Another HUGE VICTORY for Men’s Rights! Some guy on the internet told a woman that the term “mansplaining” is mean to men! And then he used the “c-word” a couple of times!
At first glance, this might not be seen as the HUGE VICTORY that it truly is, men’s rights-wise, but get this! The guy in question is the guy who made Minecraft! A VIDEO GAME that LOTS OF PEOPLE LIKE. Which makes his opinion on this subject really really super important, for some reason.
Naturally, the fellas who hang out in the Men’s Rights subreddit understand what a TRIUMPH this is for men’s rights. There are currently three posts on this WORLD HISTORIC EVENT in the subreddit’s top ten.
Over in KotakuInAction,the main GamerGate hangout on Reddit, the regulars are if anything even more AWAKE to this monumental achievement for all mankind. They’ve got FOUR posts on it in their top ten.
So let’s check out the Minecraft dude’s carefully reasoned argument, which he Tweeted out yesterday.
You can tell he’s totally right about this, and also quite BRAVE, because he got 3700 likes and retweets for it.
Persson went on to explain his PERFECT MANLOGIC in more detail.
Ha ha! Because this explainy thing that men do to women constantly but that women do to men pretty rarely is equivalent to calling car crashes “womendriving” because, ha ha, women can’t drive and are responsible for 90% of all car crashes no wait, that’s not even remotely true; the demographic group that is responsible for far more than their share of accidents is teenagers.
When one Twitterer suggested it might perhaps behoove him to listen to women on this issue, Persson quickly saw through this MISANDRIST OPPRESSION of men who want to talk pretty much constantly.
Actually, Mr. Persson, as I have learned from years of doing this blog, there is no possible way to shut up men who want to inform you at great length of their opinions about feminism and what women are doing wrong. You can ban them from your comments, sure, but some of them will keep trying to post comments for months if not years afterwards.
And certainly Mr. Persson felt no need to shut up. Instead, he kicked his MANLOGICAL STEM LOGIC up a notch by unleashing the ultimate tool in the MANLOGICAL STEM LOGICKING toolkit. I refer, of course, to the c-word.
Here he applied the MANLOGIC STEM LOGICKING directly:
But don’t worry, gals! He’s totally got your back! He’s an EQUALITYIST who’s all for equality between the genders and not for sexism at all!
Huh. Apparently being into “equal rights and against sexism” requires one to go around calling women the c-word, which is TOTALLY NOT SEXIST because sometimes men get called “dick” which is TOTALLY the equivalent of the c-word., I mean it’s not like the c-word is widely considered the worst possible insult in the English language or anything.
Luckily, we have a KotakiInAction commenter called DaedLizrad to Gatersplain to us why it’s totally ok to refer to women with that special word.
Why is calling a man dick acceptable but dropping the c-bomb(seriously your too cowardly to use the word outside a quote?) is so reprehensible?
Its likely to be because of gynocentrism, even if you feminists refuse to accept(or even entertain the possibility) that society cares more about women than men you cannot convince me that feminists, both female and male, don’t clearly value women more than men, that is why treatment of a woman in the same exact way as a man is considered more abusive, because you don’t care about men as much as women.
You sit there and defend a sexist word designed to shame men for speaking to women about any topic, it is only used to tell men to shut up, like it was being used to there against Notch.
You sit there using and excusing gendered slurs against men while clutching your pearls screaming “think of the women” to the same treatment aimed at women, you feminists are all gynocentric and you c*nts can f*ck right off with your double standards.
Meanwhile, fellow KiAer Saddex took a moment of his time to let us in on what “mainsplaining” ACTUALLY is:
The thing with mansplaining is that, just with religion, it’s an unfalsefiable hypothesis. There is really no way to prove that it’s actually a real thing. Sure, might be a couple of assholes out there, but isn’t that same with women as well? Are you sure that if a man, or woman talks condescending to you, that it must be because of your gender? What about your personality, or the actual context? Did you say something just before that would be considered stupid by other people?…
I am going to treat people who tries to convince me that mansplaining actually is real thing like I treat people who try to convince me that god is real. You can believe if you wish but I rely on proof, and the burden of proof lies on the believer. It’s so satisfying to know that these people act just like religious extremists, should be compared to those and that you can use very similar argumentation to debunk what they’re saying.
Yes, what better way to debunk those ladies who get mansplained constantly than telling them they’re irrational fanatics who are seeing things that aren’t there, and that they probably brought this totally imaginary thing on themselves anyway by being such, well, the c-word thing.
All in all, an outstanding victory for the forces of Men’s Rightness and Ethics in Guys Who Make Video Games Calling Women the C-word.
Social sciences are sciences.
I hope I don’t have to fight about this, but I will if necessary.
Minecraft was and still is quite something but if I’m gonna return I need to find good servers with good communities in them
@Diptych
I don’t think scientific distinctions can be dismissed as “purely social.”
Yes, the boundaries are fuzzy and biological processes are imperfect. My comment acknowledged that.
“Sex” is still a coherent concept and “gender” is still a concept distinct from sex.
Confusing the two just reinforces sexism. What are little girls? Why, they’re those pink creatures made of sugar and spice!
(Since this is OT I probably won’t pursue the subject any further.)
(Because it’s time consuming typing on my phone my edit time window expired, so I’ll just add this: And I didn’t describe a worldview; I made a particular claim: that sex and gender are not synonymous.)
@EJ – ha ha, my other degree is in Economics. But I didn’t really think the approach of ‘hard’ science and my social science were quite the same thing and nor did I think they should have been. Of course, not all science is experimental, some of it is descriptive.
Anyway, I think there’s a lot of sniping from all sides – I’ve certainly seen arty types be quite dismissive of science and engineering and those who do those things. For me these things are not incompatible within the same society or the same human.
@starfury – I grew up in America and now live in the UK and I agree with your assessment on the C word. I refused to say it there, but use it with some regularity here. It took me a while, though. It’s dang offensive in the US.
I do! In this context, at least. Even leaving metaphysics and epistemology aside, the physical world is the physical world, and we can try to measure it, but we don’t cut people open and find “sex” or “gender” written on their insides. That’s a category we’ve invented, several steps down the line. It’s the title down the spine of the binder we’re putting our data in, long after the fact.
Yeah, you did. I’m taking that acknowledgement and arguing that the boundaries are -so- fuzzy that it’s better not to base a system on them at all, because the exceptions just keep mounting up until the system does more harm than good.
Granted, and I’ll plead similar circumstances – I was away from home and in a hurry, and rushed my introduction without wording it as well as I’d like.
I’d leave the subject behind entirely and chalk it up to natural differing perspective, but I do take umbrage to this bit. You’re accusing me of reinforcing a system where identity and behaviour (“gender”) are determined by physical form (“sex”), when that is the exact opposite of what I’m arguing! I’m saying that the only useful descriptor is someone’s identity, and that we shouldn’t categorise people according to their physical form at all!
Acknowledging that some people are male and some are female does not preclude the idea that some people are neither. It does not require that we treat people differently based on where they fall in this, or even that we must know where everyone around us falls. In a social sense, sex should not be a consideration in how we treat people. In a medical sense, there are cases when it must be a consideration. (drug trials only being conducted on male subjects, people wanting to reproduce, location of internal organs for medical/surgical practices etc…) In addition, at the current time, people are being treated differently because of their sex and denying that sex exists does nothing to help their situation – don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Maybe this goes beyond what you (and others that I’ve seen) mean when you say that sexual classification isn’t useful, but it’s what I (and probably others) are reading out of it.
TLDR: sex is a useful classification for dealing with biology and medicine and for fighting present injustice, not for determining someone’s identity.
Oh, lor’, certainly I’m not going to say “sex doesn’t exist so we don’t need protection against sexism” or anything like that. And I never said “male” and “female” don’t exist. …to be honest, I’ve rewritten this comment like three times, and I’m too tired to make it make sense. So I’m going to go full disclosure and tell you some of the emotional impetus behind bringing it up in the first place, which is that whenever I see a discussion of gender issues and some woodworm appears and has the sheer gall to say something like “no sweaty, your gender is female but your sex is male, get it right next time ; )” (or whatever), I want to vomit up my shins.
(Also, considering the sheer number of stories we hear about sexism in medicine, and of doctors ignoring trans and intersex patients’ needs, taking sex preconceptions off the table and forcing doctors to actually engage with their patients’ requirements on a case-by-case basis seems like no bad thing.)
@Starfury, just wanted to say I really liked your comment. It captured a lot of nuance I was unaware of.
Thanks also to all the other non-North American commenters who have shared their regional understanding of the word, while still acknowledging that Notch was being misogynistic as hell.
@ viscaria and star fury
It’s not a word I particularly like (that one scene in Withnail and I being the exception). I wonder if that’s because my mum hates it so much and there’s some childhood conditioning going on.
It is used a lot though by my more radical friends, including my real world feminist friends. They’re particularly fond of ‘C**tservative’ and they’re currently sharing that picture with the caption “When we were and empire we had an emperor. When we were a kingdom we had a king. Now were a country and we have David Cameron”
Still makes me cringe a bit though. Not sure if that is because of the gender aspect because I don’t have a problem with ‘Tw*t’; although where I grew up that was just a local variant on ‘twit’. Our school teachers called us that if we did something daft.
Interesting topic though.
It’s just nice to hear the real story from thoughtful non-misogynists. Too often we have dudes from the UK stroll in and say “uh, it’s not misogynistic where I come from, which is why it’s totally cool that I call my evil child-stealing greedy ex wife C-ntenstein! Claiming otherwise is ignoring cultural differences, you American c-nt.* Also, it’s completely okay for me to ignore your extreme aversion to that word. Who cares if it’s a slur for you! It’s not for me, so I’ll call you whatever I want!”
*”I’m not American, actually.” “Whatever, same diff, it’s practically the same country.”
@ Diptych
I can completely relate to that. Most of my comments get three or so revisions and then I just close the tab.
Your anger/frustration/disgust is completely understandable. These people aren’t trying to do anything but cause pain. I just can’t understand the mindset.
I agree completely that doctors should treat patients as individuals and not as some sort of theoretical problem. A friend of mine always had to fight to the keep the focus on her actual compaint and not on her weight just to get halfway decent treatment. Doctors fixate on things in less than useful ways but I think the answer is to add more social and perhaps critical thinking to their training, rather than taking sex off the table for consideration.
But I can also understand that this is important to you and don’t want to keep pursuing it if you don’t want to.
I think anyone can agree that sexism in general is a horrible thing. However it should be noted that some so called feminists will end up preaching equality of the genders, then turn around and come up with terms like “mansplaining” which in itself is also a sexist act. It’s much easier to just call someone a gender neutral term to explain that they are acting like a jerk. Because saying “man”splaining makes it a term that could only really be used to describe men. The point that Notch was trying to make is that in general using a term like that is a detriment to our society when you are easily able to just tell a jerk, male or female, should they be condescending to you, to shut up, rather than using a term that actually negatively impacts equality.
@ William
So, you’re saying that mansplaining is a sexist term because it can only describe men?
The word ‘man’ does that too, doesn’t mean the word is sexist.
‘a detriment to our society when you are easily able to just tell a jerk, male or female,’
If we don’t talk about why they’re being a jerk, we’ll never solve the problem. People have been saying already in this thread that it seems as though the only involvement feminists should have in these discussions is no involvement, and you’ve kind of just reaffirmed this.
Preaching equality does not mean enforcing the status quo and it certainly doesn’t mean failing to notice that we are not currently at a state of equality.
Mansplaining is a sexist thing that men do to women. It’s when they explain something to us that we already know, maybe even better than they do simply because they assume that men know better about every topic than women. The reason we don’t use a gender neutral term like jerk or condescending is because mansplaining is not the same thing as just generally being a jerk. It’s describing something that men specifically do to women.
It’s not sexist to point out sexism.
Case closed.
@Nparker
I’m not exactly saying that it is directly a sexist term, what I’m saying is that saying the term “mansplaining” gives the connotation that only men could be “mansplainers”, it’s like if you coined a term like “womanb***hing” and tried to come out saying to the general public and say that men could also be “womenb***hers” right, like sure anyone can be a b***h right, but adding the word “woman” to the term gives an air of being anti-woman, just as “mansplaining” can come off as anti-male.
My point is that if you want to preach the idea of equality, then you have to come up with terms that the general public will understand as being more all inclusive, otherwise you end up not actually helping equality in the end of things.
Like to be fair, I, as a man have been “mansplained” to before by a former girlfriend who didn’t allow me to voice my whole opinion when it came to certain topics, then would proceed to tell me where I was wrong. But an opinion is in fact never wrong, that’s just it, it was my opinion, it may not have been factually true at times, but it was still my opinion, and I’m allowed to have those as a person.
That’s where the whole “it’s a detriment to our society” thing comes in
I dislike using coined terms that aren’t more all inclusive because it allows people to read it as being anti-whatever. It ends up that it doesn’t matter if the term is meant to be for both sides of an argument to begin with, because if people read the context clues, it ends up appearing that it isn’t about equality.
It’s like If I said the phrase “All cops are jerks” when the truth is that there are great cops out there that legitimately do their job to the best of their ability, and that do care about protecting the public, however, there are also very bad cops who only use the position as something that puts them in power of someone else’s life, and that enjoy watching the general public squirm.The truth is while some cops are jerks, some are very much not.
And I completely agree that we need to tell them where and how they are being unfair, in fact if someone were to belittle my girlfriend’s knowledge on something I know she knows more about, I’d be first in their face to tell them how they were wrong, mainly because she can be pretty shy with people she doesn’t know, not because she couldn’t do it, but that’s besides the point. And I love feminists, in fact I suppose I would label myself as one, the whole “so called” part was about some “feminists” who claim they want equality, but end up being anti-equality in some way, shape, or form.
This is the worst example of “not getting it” I’ve seen in a while.
1. Holy shit, that was one sentence.
2. “Bitching” is already a sexist term primarily aimed at women (and even when it is aimed at men, the underlying insult is “You’re so woman-like“). So, y’know. Bit redundant, there.
3. You’re right about one thing, though: Only men can be mansplainers. At least, I don’t see many women being condescending to women because they, as women, know more about women’s issues and lives than women do.
…
That must be the most Dada thing I’ve typed in years.
I wake up to this!?
http://files.shandymedia.com/styles/page/s3/images/photos/life/kids-shows-that-entertain-adults.gif
Willam, just some advice. If you’re about to jump into a conversation and the 1st thing you think to say is a variation on ‘I’m not sexist, but…’, maybe sleep on that shit. Sometimes a good 8 hours is what you need to keep from, well… the tire fire you’re leaving in the comments here
But naw, you got it. Fuckin nailed it. *Bemused sigh*
BTW, can we make “womanbitching” a real thing? Like, this is r/MGTOW level linguistic absurdity, and I love it
Okay as an aside, I love the name “Scented Fucking Hard Chairs” I only wish I understood the reference, probably something with your close group of friends, I’d imagine, maybe a movie, I’ll admit I don’t know everything, great name though.
Sorry for the poor grammar, was in between doing several things and lost my train of thought.
Anyway, my point is that the general public can read too much into words with the words “man” or “woman”, or when they look up the definition things can become even more unclear the wiki defines mansplaining as “to explain something to someone, typically a man to woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing.” So from that wording one could assume that women could also be mansplainers(or in that case would it be womansplainers Idk.) If that isn’t the case, then the definition needs to be changed to be more informative that it is strictly a woman’s issue.
Oh good. The old “feminists aren’t allowed to talk about misogyny unless we first check with men and make sure it doesn’t hurt their delicate feelings” saw.
Well I am certainly gaining a much clearer understanding of the term now.
@William:
You’re missing a crucial aspect of it. Talking down and assuming ignorance is intensely annoying, yes; but it becomes really important when it’s done by a more privileged person to a less privileged person. For example, I’ve seen a white first-year student *splain relativity to a (very patient) black postdoc, whom he assumed must know less than him. Were it the other way around it would just be a funny story to tell, but since it’s coupled with privilege it becomes a perpetuation of social hierarchy.
Right now, for example, you are talking to a group of people who spend a lot of time discussing, reading about and gathering information about such concepts. There are people in this community with PhD level knowledge of the topic.
From what you’ve said, it appears that:
a) You didn’t know that this community had that level of expertise in it.
b) It didn’t occur to you, before you came in, to wonder whether this was the case.
c) You, yourself, do not have this level of background in the subject.
d) You do not consider your lack of expertise to be an impediment to you explaining your opinion to others.
Can you see why you aren’t getting a particularly warm reception?
For reference, if it matters, I am male. In my experience, this is an extremely welcoming community for men, as long as they don’t act like assholes. Unfortunately western society teaches men, in my experience, to associate “not being allowed to act like an asshole” with disempowerment and to dislike it. As such, a lot of people see us as mean because of this.
Would you like me to give you some etiquette pointers, as one man to another, which may make your stay easier for you?