By David Futrelle
Today, just another example of the sort of toxic nonsense that gets upvotes in the Men’s Rights subreddit, despite the protestations from Reddit MRAs that they really aren’t about hate at all.
What I’ve got for you is a rather remarkable comment from longtime Men’s Rights Redditor DavidByron2 — a fellow with quite a history of reprehensible opinions — responding to an OP who had argued that “feminism is a shit test to weed out weak men” — that is, that women use feminism in order to figure out which guys are “manly enough” to disobey its rules, because these Chadly anti-feminist rule-breakers are the men that women (even some feminists) really want to get with.
Mr. Byron2 suggests that this applies as well to laws against rape.
Yep, that’s right: he’s convinced himself that “real” — or at least non-feminist women — prefer men who ignore their “noes,” because I guess he thinks these women prefer “manly” date-rapists to feminist men who are so wimpy they’ll only have sex with women who’ve consented to it.
I’m not quite sure I’m following his logic at the end, but apparently, for straight guys, only having sex with women who consent to it is equivalent to … having your head bitten off by a praying mantis?
Byron2 got a dozen upvotes for the bizarre rape apologia, because of course he did. I mean, honestly, his argument — awful as it is — isn’t that far off from the terrible anti-date-rape-law arguments of Warren Farrell, the intellectual grandpappy of the Men’s Rights movement, in his still-influential 1993 book The Myth of Male Power — opinions he’s still defending to this day.
But that’s a whole other post. Or maybe two.
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@ weirwoodtreehugger
D’aaaaawww! SO CUTE! She looks so delicate and lively!
@ Scanisaurus
I am right there with you. I absolutely loathe The Piano for all the reasons you have mentioned, plus it is the favourite, most beloved film of someone I know. That same someone said the rape scene in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was not really rape. Because she had the opportunity to stab him with the letter opener (in the book), and didn’t, so she was consenting to it. Not wanting to kill someone = consent. I just could not even.
GwtDT was one of the very few instances I thought a movie was superior to the book. It made Lisbeth even more important due to distribution of screen time than the book did and cut back on the whole “all Lisbeth needed was a good peening from me, the author insert, to cure her mental instability!” I did not like that about the book at all. It was doing so well until he just haaaaad to put it in at the end.
@WWTH:
Re Clover – squee black kitty!!! Black kitties are my favorite. There’s, in fact, a family story about me because I have 2 have a black cat, preferably male, with me 2 consider my house a home. I even have an acronym for it: BCIR (Black Cat in Residence).
I also adore the pic of Clover’s paws poking out from under the bookcase. She looks like a real sweetheart ? May she & your mother have many happy years 2gether.
I haven’t seen the USAnian re-make of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but I did (initially by accident) find myself watching the three-part original with Noomi Rapace and it is outstanding. (started watching the first film by accident at about 2am; it was so good that we then had to on-purpose stay up all night for three nights running to watch all of it and then the other two).
Among many, many other things, I liked the fact that although there is one sexual passage in the interactions between her and her co-lead character it is quite clearly shown to be far less important than the friendship, and doesn’t transform her or change her life at all (whereas the friendship is instrumental in significantly helping both of them). The behaviour of the legal guardian figure is properly shown as abusive, and not in the least ‘sexy’.
The English-language title of the book is very fine, but it’s also outstanding that the original title is Män som hatar kvinnor, which (thank you Wiki) apparently translates as “Men who hate women”.
@Lumipuna—
Recently I heard post-copulation cannibalism in spiders may be one of those things that’s pretty rare in the wild, but happens in the lab because the animals are confined together in a small space— the male spider can’t leave after mating, so he’s still around when the female’s hunting instincts switch back on.
Clover looks very much like my younger cat, Nana, who is a delight.
https://mooncustafer.tumblr.com/image/185791157895
Same thing as alpha wolf then :p
THat make sense, since generally speaking animals (and plants) are a lot smarter than we assume them to be. Killing your mate isn’t a terribly useful thing to do.
wwth – Clover is adorbs and I’m sure she’ll be out from under the bookcase in no time! Especially if she’s accepting pets.
Story time!
When we brought our kitty boys home, Desmond (who was a baby) ate, crashed, and took over the house the next day.
Mr. Mistofelees (Stoffy) ensconced himself in our closet and hissed (silently!) at us if we looked at him for too long. After a couple of days, he was okay with me bringing his food and water, but would hide behind a box if Husbeast came in and would do the silent hiss if I petted him more than once. At that point, I started just sitting in the closet while softly talking or singing with my back to him, in the dark a couple of times a day (but not at mealtime.)
After a week and a half of just sitting with him, Stoffy would accept pets without hissing so I started sitting in the closet with the lights on, talking to him. A few days later, he came down from the tote he had decided was his safe space and actually rubbed my leg and let me pet and skritch him! I was so happy, I cried. At that point, I had Husbeast sit in the closet, too (not with me there, that was too much for him, still.)
The next week, Mr. Stoffy started venturing out of the closet when I was awake in bed. (He had been leaving the closet to use the litterbox in the bathroom all along, but only when we weren’t around or were sleeping. I called him a ninja pooper) After that, he started jumping up on the bed to sit on my chest and give me head bumps and rubs! He finally started to explore the rest of the house after that and hasn’t looked back, even though he had to fight Desmond for every square inch outside the master bedroom!
It was three weeks, all told, but omg, SO worth it! I still get head bumps and rubs every morning and night, it’s so awesome!!
Awww, those pics of Clover are cute.
A cute thing about cats growing up is they keep trying to crawl under the bookshelf, even when they’re grown and don’t really fit anymore.
Clover is grown, she’s just really petite. But if she fattens up she may not fit under there anymore.
Reportedly, she did come out and sleep with my mom for a little while, but she’s mostly been under the bed now. But, if she’s already coming out a little bit, I think she’ll come out of hiding permanently before too long. I hope by the 5th of July she will, cause I’m staying the night over there and want to interact with her more.
It’s funny because mom doesn’t typically love solid colored kitties. She likes tabbies and calicoes and tuxedos with their cool markings. But she connected with Clover right away, so I guess now she’s a black cat convert.
melts
@wwth
Here’s hoping there aren’t a lot of fireworks near you mom to spook her! One year Pepper actually figured out there were lights outside to go with the sound, so she really enjoyed them that year. Never before or since, though. Usually it’s under the bed all night.
@An Impish Pepper
Exactly, I’m sick to death of people using a historical setting as an excuse to portray nazis, rapists, slave owners or nazis raping slaves without any real critiscism of them and expecting us to feel more sympathy for them than their victims, all because “it was like that back then”, as if everyone in the past were some weird hive-mind who never disagreed and no one considered rape, slavery or torture a big deal, including the victims of it.
@Bookworm in hijab
I agree with every point. One of my favourite video games of all time, Alice: Madness Returns takes place in the victorian era and features sexual abuse as a big plot point, but it shows it through symbolism in the enemy and environment design, and the villain is only appearing friendly in order to make a point about just how predators lure their victims by pretending to be nice.
@Big Titty Demon
I’m so glad I’m not alone in hating that movie!
As for The Girl with the Dragon tatto, I will forever be dissapointed that the editors wussed out and didn’t release it with a proper translation of the real title. I also consider the Swedish version with Noomi Rapace, while not without flaws, to be very much superior to all other versions. As for the book, I lost all interest in reading it after a friend complained that the book kept switching perspectives between a sexy sex scene and a rape depiction, and said friend watches all kinds of weird creepy anime, so when he complains, it’s really bad.
But even though Lisbeth Salander is a great character, I’m still tired of all the women defending rape scenes as neccessary, or saying it did’t really count as rape. To me, it just comes across as too similar to the arguments real-life abusers use to justify their actions, and I can’t help but feel that making sexual abuse and humiliation the default for female-led stories is just another form of opression that also contributes to the attitudes of people like the guy in the title. After all, it’s incredibly rare to see stories about male rape victims, or even just serious stories about abuse and humiliation of men in general, marketed as entertainment for straight white men, because then it’s taken as a given that they don’t want to see that and it could cause severe discomfort for them to see it happen to a character they are meant to identify with.
@scanisaurus
Yah, it especially gets my goat when (white) people defend American slaveholding because ‘everyone’ thought it was ok: there was a very large segment of the population who were very much opposed to it, on the grounds that, y’know, they were being enslaved.
Just dropping in to squee at Clover kittie. I bet it won’t be long before she’s roaming around the whole house. Piper was the shyest of our rescue babies; she hid in my son’s room for the first week or so. She’s still very skittish with strangers, but otherwise quite chilled, as you can see:
http://i65.tinypic.com/91ia7q.jpg
so many people with disgusting beliefs…. coming from every direction…. all the time….
@Dalillama
Exactly, I remember reading an interwiew with a german woman who’d been raped during WW2, and afterwards she couldn’t stand raunchy “jokes” and the like, despite living in times “before everything was so damn politically correct”, and at least to me that stood out as a very clear example as to why the victims never found that kind of stuff funny, the only difference is that today they have an actual chance to make their voices heard.
@Lumipuna:
Good lord, Grave of the Fireflies. I firmly believe that movie should be on the list of movies everybody should see once, though it does very much need a trigger warning. You will almost certainly never want to watch it again.
@An Impish Pepper:
I live in St. Paul’s, which is one of the parts of Toronto where tires were slashed of people who had Liberal election signs during the campaign.
It’s also the area where, when John Tory was running for premier, the local Conservative MPP-wannabe Lilyann Goldstein sent out a mass mailing to the area saying ‘Warning! A convicted gun and drug dealer has just been released into YOUR NEIGHBOURHOOD!’… months before the election was officially called, which probably broke some rules about electioneering. She lost the election.
It’s also the area where Sue Ann Levy, the Toronto Sun columnist who used to call Toronto City Hall ‘Socialist Silly Hall’ while David Miller was mayor, ran in a by-election. When she lost, she dismissively said we were going to get the government ‘we deserved’.
I believe it’s also one of the areas where, back during Harris’ time as Premier, volunteers at election sites were called up prior to the election day and threatened. With many people afterward noting that the only people who should have had access to the list of volunteers were those in the government running the election.
For an area that pretty regularly turns out Liberal and even occasional NDP candidates, it also has a number of really nasty conservatives.