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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@kupo – Yup.
@ Scanisaurus – You aren’t remotely alone. I remember it being criticized by bell hooks no less when it came out. There were definitely readings arguing both sides. If I recall, Campion herself said she didn’t think of it as a feminist film.
On the subject Scanisaurus bought up,
If some people here have seen Tale of Princess Kaguya by Isao Takahata – Do you think it generally needs a trigger warning for sexual assault, if I’m going to recommend it to people?
I think that movie is an amazing masterpiece in animated expression – perhaps unfortunately including said assault, which is only about 1-second long creepy clothed hug. (It also seems to be a major plot element, unfortunately. I haven’t seen anyone discuss this particular theme in mentions of the movie.)
@ Lumipuna:
I’d say if you ask if it needs a trigger warning, then a trigger warning would be appropriate. 🙂
@ Lumipuna and Weird(…)Eddie,
I am in favour of trigger warnings; they’ve been a big help to me, and to many others.
My sister is against them, for the reason that sometimes an element of a book or film is meant to be a surprise, and if there is a trigger warning for, say, violence, then the reader/viewer is always anticipating it, which ruins the surprise. I can see her point; I just disagree for personal reasons.
Maybe if you are recommending the film to a specific person, you could ask if they want a sense of what possible negative things to expect?
If you’re just, say, posting on your blog for anyone to come across, I’d say that asking if it needs a warning means it does indeed need a warning.
Fair point. Maybe I’m just reluctant because my gut instinct is, if it needs such a warning, then it’s not really worth recommending (I mean to people generally, not specific individuals with known sensitivity). I know this is not how trigger warnings work, but my friends might easily misunderstand.
@Lumipuna
If it’s something that needs a trigger warning that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t recommend it. In fact, some films I love best are ones I have to mentally prepare for some of the scenes in. The trigger warning isn’t about “don’t watch this if you’re sensitive to…” it’s about allowing the person to determine if they’re able and willing to handle the content and to prepare themselves so they’re not caught unawares and suddenly having a panic attack (or whatever else might be triggered for that individual).
I know. It just seems like a plot spoiler, if I were to explain what exactly is coming.
I previously recommended another Takahata film, Grave of the Fireflies, to my friend – in that case, the trigger warning was basically a brief description of what the movie is about. (Also, it’s a movie that everyone says needs a trigger warning, so it didn’t feel so odd.)
I’m reading “Dinner with a Cannibal”. Early on, the author describes various forms of postcoital cannibalism (e.g., spiders, insects) and points out that the nutrition from the devoured male increases the likeliness of healthy offspring from the devouring female. Thus, the male’s reproductive fitness is actually enhanced by being eaten.
An interesting perspective, to be sure.
I have to admit that I’ve never seen the big problem with trigger warnings. I save my annoyance for people that do have a problem with them.
But I don’t want others to experience undue upset, even if it’s accidental or unintentional. So, it’s not a real hardship to skim past two words on a page or screen even if I feel I’m unlikely to be upset by the contents. Plus, I have heeded one or two on bad days, myself.
It is, of course, a bit more of a burden to attach a warning to content one creates but it’s still not such a big deal. Especially since it just might mean more eyes on your creation!
Robert – AFAIK in many spider species the male being eaten thing doesn’t usually happen after a successful copulation, but is much more likely during courtship, if the female is slightly more in the mood for hunting than mating.
Generally in spiders, it seems that female sexual consent mostly consists of suppression of hunting instinct. Not very analogous to humans, I’d say.
This reminds me of something that I HATED when I was a child. Those films where the hero forces the love interest into kissing – she turns away a few times and then passionately submits.
Of course at the age of 10 I did not know what it was about, I just knew I hated it.
That whole thing about women being too eager makes them promiscuous ‘easy’ women, this attitude is still going strong. Recently I read about teen girls not carrying condoms because it would make them seem too keen.
This is of course a far cry from the shit this arsehole is banging on about, but I have to commend him for once more scraping a barrel I thought had been scraped to the wood as far as it could go.
Give the fools a teeny bit of credit – there’s an entire planet under the bottom of the barrel to scrape through.
@An Impish Pepper
Remember your last post on this. First off and most important, really glad things are improved for you!
Can’t advise much on the whole friends thing – I don’t make them easily, or feel much of a need to – but this:
If you can pay it off without compromising your ability to live (and your run-out fund), pay it off. While you may not yet have a deadline now, you will eventually, so getting ahead of the jump is a nice feeling.
That’d be my advice.
@ All;
Oh, I DO hope we’re still talking about hair color….
@Bookworm in hijab, Lightcastle
Thank you so much, your words mean a lot to me and I agree with everything you said.
The big problem with my relative is that she genuinley didn’t seem able to see why such things upset me or why anyone would interpret it as glorifying sexual abuse, she literally said “we interpreted it differently, let it go”, and she’s told me I shouldn’t subject myself to say, war movies, and only stick to comedies instead, despite I’ve tried tell her over and over again, it’s not violence or sad themes or respectful non-graphic depictions of sexual abuse that upsets me, it’s sexual abuse being treated as ubiquitous and inevitable for any female protagonist not a Disney Princess and gratuitously and graphically included just for “realism”.
It’s just so frustrating since despite being a vocal feminist, she just brushes off my feelings on this by saying that stuff like the wage gap are more important, and “it’s a man’s world we live in, accept it” or “the filmmakers are just following commercial interests, and men have the money”, and I don’t know what to say. Like, whatever I tell her she only tells me to let my feelings go and avoid anything that upsets me – which was what I was trying to do by trusting her in the first place.
Regarding the discussion of triggers, I’d say always err on the side of caution, and merely mentioning the prescence of violence, sexual abuse or anything else commonly triggering should never deserve to be called a spoiler. A spoiler would be to reveal who’s the killer in a crime story or some big plot-changeing twist, not a honest warning of things that could cause serious harm to people with ptsd or depression. Should we stop writing allergy warnings on food labels as to not ruin the surprise for non-allergic?
Personally, I’m just sick of seeing people argue that we should sacrifice the mental health of the most vulnerable for the sake of entertainment for immature persons wanting to bask in shock value.
If anyone needs brainbleach, here’s the promised pictures of my mom’s new cat.
Her name is Clover. She’s one years old. A stray who was lucky enough to get a forever home with a total cat person. She’s very sweet and very vocal and curious.
Hopefully this embeds because I’m too lazy to find a photo site.
After coming home, she went under the bookshelf, but welcomed pets if you stuck your hand in their, so I think she’ll acclimate quickly.
I forgot to add, but what galled me the most about The piano is seeing the heroine selling her body for a piano that was rightfully hers to begin with framed as “empowerment” and her being in control of her own body, despite her being put in that choice only happened exactly because she didn’t have any control. The thing is, The girl with the Dragon Tattoo had almost exactly the same setup where Lisbeth Salander is a hacker who needs a computer to work, but once hers is broken her legal guardian demands sexual favors before allowing her the money she needs for a new one, but there I didn’t feel triggered because it was rightfully framed as a severe sexual violation and abuse of power, but I just found it so very telling that when the piano framed it as “romantic”, the Girl with the Dragon tattoo used the exact same scenario to show how evil and abusive one of the villains were.
To follow up Ohlmann’s post Mary Cagle is the creator, writer, and artist of the webcomics Kiwi Blitz and Sleepless Domain.
Unfortunately, how it is portrayed on screen all has to do with how we are supposed to feel about the that male character. If we are *supposed to like him like we are in the Piano then it’s all portrayed as ok and even good for the woman. If he’s supposed to be a villain, then it’s portrayed differently.
*not because I actually like any of these characters, it’s just that a lot of movies (raunchy comedies, for example) depend on on us liking characters that commit sexual assault.
OMG Clover is so adorable!
I now recall that I must have discussed grad school before because I remember saying I was blocked off from OSAP funding as a result of using repayment assistance. It just feels especially cruel that I spent the entirety of Wynne’s last term just getting to the point of having a job at all and being able to pay off the debt in a shorter time, only for a large enough portion of Ontarians to decide that they wanted to own the libs or whatever. I’ve heard people blame Doug Ford for being an extremist dictator-wannabe, but just like Trump in the U.S., the party around him has been extreme for many years (John Tory being an exception except people were slashing the tires of the PCs’ political opponents when he was running for premier) and they’re the ones who chose him. They even got heavy backing from a group called “Ontario Proud,” which is pretty much what you think it is.
@Shadowplay
Thanks, though I’m not sure I’ve progressed that much and sometimes I feel like I’ve hardly progressed at all. The staff I’ve interacted with at school do assure me that I’ve accomplished a lot, and they compliment my writing and stuff. As for the loan thing, I guess it was more about my frustration at the political situation, and really there’s no reason not to keep to my original plan based on finishing it off in the fall. It feels bad to have one of the big reasons I planned it out that way be in jeopardy.
@Big Titty Demon
Sorry, I must have been more incoherent than I thought at the end there. I’m not a grad student, just using a program intended for undergrads and recent grads looking for career paths to transition into. (So the younger students I mentioned are mostly undergrads; I even caught myself thinking “those poor kids” after the reality of the OSAP cuts hit them this past Wednesday.) I guess my concern is related to a discussion I saw here a while ago about age and power differentials in dating. It does seem to be true, both inside and outside of dating, that two people with a significant enough power differential can’t really be friends or partners in a healthy sense. But maybe this isn’t actually a problem in my case? The biggest thing really is that I submitted a sort of application that they then evaluated, and their approval could be revoked if I exhibited unprofessional behaviour. But that situation most likely won’t even be repeated, so…?
@Kestrel
I’ve gone to a therapist and speech-language pathologists in the past and they weren’t really successful in getting me to communicate a whole lot. I’m also honestly kind of skeptical of therapists as I have gained somewhat of an understanding of the limitations of the commonly used therapies and it just doesn’t seem like they’ll help me much. I’ve thought about the possibility that I have depression and/or social anxiety, but I’m not sure that either describes my situation as well as I thought in the past. I’ve suspected for a while now that I’m suffering from some kind of “autistic burnout,” and if that’s the case then I really doubt that conventional therapy would help me.
@Scanisaurus
I really dislike the notion that atrocious acts and opinions from people in the past were just how it was in the past. It just seems like a way to give the impression that society has progressed so much since those barbaric days of yore. White men used to be so cruel, we get that, but we white men are better than that now!
Except when white men in the past wrote their bad opinions, it was for a reason. They were writing in response to something. When Voltaire wrote racist stuff against Jews, Muslims, and black people, he was saying that because Jews, Muslims, and black people were writing to fight against racism. But that last part gets glossed over in history class. Talk about being doomed to repeat it…
@ Scanisaurus,
THIS, yes! One of my favourite historical novels has a main female character who is raped, but it is NOT graphic, it IS necessary for the plot, it DOESN’T present it as “ok because history”, it’s in no way presented as erotic, and the rest of that book plus sequel include a lot about how she heals herself emotionally. I thought it was empathetic and realistic rather than gratuitous.
Weirwoodtreehugger, thank you for posting those gorgeous cat pics! Many hearts!?????
If they’re willing to take this “shit test” argument to its logical extreme, than anyone can be portrayed as wanting the opposite of what they say they want. “You said you wanted regular coffee, but that’s obviously a shit test to weed out the weak baristas who are afraid to give you the decaf you obviously want!” And of course, your saying you want to get laid is obviously a shit test to weed out the weak women who are afraid to deny you the lifetime of celibacy you obviously want.
Oh, and female mantises don’t eat the male’s head in the wild.
Clover’s feet sticking out from under the bookcase do seem pretty relaxed.
@Bookworm,
You knew this was coming: dare I ask what that book is? I’d love to read it.