One of the strange superpowers of the modern Manosphere intellectual is the ability to pontificate endlessly, and with utmost confidence, on a subject — feminism — that they know absolutely nothing about. You could even say they know less than nothing about it, in that the few things they do think they know about it are completely and utterly wrong.
Today, the reliably terrible Return of Kings posted a prime example of what we might call the manosphere-splaining of feminism in the form of a post (archived here) by Beau Albrecht with the patronizing title “An Open Letter To Women Who Still Believe In Feminism.”
In other words, a guy who doesn’t know crap about feminism has decided to explain feminism to women who do actually know something about it. To paraphrase Mary McCarthy’s famous dis of Lillian Hellman, pretty much every word of Albrecht’s post is wrong, including “and” and “the.”
The post goes completely off the rails by the second paragraph:
I’m here to discuss radical feminism, which is the only variety that gets much attention and media access.
Like most antifeminists, Albrecht doesn’t actually know what radical feminism is, or what sets it apart from non-radical feminism, simply using it as a synonym for “all the feminists I don’t like,” a group that pretty much includes, well, all feminists except for mythologized first-wave feminists who were all polite and stuff, and possibly anti-feminist “feminists” like Christina Hoff Sommers.
Since the Second Wave arose—beginning in the mid-1950s, and kicking into high gear in the mid-1960s—feminism has been telling you that we live under a patriarchy, men are responsible for all your problems (“the personal is political”), we’re a bunch of evildoers, and so forth.
Here’s my Open Letter to dudes trying to explain feminism to feminists:
Dear dudes trying to explain feminism to feminists,
It helps if you get the basic facts about feminism straight.
Love, David
PS: Second wave feminism didn’t start in the 1950s; it started, very tentatively, in the early 1960s and only really took off on the late 1960s.
PPS: What difference does it make if you’re off by five or ten years in your dates, you ask? Because history involving women matters as much as history involving men. If you were writing an essay about Ronald Reagan and you said he had been elected to the presidency in 1972 or 1976, everyone reading your essay would know that you don’t know crap about crap.
PPPS: I mean, this is all stuff you could look up in two seconds on Wikipedia, or with a single Google search.
Albrecht continues on in this fashion, piling nonsense upon nonsense; his attempts to rebut statistics showing that a significant number of female college students are raped every year are undercut not only by his disingenuous use of stats but also by the fact that he keeps referring to said female college students as “coeds,” which conjures up images like the one at the start of this post.
The rest of Albrecht’s post is a collection of manosphere clichés we’ve all seen dozens of times. He suggests that the root case of misogyny is women being mean — and that some men are so disgusted by snarky women that they literally turn themselves gay, “finding it to be better than nothing.” He mentions sexbots, and Japanese “herbivores,” and “cultural Marxism.” He declares that antifeminists like him “care about you more than the feminists.”
There is the obligatory reference to Sex and the City, which Albrecht naturally refers to as Sex in the City.
If you spend your 20s partying and “finding yourself” as you’ve been encouraged to do, don’t expect Mr. Big to be waiting around patiently to sweep you off your feet after you’ve aged and decided it’s time to settle down. Actually, many Mr. Bigs used to be those nerds you wouldn’t have given a second look to back in college.
Sex and the City is such a completely fresh and original cultural reference that it’s likely many of Albrecht’s manosphere readers are going to spend much of the night tonight creepily hitting on women born after the show first went on the air in 1998.
There’s even a genuine “we hunted the mammoth” moment as Albrecht tries to convince women of the many fine benefits of patriarchy:
It was all on us to provide for you and the kids; be it by working on an assembly line all day, in a coal mine, digging ditches, or under the hot sun tilling the fields. … We got drafted in wars to protect you. We let you have first place on lifeboats. Meanwhile, women were tending the children and doing housework. All told, it wasn’t quite such a bad trade-off for women.
Look at this picture of men gallantly farming away for their pampered stay-at-home wives.
I don’t know why they’re all dressed as women. Probably just some gleaner thing.
Perhaps the most telling moment in the post comes during Albrecht’s attempt to prove that rape culture isn’t real.
Think about it a minute. We’re bigger and stronger than you. If we really were savages, we would be doing whatever we wanted to you, especially if that truly was approved by our culture. The reason you don’t have to pepper spray someone every day is that the vast majority of us are actually decent, civilized people. There are a few exceptions; they end up going to prison, and rightly so, where they’re despised even by the other criminals.
There’s just a teensy bit of an irony in the fact that Albrecht is posting this on a site run by everybody’s favorite repugnant “pickup artist” Roosh Valizadeh, an allegedly “ironic” proponent of rape legalization who has himself been accused of rape.
Yeah, the rest of this post isn’t going to be terribly funny.
In his book Bang Iceland, Roosh offered this account of one of his “dates,” if they can be called that:
While walking to my place, I realized how drunk she was. In America, having sex with her would have been rape, since she couldn’t legally give her consent. It didn’t help matters that I was relatively sober, but I can’t say I cared or even hesitated.
I won’t rationalize my actions, but having sex is what I do.
In a book called 30 Bangs, Roosh wrote about his inability to take no for an answer:
It took four hours of foreplay and at least thirty repetitions of “No, Roosh, no” until she allowed my penis to enter her vagina. No means no—until it means yes.
Roosh went on to note that:
The sex was painful for her … She whimpered like a wounded puppy dog the entire time, but I really wanted to have an orgasm, so I was “almost there” for about ten minutes. After sex she sobbed for a good while … .
In Bang Ukraine, Roosh wrote this about a woman he got into an argument with during sex:
She tried to squirm away while I was laying down my strokes so I had to use some muscle to prevent her from escaping.
Apparently some men really are savages, at least by Albrecht’s definition of the term.
@WWTH
Right!? Cos that’s some animal husbandry shit, and I cannot endorse it
Thus, president elect Trump…
Has been since Ieyasu unfortunately
@Troubelle: Moonbeam Malcontent
Thank you! Sauce is ASDF. It comes in handy in many internet convos.
Like the manosphere cares about historical fact. They are just going to keep believing whatever confirms their biases. Anything else would require research, an open mind and putting aside that privilege they cling to.
Ugh, I was sitting in a workshop yesterday that got onto the topic of office cliques, and how they are frequently dominated by women. The consensus in the room – from both men and women – was that women were hardwired that way because the men used to go out and hunt while the women sat around the campfire gossiping. I almost spontaneously combusted.
It never ceases to amaze me that some people just cant grasp that being chattel SUCKS.
If the patriarchy were both a natural and pleasant state of affairs, we wouldn’t need a legal and social framework of vicious enforcement.
There has never been a time when women in patriarchal societies weren’t actively struggling to improve their lives, because if they hadnt been getting all uppity, we wouldnt have thousands of years of law (written by men) outlining exactly what they couldnt have.
If you have it so good that you never ask for or attempt divorce, nobody would bother writing laws denying you the right to divorce (crudely simplifying the nuances of how laws happen but anyhow). Some woman somewhere pled her case and was told no, which tells us that there was no paradise of perfectly submissive women.
It must be so nice to pretend that all humans everywhere always lived like it was 1954 in Indiana until Betty Friedan arrived to RUIN EVERYTHING.
Also Roosh is a rapist, and walking, talking skid marked proof of rape culture.
Ugh with the coal mine references. Much like literally every other field that’s male dominated women did it until men decided that EVERYTHING MUST ALWAYS BE ONLY FOR US and shoved them out.
@imaginary petal – how did you catch a Ditto? what happened…
I am also not a fan of the flat face cat (or dog, but I don’t have dogs) – I like a pet with a bit of a snout…
@rugbyyogi
It was in the guise of a Rattata!
That ‘women sat around the campfire’ shit honestly just sets me off. Look at our diets. Our digestive history. And our prehistory. Do you know how you maintain a diet with a good percentage of plant matter? (Not that some 21 year old manospherian keeps good fruit and veg intake) Having active and mobile gatherers, of course. Does this show their lack of thinking things through? Or does this show the implicit bias present in the workplace? How does this relate to whether they perceived the women to be too ‘dominant’?
I think I read somewhere that around 10% of chimpanzee hunting kills are made by female chimpanzees but I could be mistaken.
Anyways, directionless babble over from me.
@AsAboveSoBelow,
Apologies for late reply! No, there are only pink toesies (I double checked which was lots of fun). Mei-Mei also is a pink-toesie. However, Piper has completely black toes – that’s her in the middle here:
CPphazor:
From the Smithsonian
Just sayin…
Oh, I forgot to add, in that group, female hunters account for 30% if the kills.
@hottotrotsky (love your nym, btw)
And then they write 10,000 word screeds about how illogical it is for feeeeemales to want to upset the apple cart because women lead such cushy, pedestalized lives SHUT UP SHUT UP THE SYSTEM WORKS YOU’VE ALWAYS HAD EQUAL RIGHTS LALALA CAN’T HEAR YOU.
They’re willfully blind. People don’t try to change systems that they’re unhappy with. Rather than ask themselves why women are unhappy with the system, manospherians assume the system is fine (because it’s an ancient system and it works just fine for them) and it’s the women who are broken and irrational and don’t know what’s really best for them. Women can’t possibly have sound reasons for what they want, even if it’s the same basic freedoms that men want.
They’re the same people who are perpetually astounded that slaves don’t enjoy slavery.
My mother-in-law told me how, when she was young (Depression-era), the women had jobs and the men didn’t; employers could pay the women less. She always worked, except when she couldn’t – bed rest with pregnancy and so forth. Had an alcoholic husband (I never met my father-in-law; he died before I met my husband), and he had a mother who once came home with him and demanded to know why my mother-in-law hadn’t made dinner for him. At the time she (my mother-in-law) was feeding their firstborn, who was a poor feeder due to a cleft palate (that the doctor didn’t tell my mother-in-law about for months. Really. Because she was a “nervous mother” due to baby not gaining.).
She said to her husband’s mother, “Because that man can feed himself and this baby can’t.”
Hey, the good old days! They sucked!
Regards ROK, there is another artical there today which is basically a man admits to abusing his daughters. Called How to Raise Red Pill Daughters. If what he said is true, he has completely brain washed them.
“You better not live your life and seek an education and financial independence or else no man will marry you”.
Oh no. We’ll be missing out on someone like this? What ever will we do? I’m mean, aside from be very, very happy?
Sweet baby Christmastime Jesus, he denies rape and rape culture (essentially calling all the survivors who come forward liars) while making sure to point out how lucky women are that men don’t beat and rape us more often? Because “We could give you something to cry about, if we wanted to.” totally isn’t a threat or anything.
Why is it always the most repulsive men who constantly try to scare women back into the kitchen by saying they won’t want us anymore if we don’t get back in our place? Why do they think we need that information? We didn’t ask them. No one cares.
My paternal grandmother miscarried twins because her husband insisted that she could not stop working at the vacuum tube factory, even though she wasn’t supposed to be on her feet. She was also to keep the house and mind the children.
My maternal grandmother survived the depression with her brother and widowed mother by working hard. Her mother flipped properties and worked as a seamstress. At 7 my grandmother was expected to use a hammer to tear down old barns with her brother so their mom could sell the wood. She learned construction and eventually helped her mom flip the properties.
When she divorced my grandfather because of all of his affairs, she could not get child support. She also could not get a loan to buy a car because her brother was out of the country, meaning there was no man to cosign for her. She managed to support her two children anyway.
Women have always worked.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
People such as these need to be smacked upside the head and told that
1) “Rationality” is not solely the ability to string a series of arguments together.
2) Being ‘rational’ does not automatically make you a good person, nor does it give you moral license to dictate what people should and should not do in every situation.
3) Arguing from flawed premises is not rationality.
4) If every piece of evidence that you have encountered only strengthens your pet theory, question your premises, for they are probably faulty.
Or not (see point 2, which makes my entire comment self-defeating). 🙂
@buttercup
Thanks! Yeah no, theyre also apologists for slavery all the way.
It reminds me of a time I was at the dentist (who turned out to be a creepy mormon) and on gas for a root canal, so I suppose he thought I either couldnt hear him, or he just didn’t care, but anyway. He started talking about how polygymy is really just the best kind of charity, that men who want multiple wives just want to help, like, single moms out, and why shouldn’t they be allowed to do that?
To which: dude, the penalty for being unlucky is not life as a sex dispenser.
Also fuck you.
Also economic policies which allow women, even, GASP, singke mothers to succeed BY THEMSELVES are demonstrably better than total reliance on the whims of some fucking patriarch.
Its hilarious how the conspiracy babblings of the manosphere are actually just rabid fantasies of how terrible it would be if men had to live the way they want everyone else to live.
@CPPhazor
Buuuuut feeeeemalez r so dumb + bad @ directionz, wudn’t they git lawst in dee woods trying to gather? Prob MEN killed the mammoths (using gentle, non-frightening forms of slaughter, no doubt) then came home from their long day of stabbin’ stuff only to find the bon-bon box *GASP* EMPTY!!!!. So, naturally, they set off into the woods in the gathering gloom of dusk and picked what little berries there were just to get enough roughage to avoid crapping shards of their own pelvis whenever they tried to poop.
If only those indolent, lethargic feeeeeeeeeeemalez had gotten off their butts to do some work, then we could have some REAL equality ’round these here parts, I reckon.
Note: This post contains sarcasm.
Off topic, but the unrepentant asshole that is 2016 killed another. Ron Glass aka Shepherd Book from Firefly.
🙁
@WWTH
aka Harris from Barney Miller ?
Well, we couldn’t get rid of Castro without losing someone people actually like, now could we? Life just refuses to work that way
Aww, Det. Harris. 🙁
2016, the day the music did die, multiple times in fact.
@imaginary petal – of course!!! My pokedex says I’ve seen one – my son tells me we have to catch EVERYTHING now. We are just three away from catching everything that’s available where we live (incl. Ditto) and one of them we can walk off (less than 200K to go!)