Men’s Rights Activists have scored yet another major victory over the imaginary feminists who live in their heads. On Facebook today, the moderator of the A Voice for Men page asks a question that no straw feminist can answer:
CHECKMATE FEMINISTS, in your FACE, there were QUEENS, where is that EVIL PATRIARCHY NOW???
Well, pretty much where we left it. Apparently AVFM’s Facebook admin has never actually bothered to read anything feminist scholars have ever written about patriarchy. Or even a dictionary definition of the word.
Because, guess what, AVFM admin? “Patriarchy” doesn’t actually mean that women have zero power or influence in society, but rather that men (as a class) hold much more power in society than women (as a class).
Here are a few definitions of “patriarchy” I found on the internet with a couple of basic Google searches:
“control by men of a disproportionately large share of power”
You will notice that all these definitions include qualifications to them: disproportionately, largely, more likely.
While the term patriarchy does describe societies in which women as a class are subordinate to men as a class, feminist historian Gerda Lerner has noted, it “does not imply that women are either totally powerless or totally deprived of rights, influence, and resources.”
In other words, feminists are indeed aware there was a Queen Victoria.
But ask yourself this, AVFM admin: How did she get the power she had?
While royal succession can be weird and complicated, the basic rule — and it’s a pretty patriarchical one — is that when the king dies, the job goes to the oldest legitimate son.
Princesses are promoted to Queen only if there are no legitimate male heirs. The job goes to a woman rather than some less-directly related man because, within the largely patriarchal structure of the monarchy, preserving the bloodline is more important than making sure there’s always a man in charge.
In the case of Queen Victoria, Wikipedia notes,
She inherited the throne aged 18, after her father’s three elder brothers had all died, leaving no surviving legitimate children.
So three guys had to die for her to get to the front of the line.
The existence of queens doesn’t prove that patriarchy is a myth; it just shows that patriarchy is more complicated than the simplistic caricature that antifeminists like to pretend is what feminists believe.
Patriarchy is never the whole story. There have been, and still, a number of other power structures in society and culture that intersect with patriarchy in complex ways. Feminists have been talking about these intersections for decades now — that’s what intersectional feminism is.
But MRAs aren’t actually interested in the details of feminism. After all, straw feminists are a lot easier to debate.
This is the MRAs’ even-dumber equivalent of “we have a black president, so racism is over.”
@ subtract hominem
To quote my favourite philosopher Philomena Cunk:
Elizabeth I: QGTOW.
Funny how we don’t hear much about the Apex Fallacy anymore (of which this is an example) from these guys, ever since they got laughed off Wikipedia.
The editor thing ran out, but I was going to add that somewhere, no doubt, a manospherian is arguing that because Queen Victoria didn’t use her all-encompassing queenly powers to enfranchise women, obviously women don’t have a clue how to properly use power and are therefore unfit for higher office.
And in his very next breath, that same manospherian will be arguing that the Feminazi Fempire has infiltrated the highest levels of government and is busy stamping out Western manhood with its designer jackboots.
@ Alan Robertshaw I love the Philomena Cunk character ! Did you see her one-off special on Shakespeare? So good!
@Buttercup:
Time to quote from my very favourite essay, I feel.
– From “Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt”, by Umberto Eco (Emphasis mine)
@ youthful indiscretion
Indeed I did! Wasn’t she amazing (as always)?
And to keep the Elizabeth I theme going, here she is as the great woman herself.
http://www.beyondthejoke.co.uk/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/10811125-low-1.jpg?itok=HYx_Rg_1
(Incidentally that’s Middle Temple Hall where I learned my lawyering. To keep O/T the main table was a present from Elizabeth. There’s a smaller table that was a present from her as well; but now they just keep the lunch till on it)
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants:
No, it’s not incompetence per se; you see, women just tend to choose worthless Liberal Art degrees for some reason; that’s where the wage gap comes from and there is absolutely no discrimination by employers or faculties. At least that’s what I heard a feminist say. Oh, a second wave feminist, by the way, not one of those professional victims of the third wave who like to cry rape at every opportunity. Yeah. T_T
Even if MRAs could “prove” there was no historical patriarchy, it wouldn’t change rape statistics, DV statistics, and wage gaps in the modern day. They seem to have this idea that if they can refute just one idea in feminist thought, the entire movement will crumble.
Of course they don’t apply the same standard to themselves.
They are desperate for that “gotcha” moment aren’t they?
Depending on the kingdom, daughters could inherit over more distant male relatives if there were no male children, though honestly that was considerably less important than who had the most military backing in pretty much all cases. Women could be influential as regents for their sons, assuming they were successful in the internal palace politicking, but this ended when their son came of age in most cases. There’s a notable exception with Basileus Irene, who held on to power after her son came of age until he got together enough backing to force her out and commence the traditional blinding of male relatives to remove them from the line of succession and then two years later was forced to beg her to come back as co-ruler, and eventually she had him blinded and exiled and became sole ruler in her own right.
@Buttercup
I was just about to say HMtQGHMOW (Her Majesty the Queen Going Her Majesty’s Own Way). But yours was more succinct!
@Souriquois – They’re convinced that Feminism is the Death Star. They keep probing for that tiny little weakness that, if you hit it just right, will blow up the whole thing.
Queen Victoria: the thermal exhaust port of feminism.
@EJ – Great quote. It perfectly illustrates the shapeshifting nature of authoritarian enemies (and I love that essay title, with one extra thrown in for good measure…I’m sure Eco could have come up with many more ways). The enemy must seem even more threatening and ubiquitous to them, if it can assume just about any form. Maybe that’s why they’re constantly publishing laundry lists of “How To Spot A Feminist” (because God forbid they just ask someone whether they consider women to be human beings, which is about the only reliable litmus test). One minute a feminist is playing the weakness card and making a man pay for dinner, the next minute she’s trying to emasculate him by offering to pay herself. She might have blue hair and tattoos one day, and be a lying liar in makeup and a padded bra the next. So confusing!!
It’s interesting how, apparently, one queen can magically balance out centuries of male rulers. Whenever women do better than men (say, in school), it’s because of reverse sexism, therefore it’s a crisis. Whenever men do better than women (say, at amassing wealth and privilege), it’s just biology, so no cause for alarm. Women and PoC who rise to the top are viewed as post turtles*, which means some white dude must have gotten robbed of his chance at privilege.
*To be fair, so was Bush the Lesser, but more justifiably in that case.
@IP – Haha! Yours captures the teal-deer-iness of MGTOW much better, though.
@ Karalora
That is pretty much SOP for anyone defending the status quo or traditional ideas. Just replace ‘feminist’ with evolution, anti-racist, etc… The focus is on justifying their refusal to accept the evidence rather than supporting their own ideas with research or work.
@Buttercup
http://33.media.tumblr.com/f13b24670ca0b6c77b7b154d078b5e19/tumblr_nm958gDPMs1upxwm8o1_400.gif
White ships run down a round crevasse with black ships hot on their tails. After a bigger white ship takes out the black ones, another white releases its payload into a hole. Everything explodes
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tq5CB_s41jk/UZvtwoLX4YI/AAAAAAAACAw/nlUpa4xOWpo/s400/rethink+my+life.gif
Often I think they’re just copying what they see their (successful) opposition doing, as arguments that support the status quo very often can be taken down by a single counterexample. If “Women all do X” can be refuted by pointing to a woman who doesn’t do X, then clearly “Women as a class are oppressed” can be refuted by the queen, right? Similar to how they think that figuring out a way to call your opponent racist or a bigot means that you’re winning the argument, regardless of whether or not it makes any sense.
@ Alan,
great quote from Liz I.
My favourite is
@dlouwe:
I think it might also be because status quo defenders often have never had to learn the difference between persuasion and affirmative signalling.
Within a community, a person affirmatively signals by saying something that is commonly accepted by members of that community. For example, feminists might say “a woman’s body is her own business.” This identifies us to one another and makes us feel good because we’re amongst friends. It’s not a persuasive argument to make to someone who’s not part of that group and it isn’t intended as one.
However, people who buy into the status quo often forget that not everyone does. When they meet a person who disagrees with them they will often fall back on affirmative signalling as a means of resolving the issue, because they do not properly understand the difference between their community and the world. If you’ve ever heard a religious person reply with “but Jesus died for your sins” or a nationalist say “support our troops”, you’ve seen this.
What they’re actually saying is, “I’m experiencing anxiety due to my ideas being under attack and have never had to learn to defend them properly, so I’m going to say something which has always made people agree with me before.” This is very human and it’s hard to not feel compassion for it. However, when the particular piece of affirmative signalling they choose is a cheap shot like that, it fails its purpose regardless of how big a laugh it may get among friends.
@ bluecat
She was an amazing woman; not just within the context of the society she lived in but generally. And she certainly was pithy. I like a lot of her quotes (she had some interesting things to say about lawyers 🙂 ) but in keeping with the theme, here’s another fobbing off of a suitor (Dudley this time)
@EJ (The Other One)
That’s a good point! It also puts a name to something that really bothers me, though in particular it’s the incredibly smug, condescending, sarcastic affirmative signalling that seems to be popular among edgy internet commenters.
There are specific formal logic rules on when doing that can or can’t work. A statement of the form “For all X, Y” is directly contradictory to “There exists an X for which not Y” and by the Law Of Non-Contradiction exactly one of the two statements is true. “There exists an X for which Y” and “There exists an X for which not Y” are not contradictory and may be both true or both false (it is possible that no X exist). So a statement universally applied to an entire set can be disproven by a single counterexample, while it is difficult to positively prove it by giving examples. You can do Proof By Exhaustion by individually proving that the statement is true for every single member of the set and that there are no elements of the set that you haven’t considered, but this is usually impractical. Attempting to prove something based on a smaller number of elements in that manner is known to be impossible.
More specifically, there’s a known false proof with the argument that if it applies to one member and for any subset of size n (by which we mean that if you select n elements at random this will definitely be true) it either applies to all or applies to none, then for any subset of size n+1 it either applies to all or applies to none, by induction it either applies to the entire set or none of the set, it applies one member of the set, therefore it applies to all. This almost works. Except that if n = 1, the induction fails because it doesn’t follow that the statement is either true or false for any subset of size 2. Totally works past that; obviously any trio contains three potential pairings so each element can be demonstrated to be the same as both others if all pairs are the same. But that’s only helpful if you can prove that for n = 2 without relying on it being true for n = 1. And that is why science and logic are separate fields, because we would like to make general statements about atoms without first examining every atom in the universe. This is called the “black swan problem” because all known swan species native to Europe are white but there are black swans in Australia and New Zealand, firmly demonstrating that only encountering white swans in Europe does not prove that all swans are white.
tl;dr they are bad at logic to the point where this is a canonical example of a wrong argument.
Does anyone have a citation for the Alice Stubbs case? David?
My Google fu is failing
@ Catherine
Hope this works for you.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=htEsAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA397&lpg=PA397&dq=%22a+woman+is+capable+of+serving+almost+all+the+offices%22&source=bl&ots=JoR4vhO2Eg&sig=3qOg4e2pFy78C727pa2Wx-MVx_Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi3vfP2pt_MAhXlKsAKHT8FDVUQ6AEIGzAA#v=onepage&q=%22a%20woman%20is%20capable%20of%20serving%20almost%20all%20the%20offices%22&f=false
ETA: ah, seems it sort of does if you scroll up a bit to the beginning of the law report.
@ Alan She suits that costume far too well!
@ Catherine
There’s a nice commentary on the case here that makes the points I was trying to, but coherently. It also looks at the wider issues of women’s status in terms of office holding.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Sx-kbwYgWOUC&pg=PA86&lpg=PA86&dq=rex+versus+stubbs+1788&source=bl&ots=CqbtyAvr0x&sig=d2kzYOAtRPUQNn6Tgs4O2CrqtkU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiY9fvnq9_MAhUHLsAKHSBBDeYQ6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&q=rex%20versus%20stubbs%201788&f=false
@ youthful indiscretion
She does rather doesn’t she. She does come out with some profound stuff though.
“Where is the money in a coin?” Sounds daft but does nicely sum up the whole issue of fiat currency.