MRAs demonstrate their complete ignorance of feminist history, part 9742

Was Joe stuck in moderation?

Not all men feel this way, even when mistreated by the system or one woman.

No one said they did. Many men comment on this site. The owner of this blog is a man. We’re talking about MRAs here, which it’s clear from your post you’re only familiar with what they claim to be about and are probably unaware of what their actions show they’re truly about.

I am going through a divorce with a woman who claimed I was inappropriate with my daughter in order to gain a custody advantage.

She’s a terrible person for doing that. She’s hurting you, her child, and probably a number of other people by doing this and there’s no excuse for it. I’m sorry that happened to you.

Her plan was tripped up with a recording that was going in the courthouse. This is more common than most women would like to believe and is becoming more prevalent as a divorce tactic.

I haven’t seen any studies around this (I have seen a few around how frequently courts award custody to fathers vs. mothers, but I’m not well-versed in this specific issue). I’d be interested to see some studies if you have them.

One day I may post the entire recording to see just how this happens. I would love for some feminist to justify her actions. However, I do not believe most females or feminists would do such a thing.

A few things, here: I wouldn’t recommend posting that online as it sounds like it may contain personally identifiable information. Besides, no one here needs evidence of your specific situation. Save that for lawyers.

Another thing: if you already don’t believe that most feminists would justify her actions, then why would you love for a feminist to do so? Are you under the impression that feminists support women over men? I don’t understand the motivation behind this desire; please help me understand.

Finally: please don’t use male/female as nouns when referring to human beings. It’s dehumanizing.

I understand the MRA movement but only to a point.

How well do you understand the movement? And to what point do you empathize with it?

Most women and most men do not fall into the extreme category.

You seem to have conflated men with MRAs and women with feminists. This isn’t a men vs. women issue.

I watched the movie The Red Pill, I see her point and the MRA men’s point also.

I have not watched it, so I must ask, what is her point? My understanding of the film based on her own descriptions and those of people who have watched it is that she sides with the MRAs and I’m curious what you think is different between her side and the MRA side.

In the movie she chose what would be the opposite of extreme feminists.

The opposite of extreme feminismis extreme anti-feminism. Is she an extreme anti-feminist? Is she like a lot of the Red Pill redditors we talk about on here who think women’s suffrage should be taken away?

There is a middle ground somewhere.

When one side is “I should have the same human rights as you” and the other side disagrees, there is no middle ground. I will not concede my rights as a human being.

I work in a primarily female based occupation and have never thought less of my female colleagues vs our male ones.

It’s not really as simple as that. No one thinks they have bias but it’s there, lurking in the back of our minds. That’s true of everyone, not just one side or another of any given issue. We pick up little messages in our culture without realizing it, and we trust our intuition when it tells us about the quality of an individual. So you might tell yourself you view, say, Bob, as being lazy because of some past interactions you’ve had with him, but as it turns out your brain has decided Bob falls into a certain category and has been looking for information to confirm that assumption. That’s called confirmation bias and it causes you not to notice the times he is extremely productive, even if that’s 99% of your interactions with him, and your view of Bob is shaped by that 1% that you’re noticing because he looks like your lazy uncle (or whatever category your brain has put him into).

Also, at least in my career, salaries are tied to experience, education and years of service. Both sides are treated fairly.

The problem is that women are less likely to be promoted and less likely to get a raise when they ask for it. That goes back to perceptions and confirmation bias. If shown the exact same resume for a candidate with a male name vs. a female name hiring managers will, on average, give a lower figure for what they would offer a candidate with the female-sounding name than the male-sounding name.

Start with the “#NOTALLMEN” fallacy, and drive full speed toward the wall. Slow down, Joe, back up and think a bit.

Why might you not have experienced sexism in the workplace? Could it be because you’re a man, and women don’t like to complain about sexism to male coworkers who they don’t know very well?

I know I hardly ever hear anything about sexism except in places like this where people can talk about sexism’s effects without worrying about retaliation at work. And with a few women in real-life who’ve talked about it with me. Women are understandably cautious about talking about sexism with coworkers they may have reason to distrust.

You want to learn about sexism and it’s effects? Listen to women, and accept that the problems they discuss are real!

I guess it all really does come down to “Listen to other people, and empathize.” Even some of the trolls here get listened to, though when they start going overboard with lies and disingenuosity, it’s a waste of time.

Joe, why you call women ‘females’. I can see when someone never been in love – when he call women ‘females’. Lucky you getting divorce.

@Penny Smith

I do know muslims who say takbir instead of Allahu akbar, because sadly we’ve gotten to a point where when you say the latter in public, some people will suspect you of being a terrorist about to blow yourself up. :/

I wonder if it ever ocurred to MRAs that there are feminists out there who -gasp- also happen to be muslim. (Considering the fact that all three feminists in that graphic are white and that they went for the most extreme version of Islam, I very much doubt it.)

Okay, but would they be familiar with the word takbir in the first place, in order to look it up? My impression is that generally people are aware of “Allahu akbar” by itself, not of the verb kabbara (what Nina said seems to support that). But I don’t really know.

(Also, total facepalm on that Japanese name.)

Remember when a 3rd wave feminist wrote “The Scum Manifesto” and 2nd wave feminists were accused of being handmaidens of the patriarchy if they expressed an interest in lipstick or pole dancing?

Oh, hang on, I’ve got 2 and 3 the wrong way round. I once did that in a German test. Learned my lesson now. Eins, zwei, drei …

@Shaenon, @Lyzzy

The irony in this is that there’s a direct lineage from some of the more toxic elements of “second-wave” era feminism to MRAs themselves, via the influence of Warren Farrell. The best example of that is how Farrell sees everything awful that happens to men as strictly a gender issue. Coal miners and garbage collectors have dangerous working conditions? Yep, it’s all because they’re (mostly) men. No class issues to see here.

Warren Farrell is certainly toxic.

But I believe that Lexicon is saying that Farrell himself took the “toxic” elements of second-wave feminism from others. Then Farrell’s (borrowed) thoughts influenced the MRAs.

So I’m wondering what second-wave feminist (other than Farrell, who was a feminist as long as it was convenient) is toxic.

Kat, representative of the feminist government in exile

So I’m wondering what second-wave feminist (other than Farrell, who was a feminist as long as it was convenient) is toxic.

Toxic? Bit hard to think of any.

There were more than a few who were boring beyond belief – mainly because Freud was still a big thing in the 60s and didn’t fade out completely until the later 70s. Watching the intellectual contortions required throughout a chapter, section, or occasionally a whole book, when a strong feminist wrestles with reconciling those beliefs with a pre-existing strong belief in Freudian psychology was unpretty and extremely dreary. Jung was an equally bad influence on those who fancied themselves as a bit on the mystic side.

I suppose the same thing might be said of the socialists-communists who wrote dissertations extolling the virtues of Marx, Engels and the rest of that crowd as equivalent to those of feminism. It’s certainly an easier ask. All you have to do is skip a few bits here and there rather than explain them away as you need to with Freud. But genuine insights were few and far between and so-so writing makes it not worth the effort to find them (unless you’re an academic or a student, of course, then it’s just work).

One thing I think we benefited from though, was the general background of interest in socialism of the times even if you weren’t an activist (though lots of 2nd wave feminists were veterans of the anti-nuclear and anti-war movements as well as many being trade unionists). It meant that we expected to have to do a lot of reading. Not like reciting Mao’s Little Red Book like a catechism, but ensuring we were fully informed of the history of fighting for women’s rights. Hence the big interest in the history of the abolitionists in the USA as well as lots and lots of quite indigestible philosophy. (Anyone who tells me they enjoy Hegel is a very unusual person – unless they speed-read to get through it and thereby missed the worst of him.)

Kat:
In my experience there are a lot of people in certain leftists spaces (like tumblr) who cloak their exclusionary and gatekeeping tactics in the guise of being “second wave radfems” while accusing third-wavers of capitulating too much to men and being too involved in “non-women” issues. They then lure in younger feminists who are just learning about it and thus you get fun Feminist Faction Wars. Naturally this does not apply to all radfems or women alive during the second wave at all (again, quite a lot of them are barely feminist themselves beyond maybe a single issue), but typically these people tend to:

–Be transphobic. Bi/panphobes are also very common as bi/pan women are attacked for “making themselves available to men.” Overall the only part of LGBT+ the tend to care for is the L

–Have a lot of internalized misogyny and attack women who like feminine things while simultaneously praising men who do since the man is “breaking gender barriers!” without realizing they’re bashing a woman for doing something they praise a man for.

–Accuse third wave feminists of not being radical enough, use “third wave” as a descriptor for being passive or accepting of misogyny.

–Be very USA centric, or at the very least West-centric and very bad at understanding different nations have different feminist history and talking over those women to tell them how to be “more feminist” is not helping.

–Tend to get angry if a man calls himself a feminist since only women can be feminists (no, really, several say this) and thus men should have to identify as “feminist allies” only

They’re a pretty hostile group. IMO they’re mainly focused around the first two points, with the others only cropping up now and then. A lot of them really are just young people who have only gotten a portion of feminist history, edited to get them on the giver’s side. A lot of them are TERFs and some even insist being a TERF is a requirement to being second wave and thus “woman-centric”. It’s a big mess, and a lot of them being loud and jerks has soured the word “radfem” in some online communities like tumblr.

An Internet search for Allahu Akbar brings up the Takbir Wikipedia page. Mystery solved, I think!

Also it’s a violet laser, because purple is my favorite colour.

Lover of purple high five. ✋?

Stands up Sparticus style for the love of purple.

“All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks and permit us to stand upright on the ground which God intended us to occupy” – Sarah Moore Grimke

That’s an awesome quote. I wish I could make awesome quotes like that.

@KindaSortaHarmless

Now I’m curious. How would a Japanese school be named?

Dalillama,

There’s no way of knowing. She’s very few years older than me, and we both grew up in the culture where cross-dressing comics like Benny Hill and the Les Girls drag act in Sydney were as close as we ever came to anything remotely like trans issues as we now understand them. (On the other hand, we could recite from memory the outstanding bravery and the achievements of women who’d had to dress as men in order to do what they wanted in the way of fighting in wars or qualifying as doctors.)

I have no way of knowing what I and the people I knew at the time would have done had we “known what we know now”. What comes to my mind is one meeting (I can’t remember its specific purpose but it was probably during 1975 or 76) where we had trade union officials like me from professional and public service backgrounds sitting alongside unionists from manufacturing and other blue collar jobs who were sitting alongside Lady Somebody-or-other from millionaire’s row and her elegant friends – with all kinds of women from indigenous groups to PTA/ home duties to a couple of lesbian separatists to church representatives and everyone else in between. And we all got along swimmingly – everyone was heard, (one major complaint that many people had about feminists at the time was the rejection of conventional rules of debate – made things drag out interminably sometimes). We all just kept our usual notes and made the most of following up with interesting people during the tea and biscuits breaks.

That meeting – and others like it – makes me think that if someone had raised the issue at some suitable time, in one of those health-reproduction-sexuality type discussions and the discussion had spread, many of us would have said, Oh my goodness, you’re right (even if our first thoughts would very likely have been about the problems and the rights of AFAB people wanting to be accepted into male society). We wouldn’t necessarily have got it right, but we wouldn’t have dismissed it out of hand either. Not all of us anyway.

We’ll never know. But I’d say that most 2nd wave feminist women have grown and developed in much the same way as society has done as a whole. Some are rigidly sticking to their last which was fully formed some time during or before 1975, International Women’s Year. Many more have changed in various ways, hopefully for the better even though I know some who haven’t.

@Jesalin
<3