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.
@NicolaLuna, @AsAboveSoBelow
I’m so sorry to hear that you’ve suffered.
All best wishes.
FFS, Beau Albrecht, you certainly haven’t made a career out of any of these occupations.
Likewise, I’m not Florence Nightingale (born 1820), who founded modern nursing, thus saving countless lives.
Nor am I Grandma Moses (born 1860), renowned self-taught folk artist.
Sarah Bernhardt (born 1844), who convincingly played the role of Juliet when she was 70 and wore a wooden leg? Not me.
Nobel Prize winner in science Marie Curie (born 1867)? Nope.
Jeanette Rankin (born 1880), the first female US representative in Congress? Still not me.
Celebrated acting teacher Stella Adler (born 1901), founder of her own acting studio? No, I’m not her.
Just because some men worked in coal mines, etc., that doesn’t mean you or your fellow manospherians did. Stop claiming their hard work as your own.
It’s dishonest.
It’s absurd.
Knock it off.
The conversation has moved on, but I am glad to see the positions expressed here about Castro. I’ve been appalled at the reaction in some lefty spaces. “If neo-cons are happy that he’s gone, he must have done something right.” I’m pretty sure neo-cons don’t like drinking rat poison, either. Doesn’t mean rat poison is good. I’ve also seen the ex-Cubans celebrating the man’s demise called “bourgeois fucks,” which is something else.
@IP
I thought Trudeau’s response to Trump’s election was cowardly and mealy-mouthed. But, I reasoned, Trump is the incredibly petty future leader of our closest ally and trading partner, and he’s already criticised our trade deals. Sometimes you have to be a politician, I thought. But a glowing eulogy to a dictator? Yeah, there’s no excusing that. You don’t get to ask for credit for marching in pride parades and then turn around and talk about what a swell guy Fidel Castro was.
@StephToe
A little late, but don’t use the cr!zy word. Ableism and so forth. Not a good. (I had to learn this myself whilst describing my grandmother’s resilience.)
Yeah, when I start to think that maybe Castro wasn’t all bad, I remember the boat people and Elián González.
People were willing to risk drowning trying to float improvised rafts across 90+ miles of the Caribbean, rather than spend another moment in Cuba.
So, no matter how well they’ve managed to do despite the Castros, I’m not inclined to miss Fidel.
That so? Well, I didn’t look for any “Mr. Big” back then, because I just wasn’t interested. I wasn’t there to drink and fuck around, I was there to LEARN. (Being the first university-educated person in my family made that kind of a priority for me. Go figger.)
And as for these weenies you’re on about, I still wouldn’t give them a second look today, because now they’re all middle-aged, and if they weren’t even cute back then, they won’t be any handsomer now. Even fine wines turn to vinegar if left long enough.
But don’t worry, pal, you’re not a fine wine kind of guy. You’re one of the bitter ones whose nastiness only gets uglier with age. And who think they’ve “matured” (oh, the powers of self-delusion!), and who think they’re therefore entitled to the pick of the young-girl crop. And who are pissed as hell to find that now as then, the girls still aren’t biting.
I would feel sorry for you, but I’m too busy laughing. And pointing.
@Verily
Capping work hours would also be a quick win as it appears that a lot of the time employees aren’t actually performing productive work during that time.
It’s all about presenteeism.
It would also be a benefit to all workers not merely those with a spouse and/or kids. Fairly quick, easy and cheap to do.
The convo’s moved on and sounds like we’ve more or less agreed to disagree on Japan. Just want to apologise for throwing my hat in and then abandoning thread – I’m on yet another DA:Inquisition play through and I may have gotten a little distracted!
Without touching on the birth rate issue – StephToe has pretty much said all I wanted to say, and it does seem to more or less have reached a stalemate – I would add one thing. However Japan incentivises a higher birth rate, I don’t think it’s going to avoid serious demographic pressures without loosening up its immigration policy as well. The experience of all the industrialised countries would suggest that once you educate your women, the best you can hope for is around replacement birth rate (two kids per woman). Perhaps a true workplace revolution, with reduced and flexible hours for parents of any gender, would change that, but I tend to doubt it. Even if Japan acts tomorrow and pushes the rate back up to replacement within five years, it’s a quarter of a century before those babies are entering the workforce. A lot of demographic damage has been done already. Like the US, like Britain, like Australia, like basically the entire West, Japan needs multiculturalism to thrive.
Or it needs to implement Gileadesque policies to force its wimmenz to procreate. I bet I can guess which policy Professor Douchecanoe would choose!
I retired a few years ago after 36 years as a professor, where I encountered 18-22 year old women every day. After reading some of the Mens’ Movement stuff, I have concluded that the complete lack of young women hurling themselves at me was due to my being such a testosterone tsunami that they were intimidated by me, plus being afraid that my superior intellect would bore laser-like to the heart of their schemes against me.
Yeah, that must have been it.
Okay so this is only sorta apropos, but it’s just too sweet not to share.
At the moment I’m doing hiring for a intermediate wordpress developer position at my office. We are giving the applicants a short, relatively simple programming test (It’s FizzBuzz for those interested) in order to check if they actually know how to code. So far out of 6 interviews, the only two to pass the test were the two women. Why are men so bad at coding???
@Hambeast,
The power of the floof is irresistible! But don’t worry, I’m sure Catbeast is much too smug and secure to let it worry them 😀
@StephToe @Verily Baroque
Good ideas.
(Now I will pretend I never commented in this thread, tallyho.)
@Imperator Kahlo
Oh sure — he’d definitely prefer forced procreation.
But something tells me that this genius is personally interested only in the actual act of procreation, not in raising and supporting the children that he helps to conceive.
@Steven Dutch
Ha, ha!
Men of any age rarely hurl themselves at me — okay, okay, they never hurl themselves at me — because I’m too real for them.
That’s my story.
And yes, I will be sticking to it.
I ask myself that every day as I weep silently into my coffee while reading code at work. 😉
Ahhh, fizzbuzz. Bonus points if you Prolog it.
fizzbuzz(X) :- 0 is X mod 15, write(‘FizzBuzz’).
fizzbuzz(X) :- 0 is X mod 3, write(‘Fizz’).
fizzbuzz(X) :- 0 is X mod 5, write(‘Buzz’).
fizzbuzz(X) :- write(X).
dofizzbuzz :- foreach(between(1, 100, X), (fizzbuzz(X),nl)).
@kupo, <3
One guy I worked with was asked to write a log processor that received (rather complex) server log files as input, and had to output objects that could be stuffed into an object repo. Was working in Java, had to be compatible with Cassandra DB store.
I was given a single class with five methods in it. All of the actual work was a single method. That method was 800 lines, and had 20+ internal variables, including a set of 8 booleans, 8 strings and 4 hashtables. None of the variables had descriptive names. There were no comments. The code was a massive foreach loop with a single if/then/else chain inside.
Spent a week trying to understand it. Turned out to be quicker to just throw it out and rewrite it from scratch. An unpaid weekend and 60 classes later, I had a working ingestion system!
In Forth:
: .item ( n -- )
dup 3 mod 0= if
." Fizz"
dup 5 mod 0= if
." Buzz"
then
else
.
then cr ;
: fizzbuzz ( -- ) 100 1 do i .item loop ;
Indentation doesn’t work, unfortunately.
I could do FizzBuzz in C, LISP, Perl, bash, or maybe even x86 assembly. I’m amazed that there are so-called programmers that can’t do it at all.
@Scildfreja:
To be fair, Java is awful for text processing (I much prefer Perl), but not so awful that bad technique is necessary.
I tend to prefer Python for string juggling, myself, but Java’s perfectly respectable. Perl’s nice though, yes! Java’s really the lingua franca of the internet backbone, and that tends to be where I do a lot of work, so I’m used to thinking in Java. That’s really the only reason.
I was so proud of having done it in Forth, only to find that it didn’t work!
.itemshould be: fizz ." Fizz" ;
: buzz ." Buzz" ;
: .item dup 3 mod 0= if fizz dup 5 mod 0= if buzz then else dup 5 mod 0= if buzz else . then then cr ;
I’m glad I don’t work in Forth!
It’s better indented, but I can’t really indent here.
As a single line of SQL:
sel case when row_id mod 3 = 0 then ‘Fizz’ else null end || case when row_id mod 5 = 0 then ‘Buzz’ else null end as FizzBuzz
Make sure to define row_id using a row_number() over (partition by…) statement, using whatever column you prefer.
All this code talk is making me feel like an inadequate gamma. Please stop and spare delicate manboy feelz? :p
PHP, code-golf style!
while($x<100){if(!(++$x%3))$$x.=Fizz;if(!($x%5))$$x.=Buzz;echo $$x?$$x:$x;}
(I wish I could take credit for that one, but I was never clever enough to independently figure out a way avoid the 3rd if statement. Though I'm happy to settle for knowing how it works.)
Also in all seriousness, I feel like my experience with interview applicants is a pretty good illustration of how men are taught to overestimate their skills, and women the opposite. Where the men talked about skills they were planning to learn, the women had already put in the time and learned them. I asked them all if they prefer the development or design side of website work, and every one of them said they prefer development/coding, but only the women demonstrated it.
And yes it’s just anecdata, and the best junior dev I’ve had was a dude, but I find this kind of counterexample delicious in the wake of a trillion stories of dudes claiming superiority in the STEM fields by virtue of penis.