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.
… Experimentation on the meaning of words? How the fuck would that even work?
If you’re trying to act all SCIENCE, it might help to learn what the words THEORY and HYPOTHESIS actually mean.
My brain is not awake enough to process sarcasm and/or irony yet.
The fact that the word “mansplaining” upsets some men so much just makes me want to use it more.
http://i.imgur.com/IQt8MHt.gif
I have to wonder if he’s one of those “evolution is just a theory” people.
Besides, experimentation and even peer-reviewed studies mean exactly jack and shit in the face of MRA denialism (for example, the wage gap’s been as thoroughly proven as the Holocaust*, but every single study is brushed off as “BIAS!!!” [sic]). So this is all just an exercise in mental masturbation and above-it-all pretentiousness from a man who’s not very good at either.
*Oh, wait, most MRAs deny that too.
Sadly, I’ve met far too many people in non-theist communities to give it more than a fifty fifty chance.
I dunno, @Handsomest Jack! I was trying to parse it as well and was worried that I was just being slow on the uptake. Can you break it down, Eva? It sounds like you’re pretty upset about it at the least!
@Cupcakes 4 Hitler,
Cupcakes, It’s an infinite supply of Legos! That you can run around inside of! That’s the depth! Minecraft is about the joy of creation, about letting your imagination run free over an entire landscape. It’s not about fightin bad guys, or having a customizeable skill tree. It’s about building awesome forts with your friends and then having a big snowball fight; it’s about playing king-of-the-hill in an abandoned city; it’s about imagining an awesome underground dwarven kingdom, and then being able to make it, and then defending it from hordes of zombies.
Minecraft is about the purest distillation of childlike joy that I can think of on the computer. Try looking at it from that lens, maybe you can reconnect with that. It’s very worthwhile if you can.
@ scildfreja
In real life there are 68 pieces of Lego for every person on Earth*.
Like so many things though they’re not distributed equitably.
(* according to the Lego people anyway)
@Cloud
Mansplaining wouldn’t even be a theory. But it would indeed be a fact, right?
‘Men sometimes assume a lower level of understanding from a woman than a fellow man on a given subject, especially those he considers himself an authority. Thus, he will attempt to explain the subject to her without taking her expertise into consideration.’
That’s a series of obserations AKA facts. So long as said observations can be verified, that is. A hypothesis would be a testable proposal based on those facts like, say, ‘mansplaining is more prevalent in STEM fields’. A positive result in experiments advances the field of study. A theory would explain (heh) mansplaining and a host of other phenomena with an underlying principle and, in so doing, unify related phenomena. My understanding of feminist thought is that there is such a theory, commonly called ‘Gender Imbalance’ or ‘Patriarchy’
At least, I’m pretty sure that’s how it works. Correct me if I’m wrong about anything, science mammoths
@Cupcakes 4 Hitler
I felt very much the same way before I played it. Then I spent way too much time playing when I should have been studying. 🙂
@Scildfreda
Yes, maybe, but I don’t want to give this Notch guy any money after reading that. What do you think of Terreria?
Notch won’t get a dime of anything spent on Minecraft. He sold Mojang and all of its catalog to Microsoft two years ago.
@Cupcakes 4 Hitler
Terraria is GREAT. I actually love it a lot more than Minecraft. I finally managed to replace my computer after some weird storm messed up mine three days ago and I was actually considering getting back to it for yet another time. The 2D aspect seems to limit the “creation” part of it but it actually doesn’t. It just gives you different rules to mess around with and you can really make some amazingly beautiful stuff. And the gameplay outside creation, well… it’s a lot more explore-y and RPG-y than Minecraft. That alone is worth it, you don’t even have to be in it for the creation part (at first I wasn’t, and still enjoyed the hell out of it). It’s maybe harder, expect to die a lot unless you’re badass, in which case come help me restart a save since I lost all mine.
No but seriously it’s a great game, I sunk dozens (hundreds ?) on it and will do it again.
Also : male AND female characters on creation, unlike Minecraft, heh. And although some haircuts are gendered, both sexes have access to all of them. That earns some more points in my book.
Though I do agree with Scildfreja’s take on the joy that Minecraft is, it never struck me quite like Terraria does, so if my experience is worth anything you may wanna check it out.
@pitshade
Nice to know, although I’ll warrant a great many of these game developers drink from the same trough and have the same bigoted attitudes.
I wrote this on the page about the Ghostbusters movie, and I’m going to post it again as it’s “gamergatey”, I wasn’t sure where to put it.
When I was little, I loved Ghostbusters. I had all the toys (still have some of them somewhere) the Sega Megadrive game and I wore a little khaki overall like they do in the movies. It never occurred to me that as they were all guys, I wasn’t allowed to be a Ghostbuster. I know some blokes are saying that having an all female crew has “ruined their childhood”, but if this movie had been made thirty years ago, it would have made mine, and any other little girl viewers.
The big “blockbuster” hyped up last summer was Adam Sandler’s vicious and mean spirited Pixels, which was a waste of a great opportunity. The trailers had me thinking is was going to be a new Ghostbusters. It had the potential to be a class a family movie. Unfortunately, it’s probably the most gamergatey movie ever made. It portrays women as objects and objects of derision, prizes to be won and leered over. The bit with Peter Dinklage, Serena Williams and Martha Stewart is embarrassing, as is Josh Gad’s liasons with Ashley Benson. What were their agents thinking? (Answer, £££££’s) despite this being plugged as the must see action flick of the summer, critics lambasted it. All the fault of the feminists of course (or the Cultural Marxists unaware that most of the guys were Jewish) according to the MRA types who regard objectification of women a ‘divine right’.
I do not know when the Ghostbusters reboot was put into production, whether they had heard bad things about Pixels before it was even released, but to my mind, in casting an all female Ghostbusting crew, they have done the right thing. They have avoided another epic fail like Pixels. It makes no difference if the film is amazing or barely adequate, it will always be superior to that benchmark of purile man baby wank that is Pixels.
I enjoyed McCarthy in Spy and Tammy, and Wiig in Welcome To Me. They are very funny and talented actors, with more talent in their little fingernail than the smug, self righteous Sandler. I know they say “women can’t be funny” because it defies their marriagability and femininity. You try watching a Sandler film, you see he’s not funny, just smug, passive aggressive and cruel.
@C4H
Also, the plot was stolen wholesale from an infinitely superior episode of Futurama.
… Small potatoes, but seriously, Sandler should’ve been sued for that one.
EDIT: And I didn’t realise Pixels is also racist as fuck until watching that trailer mashup just now (I haven’t seen it and never will). “Herro”? Seriously?
@Cloud: It’s super easy for people who aren’t affected by something to sit back and demand level-headedness, neutrality and scientific method, isn’t it?
I see so many men sit back when confronted about sexism and sexists behaviors and say “This isn’t a thing. I don’t do/think this thing, no man I know does/thinks this thing, therefore, it’s not a Thing That Happens, despite all the women telling me that it is indeed such.” And indeed, they get upset when women insist that they do, and point to the mountain of anecdata (accumulated by hundreds of thousands of women) and scientific studies and feminist articles on the subject.
And when women ask for a conversation on the subject, the men sit back with that same dismissive attitude, almost like they’re “debating” a child, and then get confused when women are so frustrated with their dismissiveness.
“Why are you so angry? Don’t you know that you can’t discuss things logically if you’re angry like that? Come back when you’re not angry about this, because then you’ll be logical about it. Like me.”
And then women women present anecdata about their experiences, and when they present Scientific Studies to back up their claims, it still gets hand-waved away and dismissed. “I’m sure it’s just you.” The men say. “I don’t do/think that, no man I know does/thinks that. It’s just you. You’re making it a big deal, and it’s not a big deal.” Of course, he’d say that only if he thinks it happened at all.
Then comes the calls for “neutrality”. “Women are just as bad!” Other men will claim. “Women do all these things that make me upset! Why aren’t you addressing those?!” The men cry, completely dismissing the women who do address those issues and the context of the situation.
Of course, that also serves to derail the conversation. To shut the women up about the topic they brought to the table, because now the men have forced the women on the defensive and now women have to calm down a bunch of angry, irrational men, and instead talk to them about the problems the women are supposedly causing instead.
At some point, women realize that it’s useless and a massive waste of time to discuss their problems with men with these men, so they stop, and try to solve their problems on their own, in their own way, and without the input of men like this.
Though, that does upset these same men, who don’t understand why women won’t debate with them when it comes to their problems. Women need to constantly prove to these men that their problems are indeed problems that one, exist, and two, are worth solving.
It never occurs to them that a woman’s existence and the sexism she faces at the hands of men isn’t a fun debate topic for men to bat around as a fun cognitive exercise. It’s our lives.
@SFHC
It’s outrageously racist. Also, people don’t say this often, but the racism extends to the British. (The other movie from last year which was racist against the British was Minions, such a disappointment after the two Despicable Me movies) Just because Sandler is Jewish it doesn’t grant him immunity from being a racist.
I couldn’t remember the Futurama episode, not watched them for a long time. I knew Sandler ripped the idea off from a YouTube short. I don’t think Chris Columbus did a bad job of directing, it’s the kind of thing he does well and always has, but it was just a job. The script absolutely sucked ass. Sandler seems to be able to turn everything he touches into shit, the only movies I’ve enjoyed with him in them are the Hotel Transylvania ones. (Which are a commentary on racism!!) I guess he didn’t write them tho.
Technically, “Pixels” is based on this short movie, which they licensed to expand/exploit/ruin.
@ SFHC
Generally there’s no copyright in an idea, only in the expression of an idea.
Of course, where that line is crossed is what clutters up the courts, and oftentimes production companies will buy or license the copyright in anything that seems too similar to avoid the risk of time consuming litigation. You also need to show that you were the first person to come up with the specific expression of the idea.
This is why the somewhat lazy ‘follow the leader’ approach is so common in media. You guys here are the pop culture experts so I’m sure you can come up with plenty of examples (copycat superheroes, video game clones etc)
@Alan
The most famous example
http://static1.comicvine.com/uploads/original/11111/111113706/5118156-4512614769-uploa.jpg
Apparently an orphan boy who gains superpowers from a wizard by saying a magic word is a violation on the copyright of an alien man who gets his powers from sunlight and scifi metabolism. Somehow…
Deadpool was meant to be an ironic pastiche of Deathstroke…
Where do you do the Deathstroke?
In the Deadpool.
… … ….
Anyway…
Lobo was DC’s caricature of Wolverine which I think Marvel turned around and did a parody of Lobo but I’m not sure.
Lobo’s pretty cool.
@ axecalibur
I must confess to not being familiar with US comics; is the chap in the red Captain Marvel/Shazam? If so that’s a very convoluted intellectual property story; hence the title of the comic.
@ cupcakes
Pastiche/parody can be an exception to the general rules on copyright; although as always with any legal stuff it can get nebulous. But it is the reason the Johnny English films, for example, can mirror the James Bond tropes so closely whereas a more serious film would have to tread carefully. Ironically the JE films were written by the same guys who wrote the real Bond films anyway and even used some scenes (the chase on the car transporter) that had actually been written for the real series. All gets very convoluted.
@Alan
That’s Shazam.