a group of people who already have more than their fair share of privileges is backwards and silly? Because MRAs are less interested in making life better for men than they are in making things worse for women? Because most MRAs are ridiculous?
Uh, because they don’t? Feminists do sometimes point out that the overwhelming majority of rapists are men, but they don’t call all men rapists.
Er, what? That doesn’t make any sense. Among other things, ‘rapists” and “whores” aren’t equivalent categories, given that the latter category involves consensual sex and the former involves nonconsensual sex.
Do you not understand how adjectives work? When feminists talk about “toxic masculinity” they don’t mean that masculinity itself is inherently toxic any more than someone referring to a “red car” means that all cars are red. Some kinds of masculinity can be toxic; that’s what feminists are taking about when they talk about “toxic masculinity. As the Geek Feminism wiki explains it, “toxic masculinity … refers to the socially-constructed attitudes that describe the masculine gender role as violent, unemotional, sexually aggressive, and so forth.
I don’t know why so many MRAs still don’t understand this; it’s certainly been explained to them more than enough times. And do MRAs not know how to use Google? That Geek Feminism definition I quoted above is literally the first result you get if you Google “toxic masculinity.”
And now we’re just getting silly. First off, fictional characters don’t hijack franchises; they’re fictional characters. Second, since when do movie franchises belong to a certain gender? There’s no movie law that says ghostbusters have to all be dudes, just because that’s what they were in the original Ghostbusters films.
Everyone has the right to defend themselves, but “hitting someone back” in a punitive manner is an escalation of the fight, and that’s not a good thing. Also, why are you putting “woman” in scare quotes?
I can’t even. What?
Three Guns
So we see here the common misunderstanding of free speech, confusing the push to remove harassment and hate speech and death threats with criticism or civil discourse. Of affirmative action, and how a strong push for women and girls in higher education is directly linked with better economies and improved situations for the countries who implement it. And of course just being frankly wrong on the wage gap that results from shallow thinking and shitty sources.
And there’s the rage from circumcision that is always directed onto women instead of the male doctors who do the procedure, male religious leaders who created it and perpetuate it through culture, and the fathers who were cut and want their sons to match them. Dude, as one cut guy to another, the people you should blame for this is your fellow men. And your perfectly serviceable dick is nothing compared to the violation that lack of abortion is. Oh, you’re just missing a bit of sensitive tissue, whereas women are rendered literal second class citizens without complete control of what happens to their bodies. Where women can and do still die from pregnancy related problems. I would say that the strong possibility of death vastly outweighs a tiny bit of sensitive skin. And of course the usual disclaimer needed for MRAs, as a feminist I,and most others, oppose circumcision as its a violation of bodily autonomy.
And there it is, the real reason for them abandoning feminism. The aggrieved and wounded ego of a male spurned and not given enough cookies for being decent.
http://gifrific.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Francis-Underwood-Looks-at-Camera-House-of-Cards.gif
Three Gun’s responses to mine were both perplexing and incoherent – but I do want to comment on one of his responses to Paradoxical Intention:
By not backing up a single thing you’ve stated?
That is self-contradictory. Either you haven’t gotten to the source yet or you’ve already read it – it can’t be both.
“I don’t agree with what this expert says, so they must be wrong!”
Then show them. So far, you haven’t.
When I talked about abortion rights, I just knew before I even hit post that he’d compare getting a bit of skin snipped off to being forced to give birth. I knew there’d be a false comparison to parents making what they thought was a correct medical decision for their baby boys to adult women being prevented from making medical decisions for themselves. If the government was trying to force adult men to get circumcised he might have a point.
I think if someone says something factually incorrect it’s usually a good idea to correct them; however, pay attention to whether they’re addressing the fact in question or the way the troll is arguing. Often trolls are so all over the place that people aren’t going to bother addressing and/or agreeing with their few correct points. And maybe avoid mentioning the troll when correcting posters. For example, rather than saying, “Actually, Walter is right, statistics show that there’s a weak correlation between penis size and leadership capacity in men” you could just say, “Actually, statistics show that there’s a weak correlation between penis size and leadership capacity in men.” (Totally made up example.)
As far as that second scenario where you’re saying someone had an unfair take on a troll, personally I would recommend leaving that alone. Mocking trolls is a common source of amusement around here, and people sometimes get purposely hyperbolic when doing so.
@Three Guns
I’m going to pick out the fatal bits of unreason and illogic from across the post. You don’t sound like you have any idea what feminism is. If were a feminist at any point it was not because you actually had any idea about what it was or what the goals and important issues were.
Pg2
Your response to David pointing out that feminism is called feminism because of the systematic oppression of women and female people (this will become important) was,
Followed by an attempt to refocus things with,
That men were punished in a specific way in a place you do not reference does not negate the thousands of years of oppression of women and female people in general. BBYour point does not merit a subject change because your point does not make David’s statement untrueBB.
We’ve been seeing it. We refuse to cooperate with it since we don’t have a problem with the group/philosophy having the goal of equality while being named by the group that historically had less social power. We don’t have a problem being overly-literal and getting psychologically triggered by the name.
Because the same systems that oppress women and female people also keep men and male people in their own social strait jackets and those systems still award men and male people more social power. Just as there are men that systematically harass women into social compliance through things like cat-calling and sexual harassment, there are men that systematically harass male people that don’t fit into the social picture of what a male person should do.
This is precisely where I see that you are simply not paying attention and are instead reading what you want to believe. David was responding to the inherent hypocrisy in an image macro, not taking a position of his own. Learn to read for comprehension. When David points out why it’s called feminism he references collective rights, he does not say that there are no rights that men need more of.
I’ll second others here and say personal bodily autonomy. I’ll also mention the right to be held to the same standards in a professional setting and to not have their professional prestige tied to things like looks and family issues.
Nice cowardly subject change from the reasonable point that Scildfreja was making to something that has been debunked.
Nice cowardly evasion of the reasonable point that David was making combined with a complete lack of explanation for why the person was reasonably insulted, instead of feeling insulted from a reasonably applied insulting characterization. Many sexists and misogynists (like people trying to make an equivalence between rape and whore) will be pissed at the reasonable application of the labels.
How about you learn to summarize the points in a source instead. Do your own damn work. If you can’t paraphrase it for the sake of argument here I’m just going to assume you are as ignorant about it as you look with many other things here.
As others have pointed out there are plenty of trades that women have wanted to get into but have faced systematic resistance for.
You have no idea what our hate even looks like. You only see your version of it.
Pg3
Recognizing that the site name was changed for specific reasons is a mark of integrity.
And so women and female people had work responsibilities like men and male people and pointing to one set does not negate the other. Like I mentioned above your point did nothing to the other one. “So what?” works for your comment too.
So what? The fact that women and men disliked feminism is the unimportant part of the point you think you have. I don’t care that they did not like it, I care about why they did not like it. If you cannot outline that and show why it matters you are useless here.
Try reading for comprehension. The point being made by weirwoodtreehugger was not about the roles they were in, but that many did not like being stuck in those roles.
Objectively untrue. Black and white thinking appears to be a major flaw, I think you simply traded one fundamentalism for another. Your assumptions about why David does what they do are likely wrong given your distorted view of reality.
You are an excellent example of the systematic devaluation of the work of women and female people.
That’s not called “backing out”, that’s called pointing out problems with your argument even if reality were the way you wish it was. I think you are failing at formal operational thought, the ability to hold an idea in your head abstractly in order to think about it independently of reality.
Yes. It’s goals are egalitarian and the name has to do with the fact that the specific details of how society is set up has to include the differences between how society treats and expects men and women (and male and female people) to behave.
*Is that why feminists have been spearheading attempts to silence speech both online and off?
Citation needed. The whining about “censorship” and “silencing speech” that I have encountered mostly has to do with people that don’t want to obey social rules in communities, or want to preserve their ability to harass others into shutting up making it projection.
Citation needed on the rest of that paragraph too. I simply do not trust your emotional impressions of things at this point.
Note that this response is in the context of your devaluation and willful ignorance of the multitude of ways that society removed bodily autonomy from women and female people. Actually face the issue coward. I find it disgusting and nauseating that you think that pointing to circumcision is a shield.
Name the feminists that have a problem with ending circumcision. What you just posted would only matter if they existed at any reasonable number if they even existed at all.
As someone who was also circumcised I could not try to compare the two without feeling very very dishonest. While it needs to end it does not compare to what happens from abortion to birth control to being judged the same as men when it comes to appearance and professionalism.
It’s not the fact that you complain about it, it’s that you use it as a cowardly shield from facing what is done to woman and female people (the women being different from female people is meaningful here, trans woman are heavily policed based on the body). The best you can possibly point out is that weirwoodtreehugger was being too black and white in how they characterized things, if you actually had any standards beyond social conflict.
Noting that others have already shot this garbage down.
In some cases. You are presenting a caricature of actual positions. Many men (specific male people) are trained to treat women and female people in certain ways and society trains women to be compliant which can make it impossible to get out of the “freeze” in fight/flight/freeze. As a man yes, SOME men are deficient.
Some people made that claim and I see little reason to believe what you say about MRAs. Many of the other shitty opinions are shared.
There are feminists that heavily criticize that and the fact that there are women that also propagate rape culture is part of feminist thought. I do not believe you were ever a feminist, and I do not believe that the details about why you think men rape will bear much resemblance to reality. I would like to see it though.
That second was made in the context of group affiliation which includes members that have made that claim. The best you can say is that someone should have waited until you expressed your specific views on rape, but I can’t muster much sympathy for you at this point.
More later.
Ok, re: the hunter/gatherer thing, where apparently gathering means just vegetation. The menz go slaughter a mammoth, the wimminz go gather the salad.
Gathering encompassed more than plant foods, depending (of course) on geographical location. Gathering could (and did) include seafoods (like shellfish, etc), eggs, insects, and trapping and net-hunting small game (ie: birds, rabbits, etc). This is why ‘gathering’ could form the basis of most h/g diets – because it included protein sources. This apparent misconception of gathering as just picking berries and leaves is really irritating, as is the term ‘gathering’ for activities that are actually hunting.
Also, throughout history, women have done work that is not ‘domestic’ (as if domestic work wasn’t bloody hard or valuable). Not everyone was of the higher classes. Most people weren’t.
Maybe if we throw tampons at the troll it will go away.
I can only respond to bits and pieces of the troll because I’m at work but I’d like to point out real quick that the women who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and the women who died in the Bangladesh factory collapse would take exception to the notion that women don’t work and when they do, it’s not dangerous.
Of course they are dead from working in unsafe conditions, so they can’t.
Susan Faludi’s book Stiffed is a good exploration of toxic masculinity and its effects on men. The first chapter considers ‘healthy’ and ‘normative’ (not her terms, it’s been forever since I read the book so I’m just drawing on my memory) forms of masculinity and femininity, suggesting that both have the same goal–to nurture, support and protect the group and the next generation.
Y’know, I’m sure he thinks he’s being clever here, but I’ve literally used that analogy to explain diversity to five-year-olds before. So…
Or maybe he really doesn’t understand. In which case, wow.
This is almost kind of beautiful. The way he’s trying to make an impassioned point but literally can’t stop himself from going off on a tangent of sarcastic piss-taking, resulting in a meaningless mush that requires a note at the end explaining what parts he really meant.
PS the colors on the screen are red, green, and blue, dumbass.
You hear that? It’s only REAL work if you died doing it. Thx for proving that any other work that doesn’t involve dying is illegitimate and counts for nothing. Oh except you haven’t proved anything. You haven’t even cited anything yet. All you’ve done is given your opinions, and gotten angry when no one accepts them as fact.
I went to sleep! I said I was going to sleep and then I went to sleep!
Now, I’m back briefly, and then I’ll be on later tonight.
Well, pup? Pup. What? Anyway, can you be more specific. I have something like 20 cites relating to dating strategy alone.
And if they all must be peer reviewed journals, then that cripples you. This is social science. At least I do my best to keep my cites within the last ten years, which I’m already seeing cites from you guys that are very much not that.
Neither is David. 🙂
Also, I love how I’m ooh so boring, and a troll and all, but you all can’t help but just talk to me constantly. And me alone.
I feel like the bell of the ball. Because I am. Step back, bish.
Yet here you are.
This troll’s emphasis on legal rights reminds me of the Swedish (former?) MRA Pär Ström, who relied entirely on the following argument:
1. There are laws giving women “special rights” (by which he meant things like VAWA, i.e. usually things that aren’t actually exclusive to women but were put in place essentially to acknowledge and make up for the systemic discrimination of women).
2. There are no such laws giving men “special rights” (because there’s no systemic discrimination of men).
3. Therefore, men are being discriminated against.
Ström wouldn’t accept any form of argument or evidence that isn’t written into the law of the country. He would reject the entirety of science and direct observation, treating the law as the only “real evidence” and all other evidence as “hearsay/emotional”.
He also used the term “jämställdism”, which I suppose would translate to “egalitarianism” (although there’s already a Swedish word for egalitarianism, and it’s “egalitarism” – but MRAs are very fond of making up terminology, as we all know).
Wait, is this troll Pär Ström reincarnated?
Troll Guns,
We keep trolls around because having chew toys amuses us. So we sharpen our teeth on you until we decide we’ve had enough. Then it’s banning time.
You can be flattered by the attention if you like, but you probably shouldn’t be.
We’re laughing at you. Not with you.
And shouldn’t it be beau of the ball? Not bell(e)?
It may cripple your argument, but then that’s the point, isn’t it? If you can’t back it, it’s not a strong argument to begin with. Social Science is, you know, an actual science and if you have a leg to stand on, you can cite sources for your claims.
Wait wait… You’re going to cite dating strategies? Maybe that doesn’t mean what I think it means, but I thought the topic at hand was whether or not feminism caused men to be oppressed (it didn’t)
TIL: Social sciences aren’t peer reviewed. XD
Oh, oh, a “bell”, is it? A pity your tone is so cracked that nothing you say rings true.
Social scientists certainly have a peer-review process. This is not a matter of opinion: I may be more versed in the hard sciences but I respect the diligence of those who work in social science and their adherence to the scientific method.
Here’s an example of a learned paper from the social sciences: Sara E. Hill and H. Kern Reeve from the University of Texas at Austin lay down the fucking law on human behaviour with regards to mate selection. You can criticise their methodology or their approach, but you cannot criticise their rigour.
If you are not at least Dr Hill and/or Dr Reeve, you can fuck off when you’re talking about human behaviour. The bar has been set. Meet it or back down.
Pup.
@Lagoon
He thinks they’re the same thing.
Sad boners: The only true oppression!
</what every single MRA ever’s “Argument” boils down to>
Liar, liar:
Not only were men NEVER flogged for wife beating, in the US or elsewhere, they were actively legally PROTECTED in their “right” to do so, and still are to this day.
Basically, you’ve just signalled that, as a supposed ex-feminist turned MRA, you’re a member of the abusers’ lobby. (I would say “card-carrying”, but I’m guessing you and your fellow dolts still can’t agree on a sufficiently ugly design for a card.) Your “mission” here isn’t to bring truth to the delusional (because we are not under any delusions, and the one who lacks truth is you); it’s to excuse and deliberately obfuscate the privilege of abusive men to continue abusing. “Men’s rights” is nothing but another way of saying “the right of men to abuse women at their pleasure”.
You can fuck off now. Or you can start adding links (which you claim you have, but haven’t produced even once!) to prove your (empty, and empty-headed) contentions, Ding Dong Troll.
One of the reasons some people didn’t get involved when Kitty Genovese, who came up in comments to a post here a while back, was murdered outside her apartment building is that they didn’t want to get involved in a ‘domestic’.
Ah, the old “Well, why don’t you just go make your own?!” argument.
See here’s the thing: We do.
We have women who run major motion picture companies, we have women who are directors, and actors, and women who do all sorts of jobs in Hollywood from the huge to the tiny, just like men. Women work just as hard, if not harder in Hollywood to make movies happen.
Part of the problem is: Hollywood has fallen to the self-fulfilling prophecy of “Women in movies don’t sell”, so major studios aren’t willing to back a movie made by women, starring women, or if they do, it takes a hell of a lot of cajoling. If major studios decide to not back a movie, it’s never going to get the same attention as Action (Cishet White) Dude 241 simply because a smaller studio won’t have the same access to marketing as a larger studio.
When we get rare access to movies that are female led and/or have good female representation (not a love interest, not fridged, not a damsel, ect.), many women will flock to them because FINALLY someone made a movie that has good female representation!
So you can talk about your “garbage apples” all you want, but the fact of the matter is, it still made tons of money (despite any weaksauce “boycotts”), thus debunking that old idea that “movies with women (and in this case PoC) won’t make money”. But still, people cling to it, because tradition.
Another part of the problem is: they don’t get paid the same as their male counterparts, and they don’t get the same respect, and thus, they don’t get the same attention or if they do, it’s met with snide, nasty commentary from the peanut gallery of people who don’t believe that they should have those roles that “rightfully” belong to men. Case in point: the Ghostbusters reboot.
No one “stole” or “took” those roles from men. No one retconned your childhood and made it so the Ghostbusters have always been women. The originals are still there. You can still go watch them at any time. They still exist.
This is just a new variation on a huge franchise of movies, just like Michael Bay’s TMNT (which a lot of other people, myself included, weren’t too thrilled with at first) is just another facet of the TMNT franchise. It’s not the whole thing, there’s always going to be other versions people prefer, and that’s okay.
(If anyone besides our little troll wants to fill in some gaps, please do. I just woke up and haven’t eaten yet, so I’m a little bit incoherent.)