Is THIS your quotation from Marilyn French? No? Um …
Is there something about Men’s Rights Activists that renders them utterly incapable of admitting a mistake? The other day, I performed a bit of rudimentary factchecking on a collection of allegedly “misandrist” quotes assembled by Jonathan Taylor of A Voice for Male Students.
Among other things. I pointed out that the drastically truncated version of a Marilyn French quote he posted completely misrepresented the actual meaning of what she had said, making it appear that she was charging the majority of men with killing, or beating, or raping women and/or molesting their own daughters:
Feminists often complain, with considerable justification, that Men’s Rights Activists try to turn every conversation about women’s issues into a game of “what about the men?” You’re talking about female rape victims — well, what about the male rape victims?
The trouble with this strategy, from the point of view of the Men’s Rights Activists anyway, is that this little “gotcha” is much less of a “gotcha” then they’d like it to be.
In the case of rape, for example, feminists are well aware that men are raped as well: the “Don’t Be That Guy” ad campaign, which sent so many MRAs into hysterics, focused on male victims as well as female ones. The emergency room rape advocate organization that a friend of mine volunteers for provides advocacy for victims regardless of gender.
So many MRAs have started playing another game: trying to twist the conversation around in order to cast women as the villains. Rape is a bit tough for them here, since the overwhelming majority of rapists are male. So MRAs talk about the alleged epidemic of female false accusers instead. Or they change the topic entirely and make dead baby jokes (see my post yesterday).
Recently, MRAs have tried a new strategy, seizing on data from The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, a massive study conducted in 2010 under the aegis of the Centers for Disease Control, to claim that “40% of rapists are women.”
Proper credentials are very important in internet arguments
Well, so far this is my favorite response to Jaclyn Friedman’s American Prospect piece on the Men’s Rightsers and that woman-hating problem of theirs. Because what better way to refute charges of misogyny than by declaring derisively that you “can usually spot whether or not a woman wrote a piece by the first few sentences?”
Let’s let rjworks13 explain just why Friedman lacks the intellectual heft to be taken seriously by serious men with credentials — sorry, CREDENTIALS — like him:
Oh boy.
I have to say that very favorite sentence of all in this wondrous bit of HeManWomanHatersplaining is this one, if it can even be called a sentence:
CREDENTIALS: I’m a long-time trained technical and creative writer from male-based military training and put to use over 20 years.
Oy. I can only assume from the evidence of this, er, sentence, that as a technical writer his job is to make sure that instruction manuals are as unreadable as possible. And that his “creative” writing most likely consists of many volumes of self-published Gorean porn.
If you want to compare Jaclyn Friedman’s CREDENTIALS with his, you can always go to her Wikipedia entry. I looked around a bit for rjworks13’s Wikipedia entry, but he doesn’t seem to have one.
rjworks13 was evidently so proud of this bit of writing of his that he deleted it. Luckily, I grabbed a screenshot beforehand. ABS: Always Be Screenshotting.
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.
What on earth is she talking about? She quotes one of her readers, someone called Just Saying, explaining the peculiar logic behind this assertion in a little more detail:
Feminists lost long ago. Men are in control – at least the ones that understand. We get to call the shots – now instead of being able to keep house, have children, and cook (very, very few women can cook these days) women are ONLY sex-objects. It is the only thing they have to offer to a man, that will get a man’s attention and to hold it for a while. And we don’t have to marry them to get it …
Feminism has brought about all of the things they say they hate – women today only bring sex to the equation. So I have to thank Feminism – I doubt that young women would be as skilled, or as open to oral sex, anal sex, and every other type of sex, without it. And for that, I say, “Thank you Feminism.” If there were a patriarchy, I doubt they could have ever come up with something as beneficial to men. No one would have believed women were that dumb.
The Sunshiny One uses this as a starting point for a bizarre post purporting to show that “feminism has also reduced many women to being childless careerists who must purchase other women’s reproductive capabilities.”
But let’s forget about Mary for now and take a somewhat deeper look at this whole “feminism reduces women to sex objects” argument — which only makes sense if, like Just Saying, you define the worth of women as consisting only of 1) sex and 2) “housewifely duties” like cooking, cleaning, and bearing children.
If you simply ignore all of a woman’s other abilities and accomplishments, and basically her humanity, well, I suppose you could say that the worth of a woman with no interest in cooking, cleaning, or children was “reduced” to sex.
But what a strange way to look at the world, to base your judgement of a person’s worth on a small subset of human interests and abilities and to condemn them if they aren’t enthusiastic experts in these pursuits. You might as well go around dismissing everyone who’s not a proficient accordion player.
The other strange thing about Just Saying’s argument is that it doesn’t even make sense on its own terms; it requires a willful blindness as to how the world works these days. Women make up roughly half the workforce today. Yet babies are still being born and raised. Meals are still getting cooked. Homes are still getting cleaned. It may not always be a wife in a traditional marriage doing all the cooking and cleaning and baby-raising, but couples — and single parents — are making the arrangements they need to in order to get all these things done.
So is the “feminism reduces women to nothing more than sex objects” simply an indication that certain kinds of men — and women — have a hard time recognizing women as full human beings?
Well, to some degree. But I’m pretty sure that even the most backwards thinking misogynists of the manosphere recognize that there’s more to women than cooking, cleaning, baby-making, and sex.
No, I think their attempts to reduce women to these things stem from their own defensiveness over the gains of women — and not just in the workforce, and in politics, and the wider culture.
Consider how Just Saying describes the sex-having women of today. They’re no shrinking violets. They’re not passive receptacles. They’re “skilled … open to oral sex, anal sex, and every other type of sex.”
In other words, they’re women with sexual agency. They’re women who are engaging in sex for their own pleasure, for their own reasons — not simply as a lure to capture a man to marry.
And I think this makes a lot of men deeply uneasy — especially the sorts of men who inhabit the manosphere. That’s why so many of them are so quick to shout “slut” at the very same women they’re so obsessed with pursuing.
That’s why, when they’re lucky enough to find a woman who’s enthusiastically in charge of her own sexuality, they have to pretend to themselves that sex is all she has.
Woman: Always wanting men to buy them toasters — or steal them!
Sometimes posts by Men’s Rights Activists seem like transmissions from some alternate universe, a Bizarro world that bears a superficial resemblance to our own but where everything is backwards and upside down.
Take a recent post on A Voice for Men by FeMRA Diana Davison with the seemingly innocuous title “Women don’t own sex.” Ostensibly a response to a piece about rape in the Irish Times, the piece contains a series of bizarre assertions about relations between men and women that Davison apparently thinks she can use as proof that, despite all evidence to the contrary, it’s really women, not men, who run the world. And that men only commit crimes in order to make women happy.
Apparently feminism has turned the lovely and obedient ladies of yore into a bunch of wild wolves and dingoes — by preventing men from “putting the foot down” when ladies misbehave. At least that’s what the always awful Men’s Rights Redditor who calls himself Alisdair_ and the 41 terrible people who’ve upvoted his comment so far think:
Thanks to chewinchawingum in the AgainstMensRights subreddit for pointing out this lovely quote. Huh. There’s something that seems oddly familiar about chewinchawingum.
Just thought I’d give Sunshine Mary a heart attack with this.
Have you ever wondered what makes crabby old ladies crabby? Maybe they’re having a bad day? Maybe younger people are being rude to them and they’re speaking up for themselves? Maybe they’ve always been crabby? Maybe they’ve lived a long life and don’t give a shit what people think of them any more?
According to Sunshine Mary — “Christian, wife, mother, and anti-feminist” — the real problem is feminism.
Want to earn yourself some quick karma points on Reddit? It’s easy! Just post some terrible misogynistic comic and wait for the inevitable upvotes. Like this one, which combines some standard-issue victim-blaming rape apologism with a bit of racism and serves it all up in terribly drawn cartoon form, and collect dozens of upvotes!
Paul Elam: If he hears any more about rape culture, he might possibly lose it.
You might not think that student orientation events would be an appropriate venue for chants celebrating the rape of underage girls. But such chants have apparently been something of a tradition at not one but two Canadian schools — and possibly more? Last week, a scandal erupted at the University of British Columbia after word got out that an orientation event at its Saunder School of Business had included a chant on this particular theme, led by orientation leaders from the Commerce Undergraduate Society.
Y-O-U-N-G at UBC, we like ’em young, Y is for your sister, O is for oh so tight, U is for underage, N is for no consent, G is for go to jail.
Meanwhile, in Halifax, someone made a video — and posted it to YouTube — of student orientation leaders at Saint Mary’s University chanting a nearly identical chant.
Naturally, noted, er, human rights activist Paul Elam of A Voice for Men felt compelled to weigh in on the issue. He started off by expressing his deep disgust … with having to hear anything about the issue at all:
I swear if I read one more outraged “report” — aka feverish, paranoid rant — that twists something stupid into “evidence” of a “rape culture,” I am going to just lose it.
Yes, how outrageous that a chant joking about raping underage girls at an official school orientation event could possibly be construed as contributing in any way to rape culture! So sorry that your delicate sensitivities were offended, Paul.
After some more predictable histrionics on this “hyper-hipster-hysteria” from Mr. Elam, he got to his main point: blaming feminists for the rape chants.
No, really.
I am an older guy. I find it interesting, given that I came from a more “patriarchal” generation, that something like this when I was 18 would have been unthinkable. Why? Because other men, especially older ones, would have pulled those young people aside and said, “Hey, we don’t do that around here.” That would have been that, as they say, if it had even happened in the first place.
We can thank feminists for this. Through policy and governance they have eroded positive male role models, and male authority, right out of the culture. After feminist undermining of the family, removing fathers from the lives of children and demonizing male heroes, we have a population of young people, especially young men, growing more socially feral with each new generation.
And now what do we see? Feminists running around everywhere telling men they need to tell each other, “Don’t rape. Don’t abuse women. Don’t this. Don’t that.” …
You can’t assault the identity of half the human race, marginalize and disempower them, which is exactly what feminism has done, and expect anything in return but what you are getting.
