It’s not news to anyone that some of the most popular antifeminist “arguments” are in fact logical fallacies.
For example, here’s the fallacy of relative privation, suggesting that women in first world countries aren’t allowed to complain about sexism so long as anyone in the world is worse off than them.
And here’s the good old straw man, in the form of a meme accusing feminists of believing all sorts of things they don’t believe (as well as a few things they do believe, but for perfectly good reasons).
MRAs: in case you’re wondering which of these statements are straw men and why, I’ve attached a helpful footnote below.
So, yeah, those are some logical fallacies on display. But looking through the memes on display on the Male Lives Matter Facebook page today — which is where the memes above came from — I began to realize that MRAs have invented a whole bunch of brand-new logical fallacies of their own.
Let’s take a look, shall we?
Argumentum ad Picard Facepalm
This “argument” might make a little more sense were it not for the fact that Patrick Stewart — you know, the dude who played Picard — weren’t in fact an outspoken feminist who has literally worn a “this is what a feminist looks like” shirt in public.
I should note that using a Picard facepalm pic isn’t always a fallacy For example, if you are Ian McKellen, a personal friend of Stewart who famously carried a Picard facepalm sign at the London Women’s March this January.
Argumentum ad Ha Ha You’ll Never Get Laid
Granted, “white knighting” is not the same as feminism; it’s a rather patronizing form of “chivalry.” And that last post on the right up there is a little cringey.
But this meme is aimed at male feminists. And while there are some ostentatiously “feminist” dudes who profess a shallow facsimile of feminism in hopes of scoring with the ladies, genuinely feminist dudes are feminists because, you know, they actually believe in equality and shit. As much as this might shock MRAs and others obsessed with classifying men according to simplistic schemes using Greek letters, feminism doesn’t actually render men unfuckable.
Hell, I have actual photographic proof that one of the guys in this very meme has had sex with at least one woman at least once. Here’s the guy in the middle up there — Nev Schulman of the show Catfish — posing recently with his very pregnant wife.
IN YOUR FACE MRAS!!!11!
In case you’re wondering, she has since given birth to a baby girl.
Argumentum ad WTF-um
Wat
Argumentum ad You’re Not a Fireman
Apparently if you’re a female feminist you’re not entitled to emergency services? Even if you pay taxes just like everybody else? Does that apply to male feminists too? I need to know before I light my apartment on fire.
It’s true that there are not a lot of female firefighters. It’s also true that women have been largely kept out of the profession. But not by feminists — the only people I ever see arguing against women firefighters are MRAs and other antifeminists.
Argumentum ad You’re Not a Coal Miner
A kind of mash-up of the Fallacy of Relative Privation and Argumentum ad You’re Not a Fireman. It’s worth pointing out that none of the MRAs I’ve ever seen making this “argument” has themselves been a coal miner.
Argumentum ad Women Sometimes Get Drunk
It’s true that women sometimes get really, really drunk. I’m not quite sure how exactly this is a rebuttal of feminism.
Or is this about the hats? Are you suggesting that women need to start wearing 1956-style hats again?
It’s all very confusing. I think I need a drink.
FOOTNOTE:
Here are the straw men in that straw man meme above:
On drunk women: feminists DO believe drunk women should be responsible for their behavior. Just not the behavior of others. If a woman drives drunk, feminists have no problem with her charged with drunk driving. If a woman is raped while she is drunk, by contrast, feminists don’t think she should be charged with “drunk being raped.”
On alimony, etc: Women do pay alimony and child support when a court rules that it’s appropriate, and no feminist I’ve ever seen has argued that they shouldn’t.
On the draft: Feminists have long argued that women should be allowed to serve in combat and the National Organization for Women has in fact taken legal action to try to extend selective service registration to women,
As for the other ones? I’m not quite sure how exactly the “false accusers should be charged” crowd defines a “false accuser,” but, yes, it’s true feminists don’t want rape accusers charged if they lose a rape case any more than they want murder accusers to be prosecuted for losing a murder case. Accusers of all sorts can be prosecuted for filing a false police report, but this is relatively rare.
Meanwhile, 50-50 custody can be crappy for kids, so it makes little sense to make it the default setting. As for the one about “unwed fathers,” is that really saying what it looks like it’s saying? If so, no, feminists don’t think fathers should be allowed to force women to get an abortion (or to not get an abortion).
EDIT: I reworked the paragraph on feminist dudes and sex to make myself clearer.
Wait – if women were wearing vaginas on their heads, does that must mean artist Judy Chicago made pussy hats too, but made to look like vaginas instead of cats? Then I missed getting mine by having to work that day! D:
(Reference here:
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/dinner_party )
@EJ Possibly! Though in my profession it’s really important to me that no one is able to come back to me and say ‘you said x’ when I actually said ‘I believe, given y and z circumstances, that x is probably true’…. You may be right, though, that people not in my profession aren’t necessarily used to that. However, the email I described in my comment was literally only two sentences long–! But I will bear what you said in mind.
@Rhuu I don’t think I’d suggest that women brought in more money back in the day (though they may have), but rather instead of saying ‘we earn money and strive for money’ people would have said ‘we earn a livelihood and strive for social standing’. Money just wasn’t as central to physical and emotional life as it is for us. I spent some time in a less monetised economy, and remember having a real difficulty explaining to people that where I came from you needed money to live–if you don’t have money you die. ‘Well why can’t you just grow/pick food?’ the people would ask. ‘Or gather/raise food to sell in the market if you need some money?’ Remember according to Graeber money isn’t really an integral part of the transactional economy; it was initially only needed for taxation, and taxation was primarily needed for warfare. It has actually just occurred to me (though Graeber may have touched on this in his book) that a substantially cryptocapitalist economy makes collecting any kind of general graduated (e.g. income, sales or transaction) tax pretty much impossible, leaving taxation to rest almost exclusively on the people WITH any money, i.e. the elite. Another reason for them to be anxious to change the way we interact economically. Back to the blog, maybe…:)
Also the economic unit was the family (however constituted)/household rather than the individual, so it’s difficult to tease out who contributed what/how much (apropos of that, men did much more ‘housework’ than men do now). We do sometimes use the ‘household’ or ‘family’ as a unit of economic measurement, but in a deceitful way–for example, we compare current ‘household income’ (based typically on 80+ total revenue earning hours a week) with former ‘household income’ (based typically on 40 revenue earning hours a week) to claim that ‘household income’ has been increasing over the past 50 or so years.
sorry, didn’t finish my thought…. when in reality the average amount of compensation for work has been stagnant or dropping during that period, which is despicable given the concurrent enormous increase in average worker productivity.
Hm, I think I may have just answered my own question, or at least had an idea about it…maybe since we’ve started consuming filtered social media and news we’ve become more trained to hear/read what we expect to hear/read, and consequently devote less mental effort to paying attention, because we don’t really have to?
@guest: hmmm… What i meant was that women weren’t completely shut out from participating in the economy, as i had assumed. I quite like the idea of women still running companies, even if it is from behind the scenes and not in their own name.
Is that a fair understanding to take?
I see now that it is the concept of money that trips me up. How does one reference the flow of trade that allowed people to specialise in something, yet still trade so they had all the basics of life? …perhaps the ‘cryptocurrency’ term you are using, haha.
@miggs, i wrote a post in the last thread you were in, explaining how women aren’t a monolithic block as you seem to assume. Did you read it? What did you think?
I tried to roll an imaginary natural 20 to help you understand and believe it, and i’m wondering about the results.
@Rhuu As far as I can tell, women being shut out of economic activity is historically more the cultural exception than the cultural rule. It bothers when people say or write things like ‘before [the recent past] women were shut out of the economy, now women can participate’, as if women had never participated before, when it would be more accurate to say something like ‘between the 1830s and [the recent past] women in England were shut out of the economy, now women can participate’ [not sure about the right years for other countries].
Women did participate ‘behind the scenes’ but also ran businesses in their own names–in the particular sector of the economy that I write about I mention that, while certainly more men participated than women, it doesn’t appear to have been remarkable for women to do it–a newspaper might write ‘Miss x manages the work for y city’ or ‘the five companies in z city are owned by Mr a, Mr b, Mrs c, Mr d and Mrs e’–there’s never any sense of ‘whoa, there’s a WOMAN doing this job, that’s pretty amazing’. And that seems to be generally true up to the 1830s–while women were by no means equally represented in any area of business, it wasn’t bizarre or unprecedented for them to be there. I was just looking for this great article I read recently about a single woman who owned and managed a large and apparently successful investment and banking business in London in the early nineteenth century, but alas can’t find it now!
Re the money thing–this isn’t a perfect analogy, but imagine how you manage transactions within your wider circle of friends and acquaintances. You exchange goods and services keeping an informal ‘tab’, and sometimes just out of friendship, as well as through formal and quantitative transactions, and as you mentioned before you can ‘settle up’ when and how it’s convenient, using the relationship as ‘collateral’ (the value of this ‘collateral’ varying with the strength of the relationship, and the trustworthiness of the individual).
@MGTOWRevolutionary
We’re a quite a skeptical, logical, and intelligent group of people here. If you actually want us to take you at all seriously, you really must stop pulling statistics out of your arse.
Provide us details of actual published studies (from reputable, peer-reviewed journals and NOT from MGTOW or MRA websites) that support your claim and we will be happy to dissect and discuss them. Until then, it’s just so much flatus.
Don’t forget that, asthe saying goes, that which can be asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. The burden of proof is always with the person making the extraordinary claim. I look forward to reading about the fruits of your researches.
John McCain is a metamaverick: as a GOP senator he frequently bucks the trend of spinning blatant lies about what the GOP is doing, then he almost invariably bucks the trend of being a maverick and voted the party line.
What does “I bet 90%” mean? Does it mean that Miggie is betting 90% of his money? If he’s so sure, why not 100% of his money? It can’t mean that he thinks there is a 90% chance, because that’s not what he said, and that also doesn’t even make sense. If she is having sex with her partner often enough for him to think that the baby is his, then there is a far greater than 10% chance that the baby is actually his.
I went over the genetics of the alpha/beta thing awhile back, and won’t do it again, but suffice to say that “betas” would die out really fast if women sexually selected for alpha by even a small margin. Sexual selection is an extremely strong genetic pressure. Betas would be edged out of the population in only a few generations. News flash: Miggie is sciencing badly, just as he logics badly and statistics badly.
I just read a newspaper story about actual wolves in a area near here. There was a mention of “alpha female”, which I found mildly amusing after hearing so much about alpha males from manosphere.
@Arctic Ape
The alpha male and female are the parents of the rest of the pack.
What you mean is that women are not attracted to you. But that has nothing to do with betas or ‘biological attraction’. Women don’t like you because you’re a boring, unpleasant misogynist.
Miggs,
You really want it to be true that you were born a “beta” and that’s why no women anywhere like you. That’s very comforting to you, I’m sure. You want to choose to be lazy and feel good about that choice.
Tough.
You’re going to have to put your big boy pants on and learn to deal with the fact there are no such thing as “betas” and your personality is just repugnant. I get that you don’t want to better yourself, because that’s hard work and blaming everyone else and pretending to be helpless allows you to do nothing, project your self-loathing outward and wallow in your fantasy world where you aren’t an ignorant shithead. You are though and that is a fixable situation. You aren’t oppressed. You aren’t helpless to change. You can get a decent education. You can find a therapist, a workbook or online support group to help you learn to take responsibility for your actions and find strategies to improve your self-esteem. No one does that kind of work for you. You have to do it for yourself.
Women aren’t wicked and broken. You’re just a creepy misogynist and we are right to avoid you like the Clap. Change. You might actually make a friend or three one day.
@Dali
I figured it out! See, Hubby does have a girlfriend, but doesn’t she have other partners as well? So, I’m being reverse cucked (probably a thing in the manosphere, who knows) by your husband, but he’s being cucked by me and a handful of other people too. More cuckery means he’s the beta, QED
It’s So Rational!!!1!!!
Reminds me a bit of when Dan Savage temporarily broke Stephen Colbert by answering a question about his concept of “monogam-ish” with “Is it adultery if I’m committing it at one end of a guy and my husband is committing it at the other end of the same guy?”
Do you mean that there’s a 90% chance that a woman is lying about paternity if the “father” is not a good looking and domineering extrovert who’s in and out of jail?
Because no. Even when children are paternity tested, the man seeking the testing turns out not to be the father only about a third of the time. I know this because a lot of your ilk use that stat to claim that there’s a 33% chance that any given pregnant woman is lying about paternity. This is not true because the sample of paternity tested babies is not random. There’s only a test done if the father has some reason to believe he’s not really the father.
Also, you need an anatomy lesson. Belly tends to mean stomach. The stomach is not where the fetus gestates.
You know, when I did my genetics analysis before, I presumed that the “alpha” gene wasn’t sex-linked, but that it had no effect on women. That is to say, a woman with “alpha” genes is exactly as likely to reproduce as a woman with “beta” genes.
But is that really what would realistically happen? Either the gene is sex-linked or it isn’t. If it’s sex-linked, it vanishes very quickly. If it isn’t, it seems like it ought to have some kind of effect on women.
What are alpha women like, Miggie? How do they differ from beta women, and is their chance of reproductive success affected by their alpha genes?
@Axe
But besides him, she mostly dates ladies. How does that fit into the Cuckening, Miggy? Inquiring minds want to know.
Well, if we extrapolate, then an “Alpha” woman would be strong, determined, and intelligent. She wouldn’t take any crap from any one and would be a natural leader. Consequently MEBAWs (Men Endlessly Bitching About Women) would be scared witless (low bar, I know) of them.
If we take the usual MEBAW hypocrisy into account, an “Alpha” woman would be the ‘perfect’ woman (just as the “Alpha” male is the ‘perfect’ male), which is to say she’d personify the 3S’s, Silent, Submissive and Slutty.
I think I might disagree with this but I do agree that custody of children is a very very complex issue. I also have seen feminists speak up for the fact that men haven’t gotten a fair shake traditionally at custody.
The only thing I’ve seen mininininist or MGTOWs do is just say that women do everything and men are being punished in literally every way. No nuance no respect for the complexities involved. No accounting for the fact that not every man DESERVES to get custody. I mean women standing up for men right away says they see that some women don’t deserve it. MGTOWs dont do that.
The thing with the whining about custody imbalance is it ignores that most custody arrangements are agreed by parents and when the court does intervene it seeks to maintain the status quo by maintaining the primary carer arrangements that occurred pre divorce.
Yet the men moaning about this rarely do anything g to change the culture that sees women as the primary carer. Heck being a househusband is apparently a “beta” thing to do.
As for 50/50 default custody I am unconvinced. It appears to prioritise the desires of the parent over the needs of the child. If trekking between two homes was a nice thing to do we would all do it.
@Dali
Somewhere, in an awesome, MGTOW bachelor pad (read: a normal apartment but with an XBox, lotsa near empty Axe Body Spray cans, and a lifetime supply of Pabst), some dude is looking at an evidence board covered in playing cards, newspaper clippings, push pins, and red string, just tryna figure this shit out XD
@wolfkin
‘When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression’
-Somebody clever
To the guy who ‘designed’ that firefighter meme; maybe I would punch my way out of a burning building while roaring the main chorus of “Eye of the Tiger”. You don’t know my life.
I’m not even sure I’m joking. I get absurd when I think my life is in danger.
These memes…
“In an emergency, the most rabid, kill-all-men she-beast will suddenly turn into a helpless damsel in distress.”
Depends on whether I’ve been incapacitated or not, Dudebro. If I’ve been clobbered upside the head by debris or have a broken leg or have been impaled, then yeah, I’m going to be pretty helpless.
On the other hand, I’m a trained medical person, currently a nurse, formerly an EMT. My license expired in 2009, but I’ve never forgotten my training, and I do take my oath to help others seriously. I have a lot more physical problems than I did thirteen years ago when I initially took my EMT training course, not able to do much heavy lifting because of my back, but I’m not useless and wouldn’t allow myself to be useless. I can triage, I can do first aid, I can take orders from paramedics, doctors, EMS command, what have you. I’m capable of inserting an IV. I actually tend to remain pretty cool in an emergency situation and freak out after it’s all done.
Also, no, I don’t want to kill all men. But let’s just say if you were to leave me and the dudebro who came up with this crap on the edge of a cliff and the dudebro were to accidentally fall off the cliff after my hand sort of made firm contact with his chest and he accidentally lost his balance, I wouldn’t feel it was any great loss.
@Lea
True facts.