Never underestimate the ability of Men’s Rights Activists to get worked up over the most ridiculous nonsense.
I found the meme above on the Men’s Rights Australia Facebook page, accompanied by this explanation:
Women are allowed to wear whatever they like to work, including sleeveless tops, short skirts, and even thongs. Yet if a man were to wear sleeveless tops, shorts, or thongs you can be sure he’d be sent home from work or even fired. In summer men have to suffer in the heat wearing trousers, long sleeve shirts, and tie. Feminists claim they also care about inequalities facing men so why aren’t they fighting against this? -ms
YEAH FEMINISTS WHY AREN’T YOU FIGHTING AGAINST THIS TERRIBLE INJUSTICE, WOMEN NEVER HAVE TO WEAR ANYTHING UNCOMFORTABLE OR AWKWARD AT WORK 0h wait
Note: I should point out that the “thongs” being referenced aren’t the ones that ride up your butt, but rather are the ones you wear on your feet and that are also called flip flops, at least here in the US.
BONUS MEME: This isn’t a Men’s Rights meme, obviously, but it literally made me laugh out loud.
Apparently the best way to fight communism is to do nothing while the oceans rise. I guess the Communists have their secret bases on the Marshall Islands?
I’m reminded of this legendary toilet paper ad.
A spectre is haunting the bathroom — the spectre of really really scratchy toilet paper.
@throwaway
Ha, ha, yeah!
I’m always amazed at how some people have so much difficulty apologizing. I’m amazed because they’re really good at telling other lies–so why can’t they lie when they apologize? I guess there’s something about a simple “I’m sorry” that’s psychic kryptonite to the privileged & clueless.
@LindsayIrene – I don’t think anyone had pointed it out yet, and you’re absolutely right.
I want to add that even if two work colleagues are absolutely consensual about a mutual red-hot attraction!!!!!–confine it to your private lives.
It’s really offputting to be stuck between two people flirting.
kinda feel guilty and icky like I exposed stuff about me, was too mean, too emotional…
to get back on topic after this …unpleasantness, another thought on the OP:
Classist…Or at least over simplified.
Everyone, male or female, at my job wears blue jeans, black shoes, blue collared shirt, apron, cap. Other jobs have other sorts of uniforms – police uniform, firefighter gear, those full body suits construction workers wear sometimes, scrubs, lab coats, you get the idea. Not everyone works in an office, not every work uniform is gendered.
@OoglyBoggles – by the way, from way earlier – sorry to hear about your friend. Wishing them and all of the people who care about them – especially you! – strength.
When a thread hits 4+ pages, one knows a treat is in store. How the fuck, dude. Like, how even..?
@Dlouwe
XD
Anywho, as far as the dress code thing goes…
Who even wants to wear that kinda sleeveless shirt? Not literally, I know that plenty of men/males would. However: 1)how many of these Alpha, manly Men’s Rights Assholes, who are complaining about this, actually would (I’d expect a lot of ‘queer clothes’ talk)? And 2)what feminist is totes against dudes wearing a sleeveless shirt to work? Did Anita Sarkeesian *(ominous fanfare)* say something about men’s fashion I don’t know about?
Also
Men have to stick their legs thru holes, whilst women can just slip on a cloth tube
*MISANDRY*
@kale – That’s a good point. And usually uniforms are made for men, and then sort of adapted (usually poorly) to women. Like, if I ever find a shirt that buttons down AND looks normal tucked in, I’ll probably die of shock. I don’t see any uniforms that are yoga pants but adapted for the typical man’s body.
Of course, the whole premise is nonsense from the get-go. Really, you work in an office where men have to wear ties and the women can wear shorts? Unless Australia’s office norms are way different than other western countries, no.
My husband has been trying to prove to me for years that he can jump into his jeans, but I don’t believe any women, misandrist or otherwise, have forced him into this unfortunate behavior. Similarly, he tries to throw his shirt in the air and have it sort of fall onto him in such a way that he is wearing it when it lands.
So far his shirt just falls at the wrong angle to glide onto his body and he gets his feet partway into his jeans and falls over.
I should start videotaping this and launch my youtube career.
I have a friend who works for the county and she says there exist women’s uniforms for her job, but the county just doesn’t order them because they don’t have that many female employees.
You know, I’ve never thought of “sausage fest” as transphobic. I use it to refer to situations where the place is full of cis het men who are horny as hell and act like the few women in the area owe them a dance/flirting/something more intimate. I’ll have to think about that phrase now and its implications.
@Emmy
omfg you have to tape that for the future for the youth of America and the world.
holy shit your husband is a delight and should have his own sitcom. the first real reality sitcom.
take my money, please.
do it for the children.
@kale I’ll let you know when he agrees to this surefire hit of a video series. It all started because I saw a youtube video of someone doing both things successfully, and he was like “I can do that”. 4 years later, I suspect he can’t.
@kale
Don’t worry. You expressed yourself. You’re fine. You’re good. It’s all good.
@Emmy Rae
Echoing kale, we need to see this Youtube!
I like to compliment people (men and women both; we have some very natty dressers in my office of both genders) on their clothing and do it fairly frequently.
The trick is to do just that; the compliment is on their clothing, which reflects on their good taste, not on their physical anything and certainly not anybody’s body. “Cute dress!” or “I like that shirt, it’s so colorful and springy!” Keep to the clothes, not the people, and it’s all good and noncreepy.
Oh look another thread that’s become almost entirely about one dude’s hurt feefees at the merest suggestion that maybe he’s not a perfectly impartial totally not bigoted or biased in any way super enlightened man.
Everyone but eloli lacks a sense of humor.
Everyone but eloli doesn’t understand how sexism really works.
Everyone but eloli is being uncivil and super hurtful to poor eloli by rejecting eloli’s assertion that there *is* no harm in his behavior because he means no harm.
How can there be a problem with eloli’s behavior if eloli doesn’t see the problem? HOW, I ASK YOU?!
@eloli
The instant you find yourself claiming to be not sexist? Shut up. Nobody is free of bias. We all absorb our culture’s biases to one degree or another. Anyone who claims to be free of them is wrong. Your steadfast insistence that you’re not sexist is the single biggest red flag for me in this entire thread. That is a “why are there still monkeys”, not even wrong, kind of statement. It takes a complete misunderstanding of what we even mean by sexism to think it’s coherent.
Seriously. My last comment was like halfway through page 3. I come back and see 200+ comments and 5 pages and before I even looked I knew it was gonna be all about eloli.
One of my history teachers in high school had that Bolshevik poster hung up in his classroom! He would also make the class to watch Monty Python and Fawlty Towers if he didn’t feel like teaching
Anita Sarkeesian had a good metaphor: If someone says you have something stuck in your teeth, you don’t say “I can’t have something stuck in my teeth. I’m a clean person.”
TheLurker, that is/was one cool history teacher. Reminds me of my high school AP Gov teacher, whose favorite website was (and, I presume, still is) People of Walmart-on test days he’d go on there and show us a few pictures of trashy people on the projector to relax us before we started the test.
Nothing is quite as relaxing as a casual bit of classism.
@Mij
I’m gonna have to agree with you.
@PoM That’s a really good point, and one I think is worth highlighting. If this guy responds to politely-phrased questioning with this kind of freakout, lord knows how he’d respond to someone saying to his face ‘please stop saying these things to me, it’s making me feel uncomfortable.’
A while back I had a very strong negative reaction to a guy who was ‘just offering to help’ with a small difficulty I was facing–I was super super polite, but literally felt that my life was in danger if I said or did the wrong thing. Of course, as you do, afterwards I went over and over the incident, wondering how I could have ‘overreacted’ so badly, then realised…this guy was getting into my space. He did not back off when I said ‘thank you, I can handle it’, but instead physically took over what I was trying to do. He made it very clear that my words and my wishes meant absolutely nothing to him, and that what he wanted was more important. Sure, the particular incident might have been trivial, but the mindset couldn’t have been clearer. I’m getting that same kind of vibe secondhand from eloli.
@guest
That sounds super scary. I’m glad you listened to your intuition!
Last year I was managing a very stressful project where everything was going wrong and everyone was at each other’s throats. I got everyone to send me pictures of their cats, and before we started our weekly progress/check in meeting I’d put up a cat picture (either one of ours or from the internetz) for everyone to ponder to get us into the right frame of mind.
Thanks Kat–I had read Gavin de Becker (I recommend that everyone does, although it is very disturbing and can give you nightmares)–the takeaway is that you may not know WHY you’re ‘overreacting’, but you are very very likely to have a good reason, which you might or might not realise on reflection. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re ‘overreacting’ to something that might look trivial–that is gaslighting. And watch how guys like eloli respond to minor issues, to get an idea how they might respond to more serious ones….