On the Men’s Rights subreddit yesterday, I found this inspiring report from the front lines of the Men’s Rights struggle — the struggle of MRAs to annoy pretty much everyone they ever talk to.
Yes, it is of course true that some men get breast cancer. I’m pretty sure, though, that yelling at breast cancer fundraisers isn’t the best way to help these men.
This just reminds me that I need to renew my Do Not Call (for marketing/polling purposes) registration for my phone number (since that’s actually pretty well-honored where I live).
I did a very brief stint of soul-crushing telemarketing, and yeah, if someone said “not interested”, I just wished them good day and/or apologized for disturbance and disconnected. No use to engage with a timewaster, better to move on.
Wow, what an accomplishment. /s
I got a telemarketer to hang up on me when I was about 8. My secret method? I asked, “Are you selling something?”
P.S.: Holy shit, is that PZ Myers in the comment section?
He never said he yelled at the telemarketer, you moron.
What a tool. As many have pointed out, the telemarketer hae 0 interest in turning you around ideologically, and 100% interest in securing a donation and moving on to the next call. Even if she was afraid to debate with some nobody on the phone, what would that prove? Shes just some lady working or possibly volunteering to call folks on the phone, shes not the head of the charity, her opinion and ability to debate is so completely irrelevant to everything.
It is a testament to how thoroughly self involved these men are that they think THEY should be the barometer by which everybody measures their own beliefs.
@Greasy
Yeah, like that is the important part in this post.
Edit: @Anne Lewis
Yes, PZ comments here sometimes and links to here from his blog sometimes. 🙂
“I stated that I don’t support the drive because it’s sexist; and that of people who get breast cancer, men actually die at a higher rate than women.”
…thereby ensuring (assuming his claim is true) that if he ever gets breast cancer, he, as a man, will stand a good chance of dying, since he and all his fellow-nincompoops would have turned up their noses and zipped their pockets shut at the first mention of “the ladies.”
My God but these guys can be stupid.
And this is why I always make sure to include a line about men in every article about breast cancer I write: a lot of men don’t realize it can happen to them and don’t think to watch out for it.
I’m sure warning them is misandry somehow, but if it saves a dude from a mastectomy or two I will just have to live with it.
Yeah, I’m sure he said that the drive was sexist and that men die of breast cancer more than women with absolutely no emotion whatsoever. Those definitely aren’t statements that have historically been shouted by euphoric gentlesirs who turn around and brag about it on the MRA subreddit.
Like everyone else here, I also love that he refuses to donate to a fundraiser for breast cancer because the pitch didn’t specifically reference how it could affect him, even though he knows it already. The nose is off, the face had it coming.
@Ben: It’s like those assholes who are like “I don’t support feminism because it doesn’t do anything for men (like me)!”
(Putting aside the fact that yeah, feminism does have benefits for men, it’s still not [and shouldn’t be] dominated by discussions about men.)
So, if this dude’s white, does he not support the NAACP? If he’s cishet, does he not support LGBT+ causes either? I mean, they don’t do anything for him.
“I won’t give my money to a group who only focuses on one gender!” says the MEN’S RIGHTS ACTIVIST.
@Paradoxy:
People like that are the absolute worst. Anyone who bases their morality only on groups they themselves are in… ugh.
It makes you want to grab them and shout. The point of power is that it allows you to help people less fortunate than yourself. Anyone who doesn’t think it’s their responsibility to leverage their privilege to support others is a waste of humanity.
One of my closest friends was diagnosed with breast cancer a couple of years ago, and vividly described what an unusual experience it was being the only man in the specialist’s waiting room. I suspect quite a few of the women there were equally surprised.
(Thankfully it seems to have been caught early enough – there’s been no sign of any remission.)
Wetherby, I’m glad to hear that your friend is in remission.
I used to listen to a local radio show that had an MRA as the host. He never says so on his show, but he certainly is nasty–in a sneaky way–about women and PoC. I know for sure that he’s an MRA because maybe three years ago I went to his website, and he said there that he and Warren effin’ Farrell had started a group called the National Organization for Men because, as this radio host said, he had a “faint hope” that men could win equal rights. So yeah, the guy’s an MRA. (But apparently the National Organization for Men never got off the ground–sad face!)
Once a woman called in to this guy’s show and mentioned that she was recovering from breast cancer. He said, “What?” I’ve noticed that radio hosts rarely ask that. I might have no idea what the caller has said but the radio host always seems to know–and this woman’s words were perfectly clear to me.
So she repeated herself and he said nothing. Not even a sympathetic murmur, which is downright inhuman. (I apologize to all nonhumans, including my cats, my plants, and my Neanderthal ancestors. I’ve let you down. But you know what I mean.)
Anyway, I don’t listen to this jerk anymore.
But now I’m learning that this shit seems to be an MRA talking point.
Which is pathetic.
@ kat
By any definition Neandertals are human; but I get your general point.
(our image of Neandertals is skewed because the first examples were unusually ‘Neanderthally’, but even they would have passed unnoticed in the modern population)
@ kat
I love this pic; mainly because he’s the spitting image of a mate.
http://l7.alamy.com/zooms/2247bd2d953d4739ac303d6c09b66500/a-model-of-a-neanderthal-man-in-modern-clothing-stands-in-front-of-d61xb9.jpg
ETA: my mate for comparison. See what I mean!
https://youtu.be/Mmml6thaLLc
@Alan
There is some resemblance, but not a strong one, between the guy in a suit and your friend.
Are you saying that the illustrations I’ve seen of Neanderthals (bulging brow, weak chin, huge bones) are exaggerated? If so, why? I would think illustrations would be based on Neanderthal fossils.
I can remember when I first read about Neanderthals. I was nine and was extremely jazzed about it. I was even more jazzed when I was an adult and read that they put flowers on graves. And when I found out that humans had Neanderthal genes, I was stunned.
@ kat
That’s probably just because the Neanderthal guy has at least made an effort 😉
But yeah, the first fossils found had very pronounced Neanderthal features (maybe that’s why they attracted attention in the first place?) compared to later discoveries. But of course they’re the ones that set the standard as it were.
All Neanderthals though fit well within the phenotype of the modern population (i.e. there are plenty of modern people with more pronounced brow ridges and smaller chins than any Neanderthal discovered) even the original chaps with the very pronounced features.
Neanderthals do show a lot of cold weather adaptations and their skeletal structure is often described as ‘robust’ as opposed to ‘gracile’; but again that’s quite an arbitrary distinction. There are plenty of modern humans whose skeletons could only be distinguished by experts.
The only real distinguishing feature of Neanderthals is the occipital bun (that bump on the back of their heads) but even that wouldn’t be particularly noticeable under hair.
The more we learn about Neanderthals, both physically and culturally, the more the distinction between them and ‘anatomically modern humans’ seems to become a bit of a red herring.
@Alan
Thanks for that interesting info! I’ll keep it in mind in my Internet searches on this topic.
@ kat
You’re welcome. It is a pretty interesting topic. I’ve just been diverting myself from work by reading up a bit more (I had a theory about left handedness but turns out (a) not original and (b) debunked)
One thing I did find out though was that the Neandertal (as in the place) examples were not the first Neanderthals actually discovered.
There were previous ones from Gibraltar but, as we were discussing, they hadn’t been recognised as different.
“Yell at” is a synonym for scold. It doesn’t literally mean he raised his voice.
Careful, don’t point that dangerous arsenal of namecalling at your own face.
@Alan – Interesting info on Neanderthals. I always wondered when handedness and brain lateralization began to appear in hominids.
@ buttercup
A little light reading for you. Enjoy!
http://www.isita-org.com/jass/Contents/2008%20vol86/03_Cashmore.pdf
In summary: there was definitely population level right handedness in Neanderthals. Before that though it gets a bit hazy.
I went to an exhibition about early hominids in the Natural History Museum a few years ago. It was really good.
One of the things they mentioned absolutely stunned me: that homo neanderthalis campsites are easily discernible from homo sapiens campsites because Neanderthals didn’t create art. They didn’t carve bones, paint walls, decorate their tools or anything else. Their lives were purely functional and their living areas likewise.
(They did bury their dead and mark the graves, though. Interesting.)
On the other hand, it is apparently difficult to find Cro-Magnon campsites without art in them. We compulsively decorate almost everything we make, own and use. The creative urge is one of the central drives of humanity.
I went into that exhibit thinking of Neanderthals as being early humans, just like ourselves except a bit sturdier. I came out thinking of them as human-shaped animals. Minds that don’t create art are… I dunno, really alien to me. No more alien than cats or birds, of course, but still very different.
I expect that the telemarketers are trained to hang up when someone gets combative.
I wonder where he gets the idea that more men die than women – literally the first page I googled told me this:
“The American Cancer Society estimates for breast cancer in men in the United States for 2016 are:
About 2,600 new cases of invasive breast cancer will be diagnosed
About 440 men will die from breast cancer
Breast cancer is about 100 times less common among men than among women. For men, the lifetime risk of getting breast cancer is about 1 in 1,000. The number of breast cancer cases in men relative to the population has been fairly stable over the last 30 years.”
440 of 2600 is 17%. When I had breast cancer I looked at a lot of stuff, and found that my chances of dying were 22%. I am a woman. The stats are saying that men are MORE likely to survive.
In addition I looked at the death rates of men and women with breast cancer in England from 2012 (the year and place I was diagnosed). Men 58, women 9698 (source: http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/statistics-by-cancer-type/breast-cancer/mortality#heading-Zero) – not only more than 100 times as many, but WAY more than 100 times as many. For every man that died approx 167 women did.
But why let the facts and women’s deaths get in the way of MRA victimhood eh?
@ EJ
Hey, not only did Neanderthals do art; they invented the hashtag!
They buried their dead, laid flowers in graves (and almost certainly decorated with ochre). They took care of their sick and injured. It’s possible they made music (still trying to analyse a possible flute type instrument). They made tools (and the evidence is now shifting to show that there was back and forth influence with tool design between sapiens sapiens and sapiens neandertalis). They planned, organised and cooperated. They almost certainly had language.
I can’t regard anyone with a sense of spirituality, mourning, and creativity as merely animals.
I find it difficult to get mad at a telemarketer for failing to explicitly mention men while raising money for an overwhelmingly female affliction, when women are dying because heart attack symptoms have only really been studied in men, and drug trials are usually tailored to men, and women with chronic pain are habitually misdiagnosed and accused of exaggerating their symptoms and therefore under-treated compared to men.
Yes, men can get breast cancer, and of course it’s good to remember that when campaigning for awareness/fundraising/etc. The male victims of the disease are real and they ought to receive proper attention. One of my students is a young man who was recently given six months to live due to stage 4 breast cancer–trust me, I am all for raising awareness, and I think it’s fine to ask breast cancer organizations if they plan to address that. I even think it’s fine to only support organizations that are all-encompassing in that aspect.
But if this dude wants to start a fight about which gender is discriminated against when it comes to medical research and treatment… well, that’s not going to work out so well for him.