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.
I love Cubans and wish the Cuban people all the very best. I do not mistake my appreciation for the Cuban people with the man who took control of the land in which they live. He may have done good things, but if the cost for “the good things” is the expulsion, execution or imprisonment of anyone who disagrees with Dear Leader, there’s too much of a taint on those “good things” for them to be good anymore.
He did indeed.
IP – Well, I *did* work at a craft store, so I saw a lot more women than men! But a goodly portion of them were annoying and clueless!
Probably also a craft store phenomenon, but the men were usually more apt to listen to what we told them. I guess because they weren’t (in general) too familiar with our wares.
@Scildfreja Unnýðnes
Wow, what the fuck.
I know, right, Jack? I was half expecting Paul Elam to come out singing about Amanda Marcotte from a side room or something. I’ve been on tilt since that night. I need a vacation or something!
@Scildfreja Unnýðnes
Good luck and godspeed with that third dinner.
Good luck and godspeed.
http://i.imgur.com/7twtbRN.gif
Wait, didn’t Castro put gay men in work camps?
http://37.media.tumblr.com/3e2ee91e5b4445296db10b7141382726/tumblr_n4jg05ILyx1s2wio8o1_500.gif
I got my first perfect (15-15-15) IV pokemon! A Kingler.
Yeah, I know it’s cool to hate on the US. I don’t blame people for that. We’ve earned that. But that doesn’t mean every one who is a US opponent is automatically good.
“Some people had respect for X”. Setting aside the journalistic weasel word “some” people, in what way does that make X valid? Plenty of terrible people exist and have respect for terrible things/people. Excuse the blatant Godwin but “Some people had great respect for Hitler” would be a pretty laughable defense of Hitler.
JFC, Scildfreja. That sounds awful. Sorry you had to put up with that.
RE Castro, I’m firmly on the side of fuck that dude. Nuance is absolutely important, and I recognise his (certainly not uniformly positive) anti-colonialist legacy in Africa and Latin America. I would also point out that Guevara was the Revolution’s committed communist, while Castro was initially more concerned simply with overthrowing Batista and freeing the island of American imperialist influence. The US’ outsized reaction pushed Cuba into the arms of the USSR and arguably created the monster that one-party rule there became.
But regardless of how it occurred or the benefits that might have accrued, I refuse to believe that universal free health care* and education must be paid for in blood or loss of liberty.
I visited Cuba in 2012 and met with a number of dissidents and a former political prisoner. One of the events I attended was a two-day workshop run by a socialist political party to celebrate the cultural and historical contributions of Afro-Cubans and protest continuing social prejudice. On day two, I arrived to find the place surrounded by state police and later discovered the organisers had all been arrested. In the workers’ paradise, you see, there is no such thing as racism! /s
I believe it does the left a serious disservice to turn a blind eye to abuses like Castro’s. We have to believe there’s a better way.
An addendum – this was a fascinating podcast:
Los Frikis: The Cuban punk kids who gave themselves HIV as an act of resistance.
Castro’s dictatorship was relatively benign compared to other communist leaders. He wasn’t a Stalin or a Pol Pot. But that means many people on the left are willing to give him a pass and that’s maybe led some people on the left to be more accepting of authoritarianism. Leftists, especially now, really need to support democracy and civil liberties.
The scary thing about Trump is that he (like other fascists) values authoritarianism over his political ideology. His political views have been all over the place throughout his life, but he’s consistently valued harshness and authoritarianism as his way of doing things. He’s impulsive and thin-skinned, and that makes him fundamentally different from a “normal” conservative like Ronald Reagan.
@Ddog
And those people are foolish or evil. Castro was an autocratic dictator, opposition to which is the core feature of the Left, and indeed the reason there is such a thing as the left in the first damn place.
@LindsayIrene
Yes, he damn well did.
@The Adjunct, Ooglyboggles, Rhuu, Mish, thank you. Hugs back to any and all who want them. And kitties!
@NicolaLuna, may you get justice. I am sorry for your pain.
@Scildfreja, how horrible. I’m sorry you experienced that. So disgusting.
More hugs to all who want them. These days seem to be rough on almost everyone.
I just noticed the posts, so apologies for the late reply – but I feel I need to clarify some things:
@StephToe:
A universal minimum wage seems ideal until you consider that different people, especially with families, might need more on average than a childless bachelor who likely doesn’t need to feed anyone but themselves and whose expenses only really effect them. This also applies to single mothers who not only to provide for their children but also have enough for their needs as far as health goes – something that a childless male bachelor would not have to pay as much for either.
I’d also argue paying a guy with a wive and kids or a single mother the exact same amount who lives by themself is inherently unfair. And, if they’re paid the same hourly rate, wouldn’t that mean the father and single mother might have to work more hours to provide? Wouldn’t that, in fact, discourage the idea of having a family at all or perhaps cause them to become bitter towards their family? You’re essentially punishing people for having families while giving all the benefit to those who are single, despite each of them earning a “fair” wage.
Um, where did I say the lives of single people didn’t matter? I have no problem with people who choose to be single nor want them punished but, again, that wasn’t the topic – it was about the “herbivore” phenomenon in Japan and I was speculating on ways the government, especially in its current form, could handle it.
Also: You do get that a very low birth rate with an increasingly aging population has been an issue for years and youths less inclined to have families further exacerbates that? I’m not sure if you do, based on how vague that all was – you could easily apply it to anywhere, while completely ignoring their individual situation as a society. That’s yet another problem I have with the concept of a universal minimum wage – it’s a one-size-fits-all solution that ignores little complexities like that.
@Rhuu:
Once more, I never said anything about punishing single people for being single. Ever.
I’m talking about how, in Japan, adjusting wages and hours for those with families along with other benefits would deal with their “herbivore” problem as well as the fact the rate of death overshadow the birth rates.
If we are talking about adults who want children and can’t naturally: I would apply many of those same suggestions I made before to those who adopt as well.
I really, really, really, really, really hope I do not have to keep repeating myself.
Except many women in Japan already forgo having children entirely because of that and it’s due to Japan‘s (I’m going to keep italicizing it until it’s made clear that’s the place I’m talking about and no where else) patriarchal tendencies that pressure women to give up developing a career or having a life outside of the household once they have children.
I was speculating that, were the Japanese government to try instilling some policies to deal with the issue mentioned, it would mean that perhaps women could pursue a career while having a family as well instead of forced to choose one or the other. Maybe, just maybe, if the Japanese government put forth such policies – such attitudes might relax and allow women to do both, if they wished.
@Headologist:
I. Never. Said. We. Should. Punish. Single. People. Not. Once. Ever.
Other than that, I already addressed a lot of what you stated and am not repeating myself again.
…What…? “Designing societies”?
Is it that hard to understand I’m talking about Japan and it’s current situation? I’m not just bringing up what I think would be an ideal form of compensation for work in every area of the globe and, honestly, I’m not sure how you’d come to that conclusion unless you totally ignored that I’m talking about Japan.
I’m talking about the situation in one country and one alone, Japan, and not any other. Their situation in particular is unique, especially due to their culture, and I simply suggested ways their government – in its current form – could possibly remedy it. I would not apply this same thinking to another disparate nation.
@Weirdwoodtreehugger:
Nice to see someone who’s actually talking about the issue directly…
And, yes, I’d love it if Japan opened its borders and let in more immigrants – which would not only increase the overall population but also their dwindling birthrates – but its current form of nationalistic xenophobia would make it impossible at this time.
@Ooglyboggles:
You’re completely on the money, right there.
You do know that what you have written was essentially historically the justification given for the pay gap right?
My private life is none of my employer’s business. If I am doing the same job I deserve the same wage. Full stop. Anything else IS penalising me for my personal lifestyle choices (and for many it’s not a choice.)
Incidentally when your argue that the same work should be remunerated differently depending on the personal circumstances of an individual you are arguing that single people’s lives don’t matter or at least are less important. If I do the same job as my colleague pay me the same. Don’t penalise me for my lifestyle. Equal pay for equal work has long been a feminist rallying cry has it not.
And yes paying me less for the same work is penalising me.
@StephToe
Pretty sure all of what NickNameNick suggested are some ideas to encourage people living in Japan to work and have families. Do you live in Japan?
Oh and expecting people to work longer hours for the same money as somebody who happens to have a family also penalises that single person. Or would you be happy to do the same work for less money than your colleague.
Salary should be valued based on the job not personal circumstances. It devalues the lives of us who happen not to have families and tells us we are worth less to society than those who have families.
Also, curiously this would mean I should be paid more than somebody who doesn’t have children but is part of a couple?
No no no we have come too far on pay equity to go back now. The only support should be from the government, whether it be paid parental leave, childcare etc.
But we shouldn’t be penalised for being single by having our work devalued.
@handsome
No – why, do I have to live their to have an opinion on whether policies to penalise people for not having children / being single are a good idea?
Am I only allowed believe in the concept of equal pay for equal work if I live in Japan?
Is believing my marital status is my personal business only a valid viewpoint if I live in Japan?
@StephToe
The work culture of Japan is different from other countries. Ever heard of salarymen? Not to mention peeps have already been talking about how people are turned off from having a family due to the culture of Japan and what’s expected from men and women.
While the ideas aren’t perfect, they’re tailored to what could be done to help Japanese workers, and aren’t for everyone, and, on top of that, are just ideas thrown out there on a forum by someone who likely can’t really control what Japan does anyway. Hypotheticals that won’t impact you or anyone.
I am well aware of the issue in Japan. I am disagreeing with the idea of penalising single people and devaluing their work to fix the problem.
Especially when there are many other, non discriminatory options available. I think it should always be equal pay for equal work. No exceptions.
I get they are just ideas being thrown around but I am still allowed to thing said ideas are wrong aren’t I? Surely that’s the basis of this entire blog? Disagreement with some ideas being thrown about online? 😀
And of course if companies were required to pay those with families more they would just start prioritising single people without families – more hours for lesss money.
It would also reinforce the corporate culture if the practice was to devalue the lives of those without families – the message being “work is all that matters, unless you have a family”.