When a college feminist decided, one cold night in 2014, to burn her personal copy of pseudofeminist Christina Hoff Sommers’ book The War Against Boys, the internet’s antifeminists responded as if Hitler himself had risen from the grave.
“Universities bring book-burning back, one page at a time,” declared a blogger at TheRebelMedia. After an extended comparison with the infamous book burning campaigns of the literal Nazis, he declared that “[t]he burning of Hoff Sommers’ book is a striking visual synecdoche for the malaise afflicting free expression across not only North American college campuses.” In a featured article, A Voice for Men described the burning as a “disturbing” example of “misandry in academia.”
On the Men’s Rights subreddit, meanwhile, one angry dude declared that
If you’re burning a book, you’re basically admitting to being not just a bigot, but one who doesn’t even have enough confidence in the strength of their own views to believe that they can stand up for themselves without needing to silence and censor those that oppose them.
If we set aside the fact that, unlike the Nazis, who confiscated the books they burned, a person burning their own copy of a book that is readily available to others is not actually censoring anything, he’s got a point.
So it’s interesting to see how many of the Internet’s antifeminsts and Anti-Social-Justice-Warrior-Warriors are embracing a proposal from one of their own to literally censor all academics who teach stuff they don’t like.
On Change.org, professional feminism-hater Carl Benjamin, known on YouTube as Sargon of Akkad, has started a petition demanding that “UNIVERSITIES” — presumably, every single one of them — immediately “Suspend Social Justice Courses” because he thinks that “social justice” professors are up to no good.
In vague but melodramatic language Benjamin proclaims that
Social justice has become scientifically illiterate, logically unsound, deeply bigoted and openly supremacist.
He doesn’t specify exactly what kind of supremacism he’s complaining about here; presumably not white.
Nor does he ever define exactly what courses count as “social justice courses.” There aren’t any departments of Social Justice that I’m aware of. [EDIT: Oops! Turns out there are.] Does Benjamin mean a tiny handful of, say, women’s studies courses taught by radical feminists? Or does he hope (at least in his wildest dreams) to take down the humanities and social sciences as a whole?
Social justice professors are indoctrinating young people into a pseudoscientific cult behind closed doors that is doing damage to their health, education and future.
Well, technically, I guess, virtually all college courses are taught “behind closed doors,” since the doors of lecture halls generally do get closed before class begins. Technically, I’m writing this post behind closed doors, because I don’t leave the doors of my apartment wide open. (People might wander in; the cats might wander out.) I suspect that Benjamin himself wrote up his petition behind closed doors!
Benjamin goes on to declare that
[s]ocial justice … has become another ideology fit only to pave the road to Hell, so it is time to turn around and choose another path that is concerned with reason, science and improving the lives of every human.
If only some evil Social Justice English professor has indoctrinated Benjamin in the devilish art of writing without resorting to hackneyed cliches.
But that’s pretty much all there is to Benjamin’s petition. Somehow, thought, the vagueness of Benjamin’s plan hasn’t stopped 9,878 people — so far — from signing the petition.
It is, however, possible that some of the signers are a little bit confused as to what exactly they’re signing.
Indeed, the top two most-liked comments on the petition, for example, were written by people who seem to think that Benjamin’s proposal to peremptorily censor all college courses that he thinks are excessively social-justicey is, somehow, a defense of free speech?
Benjamin has posted a video in which he explains his crusade in a little more detail. It’s possible that somewhere in it he answers the question of how exactly his plan to drive all professors he doesn’t like from all the college campuses in the world is actually a crusade for free speech.
Here’s the video in question:
Oops! Wrong video. Let me try again:
Huh. I don’t think that was it either.
No, that’s clearly not it.
Ok, ok. I found the real one here.
But it’s 40 minutes long. I sampled the first 2 seconds, and that was about all I could bring myself to watch. So I guess I’ll just have to resign myself to a life of servitude under the jackboots of the Social Justice warlords. Still, that’s a far better option than actually watching a Sargon of Akkad video all the way through.
@Lagoon: If you told him to stop, and stop, and stop, and he persisted and did it anyways, that’s still assault, and he might be operating under the bullshit fallacy of “No from a woman means ‘convince me’.” or some other PUA-style garbage, so it’s still possible that he wasn’t “aware” that he was assaulting you.
Though, if you kept telling him no, I don’t see why he’d fucking continue.
I checked this today. it has 75k supporters.
The world makes me sad
No, it is not possible.
He may have thought it was okay. He may have thought that, as you describe, pushing past your refusals until you gave up refusing is acceptable behavior. If you refused, however, he was aware that you didn’t want whatever he was doing. He simply told himself – for whatever reason – that your refusals weren’t meaningful to him.
You even say as much here:
You’re eliding two concepts: that he didn’t know he was assaulting you, and that he thought it was okay to assault you. Keep those separate! “I thought this was okay” is not the same as “I didn’t know I was doing this.” It’s the difference between “I didn’t realize I left a red sock in the same load as my whites” and “I didn’t realize that leaving a red sock in with my whites would cause problems.”
You would know the difference between those two explanations if the man who assaulted you had, instead, left a red sock in the load when he washed your whites. What he actually did was so much more serious, so much more important, and, most critically, you were there giving him feedback! You were telling him not to do it! And he did it anyway. How could he have possibly not known?
Oh, honey. 🙁 I really urge you to read the link I gave before:
https://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/mythcommunication-its-not-that-they-dont-understand-they-just-dont-like-the-answer/
Whatever you said to him? Imagine that you said something similar to a person in a different context. If someone asks you if you want to go to a movie, and you say, “I’d rather not,” or “I’d love to, but I can’t,” or “Maybe later,” or “I need to go home and wash my hair,” or whatever it is you said … do you think they would interpret that as something other than a refusal? If someone said that to you, would your reaction be, “Great, see you at 5!” Men are not clueless when it comes to language, but people who commit assault will pretend to be when they don’t like the answer you’re giving.
Again, “I thought this was okay” is not the same as “I didn’t know what I was doing.” And if he’d ruined a load of your white clothes by leaving in a red sock, while you were standing there next to him telling him over and over to take that red sock out first, you wouldn’t be asking us now if maybe he just hadn’t known that the red sock was there. You told him that you were refusing.
Rape culture is not just a thing that affects men. It affects you, too. Rape culture is what’s telling you that maybe what he did is excusable. There’s no reason why you have to listen to it!
You should feel whatever you feel. I don’t think feeling angry is even slightly irrational, but you know what? If it were irrational? It would still be okay to be angry! You don’t have to justify your feelings. You don’t have to pass an audition in which you prove that you have a “good enough” reason to feel them. “I feel angry” is a good enough reason to feel angry.
That’s your decision, and nobody else can make it for you.
The morality of punishment is complicated, and legal and ethics philosophers have been thinking about it for hundreds of years. Don’t let that inform your reaction to the assault. The answer to this question actually has no bearing on the answers to your other questions, and you can answer it however you like without affecting whether it’s okay for you to be angry.
You deserve nothing but good things, and however you are able to find peace is the right way to do it.
@Lagoon, you are in no way responsible for what happened. In no way at all.
You can say that society has taught him to believe that getting a soft refusal is just an invitation. Sure, and that’s true – that’s what rape culture is about. That still doesn’t mean that the responsibility for what happened is on you.
Don’t fight your feelings, they’re legitimate. PoM is right, above, I just wanted to say it as well. Feelings happen before rationality, they’re the foundation of reasoning. Whatever you feel about it is completely acceptable, whatever those feelings are.
I think accepting those feelings is a good first step to finding peace. I hope you find it, and if you want to talk about it and feel comfortable doing so here, I’m sure you’ll find a lot of supportive people willing to listen.
<3
So let me get this straight – MRA assholes think it is Nazism to burn books of people you disagree with, and an admittance that you have no real argument against them….
Didn’t Thunderf00t/Phil Mason burn a shit ton of Qur’ans a few years back? Sure, they were on a harddrive, but it was meant as a true book burning. A way to “stick it Islam” or some other stupid shit.
And isn’t he now this big favorite among the MRA/anti-feminist crowd?
lmao
Oh that is hilarious!
So, if geography teachers taught us that the world was flat, this would be ok?
@Stfu, of course it wouldn’t be ok. Flat earth as a concept is false.
Your point being?
If you are meaning to suggest that “SJW Professors” should be censored and their courses audited for the same reasons, then you a) haven’t read this thread, and b) have no idea what you’re talking about.
For b), head over to google scholar and search for “feminism” and “social justice” and you’ll see a great many papers on the concepts, as thoroughly supported by statistics and facts as any other scientific paper.
You would have known this had you paid attention to a). Seriously, if you want to talk about this, at least go and read the comments in this thread. Research is good for you!
Bad analogy is bad.
This is one of those threads that’s destined to be necro’d again and again.
Anyone else tried reporting that petition? I’m assuming it hasn’t worked bc the petition is still up.
@Scildfreja
Hello, I am back. I must apologize for I completely forgot about this, work kept me busy longer than expected.
Yes, I do acknowledge that that standard of evidence is unbelievably high, however, it is a standard of evidence that is okay to set as the claim seems to be ‘sexism and racism is in everything’. This statement or claim is ridiculously broad and therefore requires each and every individual sub-claim to be proven. It is like saying ‘everything is made of the elements we know’, we do not know that for sure as we have no idea what ‘everything’ is. This is why I like to divide the claim in sub-claims which are easy to prove or disprove. In this case ‘stem-fields have a bias against women’ for example.
Maybe my comparison wasn’t great but you get the idea. And yes, specific evidence for specific concerns is exactly what you need. If you have a pallet with two hundred times blue and ten times yellow,
you’d be wrong to say that the enitre pallet is blue.
I’d say that this is not really true, I do keep an open mind, I know I can be wrong, I will criticize every flaw I find but as I also say everytime I criticize, this often does not completely discredit the study (only if a bad methodology was used).
Funnily enough (after looking more into the STEM issue (it was common knowledge in the field)) I have only been able to find a few studies, the one study from 2012 I was linked to and this similar, newer one, which does also include engineering and biology and states that women are preferred in both biology and engineering. Specifically ‘women preferred divorced mothers to married fathers and that men preferred mothers who took parental leaves to mothers who did not.’ Ergo the argument that there are more published studies showing the gender bias and that therefore there still is this gender bias, as people here have argued, is not to be held valid.
This study does indeed have it’s own issues with sample size, but is just as valid and more recent than the study I was linked to.
This is not what ‘wrong’ feels like, this is what not convinced feels like. I do not have a strong conviction either way. I explained earlier in my comment why every issue needs to be taken seperately. If you’re convinced that this is not the case and too high a standard, you would have to agree that when I would claim that due to the study I have presented and I can present evidence of a bias against men in other fields and I can present a bias against men in certain jobs, there is a gender bias against men, in everything. This isn’t the case, you know that to be true, I know that to be true. If you were willing to accept this I would call you an idiot for that (no offence but logically it doesn’t make sense). Asking me to not ask you to address each issue seperately and just taking your word for it every time would mean you’re asking me to throw away skepticism. I am not going to do that. As Matt Dillahunty says: ‘I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible’. Meanwhile I am stuck in the middle on unadressed issues.
@Orion
Hello, I see that what you’re trying to argue boils down to this(correct me if I am wrong):
Everytime someones claim is proven to be true, it is more likely their other claims are true.
While this may seem like a logical idea, it unfortunately is not.
This actually is a logical fallacy called ‘genetic’, placing judgement of the likeliness of truth of a claim or statement on basis of where it came from.
An example of this would be: ‘Because Ryan is known to be a truthful person, he is most likely telling the truth about incident A.’
Another more familliar example would be ‘because she has had the same boyfriend for five years, she would most likely be able to convey usefull relationship tips’.
This is an assumption, and making more assumptions than needed is not skeptical nor logical.
The danger with this, as we’ve probably all experienced, is that giving in to this fallacy could lead to believing arguments constructed around the logical fallacy of appeal to authority. (It would be an intellectual authority in this case.)
@Scildfreja
I forgot to add that the few studies I found were free to look into and assess, as I can imagine not everyone has access to certain studies and thus their methodology and full report.
That was the most boring necro ever. I guess the only thing more tedious than Sargon is his fans.
I went back two pages and still didn’t see the original argument. It appears that Polyliker’s trying really hard to believe that misogyny doesn’t exist because he doesn’t experience it himself and everyone knows women are usually hysterical and/or lying. Is that about the gist of it?
Well, thank you for your fantastic insight in the matter, irrefutable argument due to the height of it on the intellectual spectrum and superior judgement of what I am actually thinking and where my argument really comes from which is exactly not what I am saying I am thinking nor where I am saying my argument comes from.
Seriously, in which way is your comment productive? I see none.
Can we not continue the conversation because I forgot about the thread for a few moths? I’d have no problem doing this over e-mail, but at the moment this is the only way in which I can contact the people with whom I was having a conversation here.
You are a judgemental person. And not very nice, not very nice indeed.
Honestly I feel you misrepresented Sargon’s argument against the teaching of these subjects in schools. These Professors that are teaching these are not open to criticism. They treat everything they say as fact and by doing so silence opinions that are against theirs. Without having your views open for criticism and challenged, then you truly do not hold the values you are claiming to have worth their own weight. I encourage you to read Mills and his writing On Liberty. He talks about how censorship and why it is a terrible thing. Sargon is calling for an end to these teachings because they aren’t teaching that has been scientifically opened to criticism. It has been guarded and treated as if it is law and anybody questioning are at the least ostracized and at the most fired for challenging these views at all. When the actions of these professors is to use power to remove the voice of those that don’t agree with them, the response indeed should be to act against that. There is a saying that “the means do not justify the ends” Social justice has a great end that they want. A better world that treats people better and where people are more equal and represented. But the means at which it is being attained is a stab against individual liberty. The collectivist behaviors of the Social Justice era is damaging to the very western liberal values that gave us the freedom we have to even create such a movement in the first place. Sargon only wishes to not have things being taught to young minds that could indoctrinate them to overthrow the very system that gives them the rights they feel they don’t have. The road to hell is paved in good intentions and Sargon feels we are on that road. The social justice era removes the importance of the individual placing far more emphasis on the collective. The very idea of not judging one for the things they never chose is being used to demonize a whole race and gender. These ideals being taught to people whose minds are more likely to hold them as true and then never being allowed to criticize it without major repercussions is exactly what indoctrination is. I encourage you to look outside your bias and look at the means in which you want to satisfy your ends. I understand this will probably not make it past the moderators but even if they can read this I encourage them to reflect on it.