By David Futrelle
Apparently the sorts of dudes I write about on this blog are just out there in the real world, some of them dating women who have no idea about the fetid misogynistic notions rattling around in their boyfriends’ heads.
Take, for example the perplexed woman (or the extremely convincing perplexed-woman-impersonator) who turned to the Relationship Advice subreddit for help the other day after discovering that her boyfriend of five years doesn’t think women should be allowed to vote.
Because somehow this has become an issue for some men in the last several years.
“I’m so confused, I don’t know what to think” began the women, calling herself randomaccount1775.
I’m not even sure if this is the proper sub but I just feel that I need some advice.
In the time I have known him, my boyfriend has always fell politically independent, or so I thought. Politics was never an issue between us at all.
But then things took a little bit of a turn.
However he just admitted to me that over the past year he’s grown more and more extreme in his views, to the point that he believes women have ruined the country (we are American) and that they should not be allowed to vote.
This is basically the political equivalent of learning that your beloved is one of those dudes who smears his own feces on the walls in public bathrooms just for fun.
He says he did not feel comfortable telling me about this sooner because he thought he would lose me.
And hopefully he will.
I’m upset and I can’t tell if I’m wrong to be upset about this because I know that everyone is entitled to have their own views, but now I just feel as though he doesn’t even value my own input/views.
How fucked is it that she’s the one questioning herself over his terrible opinions.
He has assured me that he still thinks that I should be allowed to vote but that women in general should not.
Repeal the 19th Amendment! Except for my girlfriend, who might get mad and dump me like the garbage I am!
This is a person I have been with for almost 5 years.
SUNK COST FALLACY.
We’ve talked about marriage. I don’t know what to think. In all other aspects he is the perfect, most amazing partner, and I can’t imagine my life without him in it.
Start imagining.
But this suddenly has me rethinking about a lot.
Keep rethinking as you throw out this entire man.
Amazingly, she still worried that she was the one who was acting weird here.
Am I wrong to be questioning our relationship over his new beliefs? As his girlfriend am I supposed to be tolerant and respectful of his views even though I may (strongly) disagree? I can’t tell if I’m overreacting to this or not. The whole situation has made me feel terrible and I’m so confused.
Happily, enough people on Reddit assured the woman that she wasn’t the one in the wrong here that she decided — as she explained in an update — that she would “confront my boyfriend later this evening.”
There’s been no update since then; hopefully the confrontation ended (or will end) with him being shown the door. Or the window.
H/T — Twitter’s relationships.txt
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I hope she’s safe.
I hate to say it, but I’ve gotten used to the male jerks who think the 19th amendment was a bad idea. What still shocks me is that there are women who say they wouldn’t mind losing the right to vote. If you don’t want to vote, don’t vote. You aren’t exercising all your rights and responsibilities as a citizen, but you do you, whatever. But don’t tell me I shouldn’t vote by virtue of being a woman. To quote the 1994 film of Little Women:
In my more paranoid moments, I wonder how many of my fellow Americans think that women should be redefined as “non-citizens” or even “non-human beings.”
Dump his sorry ass and then take out ads in the local paper shaming him as the pathetic, 19th century loser he is.
In unrelated (somewhat) good news, Acosta has resigned over the Epstein plea. Would rather see him in jail, though.
@VP:
It’s another form of demographic shenanigans which its proponents think would lock the Democrats out of power. These men and women would prefer to live in a one-party country, provided it was their party.
It’s mind blowing to me that anyone could look around at Trumpism and what it’s doing to this country and conclude that women are what’s ruining things.
@Fishy Goat:
I guess Trump can be relied on to appoint someone even worse. Right now, he’s probably asking whether R. Kelly is available.
@ V.P.:
We know from the 2016 election there are around 60 million Americans who, while they may not THINK this way, they’re willing to accept it.
Ugh. Hit post too soon and my comment isn’t showing up yet to edit.
The typical MRA talking point was that feminism is controlling and ruining the nation, so women’s suffrage was a mistake. But now, we’re turning back the clock on all those gains. We’re turning into the right wing dictatorship of every reactionary’s dreams. So what’s the fucking problem? That we’re not just lying back and quietly accepting the erosion of the rights of all non wealthy white cishet men, I suppose.
That’s not paranoia.
I suppose the argument could be made that the ~53% of white women who voted for the orange fascist rapist currently occupying the White House are a part of the problem, but A) that still wouldn’t make it right to deny them the vote, and B) that’s, quite literally, not all women.
So…. he assures her that SHE should be allowed to vote, but not women in general. How is that supposed to work? He gets to pick which women he thinks are qualified?
The fractured world view of these numpties is just exhausting.
@Moggie:
What was the position again?
Labour secretary?
Jeff Bezos.
I’m suddenly very glad the biggest argument I have with my fiancé is about baptizing our children catholic.
Nah, he hates Bezos. Maybe one of the Waltons? The Wal-Mart heirs, not the TV characters. Or perhaps the Papa John’s guy?
@ Surplus – Nah, he hates Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, which says mean things about him.
@ Vic – The good news is that 53% figure is based on exit polls that were later found to be flawed. The bad news is that Trump still beat Hillary with white women, 48% to 45%. I guess the remaining 7% voted third party or write-in.
Misogyny has 2 subtypes: contempt for women vs resentment towards women. Contempt is animosity towards those with less power than you while resentment is anger towards those with more power than you. It is the resentful misogynists , like incels/MRAs/MGTOW that seem to be under more scrutiny than the contemptuous ones. I’ve never really undestood why. The contemptuous ones are the ones im positions of power who could make millions of women’s lives harder of they get the laws on their side. This woman really should dump this guy if he refuses to change his stance….but I’m skeptical she will. We can only hope.
Yeah… Interpreting charitably, he perhaps meant, “You’re one of the few reasonable women; if all women were like you, I would totally support women’s suffrage but unfortunately that’s not the case”
Who knows, maybe it’s even a honest sentiment. It seems he might have some weirdly stereotypic view of “women” as a general category, like many online misogynists apparently do.
@Pyxxxie
I’m not sure the two subtypes are mutually exclusive. I think a lot of the MGTOW and MRA types are both resentful and contemptuous. Two toxic flavors in one terrible shit sandwich.
@Lumipuna
I’ve heard arguments like that from FeMRAs as well, claiming that women shouldn’t vote except for them. Andrea Hardie aka Janet Bloomfield said something to that effect a while ago.
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2016/02/11/andrea-judgy-bitch-hardie-women-arent-xenophobic-enough-to-deserve-the-vote/
The boyfriend is largely correct in his assesment that allowing women, all women, to vote has drastically changed American culture and politics. Right-wing authoritarianism is reasonnably popular amongst adult men, but its very unpopular amongst women. Social policies oriented toward childcare like free schooling and healthcare for children are basically so popular amongst women that not including those policies, even for a hard-right authoritarian party, is tentamount to political suicide.
That governments have shifted Left in the last century, becomming more involved in social services and more equalitarian in the western world is one of the direct consequences of women’s (and other minorities) political activism. The idea that police forces could be anything else but a tool of repression, developped in the late 70’s and early 80’s specifically when a substancial level of women integrated the police force. American police is still one of the most repressive in the western world and has one of the lowest level of integration of women in its rank (around 10-15% instead of 20-25% of Canada for example).
That’s the problem with strict gender roles. You basically create a population with two very different set of values roughly split according to gender. If you allow only one of the two group to control culture and politics, one set of value will larely define your policies and culture. If you suddenly allow the other group to participate, you will create a wave of changes as a new set of values compete to gain prohiminence.
The boyfriend, and many other reactionnaries, wants to return to a point where women couldn’t vote (except a few of them) because they correctly realised that they are opposed to the core values of women as defined in traditionnal gender roles. They don’t want to ditch the gender roles, but they certainly are opposed to give a political and socio-cultural platform to the values of traditionnal women; values like kindness, patience, tenderness, compassion, cooperation, etc. They are directly opposed to those. The other bunch of reactionnary prefer to play the race-card and rally white women to their position and contain the values mentionned above by filtering them with racism, making them apply only to a smaller group based on race instead of being universally applied. There is, technically, a third group who would be opposed to gender roles and basically tries to rally women in general to what used to formerly masculine sets of values in an effort to boost the popularity of typically far-Right authoritarian policies amongst the population, but I find the later less numerous or ar least less efficient if only because the Left has been much more efficient doing the exact opposite, rallying men to values that used to stereotypically feminine.
@Naflgar:
MRAs and MGTOW are pretty much always men of low social standing who are unsuccessful with women. You don’t see men like Donald Rump involved with those movements.
@epronovost:
I think most American MEN do not like authoritarianism at all. Those who do are usually low status men who feel powerless and want a powerful leader to look up to cuz it makes them feel more secure.
Women are the largest agitators of social change, so of course regressives think women are ruining everything. They are convinced that the world becoming a better place for other people is an attack on them, and they just can’t stand the idea of losing privilege. The more people get access to rights, the harder they’re going to fight to take them away.
“Hmm, although in retrospect, the fact that he owned the complete works of Tucker Max should have tipped me off….”
(Also, that’s not what resentment and contempt mean at all, nor is it an accurate portrayal of the power dynamic between manospherians and women.)
By “ruining the country” they don’t mean for everyone, they mean for white men. The same line of thinking that makes someone like this guy say women shouldn’t vote is what makes Bagel Guy angry that he can’t file complaints against people for making fun of him for his height (“There’s never a remedy for me.”). It’s the same line of thinking that upsets men over the power given to women because of the MeToo movement. They want the country to return to the mythical way it was, when they could do and say what they wanted and call that fair and equal.
I really think that ANY movement on the left is going to be seen by the “right” (quotes intentional) as extremist, or at least framed that way, in order to polarize everyone even more.
I’ve been checking in on this reddit post to see if she’s followed up because I believe he could get violent.
@Pyxxxie
You’re ludicrously mistaken.