Men’s Rights Activists learned a long time ago that the easiest way to win an argument with someone is by playing the old straw man game, ignoring what they actually believe and instead pretending that they believe something much less defensible — and much easier to rebut.
Trouble is, when you’re actually debating one of these people directly, they may point out to you that they don’t actually believe what you claim they believe. And this makes it oh so much harder to win the argument.
Luckily, MRAs have found a workaround for this little difficulty. Instead of debating real feminists who can argue back, they debate imaginary ones who say only what the MRAs allow them to say.
One quick visit to a stock photo repository and hey, presto! You’ve got yourself the following memes depicting Straw Feminists Confused About Everything.
Er, what? Feminists have the power to ban hot babes from going out in public? Do these hot babes have to make themselves less hot before they can get a walking around permit from the Department of Jealous Feminists Who Won’t Let You Go Out if You’re Too Hot?
I think I may have posted this one before, but I still don’t quite understand it. Hey MRA dudes, you’re supposed to confuse the imaginary women in your memes, not the rest of us!
This dumb little cartoon, drawn in 2003 by a dude hoping to sell a few t-shirts, has provided MRAs with thirteen years’ worth of cheap outrage so far. Congrats, MRA meme-maker, for squeezing a little bit more outrage from its desiccated corpse.
I ain’t saying she’s a golddigger but, yes, you are saying that. Again. That song is more than a decade old. Move on, dudes.
@Mish
She’s got great eyes!
http://i.imgur.com/rfQk7Ou.jpg
Citation needed on all of this.
If women were biologically designed to want nothing more than to stay home and raise kids, while somehow not possessing libidos to go out and pursue the sex needed for reproduction, how come feminism exists in the first place? Why do men have to work so hard to force women into subservient housewifery if that’s what our bodies are wired for? I’ll give you an example of a behavior that humans really do appear to be hard wire for. That would be speech. Children will – barring a disability that prevents it – pick up the language/s spoken around them. They don’t need to be taught it. They need to be taught some of the ins and outs of proper grammar, but that’s about it. Feral children will develop their own language, will find some way to verbally communicate. It isn’t this way with gender roles. We don’t pick them up with no socialization. They change across time and culture. There’s just simply no evidence that Leave it to Beaver represents the natural state of things. None.
And how do you explain gay couples? If women only have sex in order to get a father, how come lesbian couples have sex? Why do they, like hetero couples, sometimes cheat? If men only want to spread their seed and lack the ability to nurture, how come lots of gay men get married and have kids?
What a shock. You hate women who are (in your mind) golddiggers. You hate women who are independent. I never would have seen that coming. If you desire women who expect the man to pay on a date, that’s fine. But don’t resent them for it. That’s silly.
You are again failing to account for all the women who offer to pay but are thwarted. You’re making the bad assumption that all women want a sugar daddy, it’s just that some can get one and some can’t.
Are you going to answer us about why women need to watch their weight and men don’t? Since you’re clearly into the pseudoscience of evopsych, care to provide the evopsych explanation on why skinny is better than chubby evolutionarily speaking?
Hmmm.
But Dustin totes isn’t sexist! He just puts women into a situation where there is literally no possible action they could take that he would view as unobjectionable. But that’s not sexist at all! It’s just incredibly stupid and a sign that he is not the deep thinker he believes himself to be, but not remotely a sign of his misogyny.
I suppose we can refuse all dates and be celibate. But then I guess we’d be mean for rejecting Nice Guys.
We could accept Dustin paying the dinner bill and repay him with the sex act of his choice. But then we’d be sluts.
Maybe he’s okay with women who are heiresses and own their own restaurants so that there’s never a dinner or drink bill? Oh, but then he’d be upset because she has more money than he does, and that’s just not right.
Yeah, there’s really no way to woman properly. Since we can’t win, even if we try to appease misogynists, we might as well misander to our heart’s content!
Yep, when someone can’t be pleased and criticizes everything you do, it’s much more satisfying and a nicer way to live to just say fuck it and do what pleases yourself.
And that’s how the Dustins of the world lost their power over me.
@Dustin
Teehee! Perfect
You…you don’t find me attractive? Heart: broken.
Do I even have to mention this is sarcasm? Yeah, I probably do need to mention that.
Oh, Dusty, you’re kind of entertaining in your own irrational, apoplectic way!
Well, he got one part almost right.
Or not.
But I thought it was funny.
ARGLEBARGLE!
Ninja’d while reading comments 😉
@ WWTH
It’s almost as if the only women he can imagine are ones who would need to be bribed to tolerate his presence.
^ Or the straw women tossed about on m
MRA-y corners of the internet.
@Dustinzeit,
http://orig05.deviantart.net/e438/f/2014/152/d/3/concerned_by_corpulentbrony-d7kp0bh.gif
I’m sorry! I’m not very good at explaining the basics of things. I’ll try to break it down for you.
Our question is whether sexism affects the wages of women. Correct?
Sexism is composed of numerous factors. Some of these factors are things like “social pressure to dress in specific ways”, “social pressure to spend extra time maintaining a home,” “social pressure to behave subserviently/be helpful/be generous/be kind”, “social pressure to perform poorly in certain fields”, and many others! It’s a very complex topic. So, our question is whether these factors affect the wage of women compared to men.
With this in mind, should we say that we should control for – remove from our study – these factors?
No, we should not. Removing these factors would be making the assumption that they are not a component of sexism. This is not a safe assumption.
Now, we can examine how much each of these factors influences the difference in wage! This is an interesting question! We can use ANOVA statistical methods on the simple side of things, or something like PSA for more complex analyses. We have tools to tease apart just how much each variable influences the overall difference in wage!
(Come to think of it, that’s a *really* interesting question. Maybe if I have a free day or two!)
Does that help things make more sense sir? 🙂 Hopefully!
Don’t forget that fields inhabited mainly by women are paid poorly because they are inhabited by women. As came up in another thread, you can see the effects of systemic sexism when men choose to enter or leave a field in large numbers. Computer coding was low-wage, low-status, entry-level slog work when women did it, but it magically became high-wage, high-status, skilled labor when men became interested in it. Family physicians were highly respected for being so versatile and knowledgeable when they were all men, but the wages are going down now that women are going into that specialty in high numbers. Fortunately for male doctors, surgical specialties are still dominated by men and therefore enjoy high status and wages.
It’s not that women are naturally attracted to low-paying fields and should pay the price of their choices. It’s that fields become low-paying fields when there are a lot of women in them. The fact that women made the choice to go to fucking medical school and learn the wide breadth of knowledge needed to be a primary care physician causes primary care to become less valued and less well paid.
@Dustinzeit
So your argument for men, such as me, is to reduce me and women to this.
Unironically
While also posting wild claims without sources to back you up. Even then I judge your standards because it sounds more like you’re less concerned about being healthy and more inline to typical Victoria Secret standards of attractiveness, which is literally unhealthy in the malnourished sense.
Oh, gosh, I missed this too! I hope you don’t mind if I answer this as well, WWTH,
@Dustinzeit,
Um, well! Sort of? There are “stereotypically male” and “stereotypically female” brain structures and body structures, but the division between them is very fuzzy – and the typical person is a blend of both! Genetics does not create clean divisions; certainly not based on sex chromosomes!
In other words, I guess someone else said it more concisely – Citation Needed!
That’s right! Sexism is a very complicated knot, and it’s devilishly hard to de-tangle the mess. Not only does the fact that a woman is in a field result in lower pay, the whole field is judged by how “female” it is, pushing the wave of the field as well! I mean, let’s be honest here – teachers are the ones responsible for developing our children into functional adults (alongside their parents of course). They should be as well paid as the doctors who are responsible for the same, by keeping them alive – the teachers are responsible for helping them be prosperous! And yet, because the western world sees teachers as pseudo-babysitters, a.k.a. a woman’s job, it is poorly paid.
There are lots of things going on in the wage gap problem! You’re quite right.
>feigns rationality in discussion in order to subjugate women to his whims and plans to use women’s own weapons against them.
>points this out by discriminating against feeeeemales, which he thinks he should be able to do with impunity.
Oh, and he thinks women should be charged more for cupcakes by way of being “reminded to watch their weight”, too. What about teh MENZ, Dustin? It’s not like there aren’t at least as many fat dudes as dudettes, dude!
Checkmate, kekmate.
@Scildfreja
Elaborate.
Being skinny implies that you are fit and that you don’t lie around, gobbling down food every day, thus meaning that your children will not have to compete with you for as many resources. Being thin also means that you can probably run faster in the event that something is chasing you, with fat people being unable to climb ledges and/or swim from things that might eat them. Fat people are more appealing to predators, and it’s possible that men might have evolved to find them unappealing so that they wouldn’t feel inclined to dump their resources onto them, given that this would be risky in an environment fraught with predators.
It’s not as important for men to be skinny, but it’s more desirable all the same. Fat men can handle long campaigns of looking for food in cold environments because of the body heat.
@Police of Madness
No, because women have the real power; they’re just really subtle about the way that they manifest it. They’ve been pulling the strings for far longer than men think, we are but bugs, caught inexorably in the web of womanhood. You’re probably manipulating men at this very stage in life and it’s become so natural to you, that you don’t even realize it.
@Dustin
As a penis-haver, I’ve never paid for another person’s meal or drink in my life. And I managed to become happily married. Maybe you should try not being an insufferable asshole?
No.
@Imaginary Petal
@Dustinzeit
This thread in a nutshell.
http://orig12.deviantart.net/b1ce/f/2013/006/0/0/fluttershy_skips_by_eeglfethr-d5qpka8.gif
Oh, gosh! Okay. I will try to keep it simple, and do note – I am not a geneticist, so do check with the literature as well! This is just stuff I’ve picked up along the way, and from chats with the microfluidics peoples in the next lab over!
I will just give you a simple case of how genes express during development, to illustrate the principle.
When an area of an embryo is growing (A growth cone or bud or whatnot), the growth is managed by hormones. A good example is the hand – the embryo has a little fin which differentiates into fingers. A cell in what will become the knuckle of your little finger starts emitting a signalling chemical which diffuses out from it, through the fin that will become your hand. The further from that signalling cell in your knuckle, the weaker the signalling hormone – and the concentration of that hormone determines whether the region of the “fin” becomes a pinky finger, a ring finger, an index finger, etc.
And that is how a hand forms! Okay? Now we will bring it back to gender expression.
There are a huge number of things that complicate this simple signal-chemical concentration model. The gene instructs the signalling cell to generate an amount of the hormone, but the genes’ influence ends there. After that it’s all chemistry. Other hormones may interfere and confound the orderly diffusion of the signalling chemical; stress hormones in the womb (or other chemicals from the mother) may interfere; improper diet may affect the production of that hormone in the cell… there are many, many ways in which this process may be complicated or confounded! This results in polydactyly or oligodactyly – having more or fewer fingers than the norm. And there’s no genetic defect responsible – it’s just biochemistry!
And that’s just one little process! Everything in the body is doing this, at the same time!
Now look at the sex chromosomes. Expression of sexual characteristics (and brain structure differences, etc.) The development of these processes is very complex, with lots of things that could interfere with the proper expression of the genes on a sex chromosome in a completely healthy individual. So someone with XY sex chromosomes may only have partial expression of those Y genes in some portion of their body – like the brain, for example! – and proper expression in other parts.
This does not, it should be said, result in a defective person. This is the process that we all went through, with all of these complications and sub-optimal gene expressions. This is normal gene expression.
This is also only one example of the ways in which genes might express oddly, or not at all. Epigenetics is enormously complex and well outside of my area of expertise, so I encourage you to hit the white papers and literature, and see what’s out there!
tl;dr: genes express variably through the body; just because you’re XY doesn’t mean that your body is built uniformly with that Y from top to bottom. The growth environment gets in the way!
Being skinny implies that you are fit and that you don’t lie around, gobbling down food every day, (citation needed) thus meaning that your children will not have to compete with you for as many resources. (citation needed) Being thin also means that you can probably run faster in the event that something is chasing you, with fat people being unable to climb ledges (citation needed) and/or swim from things that might eat them. Fat people are more appealing to predators, (citation needed) and it’s possible that men might have evolved to find them unappealing (citation needed) so that they wouldn’t feel inclined to dump their resources onto them, given that this would be risky in an environment fraught with predators.
Well-researched thesis ya got there, buckaroo!
Oh! I should add, since it seems to be a common misconception. (Especially amongst MRAs and HBD people). Because the sex chromosomes are XX and XY doesn’t mean that all male genotype lives on the Y chromosome! To my understanding, male-expressing genes live throughout the human genotype, and the Y chromosome is responsible for their activation, but they do still exist in the X chromosome and elsewhere in the chromosome.
The specifics there are pretty fuzzy for me, but I do specifically recall being told by a developmental geneticist that the Y chromosome isn’t the only source of male-ness; it’s more like a catalyst for the activation of other processes.
This is sort of the issue I have with the “science” that the manosphere uses. It’s wrong! It’s sloppy and reductionist and ignores the fact that science is hard and we still have a lot of work to do!. It worships science instead of practicing science.
You can tell when I’m emphatic by looking for when I’m using italics, i guess!
Anyways, there you are!
AKA the Bullet Farmer song.