The old Men’s Rights theory was that women were oppressed once upon a time, but not any more. The slightly newer Men’s Rights theory is that women have never been oppressed — they were pampered by their men, like a cosseted pet.
“It depends how you define oppression,” explains Brave-Evidence2793 on the Men’s RIghts subreddit.
A pet kept in a home (happy, healthy, cared for, fed, safe, and warm) is seen as oppression but the same animal on the street (hungry, alone, cold, unsafe, no healthcare) is seen as not oppression.
Er, what? Who other than PETA thinks that pets are oppressed?
Basically how feminism treats gender. They see women being cared for as slavery, and the men who are not cared for and have to take care of themselves (while also being expected to care for a woman) to be the slavers.
What world do you live in, dude? It’s not this one.
It’s like a bunch of fat cats pushing signs for #petequality, and then whining about all the discrimination they get when told “you can stop being treated like a pet when you take care of yourself for once”
What the fuck kind of drugs are you on, dude? Are you talking to cats or to women? Because cats don’t give a shit what you tell them because they don’t know what words are (apart from their names and “dinner”). Women might have a more, well, interesting reaction to this weird theory of yours.
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Yeah cause that’s what I want in life. not to be a human being, but to be a pet
*cough* The Yellow Wallpaper *cough*
PETA don’t have a problem with people sharing their homes with animals; most PETA members do so. They do have issues about language, preferring ‘companion animal’ and ‘guardian’ rather than ‘pet’ and ‘owner’. And they don’t like pet shops and commercial breeders, on the ground that animals shouldn’t be commodities. Instead they recommend adopting from shelters. And quite a lot of countries have now banned or are in the process of banning pet stores from selling commercially bred animals; so it’s not exactly a radical idea.
I’m not sure though how the Sunderland branch of PETA deals with how Geordies use ‘Pet’ as a general term of affection. See for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auf_Wiedersehen,_Pet
I always like to point to this piece by the wonderful Dr. Eleanor Janega, in which she describes how women have been expected to work in various trades throughout most of history: the “pampered pets” are historical anomalies, not the norm.
https://going-medieval.com/2019/05/30/on-women-and-work/
@ mrs obed marsh
Indeed. And even though the idea of the housewife in the modern sense is a relatively new phenomenon, the word originally was itself a job title; for a woman who had stewardship over a household. Wif in Old English just means woman; not spouse.
See also…
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/13/working-women-stay-at-home-wives-myths
MRA history: human societies were like Leave it to Beaver for 100 thousand years and then the 1970s happened.
Don’t fool yourself, David. Cats know a lot more than they let on-they just play dumb because if they showed us their true intelligence, we’d force tasks-specifically tasks that they’d find silly-on them and then they wouldn’t be able to just do whatever they want.
MRAs… now those guys are the dumb ones.
@Mrs. Obed Marsh: Indeed. In fact, it is interesting, given most people’s views of the period that european women generally enjoyed more freedoms in the middle ages than the enlightenment (the latter also being the period when witch hunts became a thing). Not saying times in the middle ages were good, mind you.
OP: Also, I’m pretty sure most slave owners would claim their slaves were “happy, healthy, cared for, fed, safe, and warm” if asked. Why would they possibly want freedom? Ugh.
This is not a million miles away from the conservative view that welfare means that the poors are being pampered.
It’s so hard, having to wipe your own ass while confusing women with sea monkeys. Why won’t society acknowledge the struggle.
Ok this has fried my brain can we go back to sharing pictures of sexy satan?
Drat. If it weren’t for feminism, I too could hang out in the basement hoping a mouse finds its way in and I too could eat disgusting smelling canned meats. I’m really missing out!
Even if we were to grant this ridiculous theory the benefit of the doubt and say its premise are true; that women were indeed not oppressed because they were treated like pets, it sill pose a big problem. One, it assumes that being a pet (or a child) is a desirable thing for adult human being and second it assumes that pets cannot be mistreated in any way shape or form, even by people who supposedly love them (many a pet owner doesn’t provide correctly for the needs of their animals simply because they don’t know how and/or don’t know what those needs are for example).
I also find the very premise of this theory ridiculous. For most of human history, the overwhelming majority of humans were subsistence farmers. There was no separation between “home” and “work”. Over 80% of people had a small farm, were working it to feed themselves and were hoping to make just enough surplus to be able to acquire what they cannot make themselves. In such a context, everybody works: men, women and children.
@ epronvost
And that carried on until very recently.
When compulsorily education was introduced here, in 1880, for all children up to the age of 13, there was an exemption for children who were already employed.
That meant around 80% of rural children didn’t go to school because they did farm work.
(Also because you didn’t have to go to school if it was more than two miles away)
It wasn’t until 1944 that attendance became mandatory for all children up to the age of 15.
(These acts make weird reading. Like, for the time they were really progressive. But today stuff like saying you had to be at least 10 before you could operate heavy machinery seem a bit incongruous. Still there’s plenty of places that still happens.)
http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/acts/1880-elementary-education-act.html
http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/acts/1878-factory-workshop-act.html
I’m pretty sure Black women might have something to say about this bullshit theory! In fact, I’m reasonably certain most women of color would have some sharp words for the theorist.
it’s interesting to see how incredibly blinkered their minds are. They literally cannot see/imagine any point of view beyond white, and male! It’s astonishing!
@Gerry Sherry
I don’t know about Satan… but have a classic Shin Megami Tensei Lucifer:
(Satan and Lucifer are 2 different beings in SMT, and Satan’s design doesn’t tend to be “sexy”… okay… maybe the goth one…)
@ gerry
Well, what’s sexy is very subjective of course…
@Gerry Sherry:
Ok this has fried my brain can we go back to sharing pictures of sexy satan?
Happy to oblige. I unfortunately couldn’t find still pictures, but here’s “Mezame no Rosen”, an interlude piece from Gothic J-Rock band Malice Mizer’s 1998 “Merveilles” tour. My best interpretation is that this is some sort of mad-scientific Black Mass conducted by the Devil (Közi) and his High Priestess (Mana, also famous as a Trope-Codifying Gothic Lolita fashion designer.)
(Warning for flashing lights, screams, and torture by electrocution):
I wonder if Evidence2793 hasn’t confused pet play fiction with real life.
@Battering Lamb
Nah, quite a number of slaveholding societies have openly acknowledged that slavery sucks and slaves hate it. They just held that if you didn’t want to be a slave, you should have won that battle, or not gone into debt, or whatever it was that got you enslaved to begin with. The main difference being that hereditary slavery has historically been pretty rare, and victim-blaming was a lot easier when most slaves had at some point been free people.
Check out this twitter thread about how slavery was treated in a textbook used in Virginia schools. There are people in the thread commenting that this was what they were taught as late as the 1970s:
https://twitter.com/KevinLevin/status/1454805468812034054
To quote from two of the pages:
“A strong tie existed between slave and master because each was dependent on the other. The slave system demanded that the master care for the slave in childhood, in sickness, and in old age. The regard that master and slaves had for each other made plantation life happy and prosperous … Life among the Negroes of Virginia in slavery times was generally happy. The Negroes went about in a cheerful manner making a living for themselves and for those for whom they worked”.
Now that book-banning is on the rise once more in the US, how long until schools are teaching this bullshit again?
Yes, because comparing women to animals has always been so respectful.
I bet these boys are probably cruel to their pets as well.
And then it becomes “You have food, shelter, and clothing. What more do you want?” That way, asking for respect and full humanity can be framed as ungrateful.
Why don’t a group of women offer these strapping gents the chance to have the tables turned and become the “pampered”, then? They could be treated with every bit of affection, reverence, and pampering as has historically been done to women. I’m sure if it’s as nice as they think, they should jump at the chance
I suspect we’d see a lot of backpedalling.
@Moggie
I remember being taught something along those lines, in the _90s_, in the Christian homeschool curriculum my parents picked out for me, which explains exactly why those people are still on that side. In their heads slavery was only bad when slaves had a bad master who beat them, or some bs, but was fine when the master was “good” and kept his slaves healthy, well fed, warm, and so forth. The institution itself of course was not the problem. Owning literal human beings is fine as long as you treat them well.
@ Seth S
Well, as you’ll know from your homeschooling, that is the biblical position.
Ephesians 6:9
But it’s a reciprocal obligation. Sort of. Peter had other views.
Ephesians 6:5
Colossians 3:22
1 Peter 2:18