So some MRAs are rallying around Herman Cain – not in spite of the sexual harassment allegations against him, but because of them.
On The Spearhead, W. R. Price notes that Cain has gotten a flood of new donations since the scandal broke. His conclusion:
The support for the conservative candidate suggests that the decades-old trend of male helplessness in the face of female accusations may be coming to an end.
It is refreshing to see a man (politician or otherwise) in the spotlight stand up and defend himself against a P.C. hatchet-job such as “sexual harrassment” when so many before him did the whiney-baby kiss-up “I was wrong” pandering while bowing before the golden hoochie.
Meanwhile, white and nerdy on Omega Virgin Revolt (yes, that’s a real blog) has actually put his money where his mouth is, sending along a donation to Cain.
I usually don’t bother with voting. Everyone running for most offices is either a liberal feminist or a conservative feminist. To me that is no difference. However, if Herman Cain is still in the running by the time my state’s primary happens (and if he is the Republican nominee) I will vote for him.
Herman Cain is now dealing with at least three women who are claiming that he sexually harassed them. Public figures who were accused of sexual harassment in the past didn’t take on their accusers directly, but Herman Cain did. He pointed out how what is happening to him is a false accusation. As a result of this Cain has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations in the last few days. One of those donations was my donation.
This may not seem like much, but this small act as made Cain more anti-feminist than all of the other candidates for president.
Notice that in white and nerdy’s version of the controversy, Cain has “pointed out” that he’s being falsely accused. Actually, what Cain has done is to deny that he harassed anyone. At this point, we don’t actually know enough to judge definitively whether the allegations are true — though the fact that the National Restaurant Association paid out tens of thousands of dollars to settle the cases makes me a bit skeptical of Cain’s denials. But apparently, in W&N’s brain, there’s not even a chance he’s guilty of anything other than standing up to the dirty feminazis.
If Cain becomes president, we might actually see an end to the incessant pandering to women by the mindless political class. It’s about time that a politician stood up and declared that women have responsibilities in life and are not entitled to a free ride. Cain might actually do that.
He didn’t even touch them. They probably hear shit like that on the DC Metro everyday.
They probably are over it. They want to get some paper and attention.
And, yes, both of these comments garnered some upvotes.
Of course, not every MRA out there is rallying around Cain. On Reddit, there are plenty of MRAs who are suspending judgment on the allegations, or who dislike Cain because he’s, you know, a right wing asshole. Over on The Spearhead, the only ones who seem to have an issue with Cain are those who, well, let’s just say that they probably also think burning crosses make great lawn decorations:
Black men are notorious for their sexual escapades, their testosterone being greater than that of White Men – as is their level of rape accusation. He may be innocent but he may just as well be guilty of a real indescretion.
I am happy to report that this comment got a lot of downvotes there; not every Spearheader is a raving Stormfronter. Of course, it says something about the general political and social backwardness of the site that those Spearheaders who are defending Cain from the crudest Klan-tastic racist attacks are doing so basically because they think he’s a credit to his race:
If the Blacks in America were like Herman Cain, this country would be measurably better for it and most of us would be hating on someone else.
What this indicates is that people are fed up with political correctness and the feminist/sexual grievance industry. …
In the new Femocracy you can’t date them, you can’t marry them and you can’t even work among them, without risking untold trouble for life. Is it any wonder men are distancing themselves from women, if not abandoning them altogether? How’s a man to know whether she has a “false accusation bomb” strapped to her waist or not? If you’re a man among women stay alert, you’re outside the Green Zone.
Will MRAs end up rallying around Cain in the way they rallied around Julian Assange and Dominique Strauss-Kahn? Or will something – his political views, his race? – prevent them from jumping on the Cain train? I guess we’ll just have to see.
Question for Pierce Harlan, the guy behind the False Rape Society blog: Do you really think this is the best way to fight false rape allegations?
The real problem here isn’t that he’s recycled an old rape joke; it’s that he’s pretending that rapists are somehow a species apart from ordinary men. His big complaint is that the PSA in question “passes off a criminal deviant as a typical guy.”
Pierce, what do you think rapists look like? They’re not villains out of some silent-movie melodrama, twirling their whiskers and cackling with glee. They don’t have giant R’s tattooed on their foreheads. No, they look like “ordinary” guys. Exactly like them. Rape prevention — and crime prevention in general — would be a lot more effective if criminals could be easily identified at a glance. But the world doesn’t work that way. Most criminals look pretty ordinary, actually.
But the problem with Harlan’s stance here go beyond that. The fact is that most rapists aren’t sinister strangers hiding in an alleyway; the overwhelming majority – something like 70% — are people known to their victims. As someone who writes regularly about rape, Pierce is presumably aware of this, which means either that he’s being completely disingenuous, or that he’s simply pretending that date rape (and non-stranger rape in general) doesn’t exist.
The PSA in question is far from perfect. Aside from the terrible acting, the main problem with it is that it it’s victim-blaming. Its depiction of a rapist as an ordinary-looking guy – and a friend of the victim — is the one thing it gets right.
To get an idea of the sort of person who reads (and agrees with) The False Rape Society blog, here are a couple of comments on the, er, “controversy.”
Here’s a comment from YouTube, posted by someone who obviously got there from Harlan’s blog (it appeared after the video was linked at the FRS; before the recent batch of comments, the video hadn’t had a comment for three years).
So the message is that if a guy is being helpful at a party, he’s probably a rapist? This is not a fair psa. It did better than some though, by highlighting the fact that the female friend ditched her.
Apparently, in this guy’s mind, trying to remove the clothes of a woman almost completely incapacitated by alcohol is just a way of being “helpful.”
Wow- just like TV- apparently the only people on earth who ever do ANYTHING wrong are white males- preferably fat ones to give feminists a little extra to hate.
Is it really possible that anyone – including the author and the people upvoting the comment — could actually believe this nonsense? If so, what a strange, sad world they must live in.
In the Slavering Beast Theory, there are two kinds of men. Two species, nearly. … There are ordinary guys and there are Slavering Beasts. And they are very, very easy to tell apart. They act different, even look different, to the point where any adult should be able to distinguish them in any casual social setting. …
This dichotomy is how someone can simultaneously believe that women shouldn’t go out after dark because rape is such a big problem and believe that tons of rape accusations are false. It makes perfect sense if you believe there are Slavering Beasts out in the dark, but if an ordinary guy is accused of rape, there must be more to the story. It explains why people are angered by rape prevention tips aimed at men–those are insulting to ordinary guys, and Slavering Beasts won’t listen. And it justifies the belief that abuse victims had it coming: either they were abused by a Slavering Beast and should have known better, or they were abused by an ordinary guy and must have done something terrible to provoke him.
Jezebel has apparently decided to gin up some page views by running a bizarre, victim-blaming, slut-shaming, skeevily prurient screed on Amber Cole, the 14-year old African American girl who was videotaped giving oral sex to some boys; the video got posted online and, despite the fact that it was, you know, child porn, went viral. The story itself is appalling; so is the screed, written by a guy pretending (for rhetorical effect) that he’s Cole’s father. It reads like something you’d find on The Spearhead.
The piece starts off melodramatically:
I am Amber Cole’s father. I am angry, confused and completely at a loss. I love my daughter. I want to guide her without suppressing her. That is not always easy. Children need protection from their worst inclinations. That is not always easy. I am trying to convince her that the world will still love her if she keeps her clothes on.
Just to remind everyone again: the author is not actually Cole’s father. (And Amber Cole is apparently not her real name.)
The screed quickly descends into an attack on the girl’s mother that reads like something you’d read in the comments section of The Spearhead or In Mala Fide:
She would listen to her mother, if her mother was not busy. Doing something, anything that is not parenting. I want her mother to spend less time being “empowered” and more time being aware and engaged with our daughter.
And it only goes downhill from there. We get a section essentially blaming girls at large for the incident, because they allegedly ignore the “nice guys” who would never make such a tape. We get a section blaming the “mother’s boyfriend, Karrine Steffans or Kim Kardashian” for teaching the girl to be “proficient at such a difficult act. … I want to know why my 14 year-old knows so much about oral sex.”
And then we get a ridiculous race-baiting rant about white feminists and the Slutwalks:
White feminists can teach their own little girls to find empowerment through their crotches – my brown little girl cannot afford to be that carefree and cavalier with her life choices. Slutlife is the hard, lonely vocation of rich, educated, privileged white women who will fuck The World, contract social diseases and still, somehow find a husband. No black woman ever got far being a slut. I want to know what kind of women “slutwalk,” while young impressionable girls of all kinds look on with wonder and admiration.
After placing blame for the whole thing on just about every girl and woman in the world, the author comes to the father:
I am Amber Cole’s father. Don’t ask where I was that afternoon, because you already know. I was at work, just like you. I do not live with her, cannot always talk to her, cannot always be there. Not the way I want, and there are few laws to help me. To protect me and my rights.
Because that’s the real issue here: Father’s Rights.
And then the big reveal:
I am Jimi Izrael. I am not really Amber Cole’s father. But she is my daughter.
You do not think so. But she is your daughter too.
In his latest post, he directs our attention to some observations made by fellow MGTOWer Spock’s Disciple on the Happy Bachelors forum on the subject of pussy and its discontents. “This is good stuff, stuff my boys need to read,” Mark writes. “[Spock’s Disciple], like his hero, applied cold hearted logic when analzying pussy. The Force is STRONG with that one!”
Yes, he actually wrote that. I don’t think it’s a joke. I think he honestly does not know that there is a difference between Star Trek and Star Wars. How that is possible, I do not know.
Anyway, on to the eminently rational Spock’s Disciple, reflecting on the irrational power of the ladybits:
Remember that pussy is a biochemical WMD; wherever it is used, there is mass chaos and destruction. How many wars and conflicts have been fought at the urging and behest of women? More than any honest man would admit to and would be proud of.
Young men are apparently helpless in the face of the punany:
The need for pussy is a very real and built in addiction for men. We are hardwired by nature for sex and procreation. … [T]he sight and sound of pussy blinds younger men and allows them to be controlled by women though their hormones.
The, uh, SOUND of pussy? If I had to pick just two (or three, or four) sensory experiences relating to the vagina that would be generally considered appealing to heterosexual males, I’m not sure “sound” would make the cut.
But eventually even the horniest dudes start to get less horny – and thus less hypnotized by the power of the pussy. The only trouble is that by the time they lose interest in sex most of them are married, and they’re now stuck with the woman whose vagina formerly had them in thrall. It’s a grave injustice.
[W]hen most men pass the age of 30-35, they begin to awaken from this biochemical “dream” and what do they awaken beside? What do married men look forward to the next 30-50 years of their lives? Sleeping with a living corpse, which continues to torture and destroy them day by day? Looking forward to the time when the woman undergoes the process of metamorphosis, into a completely insane mummy (menopause and post menopause)?
This seems a tad alarmist. I mean, if your wife turns into a monster zombie-mummy – as all women apparently do after they hit their mid-thirties – you could always get separate bedrooms.
But Obi-Wan’s Spock’s Disciple has a more radical solution: don’t get into bed with the ladies in the first place!
Pussy is indeed way overrated and if younger men could get a shot of “anti-testosterone” for a few weeks, they could see through the eyes of men who are 40+; without the haze of hormones, you cannot believe how much farther you can see! It’s the difference between seeing the horizon through LA style smog and seeing the horizon from a high mountain in the Rockies.
Pussy is a man’s Achilles heel; once that man realizes this and takes the appropriate steps, he’ll never lose his peace of mind again. To these skeptical young men I say, there is an infinitely vast arena where you can have anything you desire, and can succeed at anything you wish to try for; all you have to do is see women for what they truly are, and become a master of the beast within; once you do that women’s true face will be visible to you, and you’ll never again partake of that foul potion.
It is possible to tame that beast, and indeed it is a certainty that you will learn much from the process of taming it; all it takes is patience and time. Look at your fellow men, your brothers in arms, and look at their almost invisible chains, and wonder at why you would desire such an existence for yourself?
And, hey, if all else fails, MarkyMark adds some advice of his own: pay a visit to Pamela Handerson before going out on the town with one of those vagina-people.
[T]here is one thing that the younger men can do until their sex drives die down permanently: masturbate before going out with a woman. … To put it another way, since the little head had been, shall we say, quieted down, the bigger head could work properly; the bigger head will then allow you to see a woman for who she REALLY is.
If you’re a fan of Spock, and looking for appropriate masturbatory material, might I suggest this?
Yesterday we met Zero Tolerance Man, a feisty fellow with lots of strong opinions about the ladies, which he posts in giant letters on his blog NOMARRIAGES.COM. Today I’ve got a few more samples of his timeless wisdom and, as promised, some poetry.
American women have this attitude that they deserve a perfect man; a prince on a white horse who will solve all of their problems, look great, and pay for everything. Instead, most will get the shit sandwich they deserve!
American women are just cum dumpsters; sperm receptacles, and human toilets. They have no other value. A man in the USA MUST remain unmarried and must not impregnate these worthless vile monsters we call:
over the hill, past their sell-by date, ugly wrinkled, worthless piece of shit bitches.
Ever notice how horrible the bathroom smells when an American woman get’s done using it? I have a friend who cleans office buildings and he tells me the women’s bathroom is much filthier than the men’s room. The women piss on the toilet seat, don’t flush, leave used tampons on the floor.American women are truly pigs in most cases. That horrible odor you smell is the toxic residue from their bodies and spirit. …
Most American women stink really badly when they take a dump because of their internal toxicity.
American women have personalities similar to the horrible odor they emit
American Women are the lowest slime on the face of the earth. I wouldn’t use one to wipe my ass with. Even toilet paper has more value than an American women. If any of you feminist bitches are reading this:
“F” YOU, YOU PIECE OF CRAP!!!!
If there are any men here who are inspired enough by these posts to want to take up the “zero tolerance lifestyle, our helpful blogger sets forth a list of rules to guide you on your quest. Two of my favorite:
* The most you should ever pay for is a drink or 2 to get her drunk enough to screw. Do NOT pay for dinners, concerts, travel, or movies. In the USA, you should only be spending time with women if you are screwing them or preparing them with alcohol for sex. Otherwise, you should not be with them at all.
* Do NOT give women any attention in public. Ignore them like they don’t exist in the supermarket, gym, etc. Do not look at them at all. Otherwise, you will be feeding the ego of these attention whores. Don’t give these cunts what they want. No eye contact!!!! Walk past them like the are garbage on the ground. If they speak to you do not answer in any more than 1 word answers. Walk away as quickly as possible.
Women campaigning for suffrage for no real reason, because not voting was just what women did back then.
I swear, sometimes I wonder if the entire Men’s Rights Movement is an elaborate hoax. Our old friend Fidelbogen weighs in today with a typically pompous post on the cutting-edge issue of women’s suffrage, posted with the almost-too-good-to-be-true headline: Women Couldn’t Vote.That Was “Oppression?” If I didn’t know better, I’d be tempted to dismiss it as half-baked satire – except that FB is serious, deadly serious. (And deadly dull, too, most of the time, but I’ll try to keep this snappy.)
Fidelbogen’s thesis:
It annoys me to hear the feminists say that women were “oppressed” because they didn’t have the voting franchise in olden days. Excuse me. . . oppressed? I would take exception to the semantics in this case, for is not a bit clear to me that what was happening ought to be called by such a heinous name.
While most people are either for or against women having the right to vote – though I’ve never met any of the latter group outside of MRA blogs – FB bravely declares himself “a third way thinker upon this subject.”
Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen, because Fidelbogen is going to get all philosophical on us:
I would submit that women’s historical lack of voting rights was neither a good thing nor a bad thing. Rather, it was a morally indifferent state of affairs, based on a cultural consensus that was shared by men and women alike in the past.
Hey, it was the olden days. People wore silly hats and watched silent movies and no one had iPhones.
Our ancestors lived in a very, very different world than we do, and their cultural norms were very, very different from ours, yet undoubtedly befitting to their world — a world mysterious and unknown to us nowadays. Who are we to judge?
I mean, really, how dare we offer any sort of moral judgment of anything that happened in the past. The Holocaust? Stalin’s purges? Hey, it was the mid-twentieth century – people were just into that shit back then.
Well, FB doesn’t mention either Hitler or Stalin, but he definitely considers women’s former lack of voting rights to be just one of those things that, hey, people were into back then:
[W]as it really, inherently, such a horrible thing after all, that women could not vote? … Why should it even matter? Did the average woman in those days honestly feel that voting was “all that”? Seriously. . . who are we to judge the men and women of past times for their very different way of life which we can no longer entirely fathom?
And besides, most men had been denied the vote earlier, so even if it matters and it totally doesn’t, what’s the big deal if the dudes in charge decided to deny the vote to the ladies for a while longer? As FB puts it:
[W]as it really such an unspeakable crime that the female population couldn’t always go to the polls during that comparatively trifling span of years?
Or is that entire concept nothing but feminist historiography, meant to wring pathos out of history for present-day political purposes by the device of retrojection? That would certainly conform to standard feminist tricknology, wouldn’t it?
Seriously. Those feminologicalnists are totally retrojecting the fuck out of the pastological period using their standard sneakyfulogicalnistic tricknology.
And besides, even though we’re not supposed to judge the past, and even thought that whole denying-the-ladies-the-vote thing was totally a “morally indifferent thing which ought to concern us very little,” FB thinks that maybe it was actually sort of, you know, cool.
I believe a case might be constructed that it was a positive good in the context of those times.
FB decides to leave that case unmade, and returns to the whole “who the fuck cares” argument.
Once upon a time, women didn’t have the voting franchise because societal norms found nothing amiss about such an arrangement. Then times changed, norms changed, and women were admitted to the franchise. That’s all. And women were never, at any point along that general story-line, “oppressed.”
Furthermore, women were never at any time deprived of any rights. You see, women’s “right” to vote simply did not exist in the first place — or not during the period when the so-called deprivation occurred. I mean that “rights” are only a figment. Only a mentation. Only a notion. Only a construct. Rights do not exist in their own right. They are not some mystical pure essence which hangs in the air all by itself — they must be conjured into existence by a strictly human will-to-power, and fixed by law or custom.
And so, if the dudes of the world denied the ladies these “rights,” well, uh, it was “morally indifferent” yet also probably good for some reason.
In conclusion, shut your pie holes, ladies:
So in conclusion, I wish that second and third-wave feminists would shut the hell up with their dishonest, self-laudatory rhetoric about “the vote”. They need to quit tooting on that rusty old horn. It is getting really, really old.
Well, unless they’re this lady. She’s actually pretty good at tooting a horn.
You might assume that those Occupy Wall Street protests (and their various offshoots) you’ve seen so much little of on the news lately are all about, you know, Wall Street, and the economy, and the fact that the very people who got our economy into the mess it’s in are somehow all still richer (a lot richer) than you or me. But apparently that’s not it at all. Nope! Apparently it’s all about hating on the menz.
You might assume that by “the dudes” the lady in question is referring to extremely rich dudes – you know, the 1 percent that the “we are the 99 percent” movement is focusing its attention on. But apparently PMAFT knows better than we do, declaring that
she is demanding men subsidize her, not rich men or billionaires (which would be questionable enough) but men in general.
Oh, but she’s not the only entitled princess on display on the 99 Percent blog. Here are two other women — chosen from hundreds of examples from the blog — that to PMAFT seem to epitomize the evils of female entitlement and man-hatred:
Imagine, women actually having the chutzpah to want medical insurance for young children! Blatant misandry at its worst!
The commenters whooped it up in typical Spearhead fashion. “Single mums want to fuck with John and expect Harry to support her and her kids,” complained Nico. “New-age gov-mediated cuckoldry.”
symptomatic of the feminized educational system and media. Without a manly Patriarchy to call BS on a lot of these entitlement notions, we have several generations of women now sailing into the hard rock of reality. … nobody cares.
So, single mom? Should’ve kept your legs closed… should’ve chosen a better man….
I am not in America, but my single friends who get laid by one of your friends once every blue moon are already paying for you and your friends shoes and bastards by the insane amount of taxes imposed on them with threat of imprisonment.
If these guys are the 1%; that makes you, the 99%, parasites….
You, found a dipsh%t welfare boy, made a baby, and we, the 1% as defined by you, who actually want to work and create something useful, not bastards, are getting screwed by the real 1% who steal from us to give to you, so you can buy shoes and create bastards.
As a man … more than one third of my earning … go[es] to feed your shoes and your bastards …
Single mom with shoes and bastards, bought and being payed for by my money.
Occupy Wallstreet just shows that the western man is the pinata of the western world. And then he dies.
This comment got 63 upvotes from the locals, but no shoes or bastards.
AfOR, not quite as longwinded, noted that he found the women’s pictures “hilarious,” adding:
Suck it down bitches.
If you blow me PROPERLY I’ll buy you a 99 cent burger.
This got 58 upvotes from the totally non-hateful readers of The Totally Non-Hateful Spearhead.
EDITED TO ADD:
Speaking of hateful, here’s a comment I somehow missed, from evilwhitemaleempire. Readers of the comments here will recognize him as a dickish dude who posts dickish comments here from time to time. But in this comment he really lets his misogynist flag fly. (TRIGGER WARNING FOR VIOLENT MISOGYNY) Referring to one of the women cited as “entitled” by PMAFT, who had noted that she has “no money to hire a lawyer so I can divorce my abusive husband,” evilshitemaleempire offered this advice:
Heh. If she’s telling the absolute truth about her life on that paper (questionable) then she needs to go back to that abusive husband and start doing some serious dick sucking. And if he wants anal sex she’d better give it to ‘em.
At last count this comment had 16 upvotes and one downvote. Stay classy, Spearhead.
These are the awkwardly posed businessladies who wrecked our economy
Like a lot of people, when I’m looking for insights on the current economic mess, I turn first to random dudes posting on The Spearhead. Here’s some guy called Poiuyt explaining how ladies and the men who don’t hate them are the source of all our troubles:
Because this god damned genderist society has become so amoral, so degenerate and so bankrupted on account of its genderist pervervions and femaleist subversions, it is going to be exceedingly difficult to grow itself out of the mess it finds itself in. The proverbial golden geese and their precious eggs in male produktivity have been either been killed, eaten, over-exploited, over worked, abused, dis-incentivised, harrased and are now increasingly extinct.
Well, I can’t argue with that, though the whole goose metaphor isn’t working 100% for me, given that I’m pretty sure it’s not the man goose that lays the eggs, but the lady goose. But that’s nitpicking. Poiuyt is on a roll:
You simply cannot get any further male inspired ekonomic growth out of hugely indebted and morally bankrupted societies as ours following genderist statism today, … … because the primary sources of growth potential in male inspired productivity and male entrepreneurship has been cannibalised to the bone. Cannibalised to the point where there is nothing left to base any further ekonomic growth on, consequent of the vicious sexist state ideology of womanism at all costs.
Like Chairman Mao, the MRA blogger Alcuin is a massive douchebag with intellectual pretensions far outstripping his limited brainpower. Also like Mao, Alcuin is perhaps best appreciated in tiny doses. Most of his posts are rambling, pretentious messes; yet many of them contain wonderful little nuggets of anti-wisdom that I feel compelled to share with you all.
Mao had his Little Red Book. Here’s part one of Alcuin’s Little Red-Faced Book. Click on the titles for the full posts.
[A] woman only thinks of her next meal, and which man can provide the best one for her. … Allow them to run organizations and society, and they will destroy everything. … Women are too emotional and self-centered to build civilization.
Feminism, the domain of doctor’s daughters, is for snobs. Men with dirty fingernails are haughtily ignored and dismissed. … Ironic, ain’t it, that feminists can be both perpetual victims and upper-class snobs at the same time, with the same remark and arrogant flick of the hair, as she puts her nose in the air and walks past. … Uppity cunts.
Because feminism has attacked humans so viciously, injecting its hate-filled venom so deeply into both men and women, the “reaction” will not be a mere rainstorm. Deep, psychotic imbalance such as the type wrought by feminism and by liberals in general will necessitate a fucking shitstorm the likes of which we’ve hardly seen.
Constant rape accusations are ridiculous, given the sexless marriage epidemic. How many bored, asexual women stuck in a sexless marriage would love to be taken?
Modern miseduated western women fear their femininity, fear their natural beauty, and run away from it. … The hags we currently see in western countries resemble a clear-cut, eroded mountain. A contemporary western woman reminds one of the landscape created by the orcs in The Lord of the Rings, ugly and unnatural, a place of evil and sadness.
More to come; Alcuin’s idiocy is a renewable resource.
In my last post, I referred (albeit obliquely) to a discussion taking place in the comments section over on The Frisky about an article called How to Teach Boys to be Feminists. With a title like that, it’s hardly surprising that the topic drew MRAs like, well, I was going to say like flies on shit, but it was more like the other way around. (Even our friend NWOslave made an appearance.)
Reading through the comments, I noticed a couple from a commenter calling himself “Really?” — with a question mark – that laid out point by point why he thinks men are getting the short end of the stick. His points were an equal mixture of wrong and silly. So I decided I would offer point-by-point responses to them all.
If any of you want to fill in more detailed responses to any of his points (or to challenge or correct my points), please do so.
So let’s give the floor to Really?
If you ever think women have it harder in modern society, just think of this:
Why is it that women complain when men leave the toilet seat up, but men don’t complain when women leave it down?
Really, Really? You’re going to lead with this? This, to you, is the most salient example of female privilege? My answer: I don’t know because this literally never happens in my life. I put the seat and the lid down because I don’t want things to fall into the toilet.
Why do women complain about men that only want one thing, but men don’t complain about women that want everything?
Huh? Men complain about women who “want everything” all the time.
Why do women have the choice between abortion, adoption, dropping an unwanted baby off at a hospital, raising the child with a father, or raising the child without a father, but the only choice men have is to agree?
Because these are rights that are reserved only for those who can make babies inside their body. (Women who are infertile, post-menopausal, or transwomen don’t have these rights either.) When (cis) men develop this ability, they can have the same rights. Remember that pregnant (trans) man? He had the same rights as a pregnant women.
Why do women dress in makeup, short skirts, bare midriffs, and low-cut blouses but complain about men that stare at them?
You actually think that heterosexual men are oppressed by women wearing makeup, showing cleavage and wearing short skirts? Most heterosexual men manage to steal glances at women they find attractive without being a creeper about it. And for the most part, women don’t get upset if a guy looks at them; what’s upsetting is when guys pull up in a car and ask “can you give me directions to Pussy Avenue?”
Why do we pretend that men are the ones that abuse children when it is a well-known fact that women abuse children more than men?
Who pretends that? Feminists acknowledge that women abuse children. And yes, women do abuse children more than men — because women, on average, spend much more time caring for children than men. If you adjust for the amount of time spent caring for children, men are more likely to abuse. But it’s not some sort of gender competition here. Abuse is a horrible thing, regardless of the gender of the abuser.
If single mothers have it so bad, why do women initiate about eighty percent of divorces and routinely commit perjury to win custody?
I’m guessing for the same reason men initiate divorces: because their marriages are terrible, and they’re miserable. [Citation Needed] for the claim about perjury.
Why do we have a Violence Against Women Act but nothing for men when women cause domestic violence just as often as men?
At the time the bill was passed, people were only just beginning to understand the prevalence of domestic violence towards women. Nonetheless, despite the name of the bill, VAWA is gender neutral, designed to protect male victims as well as female ones.
Why is it funny when a woman kicks a man in the groin but terrible if a man did the same to a woman – won’t the man be in more pain?
Why is a man a wimp if he lets his wife beat up on him but a criminal if he defends himself?
I know of no feminists who would consider him a wimp; they would consider him to be what he is, a victim of domestic abuse. No one is a criminal for defending themselves; they can be a criminal if they respond with disproportionate violence, responding to a slap by beating their partner unconscious.
Why does women’s health get much more attention when men die about seven years younger than women?
Many of these issues are related to (cis) women’s reproductive health. Men have a smaller number of issues specific to their gender. If men want to help increase awareness of men’s health issues, they are free to organize awareness campaigns just as women have done over the years.
Why do we complain about legislators being mostly male when they always promote women’s rights and never promote men’s rights?
[Citation needed]
Why is it sexist to have clubs for only men but empowering to have them for only women?
Depends on the club.
If women only make 72 cents for the same work where a man earns a dollar, why don’t companies hire only women and put the competition out of business?
Women do get paid less. That’s simply a fact. The question is why, and that’s complicated. Sexism plays a part. See here.
How do police know who to arrest when there is a domestic disturbance involving lesbians?
The same way they know who to arrest in cases of domestic violence involving heterosexuals: by determining who is primarily responsible for the violence. This may involve collecting witness statements (if there are witnesses), by looking for visible signs of injury and other evidence of violence, and so on. Women – heterosexual women and lesbians alike – are regularly arrested for DV. Sometimes both partners are arrested.
Why do married women complain that their husbands don’t want to change a baby’s diaper but divorced women say their ex-husbands can’t take care of a child?
I’m having a hard time seeing the contradiction here. If a married man doesn’t regularly care for his children, he is less likely to be awarded custody.
Why do men that don’t pay child support go to prison but nothing ever happens to women that don’t allow visitation?
Women cannot unilaterally decide to cut off visitation. This is something determined by the courts. If a man is denied visitation, there’s generally a good reason for this – he may, for example, be an abuser.
If women-in-the-military is such a good thing, why don’t they have to register for the draft?
Feminists don’t actually run the military. Generally, feminists support women’s right to serve in the armed forces, and NOW has petitioned to include women in draft registration. But most feminists I’ve ever met are opposed to the draft for anyone, male or female.
Why are we so concerned about girls under-performing boys in math and science but not concerned about boys under-performing girls in everything else.
Because the ratio of women to men in the sciences is seriously skewed against women; STEM professions are heavily male-dominated. And this is no coincidence: girls and women are often told that women are “naturally” worse at math and science. There is no similar prejudice against men in, say, the liberal arts.
Why do fathers have to pay the mother to take his children away from him in divorce?
Child support is intended to help support, er, the children. Women tend to be the primary caregivers, so they are more likely to win custody. When men win custody, child support payments go to them.
Why is it legal for women to lie to men about who the father of a baby is to get child support, but a crime if she tells the same lie to the government to get Social Security or military benefits?
This is a difficult situation, with no easy answers. Courts put the interests of the children first, as they should.
Why do women have to prove they spent the money on the children when they collect welfare but don’t have to do the same when they collect child support?
Do they? I don’t think aid recipients should have to prove what they spent the money on.
Why do we have to cut men’s sports that have fans to create women’s sports that don’t?
That’s not how Title IX works. It’s intended to give female athletes the same opportunity as male athletes, not to “cut men’s sports.”
Why do women tennis players win the same prize money as men when they only play three sets and men play five – isn’t that equal pay for less work?
Again: Really, Really? You’ll have to take that up with the people handing out the prize money. The amount of money athletes make is pretty arbitrary, largely determined by how popular their sport is, how good their agent is, and what sorts of endorsement deals they get. Female gymnasts work pretty hard. How many of them earn big bucks? There are far more millionaire male athletes than there are women.
Why is it called sexual freedom when a married woman commits adultery but called cheating when a man does the same?
It’s cheating either way, unless you’re talking about people in open or polyamorous relationships. Who exactly is lionizing female cheaters? Not the show Cheaters, in any case.
Why are female murderers presumed to be mentally ill but male murderers presumed to be killers?
Outside of a few cases in which women who murdered their children were indeed suffering from postpartum psychoses, this is simply not true. Lawyers defending murderers often press for their clients – male or female — to be considered not guilty by reason of insanity, but they rarely win.
Why are there thousands of “father’s rights” groups but no “mother’s rights” groups?
Are there? I doubt it. And if so, what difference does it make? There are various feminist organizations that deal with issues related to motherhood (and parenthood in general) like parental leave. What on earth is your point?
Why do we have so many fathers groups fighting for more time with their children when there are so many social problems attributed to fatherlessness?
The fact that there are social problems attributed to fatherlessness does not mean that all fathers should get unfettered access to their children. Divorce is messy, and generally there are good reasons why certain fathers are prohibited from seeing their children. Giving a father who is a child abuser access to his children will not solve any social problems.
Why do men have to support women at the same standard of living following divorce when women don’t even have to cook and clean his new apartment?
Uh, yeah, that’s not how that works. Many divorced men (and some women) pay child support, with the amount determined by the needs of the children and of the non-custodial parent’s ability to pay. This support is meant for the children. Alimony is only awarded in about 15 percent of divorces; roughly 4 percent of alimony recipients are men.
If divorced women have it worse than divorced men, why do divorced men commit suicide eight or ten times as much as divorced women?
[Citation needed]
Why do we pretend that men walk out on their wives and children when women initiate about eighty percent of divorces?
Because the person who initiates the divorce is not necessarily the person who has “walked out” of the relationship.
Why is it considered sexist to have a couple of television shows geared towards men when there are several channels catering only to women?
There are a number of networks aimed mostly at men. While sexist shows are often criticized for being sexist, the idea of appealing to a specific demographic isn’t terribly controversial.
Why are television moms always portrayed as wonderful and loving and television dads always portrayed as inept buffoons?
Are they? The wife on King of Queens is a bit of a shrew, isn’t she? And Kevin James is the star of the show, isn’t he? (Newsflash: comedians often portray buffoons.) In any case, feminists generally aren’t big fans of shows that reinforce old stereotypes about the genders – including the buffoon dad and the humorless mom. Every feminist I know is appalled by the new sitcom Whitney, which reinforces a lot of old stereotypes, many of them misandrist.
Why is it politically incorrect to say anything negative about women but funny to put men down?
Huh? Comedians say misogynistic things all the time.
Why are women without a job considered to be exercising free choice but men without a job considered a bum?
These are getting weirder and weirder. I can only assume you’re talking about women who choose to be stat-at-home moms (or whose husbands choose this for them). Women who do this are more likely to be traditionalist than feminist. Every feminist I know wants men to have the same option to be a stay-at-home dad. That’s why feminists push for better parental leave, not simply better maternal leave.
Why do feminists demand that women be equally represented in high paying and powerful jobs but don’t complain when low-paying, dirty, and dangerous jobs remain mostly done by men?
Feminists want women to have the same employment opportunities as men. Women have in fact fought to get into dirty, dangerous fields heavily dominated by men, like mining, for example. (Darksidecat could give you more on this.)
In a second post, Really? asked a bunch more questions. As you’ll see, they got sillier and sillier as he continued:
Why do we have to say “Chairperson” and “Congressperson” but its ok to say “garbage man” and “bad guy”?
You don’t “have” to say anything. You can say whatever you want, though people might look at you funny if you were to call a female chairperson a “chairman.” As for “bad guy,” well, men make up the overwhelming majority of criminals (in real life) and villains (in movies, TV, and fiction generally), so it’s not altogether shocking that the term used to refer to the baddies is gendered in this way. You don’t have to use the phrase if you don’t want.
Why do we always hear the phrase “innocent women and children” but never hear about “innocent men” or “men and children”?
Huh? Could you give examples of this (that don’t involve the Titanic)? When talking about wars, people generally use the phrase “innocent civilians.”
Why do news headlines use the terms “student”, “spouse”, or “parent” when a girl or woman, or mother does something wrong but use the terms “boy”, “husband”, or “father” when a boy, man, or father does something wrong?
[Citation needed]
Why do feminists demand equal results for traditionally male roles but object to equal or shared parenting after divorce?
The issue of shared parenting is complicated, and it’s often not the best option for the children. Generally speaking, the person who was the primary caregiver gets primary custody, and this makes sense to me. If more men were stay-at-home-dads, men would get primary custody more often. Every feminist l know is supportive of stay-at-home dads.
Why does the term “angry mother” sound like someone that needs our help and support and the term “angry father” sound like someone that needs to be arrested and forced into anger management classes?
Huh? Could you give an example? I think it largely depends not on gender but what the parent in question is angry about – whether they were angry because of cutbacks at their kids’ school, or because they’re an asshole with a giant sense of entitlement. Angry asshole mothers need anger management classes as much as their male counterparts.
Why is it that when men are more successful than women it’s because women are oppressed, but when women are more successful than men it’s because men are lazy?
I’m going to let Don Draper respond to this one for me.
Onward:
Why are only women free to criticize other women without being labeled anti-women, but both men and women are free to criticize men?
Gross generalizations about men and women are sexist no matter who says them. But anyone can criticize individual men or women – or groups of men and/or women who hold specific beliefs – without being considered sexist.
Why are feminists pushing for laws that prevent new laws from being passed that protect men from women, such as with domestic violence against men, false allegations by women, or paternity fraud?
What on earth are you talking about?
Why is it that when a woman accuses a man of rape, the man’s name is made public and he is presumed guilty, but when he is proven innocent the woman remains anonymous and the man is still ruined?
Because our legal system works in the open, the names of accused criminals (regardless of gender, regardless of crime) are made public. In the case of rape, accusers are often demonized and shamed and threatened, so we protect their identities. Or try to: in many cases their names have been made public. Accused criminals who win acquittal can move on with their lives; in some cases where the jury’s verdict is controversial, like OJ Simpson’s not guilty verdict, they may be seen as guilty by many people. The law has no control over people’s opinions.
Why is it considered woman-hating or whining to point it out when women have something better than men, but we rush to pass new laws if men might have something better than women?
[Citation needed.]
Why is it that we’ve had forty years and billions of dollars going into women’s rights and men’s responsibilities, but it’s taboo in most circles to even suggest that maybe it’s time to consider men’s rights and women’s responsibilities a little bit for a change?
Uh, yeah. Very few MRAs suggest merely that we “consider men’s rights and women’s responsibilities a little bit for a change.” Instead, they write out long crazy lists like yours, attempting to portray men as horribly oppressed slaves at the hands of evil feminazi matriarchs. When MRAs set aside this nonsense and bring up specific issues that affect men disproportionally or exclusively, like circumcision, they generally are taken much more seriously.
If those who always side with women are feminists and those who always side with men are chauvinists, why don’t we have a wing of a political party and billions in funding going to chauvinists when we have that for feminists?
Feminists don’t “always side with women,” whatever that means. They have raised a number of issues that affect women disproportionately or exclusively, and tried to win some redress. Feminists also work on initiatives that help both men and women, like parental leave, as I mentioned earlier. Whatever political power feminists have stem from years and years of organizing and lobbying. Other groups – like Christian conservatives, who are generally antifeminist – have also won themselves a degree of power through organizing and lobbying. (Do you remember that whole debate about Planned Parenthood?) Men’s Rights Activists are free to do the same.
For those who believe men had it better than women in the past and believe now it’s time for women to have it better than men for a while, why don’t they advocate whites being forced into slavery to blacks?
Dude, did you really just ask that?
Why are men considered more privileged than women with so many double standards against men?
Uh, maybe because they still are more privileged, a fact readily apparent to everyone who doesn’t live in MRAland.
So some MRAs are rallying around Herman Cain – not in spite of the sexual harassment allegations against him, but because of them.
