One very familiar silencing tactic in gender discussions is the accusation of misogyny. Given the gynonormative value system of our culture, a charge of hating women is a scathing accusation. People have been seeing through it more and more, but it is still matter of some concern among MRM commenters. On r/MensRights it’s quite common to find comments warning that the MRM will never have any credibility as long as there are people saying misogynist things.
Credibility with whom? Credibility is not some free-floating, self-existent substance or some kind of trait that a person inherently has or doesn’t. It arises when someone finds you credible. That’s all. So the first question is: “credible to whom?”
Because there may well be lots of people, and perhaps the ones whose opinions will end up making an actual difference, who aren’t quite so hyper-sensitive to misogyny or consider it some kind of abomination-before-the-Lord invalidating flaw.
It seems to be a hot question at the moment. A Voice for Men has a couple of posts up right now that denounce charges of misogyny as a silencing tactic and deal with the toxic backlash that doing that provokes.
Commenter forweg and I had this exchange in this article. I think it advances the discussion:
“The MRM gets called out for misogyny a lot, and it’s a valid complaint in a lot of cases. I started noticing something a while ago – many of the most misogynistic, even toxic MRAs were men raised by feminist mothers.”
Name some names, eh?”
“Name some names, eh?”
Who wants to know? Think someone is talking about you? I’m not, because the issue doesn’t matter that much to me. We need to stop crumpling every time someone flings the misogyny accusation.
And what would be the point of naming names? I don’t see the point; it’s not like I think it’s a problem that needs to be fixed. Misandry was never enough of a problem to feminism that it kept feminists from achieving their aims; why should misogyny impede the MRM any more? I don’t appreciate the way charges of misogyny have the power to shut people down, to be debate-stoppers, so I refuse to regard misogyny as some kind of heinous sin. I am not interested in worrying about the hurt feelings of people who think you or I are sub-human.
It is probably impossible in our society and our culture for a man to be as misogynist as most women (and most men) are misandrist. A serial killer like Gary Ridgway, who raped and murdered however many women that was, is not half the misogynist that a surburban housewife with a gas-guzzling SUV, that drives all these oil wars, with one of those motherfucking yellow ribbon decals to show her crocodile tear support, full of giggling little girls who will never register for the draft, is a misandrist. In the past ten years over 6,000 men have died in these wars – in that time how many women have male serial killers killed?
Forweg answered:
“Yes, I can certainly agree with all of that. Was just wandering which “toxic” MRAs you were talking about is all, as I find such people rare at the “MRM” places I read.
But the “MRM” is such a hazy, constantly shifting, ill-defined concept that it’s difficult to clearly attribute any qualities to it. Unlike with feminists, many people who are labeled “MRAs” do not actually self-identify as such.
Anyway, you are on the right trail with your article. As Fidelbogen has pointed out many times, the greater power and influence feminism exerts upon the world, the more misogyny will inevitably flourish as a result. Misandry and misogyny flow from the same source.”
“forweg, there’s a lot here.
Starters – no one on any manosphere board comes close in toxicity of misogyny to the rampart man-hatred that is trumpeted and celebrated in radfem spaces. And it doesn’t work to label to call those people marginal – Agent Orange’s work on RadFemHub has shown that those people are in positions of institutional power. They are thoroughly mainstream. And until feminists – all feminists – clean their own house, with denunciations and expulsions from the movement and demands for disciplinary firings, and pull the log out of their own eye, they have no room to say anything about the speck in someone else’s.
Second – Look at the difference between what gets called misogyny and what gets called misandry – or doesn’t even get called anything at all Look at the man-hatred roiling in this thread – and OP for that matter – http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2012/09/19/is-it-rape-if-you-dont-mean-for-it-to-be-rape/ And then there is this abortion of a thread – http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2012/09/25/lets-stop-attacking-aids-researchers-yeah/#comment-528703. It is a false equivalence to equate the misogyny you do see on men’s site’s with the misandry you see in the femmisphere.
Because what is getting called misogyny? See Aych’s comment above for an example*. Nothing sets the misogyny accusations going like a MGTOW. It is an intolerable affront to far too many women’s – most probably – sense of self-worth and attractiveness to be turned down by a man. (And society condones this, chuckles at it – Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. So you’ve been warned; from now on it’s all your own fault if you make her mad and she does whatever she feels like.)
So when a gay man turns a woman down, he’s in the wrong, he’s a misogynist. Because she has a right to sex from him, and he’s a woman-hater if he denies her that. It’s pure rape culture and the feminists response is to accuse men instead of women’s own crimes.
Third – The whole “toxic MRA” meme is a damseling plea for pity. It’s not even conscious most of the time, it is so normalized in the culture that people who do it think it’s just normal. Why is misogyny considered such an abomination when misandry is either as existing at all or else is celebrated as some kind of you-go-grrrl form of righteousness?”
* I’ve seen a gay relative be accused of misogyny simply for not wanting to have sex with women. It’s turned into a meaningless accusation.
- The Woman Card - May 2, 2016
- Frat boy bachelorettes and the invasion of gay bars - April 15, 2016
- “Not my kid….” - February 22, 2016
by 
Very true. I’ve never encountered anyone so misogynist they advocate rearranging the human race by eugenics or violence so there are no women. By contrast, sites in the non-feminist sector have been known to bend over backwards not to be seen as misogynist to the extent they’ll indulge women who advocate ridding the human race of men.
You haven’t?
I wish I could point to the places I’ve encountered this, but I have encountered suggestions that the world would be better without womyn, calls to forcibly inject all womyn with testosterone [saying it’s the only thing which could make women equal to men], and then there’s all the spam and internet ads glorifying testosterone.
Literally never encountered any of the things you describe, Marja, and the fact that you can’t point to any examples suggests they’re not very common. In any case, “spam and internet ads glorifying testosterone”, which I’ve never encountered either, hardly amount to a desire to remove women from the human race. Testosterone is a hormone found naturally in both men and women, and is not a threat to anyone’s existence, notional or otherwise.
Only once have I ever witnessed a sentiment equivalent to that so often heard in some feminist spaces or similar to what Marja describes. As that sentiment was expressed in a gay porn parody of Star Trek, I think it may safely be assumed not to have been advanced with anything approaching the same degree of seriousness (although I consider jesting of such things to be in extremely bad taste).
Well, it’s not that rare in western religious lit. For example, some interpretations of Thomas 114 imply that all females must become male; other interpretations say that it’s only one step and eventually everyone must become androgynous. And some interpretations of the [crazy-making] Revelation of John 14:1-5 imply that it’s only males who have never been with females who survive the whole mess.
Also, some radfem authors manage to find and quote recent secular claims of male superiority and calls for the elimination or reduction of the female population.
As for the calls for forced testosterone injections – I encountered one such call a few years ago on a political discussion forum dominated by right-wing pseudolibertarians, and other such calls elsewhere. There was occasional back-and-forth between that forum and an anarchist forum I was active on at the time. To me those calls look like gendercide with extra cruelty.
It’s ironic that feminists are in the process of trivializing their own pet label by attempting to silence dissenters with it. A misogynist is no longer someone who hates women. Rather, it has come to mean someone who disagrees with feminist dogma in any way. Nurdy Dancing is on the mark in her article. Misogyny is a handy accusation utilized to dehumanize a person into the Absolute Other category, thus making their actual words and actions irrelevant.
Oh, and another word feminists use pretty much interchangeably with misogynist is… MRA. Which says a lot. What it comes down to is: Feminism, like most religions, will not allow for the existence of people who disagree with the Feminist dogma.
Marja Erwin:
Could you perhaps list who made some of these recent secular claims and where they did so? Because that is otherwise a pretty tiny list of people who haven’t even managed to get their views published, plus two brief passages, one of uncertain interpretation, in a compilation of mythology (passages which I sincerely doubt the majority of its followers even remember exist).
In contrast, I never even had to go looking for radical feminists arguing for gendercide a lot crueler than “with extra cruelty” because I was forced to read their hateful tripe in school and pretend that they were making original and insightful arguments for justice.
Additionally, you yourself have implied that male-typical hormone levels are to blame for a society which is not “fit for all human beings” and suggested that we should seriously consider artificially adjusting people’s hormones to improve the situation (it appears your solution is to drastically reduce the scope of what is included in “all human beings”, which is simply too modernist for words). You wrote that this morning.
I’m sorry, Crake 2, but I don’t see how you’re advocating any less “cruelty” than the unnamed subjects of your criticism.
When I saw Nurdy Dancing’s video on AVFM about the misogyny silencing tactic, I put it into a search engine to see who was talking about it.
I came across this webpage in which I felt compelled to start challenging Shroedingers Rapist.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/crommunist/2012/09/24/misogynist-is-not-the-new-nigger/
It immediately started de-evolving into a huge cluster fuck, but overall I feel like I may have expanded a few minds there (possibly).
Some of the blind unreasoning hate against men (always qualified to *only* be against white hetero able-bodied men) is just totally unbelievable.
not to armchair blog-write… or whatever… but there’s a part of me that really wishes NurdyDancing hadn’t used “the n word” when making her point. It’s not that I don’t agree with her, what she says makes sense, but the N word is /too/ hot. It throws up a smokescreen and causes people to not actually read what somebody is writing. it’s too emtionally charged a word. And it’s far too easy for detractors to misread what she wrote as “men are the new…” which is, unfortunately exactly what happened.
@forweg
It’s ironic that feminists are in the process of trivializing their own pet label by attempting to silence dissenters with it. A misogynist is no longer someone who hates women. Rather, it has come to mean someone who disagrees with feminist dogma in any way. Nurdy Dancing is on the mark in her article. Misogyny is a handy accusation utilized to dehumanize a person into the Absolute Other category, thus making their actual words and actions irrelevant.
Oh, and another word feminists use pretty much interchangeably with misogynist is… MRA. Which says a lot. What it comes down to is: Feminism, like most religions, will not allow for the existence of people who disagree with the Feminist dogma.
I take no issue with this analysis, and every time some uni-fem trots out the MRAs are misogynists line, I point out that while Warren Farrel criticizes transmisogyny as part of the basket of normativity, Janice Raymond, Mary Daly, and Sheila Jeffreys want me dead… though they’ll claim they only want me denied medicine that stopped me killing myself, I fail to see the lack of moral equivalence.
So yeah… push back, and drop me a line if need be, and I’ll likely do the same.
“In contrast, I never even had to go looking for radical feminists arguing for gendercide a lot crueler than “with extra cruelty” because I was forced to read their hateful tripe in school and pretend that they were making original and insightful arguments for justice.”
Where did you go to school? Is their use of such materials documented?
Marja:
So the best you can do is “some interpretations” of a text that was excluded from the Bible, suppressed in antiquity and not accepted as authoritative by any contemporary version of Christianity, and “some interpretations” of the book of Revelation, interpretations even the craziest of millenarian fundamentalists don’t advocate. That’s pretty damn rare in western religious lit.
If they can manage to find and quote, so can you. I’d be willing to bet that most of those radfems are misquoting, misinterpreting and quoting out of context to demonise men because that’s what radfems do, but without examples that can’t even be investigated.
As I said, testosterone naturally occurs in women as well as men. Forcibly injecting women with testosterone, as horrendous, totalitarian and cruel a thing it is to advocate, would not stop them being women and would not remove women from the human race, it would just give them a few more masculine characteristics. While this is misogyny, it is on a far less serious level than the gendercidal misandry that has been discussed (and indulged) on this very site in the last 24 hours.
Ginkgo is right that the bar for misogyny is set much lower than the bar for misandry. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a bar for misandry. Football commentators Richard Keys and Andy Gray were summarily sacked by Sky TV for making comments in a match with a female linesman that women don’t understand the offside rule – undoubtedly a crass and sexist thing to say. By contrast, nobody lost their job on The Talk for celebrating a woman who cut her husband’s penis off and not being able to deliver a scripted apology with a straight face. There is no misogynist equivalent to Hanna Rosin’s hyper-publicised “The End of Men” or all those articles in the press that responded to the possibility of artificial sperm by declaring men redundant.
Marja said: “I wish I could point to the places I’ve encountered this, but I have encountered suggestions that the world would be better without womyn, calls to forcibly inject all womyn with testosterone [saying it’s the only thing which could make women equal to men], and then there’s all the spam and internet ads glorifying testosterone.”
Links please.
This is the sort of “but you do it too” defense that is so often used by feminists. I have found it is used mostly as a way to distract from something they find harmful to their brainwashing. Yes, water is usually blue in color but, but, but, but, I have seen black water. lol It is simply an extension of the feminist enactment of their mobius strip mentality that simply only sees one side. Ever.
I would bet that most of us could find some loony on the web who said that women should be injected with T but that is one drop of water compared to the tsunami of examples that are embedded in our cultural mindset, in our legislation, in our court system, in our colleges and in our education system that unconsciously mouth the feminist hatred of men. The two are not comparable.
I only remember where one of these comments came from, and the site’s down, and they may not have kept posts that far back.
I encounter the ads every day though. For example, there’s one in the other tab saying:
“Boost Testosterone Levels
One easy and fast way to boost natural testosterone..”
I have never seen similar ads suggesting people should “boost progesterone levels,” or “boost FSH levels,” or for that matter “trim testosterone levels.” It seems to be the one hormone they’re suggesting everyone always needs more of.
And the religious examples were the first two that came to mind. (I wonder if the Heaven’s Gate site is still up, they would be against all of us.)
A secular example was attributed to John Postgate, but I’ve only seen selections, chosen by an author I’d not trust, not the full text so I’m not sure what to make of it.
Sorry I don’t keep links to everything I’ve encountered.
Marja ERwin:
Again, that is not in any sense hate speech or gendercidal. Give that one up. Seriously. Should I be threatened by ads for HRT for women?
Marja:
This ad seems like one that is for promoting virility in men, and possibly promoting natural steroids over exogenous ones, for those who train and want more muscle mass.
The day estrogen and progesterone promote beauty when there is more, I’ll call you. The beauty companies would definitely jump on it, saying “You need more estrogen to have this baby-old skin” or something very similar.
@Marja
Yes, and cis-women are not shamed for their lack, perceived or real, of estrogen, progesterone, FSH, LH, etc. etc. There isn’t any hormone produced by the female body that is so central to the identity of women as testosterone to men. I suggest you ask trans-men about that if you aren’t convinced.
It is similar to the spending gap in cancer research relating to prostate cancer vs. breast cancer. Of course, breast cancer can infect the male body as well, but let us assume that it doesn’t, for the sake of argument. The rate of prostate cancer diagnosis is actually higher than the rate of breast cancer diagnosis in my country, even with the huge disparity of “awareness”: cf. http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-06-13/a-gender-gap-in-cancerbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice
I suspect, perhaps unlike some people here or elsewhere in the manosphere that this is not solely the product of male disposability, but rather a combination of that and the fact that the prostate is much less a part of the male identity than the breast is to the female identity. Still, considering prostate cancer is the #2 cancer killer of people with prostates, you have to wonder.
Marja Erwin:
That sounds like you got onto a spam mailing list for aspiring body-builders. If that’s gendercidal hate speech, then the same is true of the time I accidentally got spam ads for breast enlargement.
And John Postgate? The classicist and philologist? The one who died in the 1920s? He wasn’t a relevant cultural force even when he was alive, and I can’t imagine that anyone outside of his own field even remembered he existed by the time anyone who would usually be termed a “radfem” was writing. I mean, the man’s best known works are volumes of poetry in Latin.
“And some interpretations of the [crazy-making] Revelation of John 14:1-5 imply that it’s only males who have never been with females who survive the whole mess.”
The text doesn’t necesarily say that, but those interpretations are out ther and they are not anomalous. There is a really nasty strreak of sex negativism in many strands of Christinaity, and in an andrrocentric context it gets expressed in these anti-woman terms. I hestiate to call it Western ebcaaue it seems to eb strongest and emanate from Greek culture, and I’m sorry but – priests in caftans? – no, you’re not all that Western.
It’s ironic – Pan was both considered an manifestation of male lust and then later, in Christian times, was labeled demonic, while his analog in the West, Cernunnos is a symbol of Jesus when he shows up in poetry as a stag.
There is an abiding mem in Western culture, all of it, that men represent the rationala side and women the irrational. In eras that value the rational, the Enlightenment or the Reformation for instance, this has the effect of marginalizing woemn, but in eras that devalue the rational, such as the Romantic era or the post-modern present, it has the effect of centering women and devaluing men. Either way it’s misogynist although sometimes it has a misogynist effect and sometimes a misandrist effect.
first they wanna take our guns away, then our testosterone and broad shoulders….
it’s not based on any research, just some arrogance that they are so much better….
http://angiemedia.com/2008/11/15/lesbian-relationships-more-violent-than-heterosexual-relationships/#.UGnCABjSGic
seriously holding bonobo relationships as the highest form is not feminist because they don’t know Schrodinger’s rapist, a male could walk up to a group of female’s with a raging boner and the equivalent of a smile and see who would “help him out.”
Also, we in the manosphere have talked about how bad female infanticide is. Of course it goes against Marcotte’s dream of an abortion clinic on every corner. And since those girls didn’t go to the right schools, take the right gender studies courses and have the right skin color–they’re not even fully human to Manhater and her “progressive” over educated liberal friends. And I already know the response’ll be that the only reason I care about female infanticide is that my only chance of a hot wife is importing her from a third world country….
Enjoying my “testosterone poisoning” and broad shoulders-I did twenty pull-ups in one set….
Nope, I’m not gonna lift those heavy boxes for you-equality, remember that?
@John D,
Well done. I think you acquitted yourself very well. High points include when you were called a honkey and you and I and others like us were referred to as “Able Whitey McStraighterson III”. That commenter… she has anger issues.
I especially liked your connection between race and gender. I liked it because, as a Able Whitey McStraighterson (omitted III because my family was poor/LMC), I am coming to realize that a lot of the issues that pushed me towards the MRM/anti-feminist movement are things that have been experienced by black men for a LONG, LONG time, to a much higher degree. But is it totally because they are black? I’ve never seen black women described as violent, or likely to rape, or like apes or blah blah blah. I suppose it happens frequently, but what I mean is that it doesn’t happen out in the open, the way it does to black men.
I’m kind of ashamed for not having seen it earlier. That’s white privilege. But hey, its not really white privilege, is it? Its called “that’s how everyone should be able to live, but some can’t because of a situation beyond their control”.
Should clarify that I am anti-feminist in the sense that I disagree that feminists have always, at all times, been beneficially to women. Or that feminism is the same thing as women’s rights movement.
“Misogyny” has become the lazy way for feminists to deny or ignore men’s isuses. Don’t like what a man has to say? Label him a “misogynist” and then you’re free to ignore all his arguments.
Another commenter recently said “Misogyny used to mean ‘one who hates women.’ Now it means ‘one who is hated by women’.”
(Oops–obviously, that last paragraph should refer to the word Misogynist, not Misogyny.)
Maybe I’m a bit too quick to see misogyny in spam messages and cultural tropes, or too slow to see misandry in them. But I don’t think I have miscalibrated here:
One HuffPo user has picked the name raypawifmen.
He’s made some reasonable points about the bias in the draft, and some idiotic points against trans folks. But his username’s just plain misogynistic, yes?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/01/transgender-new-yorkers-face-scorn-violence-public-restrooms_n_1928748.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay%20Voices#comments
>raypawifmen.
“But his username’s just plain misogynistic, yes?”
Okay… help the dyslexic kid out… what am I missing?
Marja Erwin:
I have no idea what that username means or where it comes from. Kindly enlighten me. I suppose it might be asking people to raise their hands if they are male?
I would note, however, that there’s a decidedly misandrist bent to the raging transphobia in that thread. Most of the people against allowing trans* people to use their proper bathrooms appear to be doing so on the belief that either a.) trans women are really men and will thus harm cis women, b.) cis men will pretend to be trans women in order to harm cis women, or c.) trans women are really men and as such must have horrible body odor and leave giant messes which cis women will hate (one person qualified this to exclude gay men). I believe I saw only one sane and reasonable person in the whole thread (or at least as far as I was able to get before feeling ill and closing the tab). I am reaffirmed in my life choice to avoid the Huffington Post, and its comments sections in particular.
I interpreted “raypawifmen” as “rape a wifman,” or possibly “rape a wife men.”
Also, what’s with the idea that cis men can’t sit down to pee, and cis womyn can’t stand up [with or without an stp]? :confused:
Marja Erwin:
I suppose you could interpret the name like that, but I would want to see more clear proof before believing that reading to have been the creator’s intent. We both have to do a bit of monkeying with the spelling and spacing to get anything intelligible, so it could have an entirely personal meaning which neither of us can appreciate. Honestly, none of the comments I saw from that poster would lead me to expect them to know what “wifmen” means (‘womyn’ is common knowledge, but the other is far more obscure; the article doesn’t match in number, anyway), and “rape a wife, men” seems like an oddly specific position to adopt. That poster’s comments (those I saw) were bad, but they smacked of a much more traditionalist transmisogyny and ‘we must protect those poor, delicate women’ sentiment than what your reading would require. Honestly, the only person I can imagine saying something like that is King Ragnar from “The Vikings” (a contemporary advocate of rape would be much more likely to twist definitions to reclassify their actions than to shout “go out and rape”).
I think the idea is more that cis men shouldn’t sit down to pee, rather than can’t. A lot of straight men seem define their identity entirely in terms of what they aren’t, and so adopt an extremely exaggerated aversion to any action, item or concept even potentially associated with women, gay men, etc. They would be a thoroughly amusing bunch of performing monkeys if they didn’t cause so many problems.
As for cis women not being able to pee standing up, I have heard several insist that they cannot do so (or at least cannot use a urinal). The concern seems to be that they cannot conveniently or accurately direct their fluids into the receptacle. I cannot speak to the accuracy of this statement, but I assume my younger sister (from whom I have heard it most emphatically) can, so I guess it might be a problem for some of them (or maybe they’ve never tried and just think it would be, or maybe it has to do with certain types of clothing, etc.).
Also, who was it who wrote the Postgate thing? I really want to know what he could have possibly done to even be noticed by the kind of person who would write about things like that (I imagine there must be a nugget of absurdist humor to be had somewhere in that story). I don’t mean to rag on you or anything; I’m just curious because it’s such an unlikely combination.
It was [ugh] Jan Raymond [in her 1979 hatchet job] quoting an other John Postgate [in a 1973 essay: “Bat’s Chance in Hell”].
Thank you.
That’s a little disappointing. This Postgate isn’t even well remembered enough to have a Wikipedia entry. I haven’t read the whole article, so it could very well say some awful things, but its principle idea seems to be that human population growth is unsustainable and a pill increasing the probability of children being born male would save both the human race and the Earth’s environment by causing a dramatic reduction in the birth rate.
Oh, I think I found the bits that would have raised eyebrows. The last section of the piece predicts (not prescribes, mind you, but predicts) possible negative changes women might experience in a world which took Postgate’s theoretical solution (although he suggests that these would only be temporary, during an initial period of social transition, rather than an essential feature of such a world). He appears to view these issues, which potentially include loss of the freedom to work or travel unaccompanied, as regrettable, but not so much so as to outweigh the survival of the species. The whole thing bears some resemblance to the conditions Alfred Bester describes in “Tiger Tiger” (“The Stars My Destination”) in relation to the advent of teleportation.
quick someone tell Hugo Schwyzer and David Fatrelle that erasing the existence of men abused by womyn and making fun of misandry while defending female privilege is just not enough for their pro-feminist male credentials….
If they want to truly appease the matriarchy, they must pee sitting down….
http://depantsing-queens.greatnow.com/should-males-be-required-to-pee-sitting-down.html
yup, I can’t make this sh*t up….
Guess my dear ole dog was a kyriarchical misogynist enforcer of the patriarchy ™ and gender oppression every time he raised his leg and marked his territory-and he did that countless times. He was great!
My brother once (briefly) went out with a girl who told she would only have sex with him if he peed sitting down. Strange that so few people see the disconnect between women expecting this level of control over other people’s behaviour and their claims to be “oppressed”.
Not that I actually think this is going to happen, but if this whole “men should be forced to sit down to pee” thing actually caught on, I, for one, would make it my mission to pee on the walls of the bathroom everywhere I went.
@Stoner:
jesus fucking christ. Unreal. Having girls in the bathroom to monitor little boys to make sure their shoes are facing the correct direction? Fascist much? The best part is that the urinal saves me probably 3 seconds in the bathroom.
And chicks could totally use the urinal if they wore skirts and didn’t mind pulling it up in front of everybody. The real limitation is their unwillingness to debase themselves by pulling their junk out in front of everybody else, exhibitionists notwithstanding.
I also wonder if she has ever in her life been in the same room as a school age child if she believes that power wouldn’t be abused.
That entire website is just full of weird… something. It’s disturbing. A couple of girls chronicling sagas of being exposed at school, peeing their pants, etc. It’s just so off the wall that I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a joke, some sort of fetish, or worse.
I have heard, on many occasions, the argument, usually not qualified, that truly egalitarian men sit down to urinate.
But urinating while standing up as an instance of symbolic male violence? I am not sure I understand.
(and I think I would probably have been driven nuts if school toilet stalls were turned into those tiny claustrophobia-inducing cubicles proposed on that site.)
SWAB, how exactly did you come upon this? The article linked is from 2007, the article quoted at the beginning from 2000. AND the original article is apparently so exasperated with the weirdness coming out of political correctness that it’s difficult to verify how much the arguments feminists made were distorted by the author.
@dungone: That site *definitely* is a fetish site, indulging in sexual humiliation fantasies and sharing them with the world.
“Strange that so few people see the disconnect between women expecting this level of control over other people’s behaviour and their claims to be “oppressed”.”
Disconnect? Oh, now I see what you mean. sorry. To me the connection is obvious. One sure way to get that degree of power over someone is to claim some infirmty or form of helplessness that is suppsoed to obligate the other person. The long-suffering martyr complex mother is sucha a stock figure that it’s practically an archetype. It’s the oldest trick in the book.
“But urinating while standing up as an instance of symbolic male violence? I am not sure I understand.’
Wekll RF, that’s because you have too much common sense ever to be able to understand bullshit like that.
Maybe if more people used p-styles, this idiocy would go away… from both sides… I mean, I understand being concerned about splatter and about habitually leaving the toilet seat up, but… “nasty macho gesture”? “suggestive of male violence”? and the architectural control freakery would get in the way of cleaning the stalls.
Also some kids will have kidney, bladder, or urethra problems, or are on diuretics for health reasons, and the second poll is just abusive towards them.
From both sides, meaning, for one thing those trying to pressure all men to sit at all times, and those trying to pressure all men to stand, apparently because sitting turns men gay.
Marja, your tone is pitch-perfect. P-styles is much ado about nothing and it is a very good example of both the totalitarianism do those insisting that standing is some expression of rape culture, some kind of thought crime, and also their desperation in finding issues no matter how trivial to clutch their pearls about.
Thanks equlibrium.
I just tried to stay on point and underscore men’s humanity.
“SWAB, how exactly did you come upon this?”
not sure if it was a google search or from a “misogynistic” manosphere site…
used it in one of my articles a few months back….
http://stonerwithaboner.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/another-creepy-quote-from-a-male-feminist-extraodinaire/