So Amanda Marcotte has some thoughts on Sunshine Mary’s post about feminism allegedly reducing women to nothing more than sex objects:
Why should women want the attention of men who see them as nothing more than unpaid servants and semen toilets? …
The alternative to having a hateful misogynist around who expects you to clean up after him, accept his ranting about how women are a repulsive subhuman class whose only purpose is service to men, and to masturbate him without any hope of sexual pleasure yourself is simple: Not being with such a man. As many feminists can tell you, there’s a really pleasant alternative: Men who like women and like to hang out with us and aren’t just tolerating us in exchange for sex and housework.
But what if, as manosphere men (and antifeminist women like Sunshine Mary) like to gloat, you can’t find a man?
Being alone is better than being with a man who thinks you’re part of a degraded class put here to serve him. No matter how much misogynists may rant, they can’t get around this inherent problem in their philosophy, which is that “alone” is always a superior alternative to their company.
Sunshine Mary has responded with a post that basically argues, well, but men don’t like you, you fat slutty feminists — take that!
One of the core pillars of feminism seems to be trying to control how men think about women. We want to be seen as smart, so by fiat order we’ll command men to see us as equally intelligent. We want to be seen as having the ability to be sexually promiscuous, so we’ll command men to hold a positive opinion of sluttery. We want to be seen as beautiful at 200 pounds, so we’ll command men to find us hot despite our obesity.
But it doesn’t work. Men don’t like slutty women for anything other than sex, as the last comment thread here rather conclusively proved. Men don’t find fat women attractive. Men don’t like bitchy, loud-mouthed mannish feminists. Men don’t care about women’s supposed careers. All the commands in the world will only cause men to keep their opinions quiet, but it does not change those opinions. All the attempts in the world at resocializing men to like what feminism has turned women into will always fail because it works against the natural order of things.
Now this is just nonsensical and, you know, not true for all but a backwards and rather assholish subset of men. But it’s what follows that’s really chilling — not chilling because it reflects reality, but chilling because it suggests how punitive and self-hating Sunshine Mary’s philosophy really is.
She argues that feminists find the Manosphere “scary” because manosphere misogynists won’t do what feminists want them to do.
It is scary to imagine that men will stop doing what they are told by women to do. It is scary to feminists in particular because, instead of being dependent on one man like I am, they are dependent on men as a group to fund them.
Men pay the majority of taxes in the United States. Without men’s taxes, student financial aid for Women’s Studies degrees will dry up. Without men’s taxes, baby mamas will starve. Without men financing it, women who are being placed into corporate leadership simply as a response to affirmative action and who then quit these jobs after a year to write tear-filled articles in the Atlantic about work-life balance, demanding even more subsidies from men to ensure that women never need to suffer the consequences for their stupid choices, will cease. I only have to manage my husband’s opinion of me in order to secure his provisioning; feminists have to control all men’s opinions of them in order to secure their provisioning.
Yep, that’s right. Sunshine Mary believes that women are incapable of taking care of themselves and so must depend, essentially, on appeasing men in order to survive. She thinks she’s lucky because she only has to appease one man, while women who actually, you know, earn a living have to appease all men. Because they’re not really earning a living. They’re just playing at earning a living because the men of the world are nice enough to humor them.
But don’t make the men mad, Sunshine Mary warns, because then you’re screwed!
And she seems rather pleased that she can make this threat from what she percieves as her position of relative security.
How fucked up is that?