It’s poll time!
[socialpoll id=”2412282″]
I’m not sure the thumbnail captures the full transphobic awfulness of the graphic for option number three, so here it is full-size:
In case you’re wondering, Saddam is not actually mentioned in the story.
If you haven’t guessed by now, I voted for option 3, though the car seat one is lovely as well.
Here’s an archived link of Return of Kings’ front page as of today, in case you want to read any of these posts. I didn’t bother.
Eli, that’s an absolutely awful story. That poor family.
This poll has upset me I must admit, and not to read too much into your comment, but it hits on what I think has upset me.
Because I fear that the things that happen every day, that are just simply “not unexpected”, are often minimised away, and I feel uncomfortable seeing it in here. Boys will be boys and ROK will be ROK. Therefore something we hear less frequently perhaps, or something that some guys dream up that most people don’t buy into, is more shocking, more abhorrent. Is it really?
Not criticism, and not picking on the person who quoted above, just food for thought, and a request for insight and/or perspective. I’m a bit sensitive right now about putting our heads in the sand to abuse, to be up front. Tough Christmas.
Do we become a little numb to what goes on around us? Is it too hard to fix or too hard to see?
4 is funny to me because the RoK writers are constantly raving about how civilization is being destroyed in part because slutty single moms and black people and immigrants and gay people and so on are inferior at raising their children. I’m sure they agree with MRAs that if a man and woman divorce, the man should get primary custody or it’s misandry. Yet they don’t understand why you’re supposed to put children in car seats? It’s why I almost voted for 4. However the bad MS paint Saddam in drag monstrosity over powered all.
Totally 3. Besides the obvious, it also seems the one they put the most effort into. That alone deserves scorn. 4 isn’t even particularly manospherian, and 2 disarmed me with the dog pic. What can I say, too adorable. Don’t listen to PUAs, I know you’re a good dog, buddy *scritches ears*
1 tho? Isn’t that, like, every other ROK article?
http://i.imgur.com/9drocf9.jpg
The car seat thing reminded me of an AVFM forum post that had me scratching my head for some time.
The premise of it was how mexican women make better wives because a picture is shown of a woman carrying a baby perilously jumping over a big rock, and, unlike the rest of us spoilt brats, she is supposedly uncomplaining.
The head scratching part is just how for these asshats this is about women feeling entitled to step off a bus easily when the fact is her child is clearly in danger at a poorly constructed public bus stop. One of the comments said something like “have we men gone too far in making women’s lives easier?”.
Idk buddy, but personally I don’t think we do enough to make our children’s lives safe. I guess my sense of entitlement there makes me less able to be a good woman.
The ability of these guys to twist the world to fit their fiction never ceases to amaze me. Not to mention throwing kids under the bus (pardon the pun) so long as it makes a point of hating on women.
EDIT, sorry Idk how I managed to turn the whole rant into a link. Sigh :/ lol
Went with 4… because apparently endangering the lives of your children is really macho /s
I know an older woman who lost a baby in a car accident back in the early ’60s. She was holding her daughter in her arms when they were sideswiped by a tractor-trailer. The baby was ejected from the car. The woman and her husband survived, but their marriage didn’t. People who complained about today’s auto safety measures ought to be transported back in time and forced to be EMTs back in the ’50s and ’60s.
@Sigh
That was definitely not my intention. We should definitely not get complacent about these kinds of things, but this blog tracks misogyny of this type. We see a lot of posts about RoK, so in this context, it’s not unexpected.
I understand why it made you uncomfortable and I apologize. You are right. We need to make sure that these ideas and behaviors are not normalized.
I’d like to say that these assholes don’t have children of their own, and if they did they’d change their tune about child safety.
I’d be wrong about that, though. There are more than enough people out there who are perfectly willing to take risks with their children for the sake of being macho.
(I have a friend with a child who I just want to scoop up and carry away to a magical fairy-land of unicorns and happiness, because the poor dear has had such a tough life for a ten year old and no one seems to want to give him a break. That article sort of sticks close to home for me right now, I guess)
Sigh,
The fuck? It’s not like only women use public transportation. As a bus rider, I see plenty of men on the bus who are disabled or elderly and would not be able to navigate a light mountain climb onto to a bus. Of course, we know the only men MRAs care about are the privileged ones.
@Eli, @LindsayIrene, those are absolutely heartbreaking stories. How awful. Thank god for modern safety equipment.
@gijoel, if he’d actually hit anything, the scary thing is, he wouldn’t have been able to hold you back.
Trump says he’s going to require two gummint regulations overturned for every new one proposed. Our cars (and plenty else) are going to get way less safe if he carries through.
EMTs weren’t really around in the 1950s. Mid-late ’60s, early ’70s, was when the EMT programs started ramping up.
Scary, sometimes, how quickly we’ve gotten used to improvements in safety and healthcare.
@Dr ej, apologies not necessary, truly, but thank you 🙂
@weirwoodtreehugger
Well, they are the guys performing all the dangerous and dirty jobs right? So they’re all good with jumping over dangerous and unnecessary obstacles, and they don’t complain, now do they?
But, just remember when they die or get injured it’s still our fault because we didn’t care enough about them.
I would posit that even an able bodied man would have zero chance of traversing that each day without one day putting a foot wrong. But hey, what do I care? My only care is not dirtying my shoes. I’ll never catch the eye of Chad with dirty shoes.
Perhaps I’m being hopeful, but I think in this case the companies might still have to follow the (hopefully not soon-to-be-nonexistent) regulations, because whatever else happens, they would want to sell their products internationally, and therefore need to follow the regulations in other countries.
This is already happening with other companies and using sustainable energy. Regulations aside, customers like companies that use green, sustainable energy, and a lot of businesses (such as Apple) are pushing for more improvement, not less.
I voted for three although four is close because what the hell. I guess making sure kids don’t die is TOTALLY FOR PUSSIES DUDE. (Pretty sure a handful of the readers are alive because of car seats but whatever.)
Um, any particular reason they used a picture of Saddam Hussein?
I guess he looked manly to them, so he was an ideal candidate for MS-Painting into a drag queen for purposes of shock value.
@Kuronekonya, there is that. Also, I doubt we’d suddenly start buying cars without seatbelts. Maybe without all the airbags.
Certainly the solution to Trump’s bluster is to package up two related regulations with your new one, so the number of reference numbers goes down but the old regulations stay in place.
(Actually it’s to fight tooth and nail against Trump, but I like being a smartass.)
Oddly enough, 2 reminded me of the 60s movie “If a Man Answers”, in which a young wife’s mother advises her to “train” her husband using a dog training manual. And the advice is not all that bad, in effect: say, clearly and kindly, what you expect, be consistent, and reward good behavior. It’s just presented in such a patronizing way (or matronizing, I guess, in this case).
Anyway, I had to go with 4, because WTF. I’m not a big advocate for helicopter parenting, and I think falling out of trees and such is part of a normal childhood; but come ON.
I voted for “encouraged to become”, because what the actual FUCK, assholes, what the actual FUCK? Nobody’s being “encouraged to become transsexual”; if anything, the opposite is (STILL) the case. And as I have friends who actually ARE trans, I know this just from reading their Facebook posts.
That said, it was a tough call to make because everything from that shit site is the product of a compete and utter dissociation from reality. I just went for the one that dropped my (still not “manlike”!) jaw the furthest off its hinges.
All of the them are horrible. Like the rest of the posts on that garbage site.
Frances,
I’m wondering if it has something to do with the South Park movie? Maybe I’m just reading too much into things though.
I’m always seeing memes passed around on Facebook telling people to share if they survived growing up without such-and-such safety measure. Yesterday was one for kids wearing bicycle helmets. Every time I see one of these, I feel the urge to remind the sharer that only those who survived would be able to post, anyway, so having a lot of shares isn’t going to prove the assumed point that it wasn’t really dangerous not having those safety measures. Like, look at some actual comparative statistical data, people.
@Michael Brew:
Ugh. Or those many-times forwarded e-mails that I sometimes get from a well-meaning but misguided older friend, they’re like that too. I gag, roll my eyes, and move on. It’s too tiring to even try to argue about it anymore with some people.
Meanwhile, here I am, an adult who’s more cautious than most about simply crossing the street, because I was hit by a car at 14 and suffered a lot more pain than these bozos who complain about “pussified kids” will ever know, as direct result. Need I add that I’m also one of those “pussified” adults who wear bike helmets? And that I don’t kvetch about it being the law because I had a couple of concussions as an un-“pussified” kid, and can remember what the latter one (the worse of the two) was like (spoiler: TERRIFYING), and wouldn’t wish that (or worse) on anyone?
(Well, all right, maybe these Darwin Award candidates. But not their kids. Assuming they have any, which I hope they don’t. No kid deserves to have an idiot for a parent, and so many unfortunately do.)