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.
@ handsome jack
Ah cheers. Isn’t the history though that the character is actually called Captain Marvel but, because of various copyright issues with Marvel comics (even though CM predates the formation of Marvel) that the comic title has to appear as “SHAZAM!!!!! (is the magic word used by captain marvel)” which is why everyone thinks that’s his name (which it might now actually be). Like I say, it’s a deliciously complex legal situation.
@Alan
More or less, yeah. There was suit alleging that Captain Marvel was infringing on Superman, and while that was underway Captain Marvel started to slip in sales and the publisher didn’t feel it was worth it to fight any more and agreed to cease the publication of Captain Marvel comics. By the time DC wanted to revive Captain Marvel, Marvel had created their own Captain Marvel, and so yes, the comics and toys had to be titled as “Shazam!” and have little to no mention of “Captain Marvel” leading to the confusion about the name.
So it’s like Dwarf Fortress.
I want to note here that “I’ve never experienced this thing you describe” is also anecdata. It’s just as much of an argument from experience as “This is a thing I have experienced.” There’s a complicated logical construction behind what constitutes evidence and what is rational to believe, and suffice to say that dudes consistently get this wrong.
Testimony is evidence, and we believe what other people tell us all the fucking time, except mysteriously when it comes to a minority group’s less-than-delightful experiences in a world constructed by, and for the benefit of, the dominant group. Then all of a sudden members of the majority group, who benefit from the status quo, stop believing that they can rely on the testimony of others. If a woman says, “I went to France this summer and I loved it,” men don’t feel like they need to take a position of skepticism on either part of that statement, but if she says, “Street harassment is a thing I’ve experienced frequently and it makes me uncomfortable,” men feel a need to pick both parts of that to pieces.
Marvel existed back then, though it was called Timely.
I’ve never been able to figure out if Aquaman is a ripoff of the Sub-Mariner or vice versa.
Swamp Thing and Man Thing aren’t in that boat, they’re both copies of a much older character, the Heap.
The Watchmen are reskinned Charleton characters. DC made Alan Moore change the names and costumes so they could still use the original heroes.
Marvel responded to the Watchmen comic by releasing an alternate universe title, Squadron Supreme who were thinly disguised copies of the Justice League.
Following on Handsome Jack, Lobo was conceived as a parody but later writers didn’t realize that and used the character at times as a serious EXTREME nineties character. Writer Keith Giffen later came to regret ever creating the character as it eclipsed other work he was prouder of.
I’ll stop now…
@Alan
Johnny English was like my favoritest movie when I was a kid. Saw the sequel recently. It’s a better film, but it doesn’t have the same nostalgia…
Oh and this fuckin song ?
@Alan
To add on to dlouwe, both are still around and both are still called Captain Marvel. Current Marvel’s Captain Marvel is Carol Danvers, who was Ms. Marvel before Kamala Khan. Then there’s the DC Captain Marvel, aka Shazam, who wasn’t original DC but Fawcett and was bought by DC in the 70s.
@ axecalibur
I don’t know if you’re English. If so you’ll probably know that the Johnny English character originated in a series of adverts for a credit card. They were fantastic. We used to quote the lines all the time.
@ Dlouwe and handsome jack
Wow, American comics are complicated! 🙂
@Alan
Noice!
But no, not English
http://static3.fjcdn.com/comments/Nothing+says+murca+like+an+american+flag+shaped+like+an+_cf9aa3e574247f92e088ab2df1cb7627.jpg
That eagle got some funky pyjamas
@Scildfreja
Those, my Canadian compatriot, are the Jammies of Freedom!
*Sings anthem unironically in booming baritone*
Also, the Light Winter Jacket of Progress
http://www.freakingnews.com/pictures/21000/Canadian-Goose-21055.jpg
*Struggles trying to read French version from Wikipedia*
🙂
I have never been so happy as I am looking at that goose and eagle. Do you think they fight about softwood lumber sometimes but are generally the best of friends?
Goose and Eagle? Are they by any chance being pursued by two slightly confused Pottsylvanian agents?
@Viscaria
Next time: Eagle gets involved with what can only be described as some kind of obnoxious orange buzzard which threatens to hurt the birds’ friendship. Meanwhile Goose looks to be getting into drugs? How will Eagle react? All that and more on the next episode of Birds of a Feather
@Diptych
http://memecrunch.com/meme/29NUR/dude-your-references-are-out-of-control/image.jpg
@Cupcakes 4 Hitler says:
They probably don’t often say it because “British” isn’t a race. It’s a nationality (more or less). There are British people of any and every race.
/Delurks for comicbook nerdery…
Technically Marvel had at least 5 characters going by the superhero alias Captain Marvel:
– Mar-Vell (Kree* warrior, the original one, deceased),
– Genis-Vell (son of the first one, went by Photon later, deceased),
– Phyla-Vell (daughter of the the first, went by Martyr later, deceased… this isn’t a lucky family),
– Monica Rambeau (the odd one out, she got the alias so Marvel can keep the copyright, no relation to the other characters, she is an African-American woman who gained light powers thanks to an accident, alive, goes by Spectrum nowadays)
– Carol Danvers (Human infused with Kree genes, alive, she is currently Captain Marvel)
* an alien race in Marvel comics, they look human and come in pink (look like white people) and blue.
You think the rights for Captain Marvel are a mess, try going into the backstory of Alan Moore’s Marvelman/Miracleman, which started as a pretty blatant Captain Marvel/Shazam ripoff, got deconstructed by Alan Moore, got into a mess where Moore threatened to withhold publication rights to his Captain Britain work if Marvel UK didn’t lighten up on allowing the Marvelman character (much to the annoyance of the artist of said work who hadn’t been consulted), had to rename it anyway to get it published in the U.S. after the original British magazine containing it collapsed, at least five different versions of the story depending on who you talk to, the involvement with the Eclipse Comics collapse at the end of the indie comics boom in the early 90s (especially since Eclipse had been behind on the payments for a while)…
That’s a very good point, and thank you for bringing this up.
Of course, we still need to look at who’s doing the experiencing, as you mentioned later, because a member of an oppressed group will experience things differently as a member of a privileged group, and thus we get into “Privilege is being able to ignore things or not see things” discussion.
Men can ignore catcalling, mansplaining, etc., and the reason that is is because they’ve either rationalized it away (Either because they are the perpetrators, or they don’t think it’s a “big deal”), they honestly can’t recognize it, or some combination of the two.
A man who’s never experienced catcalling or street harassment as a woman won’t understand when a woman says she’s experienced it, and will either doubt it and nitpick it to pieces, or try to “rationalize” it away (“It’s a compliment!”).
[Sorry if this makes no sense, I just woke up and I’m still quite hazy.]
Maybe it’s wrong to say racism, but there are a lot of movies which have a very negative view of British, especially English people. We’re all familiar with the tropes, the jolly hockey sticks, tea drinking and bad teeth, loving the Queen and whatever, or the street urchin gutter snipe children. It’s more disturbing how bad guys with English accents saturate Hollywood, even Stewie Griffin from Family Guy fits this trope.
Three recent movies I consider anti-British are Pixels, Minions and the worst of the lot, London Has Fallen. The latter depicts London as swarming with Muslim terrorists who have even infiltrated the police force, and despite the amount of civilian dead ‘collateral damage’, the film focuses of the good old POTUS, and what a great hero he is. Nice.
I don’t think it matters that much because British isn’t an oppressed class. They’ve been the oppressor. At least in recent history. So it’s not punching down. Plus, they make fun of Usians too! Humor based on stereotypes is lazy and not typically funny, but I wouldn’t put British jokes on the level of racism on the offensive-o-meter either.
I get feeling frustrated by the self-aggrandizing nature of the American film industry, and I get resenting the sometimes ignorant or dismissive portrayals of people from other countries.
Both of your examples are interesting, though, because I think both are kind of wrapped up on something else. All those hoity-toity uppercrust accents for villains? That’s queer coding.
The London has Fallen thing spreads a racist message about how only (white) America can save us from the Evil Arab Hordes. Its harm rests in projecting an image of Muslims as evil terrorists. Insulting non-Muslim British folks is just kind of a by-product.
@Cupcakes
Stewie is based on the character Professor Henry Higgins from My Fair Lady, so I think his character’s evilness is more aimed at the upper crust than the British, and the accent is just modeled after Rex Harrison.
@ kupo
As you probably know the title of My Fair Lady is a play on words as it’s based on how Londoners of Eliza’s status would supposedly pronounce ‘Mayfair’.
@Alan:
…
That is just so obvious now that I’ve seen it, I wonder why I never even thought about it before.
(OT: A local comedy theatre group I used to belong to had, as an entr’acte sequence, a quick scene called ‘My Fair Mathy’ where they were trying to teach an Arts student how to pass as a Math student, focusing on the phrase ‘The range remains contained within the plane.’ It was a very silly show.)
London Has Fallen is straight-up inexcusable, indefensible bullshit. I doubt anyone would disagree with that.
That said, I think WWTH is right: one cannot be racist against British people. One can hate them, yes, but because the British are not a systematically disempowered group (despite what Nigel Farage will tell you) the combination of prejudice plus power does not exist.