By David Futrelle
Found in the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit:
So … feminism is an adult cat being bottle-fed by some random nice dude. But then it transforms instantly into a huge lion — not a lioness, but a male lion with a mane and everything — that eats the dude’s head, without even giving him the chance to change his outfit.
This makes about as much sense as those old Gateway computer ads featuring a cow with a man’s voice.
Elsewhere in the MGTOW subreddit today, a bunch of MGTOWs being racist as hell.
(Oh and sorry for posts being a little light lately; I’ve been under the weather and also my laptop seems like it’s about to die on me.)
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Actually, the lion is kind of awesome. Also, don’t bottle feed animals that can eat you. The man has no one to blame but himself.
Oh, and David, I hope you feel better soon.
I’m not a zoo worker or a wildlife expert, but something tells me that cub’s a bit big to be being bottle-fed.
Likewise, I hope you’re taking care of yourself and feel better soon. If you need money for a laptop, please don’t hesitate to ask.
@KindaSortaHarmless
OT, but how’s your NaNoWriMo going?
Get well soon, David! (Hope your laptop does, too.)
Don’t bottle-feed Bast after midnight, or she turns into Sekhmet?
I hope you feel better, David!
Get well soon, David!
Get well soon David Futrelle!
@Naglfar
Not at all well, I’m afraid. I’ve done maybe 3k words, all from disjointed parts of the story.
I’ll still try to do what I can. If I can break my personal best of 10k words, I’ll be happy with that.
Slightly more on-topic: apparently, lion cubs start eating meat at around 3 months old, are completely weaned around 6 months, and will start joining hunts at around one or two years old. So, the cub in the picture could still be bottle-fed, I guess.
I’m not sure if the guy can come out of this okay even if there is no bottle feeding.
I mean, as it is the lion is about to feed on some breast anyway. Doing the breast feeding first seems to just lose you a couple minutes of life if you ask me.
…separately…
I’m really not sure why it’s weirder that female cow talks with the voice of James Earl Jones or Edward Olmos or Mandy Patinkin than with the voice of Beyoncé or Jiang Qing or Sarah Vowel.
I mean really, would it be weirder if you were walking through a pasture and you heard a cow speaking Burmese and advocating for greater US support of Aung San Suu Kyi or if you heard a cow singing The International in Spanish or if you heard a cow struggling through Fox in Socks in halting english?
What, precisely, is weird here? Are our gendered preconceptions so ossified that what’s weird isn’t hearing a cow talk, but that the cow’s voice is too damn masculine?
@WWTH
Please watch the flickery gifs. 🙁
Yuck. I really, really wish I didn’t click on the racist as hell miggie blog link. Anyway, get well, David!
David, get well soon. And I love the orange kitten gif.
In other news, MGTOWs apparently believe that feminists cannot be trusted. That we may be cute but we are in fact lethal to men. Who knew what a frightened bunch they are! Other than everybody, I mean.
It’s okay, MGTOWs, really it is. You can avoid feminists. You can avoid all women. In fact, why don’t you do just that.
If this is the sort of dude who believes feminism only exists because it’s been condescendingly allowed to have nourishment by men, then he’s also the sort of dude who votes for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Off Party, and I don’t feel the least bit sorry for his ironic fate.
Moon Custafer:
Yep, that one beats all the interpretations of the meme that I could come up with.
@WWTH
Ok I gotta know, where is that gif from!? What’s the real story going on there?!
@wwth
OT: Good news for me I got more money into my bank account thanks to this new job I have. Okay I have to worry about the dreaded Black Friday but on the other hand I have money! I can buy things for myself like lgbt stuffs.
Observe the typical right-wing projection. The claim: that male allies of feminism will eventually be betrayed and thrown under the bus. The reality: that female allies of reactionary ideologies will eventually be betrayed and thrown under the bus. (See also: Finnegan, Lizzy.)
OT– I need etiquette advice please. I teach at a university where some of our students do part time office work in our dept. So I see and interact with the student workers but some of them I will never have in class. I just attended a presentation by one such student and learned (by the way my colleague introduced him) that I have been misgendering him. I am mortified. I really like and respect this student. He has never corrected me, which makes me wonder if I ever did this in his presence. (I don’t need to say he or she when I am talking directly to him, after all…). But then our students are so deferential it is also possible that he chose not to correct me. Anyway, my question is do I apologize? Or do I assume/hope he is unaware of my mistake and just let it go and do better?
Many thanks!
@David — hydrate and get some rest!
@Susan,
My assumption would be that it is better to avoid calling attention to the fact that this student was ever identified as the wrong gender (as many people, both cis and trans, may be sensitive to how others perceive their masculinity/femininity), but I am very curious to see if others here agree.
@Susan
It is much safer to assume that he chose not to correct you.
I’d suggest not directly apologising (likely going to be an unpopular suggestion), but rigging things to ensure you do use their correct gender publicly next time they’re around. You know, praising an aspect of his presentation to someone else while within his hearing – something like that.
Then never forget.
I like the bit about not apologizing. After all, if they wanted an apology, they would have corrected you before this.
But instead of assuming you know the correct gendered pronouns (etc.) to use for this person now, the best thing to do is simply ask, in a way that makes it clear this is no big deal. If you make it momentous, it’s probably not going to feel okay for either of you. Something like this might be appropriate:
(Of course this only works if you are actually happy to use whatever words they consider best, but I gather that that’s true.)
The point here is that you’re not talking about what’s “correct”. Many of us find that approach to be about figuring out the right rule to use when at least some of us disagree with any emphasis on rules at all. If there is such a thing as a “rule” after all, there must be a consequence for breaking it. Many of us would simply rather that people actually want to, and then do treat other people with respect.
You never know, maybe the person will even feel comfortable enough to say something like, “Yeah, in that setting I asked people to use X pronouns, but in my idea world, people would use Y pronouns instead. I just don’t feel comfortable enough to ask most people. But if you want to know the best pronouns, those are the best.”
In any case, it has always struck me as hard to go wrong if you are making an honest effort to be respectful.
@ Susan
As someone who is misgendered semi-regularly, I’d recommend simply being sure to use the correct gender from now on, and not otherwise calling attention to it. I personally find it humiliating when someone makes a big deal of a mistake like that by apologizing.
Rest well and have a nice recovery, David.
@Kat
If only there was a movement whose purported goal was to do that…hmm…
@Ooglyboggles
Good luck at your new job!
Thanks, everyone! I appreciate the advice. For now I am going to say nothing as @Vucodlak suggests but will keep everyone else’s suggestions in mind in case there is an opening to say something. Main point: do better in future!
That’s great! I know you’ve been wanting to get out of your family house. I hope you can eventually meet that goal.
Meanwhile, I’m sick. It’s just a cold, or maybe sinus infection, but I’ve mostly lost my voice and I’m on the phone at work, so I can’t really go in, even though I feel a lot better. I hope I don’t get in trouble. And hate the culture around work in the US is such that you can get in trouble for being sick for a few days. At least I was hired on for real (no longer a contractor) a few months ago so the time off is paid.
@WWTH
Yeah, I’ve been there. Got that weird stuffy nose thing I get around this time of year. Just hoping it doesn’t get to full-blown cold, because it always hits my voice hard.
Just out of curiosity, do folks around here get their annual flu shot? I’ve always done it out of habit, but I know folks IRL who think it’s useless. *shrug*
@WWTH
Hope you feel better soon.
@Katamount
I get it every year, and I’ve never gotten the flu. I don’t know if that’s just because I got lucky, and correlation is not causality, but for me it seems to be working.
Is it because these folks don’t trust the vaccine science, or because they don’t take influenza seriously as a threat?
I appreciate the shot because I expect that getting a severe influenza would be outright dangerous (I live alone), hugely unpleasant and a great waste of time, even if the risk of getting it isn’t very high.
Years ago I had a mild influenza, or possibly a severe cold, and it was very unpleasant. Nowadays I tend to get mild colds, or just feel generally mildly sick this time of the year.
Well, here’s a get well soon from me to Dave and anyone else who needs it; also, just clicking on those links made me feel like a bird pooped in my open mouth; the feeling of nausea almost made me retch.
Let’s just hope my Reddit feed doesn’t start sending me more miggie threads, or I’m gonna have a bad time.
@Lumipuna
For the people I know who say the flu shot is useless, they’re all woo-y alternative medicine fans who don’t trust science much or they’re anti vaxxer lites, or both.
@Paireon
Whenever I click the links here, I make sure I’m signed out of Reddit. I don’t use Reddit much anyway, so it’s not a big deal, but it keeps MGTOWs and incels from filling my feed.
The rationale for not getting the flu shot (from those I know IRL) is that it is ineffective and contains Thimerosal. The latter is not the case for single-dose containers anyway and the former is difficult to predict. After all, efficacy varies year to year… it’s free in Ontario, so there’s no excuse not to do it.
Personally, I think the guy who goes on about Thimerosal just does so to sound smart. There’s no indication that the mercury breaks down when used as a vaccine preservative.
@Moon Custafer:
You win the Internet for today.
@Katamount:
I always get the flu shot. It helps that it’s free in Ontario anyway, and the place where I work sets aside a day to bring in a nurse to administer the shots so I don’t even have to go anywhere to get it.
(Work also brings in a naturopath with a ‘natural immune booster’. To quote a friend with bad asthma, ‘Why would I want to boost my immune system? My immune system is what’s trying to kill me!’)
I mean, the flu shot is always a bit of a gamble. The flu virus just mutates so bloody fast, and they have to start production months in advance, so there’s always the chance that the (usually three) flu strains you get vaccinated against don’t include the ones that actually become endemic when the time comes around.
An 80% chance of being protected against whatever strains come around is still better than a 0% chance.
@Katamount
The whole Thimerosal scare is anti vaxxer BS. Like you said, there’s no evidence that thimerosal breaks down to release methyl mercury, and no evidence that it has caused harm to anyone in the doses in vaccines.
In addition, there is no evidence that mercury has anything to do with autism, which is something else anti vaxxers try to claim. This claim is particularly harmful, as it has motivated some parents of autistic children to expose them to actually harmful chelation therapy, which is usually used to treat heavy metal poisoning.
One of the most annoying parts of the anti vaxxer movement to me is how anti autistic it is. They push the idea that autism is the worst possible thing you can have, and then whenever any autistic individual tries to talk sense into them, they either become condescending or start shouting about how I don’t “really” know what autism is like because I can pass for neurotypical most of the time.
/end rant
Here in Finland some risk groups are eligible for free vaccine, and some employers provide it for staff. I get mine injected handily at the campus, but have to pay some 25-40 euro because I’m not university staff.
@Naglfar
Preach. The anti-vax movement is fundamentally “I would rather my child die of disease than be autistic.”
And I’ve gotten SO MUCH of the “But you’re not AUTISTIC autistic” crap. It’s called forty years of learning to act like other people even before I knew WHY I was different from other people.
Katamount:
Get your vaccine! Seriously. I had influenza twice in my 20s, long before the vaccines were available. You do not want that. Trust me. Until the advent of vaccines, 30 to 50 thousand people died of influenza annually, in the US alone.
Ineffective? Nonsense. Even if they misjudge which strains are going to be prevalent in a given year, and more vaccinated people actually get influenza, (like what seems to have happened in 2017-18 season), that does not mean that the vaccine was ineffective. Remember they have to decide which strains are going to be the most common MONTHS before flu season. Each year, the vaccine is their best guess. It’s not optimal but anything to cut down on deaths and permanent disability due to influenza is worth doing. Studies show that in general, influenza vaccines reduce the death rate in children by 2/3.
One more thing. Whenever anyone uses Thimerosal in an argument against vaccinations, you can immediately dismiss the entire argument. They are getting information from bad sources.
Tl;dr: Get the vaccination
The people I know irl who think the flu shot is useless usually say things like, “I got the flu shot one year and still got a cold!” And then they brush off my attempts to explain the difference between influenza and a rhinovirus. The people I know irl who have had influenza as an adult get their flu shots.
Yeah… It’s not like a viral disease would ever leave their child severely disabled.
In the UK, the flu vaccine is only available on the NHS to older people and other high-risk groups, so I don’t get it.
@Otrame
Oh, don’t worry about me, I get it ever year and have since I was a kid. Just curious about others.
I should probably get my flu shots but I always forget due to a mix of bad organisational skills outside work and procrastination. IIRC it’s free in Quebec also.
And as an Asperger’s myself, anti-vaxxers and their idiotic ideas can go to (non-existent) hell as far as I’m concerned.
@ citerior motive
Yeah, considering the NHS is usually all about prevention being better than cure and encouraging, and funding, all sorts of prophylactic action; they’re pretty laid back about the flu jab.
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vaccinations/who-should-have-flu-vaccine/
I know we’ve moved on from @Susan’s question, but I have a similar one.
I work with an individual (not every day or even week, but relatively often over the course of a year). Said individual presented as male when I first met him and used male pronouns (bios are a thing in my job). I still use male pronouns toward this individual although lately this individual has been presenting female. This individual hasn’t changed his bio so I don’t think his pronouns have changed, but I’m not sure. Am I doing something wrong?
My problem with the flu shots is that I’m very lazy. Over the last decade or so I’ve only gotten three, two of which were for the swine and the bird flu, both of which I think had some sort of special campaigns back when I was a student.
The third one I got this year, because my then-employer was giving them one floor below where I worked. They were giving them for that one day only, and it happened to be the last day of my contract, so I took this as a Sign and went to get the shot.
Note to self: next year, plan to get your flu shot; do not wait for divine intervention.
I’m surprised nobody has said the obvious: it’s a bit odd to see MGTOWs lionizing feminists.
At least they aren’t feminizing (the common depiction of) lions.
@Skye
Not at all. The person may be non-binary and simply sticking with male pronouns to avoid confusion or other social discomfort. They may be experimenting with their gender identity. They may just want to feel “pretty” or otherwise explore a more feminine male presentation.
My suggestion would be to continue to refer to them as you have (and as they seem to continue to identify as) until you are specifically told otherwise. You could also split the knot by using the singular “they/them” pronouns when referring to them.
Long story short: I think you’re good.