Feminism and feminists get accused of misandry all the time; it’s a major accusation for a movement that claims the moral high ground and claims to be about gender equality.
Feministe is a mainstream, high traffic feminist blog. It bills itself as “In defense of the sanctimonious women’s studies set.”
Recently there was a mess of a post and comment thread that mewled and whined about how anti-circumcision people were manhandling, as opposed to criticizing and shredding, AIDS research that suggested that adult circumcision could reduce infection. The thread quickly went into defending infant circumcision, which is even more indefensible that just lying to adults and tricking them into a useless and irreversible surgery. That was one recent post.
Then there is gender-selective rape apology. You need to read the whole thing, including the hot mess of a comment thread, to follow what is actually going on, but mostly it’s just bigoted fail. Most of the commenters are probably truly unaware of how misandrist their sophistry is, but that doesn’t change anything. Jill says in the OP:
“This, though, is one of those weird wild world scenarios. I’m not sure it even matters if we call it “rape” or not (and it doesn’t sound like the boyfriend does call it that). He was sexually violated; whether she intended to or not, that’s the fact of what happened. Or it’s possible that Dan is right and the dude is being a manipulative jackass.…”
One commenter said:
“Seriously? This is a complicated situation in which people are debating whether the woman is at fault here due to the situation’s unusual circumstances. If the sexes were reversed, there would most likely be a similar discussion about the male perpetrator.”
Well yes, they would. It’s just that they would come to the opposite conclusion, pretty predictably. Look at the thread when they discussed Julian Assange. Julian Assange was a guilty rapist “rutting on my Mayella” before the commenting even began.
It finally reached ultimate absurdity with this offering:
“Except that’s only true if we continue to insist that rape requires a rapist. If rape can occur without a rapist, then that concern is resolved. She isn’t a rapist. He was raped.”
Ah yes, the rapistless rape.
Why so much effort to find some way, any way to exonerate the rapist? Sisterhood trumps all, apparently. Women are definitioanlly dainty, frail, oure, harmelss creatures, sex is always something man does to a woman anyway and calling a woman a rapist risks collapsing the whole structure of rape culture and compromising an invlauable silencing tactic. The damned privileged neckbeard was really asking for it all along anyway.
So where could that stereotype of the man-hating feminist ever have come from?
Some commenters pushed back. Valerie Keefe left several comments but finally just summed it up with this:
“This feminist is pretty sure saying that men will take advantage of a situation to fake a rape and abuse their partners is, well, patently misandristic. No scare quotes required. And yeah, people should be warned. This stuff hurts women too. Not just in the ‘cis women are better than that’ way, but in the making closeted trans women want to crawl in a hole and die, reifying their CASAB, way.
Gettin’ sick of this stuff.”
No one even bothered to answer. The blatant misandry of the OP and the majority of the comments were just not an issue with these feminists.
Not all feminists are man-haters; see the comment quoted immediately above. But as that comment points out, man-hatred is squarely centered in mainline feminist spaces.
- 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 
Jesus Christ in a barrell, Gingko, you sure know how to pick them don’t you?
This is a tough one, at least as regards rape, if you believe the information as presented.
The woman has sex with her sleeping boyfriend based on signals that she and he have relied on before, only to find out he supposedly was sleeping (due to some strange sleeping illness) after all, and feels violated and even though he doesn’t apparently hate her for it, its causing issues with their relationship. Dan Savage, an advice columnist with his own share of awesomeness and his own share of controversy , makes a snap judgement that the guy is faking his reaction for unknown reasons and that the girl should break up with him. In the comments we get Amanda Marcotte who is sure (because she is sure that privileged males can never be the victims of anything a woman does) that the guy is “gaslighting” his girlfriend, probably for misogynistic reasons. The comment thread continues on with some taking the hardline anti-rape “intent doesn’t matter” stance, some taking the in my opinion more reasonable “this was a fucked up situation that resulted in an inadvertent sexual assault or inadvertent rape”, and plenty backing Mandy Misandrist in a way they never would have if the sexes were reversed. Did I miss anything?
And what are we to make of this mess? Throwing Jill in with Mandy is unfair in my opinion, and noting the differences of opinion shown are partly based on (for some, not all) the sex of the assaulter and assaultee, still doesn’t really make this thread the perfect example of misandry. I really think the Agent Orange files have far more to say on that account. What this thread does is show some feminist double standards that many cling to – but misandry? The thread as a whole? I’m not sure I see it, esp since I know I could never convict this woman of rape. She lacked Mens Rea, hell, she even lacked reasonable signs that what she was doing was to a sleeping person.
What a mess.
This one is a mess. The actual incident is complicated as you say, but I was focusing instead on Jill’s and the commentariat’s sexist double standards.
I also think the incident was really too close to call. if I were a prosecutor, I would probably never charge the woman. Mens rea does matter to me, contra so many internet feminists, due process too, and there is too much detail to the sootry that has been left out, as ToySoldier says, to make any clear determination.
“Dan Savage, an advice columnist with his own share of awesomeness and his own share of controversy , makes a snap judgement that the guy is faking his reaction for unknown reasons and that the girl should break up with him. ”
Dan has done very god work, and I generally agree wiht him. But he has an annoying affliction that troubles a lot of gay men. He pedestalizes women. he’s never tried being married to a woman, he’s never tried being in a sexual relationship with a woman, and so he falls into this trap. If he had had any of those experiences, he might appreciate women instread of pedestalizing women.
I think he may also have fallen into another gay man occupational hazard – hating on straight men.
As for equating Jill with Marcotte- yeah, that’s harsh, and Jill does make an attempt at appearing even-handed, and that should count for something. But I wasn’t equaitng them. marcotte just happend to show up in that thread. And she was roundly denounced. That really doesn’t change anything about the post or the other commentary.
I just think it’s time to stop giving these people any kind of a pass on their man-hatred. it’s time to stop leting them use charges of misogyny to defelct criticism of their misandry. It’s time to pull the curtain back on their pose of righteousbness and progressivism. It’s just time.
Either they are willing to be fully decent human beings and accord everyone the same respect they demand for themselves, or they’re not. And they have worked very hard over the years oot put the burden of proof on that questions squarely on themselves.
“What this thread does is show some feminist double standards that many cling to – but misandry? The thread as a whole? I’m not sure I see it, ”
Tell what could be motivating that double standard other than misandry.
Well, yes, there’s misandrous commenters in the thread, no doubt. I mentioned Mandy Marcotte. But I was saying I didn’t think the thread as a whole (taken into account the numbers and types of views expressed) added up as an example of misandry. So yes, this thread has examples in it, but is it the Studied Opinion of Feministe as a whole that this man wasn’t raped and should either stop his whining or stop his horrid gaslighting? I don’t think so.
The circumcision thread is a better example of institutionalized misandry (at a blog) in my opinion.
@Gingko If I were a prosecutor, I would probably never charge the woman.
I completely agree with that assessment, but that doesn’t mean that someone hasn’t been raped. There is wide variation in evidentiary standards to meet when it comes to: Convicting, charging, questioning, disassociating from, and finding it appropriate to make amends to… respectively. I would say that this is a more generous position than Twisty Faster and other radfems would take, those who would make all those standards of proof identical… the only difference is that Faster would set the bar low, and at different heights based either on sex or CASAB, something I object to, while those focusing on mens rea would set all of those bars equally high.
I don’t think leaving the legal system as the only source of healing and justice is a good idea. Social strictures can serve a useful purpose as well.
On another note: Dan Savage is a lot more transmisogynistic, fatphobic, serophobic, and generally a classist asshole, than you gave him credit for being.
And on a parenthetical point: Not all feminists are man-haters; see the comment quoted immediately above.
Thanks for the high praise… I try to keep my hatred of men more abstract and in opposition to the institution of manhood as opposed to hating those shackled by it. ^_^
I agree with that, Clarence, the comnetwariat and Jill clealry didn’t think he was gaslighting or guilt-tripping. But that wasn’t my criticism. My criticism was the obvious gap between their anxiety to find some way any way to clear the woman as compared to their almost opposite reaction to the Assange affair. The biggets diffenrence between the two incidents is the genders of the accused. That indicates misandry.
That’s all I’m saying.
It might also be a good thing to reiterate that no feminist has ever had her feminist credentials revoked on account of excessive man-hating. Whereas there are may things a feminist can do to disgrace herself in the eyes of her peers (supporting an anti-choice candidate, for instance), but “hating men” isn’t included among them. (Just as long as you don’t verge into genocidal rhetoric, because that might make feminists look bad, and public image is what really matters.)
Then, of course, there is the unstated presumption of male guilt that modern feminist theory rests upon. Men are always presumed guilty by default and they need to prove a negative before feminists are ready to accept them as being equal to women. This presumption of guilt (collective and inherited guilt) is applied to one group only– men– making it a sexist application of an wildly illiberal and unjust concept. Proving one’s innocence is something that feminists demand of no other group.
So feminism of the ‘Sanctimonious women’s studies set’ simply amounts to simple, good ol’ fashioned prejudice which is propped-up by an elaborate, cult-like system of rationalizations.
The gap between the feminist self-image and the public image is so wide as to amount to low comedy. The ‘normal’ feminists who don’t hate men have an odd penchant to happily hand the team microphone and the team soap-box over to misandrists who step-up and make feminists look like man-haters. And then, after the damage has been done, the ‘normal’ feminists start scratching their heads in confusion at what has gone wrong– Team Feminism’s brand image has mysteriously become fucked-up! But how could that be when Team Feminism can do no wrong? Immediately, they conclude that the stupid microphone and the stupid audience must be to blame.
who made Dan Savage and Amanda Marcotte authorities on gender, sex or anything….
we’ve finally got enough ammo to tell these bigots to shut up without being shouted down by shaming language…
Mandy’s a racist too…
http://dearwhitefeminists.wordpress.com/update/
at least in the manosphere everyone is open with their bigotry, they wear it like a badge even….
I’d rather deal with 10 manosphere dirtbags than the o–so appointed defenders of truth and just ™ -well that’s truth and justice if you graduated from the right school, you say the right things and you kiss the right butt….
“Ah yes, the rapistless rape.”
… You couldn’t make this shit up if you tried.
By the way– I’m wondering how someone like Jill can be a feminist who pooh-poohs the stereotype of the man-hating feminist while, in response to the death of Mary Daly, politely side-step any mention whatsoever of her cartoonish man-hating.
Mary Daly was no ordinary feminist; she was one of the very worst anti-male feminists of them all. To fail to acknowledge as much amounts to either lying by omission or monumental ignorance about Daly’s life and work. It’s truly one of those “is she ignorant or is she a liar?” puzzles.
It would be akin to eulogizing David Duke and never mentioning that whole Grand Wizard of the KKK thing. (And, let’s be fair in the comparison: David Duke didn’t hate ALL blacks, just the uppity ones who didn’t show the proper deference they ought to.)
To be fair Aych, some cis feminists did call out Mary Daly on her raving transmisogyny, which, considering most cis feminists, in deed if not in word, consider trans women honourary women at best, was a big step for them. They had to move past ‘two legs good, three legs bad,’ for a whole minute.
“It would be akin to eulogizing David Duke and never mentioning that whole Grand Wizard of the KKK thing. (And, let’s be fair in the comparison: David Duke didn’t hate ALL blacks, just the uppity ones who didn’t show the proper deference they ought to.)”
And Mary Daly didn’t hate all men, …just the ninety percent of us that she considered “excessive”
Valerie, as I’ve said before, Daly and her radfem spiritual descendants hate trans women because they consider them men. Feminists who criticise them for their transmisogyny but not their misandry do so because they consider trans women to be women, and therefore not acceptable targets for hatred – which implies agreement that there is an acceptable target for hatred. It’s like telling a racist they shouldn’t hate Jews because Jews are white.
While I do believe that most people who identify as feminists don’t personally hate men, the ideology they buy into has a lot of misandry embedded in it. For example, the core feminist notion of “sexual objectification”, that male sexual attraction dehumanises women, which is now more or less mainstream, is misandrist to the core.
Val: All I can say is that for a movement which sneers down at those who are deemed to be “acting according to stereotype,” they seem charmingly oblivious whenever they imitate the “crazy man-hating feminist” stereotype.
And if the stereotype was utterly baseless, you’d think that acting according to stereotype would be rather challenging for them. Yet it seems to come a bit too easily.
@Patrick Brown Valerie, as I’ve said before, Daly and her radfem spiritual descendants hate trans women because they consider them men.
Yeah, no shit.
Feminists who criticise them for their transmisogyny but not their misandry do so because they consider trans women to be women, and therefore not acceptable targets for hatred…
To some extent, but to a larger extent this is the somewhat good legacy of intersectionality coming into play. It doesn’t matter then if you accept the gender of the people you’re defending, though if you’re smart you’ll do so in public, but because the focus of acceptable targets has narrowed to white straight cis men, and sometimes upper-middle-class white gay cis men. It is the transphobia they abhor, even if they secretly think us a pack of confused boidykes and gay men, they have learned their conflict theory models well. They generally don’t have to respect us as women, and as treatment of trans women in queer spaces has demonstrated, most of them don’t, to grandstand when someone else goes off message, because again, the new focal point of their ire is straight, white, cis, men.
Now, admittedly, as men go, straight cis white men have it about as good as men can have it, given the alternatives… But the point remains that their model still mostly ignores class, still ignores the bi-directional nature of relations between straight cis men and straight cis women, and will continue to do so… What’s more, the only way for a trans woman to avoid attacks of this nature is to come out, and research indicates that a maximum of half do, the rest, including me four years ago, will be written off, never mind that this sort of treatment isn’t just harmful for its own sake, but it leaves closeted trans people too defensive about their assigned sex to even think about articulating their actual sex.
Valerie: “Now, admittedly, as men go, straight cis white men have it about as good as men can have it, given the alternatives”
That’s a load of bullshit, Valerie. No offense.
Straight cis white men don’t have it about as good or good for that matter. You’re just looking at it from a rosy perspective.
Believe me, If I had it good, society would accept my story of having been bullied by girls and women. Not all of it does and prefers to keep it “under wraps”, refusing to cop to the fact that women and girls are capable of hurting people majorly.
So hell no do cis straight white men have it about as good. Especially when you’re talking about male survivors of female abuse.
She did say “as men go”, as in that white cis men have it better than other men. Which I think is definitly true
JE: “She did say “as men go”, as in that white cis men have it better than other men. Which I think is definitly true”
Still bullshit because I’m white and straight.
Ginkgo,
the blog feministe is an easy target, but I think that the problem is systemic, in the sense that the common concepts of a subset of feminists (like rape culture, or male privilege), cause misandry even if the concrete feminist tries not to be. Here an example:
NSWATM
A feminist criticises an article in which another feminist attacks men’s bodily autonomy, so far so good. But how would you call a female feminist who feels entitled to people having sex with her? “Female Nice Guy”. Ozy has managed to put some of the blame on men, or more exactly nice guys, while criticising a woman behaving like a jerk. This is the problem, when you use concepts, which imply that the guilty is male per default.
“Not all feminists are man-haters; see the comment quoted immediately above.”
Um, Valerie Keefe is a raving maniac who regularly fantasizes about eliminating men from the human race (excluding himself of course).
I’ll stick with my assumption that all feminists are man-haters. I have yet to see a single exception to the rule.
“Valerie Keefe is a raving maniac who regularly fantasizes about eliminating men from the human race”
Can you provide a link? I am interested in seeing that.
This is OT but I thought you might find this interesting:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19746705
I’m going to the shower. I feel particularly soiled having read those threads.
Valerie:
My problem with viewing social positions and privileges solely in terms of gender, race, sexual orientation and… whatever the name for the spectrum with cis at one end of it is (which is precisely what you are doing with that closing paragraph), is that it serves to erase other important factors. For example, it took twenty-one years before anyone told me what my autism meant for those “privileges” I was taught to feel so ashamed of having and in the process informed me for the first time that I was just as real and valid a type of human being as anybody else. It is my experience that even the least bigoted of feminist spaces and ideologies are consistently incapable of really conceiving of and admitting the existence of neuro-atypical men or of incorporating that reality into their words and ideas. As a result, I am frequently relegated to “white, cis man” status with no mention of my autism, which I believe has played a more significant role in determining the course of my life than any of the other criteria and by which I would be much more likely to identify myself. I am not at all happy with this state of affairs and believe that the problem ultimately lies in the system which is being used to categorize people.
When I read that Feministe thread, it reminded me of prescription-triggered sleepwalkers. IME, barring utter physical exhaustion, about 1 out of every 8 regular sedative users will have at least one bout of unconscious activity. I’ve heard patients talk about having full conversations, cooking dinner, watching TV, driving…, while using drugs such as Ambien and Lunesta.
Sex, interestingly enough, becomes an especially common sleep activity when “compatible” partners are on those medications. My first case of “sexsomnia” involved a co-worker. Her husband liked to brag that he was so good in bed, his wife would demand sex from him *even after* taking sleeping pills (and when a busybody superior heard her telling her husband to make sure to clean her up after he had sex with her in her sleep, he had a couple of non-intimate videos of what happened when he didn’t give her what she wanted. Bluntly speaking, both videos showed a visibly unconscious woman raising her voice until she either woke up, or just went ahead and had sex with her. Interestingly enough, their neighbours knew them as the “satyr and the psycho”., because she would take Ambien on weekends and work her way up to a roar before snapping into consciousness.)
But, if the Feministe case had to be classified as anything, I’d say that it was statuatory rape. Consensual sex under compromised conditions (akin to the 21 year old guy who meets a hot chick in a club, hooks up with her, then learns that she used a fake I’D to gain access to the premises.) Assuming that all of her details are true, it’s (on the face of things) a case of one person pressing an advantage of an unknowingly (legally) incompetent party.
@Eagle
In aggregate, given the alternatives, i.e. without reference to class, yes, white, straight, cis, men, are pretty clearly privileged over those men that don’t meet that criteria on the whole. Do you want to argue that if you’d been black or gay that what happened to you would have been better, beyond third-wave unidirectionalist feminists saying bad things about you (which, I admit, can take its toll)
@Mojo
Um, Valerie Keefe is a raving maniac who regularly fantasizes about eliminating men from the human race [degendering redacted]
Yeah, and Johnathan Swift was a baby-eater.
First of all, I like to talk about a trans inclusive lesbian utopia as a thought exercise, to compare and contrast with what cis feminists view as such, the prejudices they’re willing to rearrange, their willful blindness to neurology as a core element of sex, and how they more or less want to kill men, either cull, death camp, virus, an apartheid state where they control the karyotype of every spermatazoa, impossible technologies such as parthenogenesis, etc.
I’ve learned a few things:
1. Maintaining prejudice in karyotype selection is incredibly expensive, while maintaining prejudice in neurological organization is not, comparatively.
2. Parents are already allowed to choose so much about their children, do we really think sex selection will lead to a brave new world in ways that aborting disabled fetuses, fetuses of poor mothers, would not?
3. I maintain there is a difference between attempting to encourage sex-selective gestation and a decades-long enactment of a Dalyite final solution. Nobody had to storm the factories and break all the buggy-whips… People just stopped buying them.
4. From my own subjective analysis, I think women have it better than men in some ways that are intrinsic and not socially constructed. I see nothing wrong with celebrating that.
Despite all that, I am horrified at the idea of treating men or anyone otherwise identified as a second class citizen in any sphere of life, public or private. I’m tired of seeing your sexuality treated like something that’s toxic, even if it’s something I don’t personally like. I’m tired of seeing you die 4 times from work for every death by a woman and have nobody who claims to believe in gender equality do anything but blame the victim. Tired of seeing you go to jail longer for similar crimes of similar severity just because you look a little more like you could beat the plaintiff in an arm-wrestle. Tired of family courts that decide you’re instantly the unfit parent. Tired of a system in which those who bear children have all the rights and those who are implicated in fathering the child bear all the responsibility. I think the responsibility should follow the rights. Tired of feminists who treat the decision to have a child as sacrosanct and unquestionable and its racist implications, as it seems they would prefer their workforce home grown. I’m tired of seeing you blamed for a broken system in which you have been the minority for nearly 50 years. Every time a unidirectional feminist wailed about a war on women I cringed, not just because of the trans erasure but because she forgets that a good two-fifths of the people prosecuting that war are women.
So yeah, if you want to hang the pejorative of man-hater on me, go ahead. Doesn’t mean I’m going to make excuses when you’re raped, when you’re killed, when you’re unjustly imprisoned, when you’re made to support children you’re not allowed to raise. Unlike radfems who claim to support trans rights yet you will never find them defending the rights of a trans person, I have defended, and will continue to defend, yours at the expense of cachet within the feminist community and other assorted social justice groups.
I will continue to do that, even though I cannot fathom on any level, why anyone would want to be a man.
Would that people who hated me would do things in that order.
Valerie: “Do you want to argue that if you’d been black or gay that what happened to you would have been better, beyond third-wave unidirectionalist feminists saying bad things about you (which, I admit, can take its toll)”
No it wouldn’t have and you’re missing my point.
Yes, bad things happen to black and gay men. So do white cis men and here you are saying that the latter have it better.
Those third-wave feminists used the same arguments against my own experiences, to basically sweep what happened under the rug. People who supposedly were about equality for all.
White cis straight men come in all shapes and sizes. For you to just ignore that and label them as having it better does a disservice to men like me and to men like hidingfromdinosaurs. We’re both autistic but we’re also men as well. We don’t have it any better or worse.
This is why I hate the gender debate where it’s skewed heavily towards assuming every single man on this planet is responsible for the social ills plaguing our world and women are the unfortunate victims that need saving.
I’d be happy to provide the entire run of my Speak To Me play for I skewer that point of view in it along with other points of view. The very point view that renders my experiences invisible or unworthy.
Valerie: “Despite all that, I am horrified at the idea of treating men or anyone otherwise identified as a second class citizen in any sphere of life, public or private. I’m tired of seeing your sexuality treated like something that’s toxic, even if it’s something I don’t personally like. I’m tired of seeing you die 4 times from work for every death by a woman and have nobody who claims to believe in gender equality do anything but blame the victim. Tired of seeing you go to jail longer for similar crimes of similar severity just because you look a little more like you could beat the plaintiff in an arm-wrestle. Tired of family courts that decide you’re instantly the unfit parent. Tired of a system in which those who bear children have all the rights and those who are implicated in fathering the child bear all the responsibility. I think the responsibility should follow the rights. Tired of feminists who treat the decision to have a child as sacrosanct and unquestionable and its racist implications, as it seems they would prefer their workforce home grown. I’m tired of seeing you blamed for a broken system in which you have been the minority for nearly 50 years. Every time a unidirectional feminist wailed about a war on women I cringed, not just because of the trans erasure but because she forgets that a good two-fifths of the people prosecuting that war are women.”
Yet that hasn’t stopped you from claiming every white straight cis male is better off.
@ Eagle34
You’re twisting what Valerie said. Further, she’s right, at least on an aggregate level.
Statistically white cis het men do not suffer as severely from the same problems as non-white trans and homosexual or bisexual men. (Even affirmative action disproportionately benefits women.)
That’s not to say what you suffered is not important or less, just that, statistically, certain groups suffer certain problems _more_.
@ValerieKeefe
You lost me at “Murdering men in mass: bad, erasing boys at birth: good” (if there is a different way for any rational human being to visualise your third point, good for them.)
As a person who experienced the evils that men do (long before I needed feminist theory drilled into my head and before I’d met enough warped women to make me question my prior training), I still can’t bring myself to support gendercide or the gendercidal in either direction.
Personally I think the problem with the view that being a white straight cis male means “playing at the lowest difficulty setting” (to use John Scalzi’s video game metaphor) is that it directly states that the eighth son (given that he is straight and cis) of a couple of white, unemployed drug addicts living in a trailer park in the US Deep South got a better start in life than Barack Obama’s daughters did.
And by extension, it implies that if a straight white cis man ends up living a crap life, he is more of a failure for failing to play his lot in life well than he would be if he had belonged to some more marginalized groups. This is why he is considered a suitable target for ridicule and humiliation.
By the way, I thought Daly’s proposal was also just about making sure fewer boys were born, as opposed to murdering currently living men.
@RocketFrog
Gendercide is gendercide. Lambasting/laughing at the results in China and India while espousing the benefits of doing so in America is shortsighted to the point of insanity. I’d rather live in Maggie McNeill’s “humans as evolved from bonobos” AU than Valerie’s mega-Spartan “utopia” (for boys.)
Typhoneblue: “That’s not to say what you suffered is not important or less, just that, statistically, certain groups suffer certain problems _more_.”
And somewhere in those statistics, I’m drowning. Get my point?
Look, as I’ve stated before, my overall goal is to have a place where stories like mine are accepted. I’ve done well with Speak To Me but I still keep hearing how women have it worse.
I can’t put it any other way, except there’s this big hole in my being. Writing and performing Speak To Me has tempered the tempest somewhat but reality is, I want to reveal this part of me that’s hurt but there are segments of society who’d rather look away.
MaMu,
My point was just that unless I am mistaken about Mary Daly’s proposal for gendercide (by “evolutionary process”), then sex-selective gestation is the “Dalyite final solution”.
Even on RadFemHub, the usually floated suggestion on how to get rid of the males is to simply stop giving birth to us.
I haven’t read much of Mary Daly’s work, but as far as I’m aware, her most famous reference to a “final solution” was in her attack on the “Dionysian solution.” Somehow, not hating trans people meant accepting hedonism meant abandoning feminism meant allowing males to exterminate females.
@Eagle34
Yes, bad things happen to black and gay men. So do white cis men and here you are saying that the latter have it better.
In aggregate, yes. Every MRA complaint against a state that privileges femaleness is replicated in those sub groups. The workplace death gap, the sentencing discount, the death gap, the bias in family court, are all worse when you correct for minority status, IN AGGREGATE, which, ultimately, is the only way you can measure microaggressions. Do you have it worse than the president? Undoubtedly, because we’re now including class privilege, but correct for everything else, and whiteness is still privileged, straightness is still privileged, cisness is still privileged.
@MaMu1977
You lost me at “Murdering men in mass: bad, erasing boys at birth: good”
Not surprising, since I too would be opposed to Moneyizing the male population. The difference between sex selection and erasure is legion. One is the right to influence the circumstances under which one will have a child, the latter is refusing the child the option to contradict their parents interpretation of the circumstances under which they are raised.
@Rocketfrog
Personally I think the problem with the view that being a white straight cis male means “playing at the lowest difficulty setting” (to use John Scalzi’s video game metaphor) is that it directly states that the eighth son (given that he is straight and cis) of a couple of white, unemployed drug addicts living in a trailer park in the US Deep South got a better start in life than Barack Obama’s daughters did.
Completely agreed, which is why I lambaste the SJers on a regular basis for minimizing the importance of class.
@MaMu1977
Gendercide is gendercide. Lambasting/laughing at the results in China and India while espousing the benefits of doing so in America is shortsighted to the point of insanity.
What makes you think I have a problem with sex-selective abortion in China and India? Surgical reassignment and infanticide, yes, but abortion which is far more widespread than the evocative extreme examples that unidirectional feminists rely on to make their larger point? No. Aborting a fetus is an act that carries no moral consequence in my eyes.
Statistically white cis het men do not suffer as severely from the same problems as non-white trans and homosexual or bisexual men. (Typhon)
Statistically dont black men murder and commit crime more often?
Valerie: “Undoubtedly, because we’re now including class privilege, but correct for everything else, and whiteness is still privileged, straightness is still privileged, cisness is still privileged.”
A straight, cis white man living homeless in the streets is more privileged?
A straight, cis white man abused by a woman who has no one to turn to is privileged?
A straight, cis white boy sexually assaulted by a woman or bullied by girls will turn out privileged anyway as a man?
Nice world view, Valerie. It’s great to be lumped with those straight white cis men at the top.
“A straight, cis white man abused by a woman who has no one to turn to is privileged?”
Does a gay cis man have somewhere to turn to if abused by a woman?
Didn’t think so.
I find myself agreeing with Valerie Keefe in that cis straight white males of upper middle incomes and better do tend to have it better than any other grouping of men on aggregate. That’s not to say they don’t suffer from societal misandry, aren’t disadvantaged somewhat (though unlike their poorer bretheren this is a disadvantage most of them can easily “afford”) by affirmative action, don’t get the male disposibility and male as “walking wallet” memes, don’t suffer abuse from girls at times, etc. It just means they are better shielded from and better able to deal with these problems than all but the elite (of any color and sexual orientation) of other men. However the power they enjoy is largely that of money and knowledge: due to white males being society’s “whipping boys” for the past 20 or so years they don’t get the social cachet that normally a group of such people would enjoy.
Class and location are two things which can help knock the white male off this perch of privilege.By location I mean that areas in which minorities are a majority of the local population and voters tend to be dangerous for a white male who lives in or near them, more so than for a person of color who , say, moves to the suburbs.
@Eagle
A straight, cis white man living homeless in the streets is more privileged?
No, I already said that class is overhwelmingly ignored by SJers, but he is likely privileged over similarly homeless gay cis white men, trans white men, and black men… so hard for you to understand that?
A straight, cis white man abused by a woman who has no one to turn to is privileged?
Not in that instance no… are there better abuse networks on that axis for anyone who isn’t straight, white, or cis… okay, maybe trans men, but that’s intersection with cissexism.
A straight, cis white boy sexually assaulted by a woman or bullied by girls will turn out privileged anyway as a man?
No, and you know that’s not my analysis of gender power relations. Don’t be obtuse. A straight cis white male survivor will probably be in a better position to seek treatment than a straight cis black male survivor will, however. (He will be less likely to be offered treatment if he acts out on his pain and more likely to be given a prison sentence). A trans or gay or both… male survivor of sexual assault will likely have their sexuality or gender or both pathologized in the course of treatment.
Admitting these privileges exist doesn’t negate your considerable oppression, something I maintain, have maintained before you made this asinine argument which I’d already addressed, and unidirectional feminists only concede after a long argument where they are repeatedly challenged on the same points so that they cannot ignore the argument any more.
I’m not arguing that straight white cis men have it dandy. I’m arguing that a lot of important events get made worse IN AGGREGATE if that man is not straight, cis, or white.
@Titfortat
Statistically dont black men murder and commit crime more often?
Men murder more often… what’s your point other than social marginalization and alienation tends to breed violence? I live in a neighbourhood with four times the national crime rate. Plenty of white people here who are violent too.
“And by extension, it implies that if a straight white cis man ends up living a crap life, he is more of a failure for failing to play his lot in life well than he would be if he had belonged to some more marginalized groups. This is why he is considered a suitable target for ridicule and humiliation.”
RocketFrog-you hit the nail on the head, can’t you see this is what bullies like Fatrelle and Marcotte are doing when they ridicule Nice Guys ™ –they wouldn’t be able to make fun of a bisexual black woman who was complaining about her sex life because she is purportedly marginalized. However, a member of a group they consider powerful-even if he isn’t is okay to ridicule because their “power structure” see’s that as okay. A duck by another name is still a duck and those people are bigoted bullies no matter how much the $PLC kisses their stinky butts…
Oh, and Mojo, if you insist on degendering me, then do grow up and recognize that universal non-androgenic gestation from weeks 10-24 wouldn’t ‘kill all men’ by your cissexist definition.
“Statistically dont black men murder and commit crime more often?”
hehe deja vu….
http://glpiggy.net/2012/09/26/gawkers-tale-of-2-cities/
http://stonerwithaboner.wordpress.com/2012/09/27/i-already-got-in-abunch-of-pointless-arguments-with-the-feminasties-am-i-also-gonna-do-this-with-all-the-uptighty-alter-righties/
@Stoner With A Boner
RocketFrog-you hit the nail on the head, can’t you see this is what bullies like Fatrelle and Marcotte are doing when they ridicule Nice Guys ™ –they wouldn’t be able to make fun of a bisexual black woman who was complaining about her sex life because she is purportedly marginalized. However, a member of a group they consider powerful-even if he isn’t is okay to ridicule because their “power structure” see’s that as okay.
Yep, you hit the nail on the head. This is what comes from ignoring class, and a good deal of disabling circumstances that aren’t diagnosed… and erasing the closeted…etc. It’s why I called Rebecca Watson out on being a femmephobic, neurotypicalist, slut shamer… oh, and got rape threats in response… good ol’ unidirectionalist feminist men.
Valerie,
here’s my canned response to the “privilege” argument….
http://stonerwithaboner.wordpress.com/2011/12/23/the-privilege-argument/
I once got into an argument with someone over at GMP. It basically wound down to this:
Me: Yes male privilege exists, I got that. No argument here, however, female privilege is also a thing.
Her: OMG Stop being a “privilege denying white man.” There’s no such thing as female privilege, it’s “benevolent sexism”
Me: So wait… I’m the one saying “Yes male privilege exists, but so does female privilege” and you’re the one say “OMG female Privilege don’t real!” And I’M the “privilege denier?” …Really?
I gave up at that point because it became obvious that she wasn’t really talking to me, but the “straight (*snort*) white man” in her head.
It’s not just about “ignoring class”. We’re talking statistically. We’re not, or at least we shouldn’t be, saying that if you belong to the category “cis straight white men” then you’re on the pig’s back and have nothing to complain about. We’re saying, or should be saying, you’re statistically more likely to be on the pig’s back than men from other categories. That’s a valid analysis.
It’s the same as saying that men are unfairly denied access to their children in divorce cases, which is statistically true, but doesn’t mean there aren’t some men who aren’t unfairly denied access and some women who are.
But internet “progressives” don’t seem able to distinguish between dealing with things statistically and dealing with individual human beings. They use “privilege” as a blunt instrument – “you’re straight, white, cis and male, therefore you’re privileged, therefore shut up”. Eagle, I think you’re reacting to your history of being treated like that, as a member of a category rather than a person, by feminists, so whenever people talk statistics, you think they’re accusing you and denying your pain. That’s not what’s happening on this thread.
Valerie:
By this I take it you’re advocating denying all XY foetuses the hormones that would normally give their bodies male characteristics, so that all babies are born with female physical characteristics. Is that right? I don’t get any google hits on the phrase “non-androgenic gestation”, so I’m having to try and figure that out. If I’m interpreting it correctly, then yes, that’s eugenic gendercide, and if you genuinely advocate that you have placed yourself beyond the pale in my opinion. If I have misinterpreted, please explain. Otherwise, fuck right off.
@Patrick Brown
By this I take it you’re advocating denying all XY foetuses the hormones that would normally give their bodies male characteristics, so that all babies are born with female physical characteristics. Is that right?
Well, if by female physical characteristics you’re referring to midbrain morphology, then yes… but I wouldn’t want to erase wolffian ducting from the female form, so female brains, and we’ll leave it to an exogenous puberty to deal with the rest of the body in our theoretical trans lesbian utopia. Also, XX fetuses would be denied the testosterone they’d need to develop a primarily androphillic sexual or romantic orientation.
As to gendercide… what ratio would sex selection have to reach for you to call it a gendercidal act? The 10:9 ratio of China or India? The 3:2 ratio found in certain sections of those countries? Four to one? Nine? Ninety-nine? Would it have to be explicitly encouraged or if it was simply a case of parents making the rational choice to increase the liklihood that their children are like them to improve parental empathy? Would you prefer your typical Michfest attendee be able to have a girl under these circumstances, or would you prefer that a boy be placed in their care, given the degree to which many of them revile men, boys, and all CAMAB people in descending order? These are informative questions that a full-stop declaration won’t explore.
When I was a proponent of gendercide, I think I was pretty much advocating the same thing as Valerie: Selective abortion of male foetuses, so that within a few generations, men would be extinct and women were free to live in what Valerie calls a “lesbian utopia”. Given that these abortions are carried out sufficiently early, it would be a largely cruelty-free process, and could be legally started today, at least in the parts of the world where women have full reproductive rights. Much like Valerie, I cannot understand why anybody would want to be a man. Unfortunately, unlike Valerie, I am one, and have hated it (and myself for it) for almost my entire life. However, I also did not think men ought to be mistreated while we were still around – much like how wanting to get rid of cancer does not translate to wanting to abuse cancer patients.
It is a view much like that taken by some of the organizations who advocate genocide of autistic people (such as “Autism Speaks” in the US): Make sure that the current autistic population live decent lives free of discrimination and abuse, but use selective abortion and possibly genetic manipulation to make sure that they will become extinct over time.
I have since come to the conclusion that a world without men, much like a world without autistic people, would be a world that had lost an important part of itself, and would have become poorer for it.
For what it’s worth, I think the vast majority of people on the autistic spectrum are people who a couple of generations ago would have been considered part of the normal range of human personality types. The problem is society’s increasing failure to tolerate and accept those personality types, preferring to pathologise and label and “other” them.
Valerie:
I feel no need to “explore” whether or not it is kinder to wipe out hated people in order to spare them the misery of being hated. Thank you for the clarification, and please don’t address me again.
Patrick:
Partly there is that, but there is also the fact that our culture has changed in such a way that high-functioning autism is more of a handicap than it used to be. As an example, a few decades ago it was possible for a socially disabled person with a penchant for specialized and detail-focused knowledge to live a good life as a university professor, because what a university professor was supposed to do was carry out research projects and teaching. Now, a university professor is primarily responsible for securing funding, for representing the university in the media, and for supervising research projects, both of which are tasks that require much better social functioning than what most high-functioning autistic people can muster.
Our society has become increasingly focused on communication, on media, and on the maintenance of social networks, which is probably great for the vast majority of people who are comparatively good at such things, but it also means that it is a larger handicap to be a high-functioning autistic person today than it was 20 years ago.
Patrick,
As I also tried to explain, I used to also be in favour of gendercide by foetal sex screening and selective abortion. Apart from sparing a hated group the misery of being hated, my own reasoning was also that they would be spared a life of being not quite human – at the time, I regarded women as “true” humanity, and men as a kind of pathological variation of humanity that had been necessary to keep around for biological reasons (but that technology was now rendering unnecessary), and that keeping men around was ultimately causing more harm than good for the species as a whole. I did not want to throw men into gas chambers or lock us into camps – I just hoped for a future where no more men would be born, so that women could be free from us.
As I said I have since reconsidered and rejected that particular opinion, but perhaps this can help you understand how and why someone can have such an opinion. Valerie probably arrived at her variation of this philosophy from a completely different angle, though.
Rocketfrog,
I used to think like that.
I also have a complicated relationship with hormones. For me, male-typical hormone levels made me feel dead, and may have caused some health issues, while female-typical hormone levels have allowed me to feel more alive again.
Now the main cause is probably the match between my midbrain and my hormone levels. I feel better with female-typical hormone levels, some other people feel better with male-typical hormone levels, and so on. But there may be other causes at work too. Some have suggested that the social differences between bonobos and chimpanzees may be related to the hormonal differences. I keep running into people justifying violence, coercion, destruction, and other dominance behaviors as human nature, and I end up wondering if we need to change human nature to create a society fit for all human beings.
Patrick: “Eagle, I think you’re reacting to your history of being treated like that, as a member of a category rather than a person, by feminists, so whenever people talk statistics, you think they’re accusing you and denying your pain. That’s not what’s happening on this thread.”
That’s basically it, Patrick.
I’ve been so internally hurt by being invalidated with the whole “You’re a straight white cis male, therefore you are still priveledged” from gynocentric idiots whom invalidated my trauma that It’s getting hard for me to distinguish.
It doesn’t help also that people still aren’t looking at the issue of “Girls and women who bully boys and men”. Even with my play, I was hoping it would make a major impact. All I got was great ratings for the final episode and good ones for the others. It hasn’t changed a thing. Now I’m back to square one: A survivor in a world where they’d rather not deal with it.
The privledge thing is a major trigger for me still.
I enjoy how most people’s solutions that must be adopted by humanity revolve entirely around placating their own potentially dysfunctional notions of self.
“I live in a neighbourhood with four times the national crime rate. Plenty of white people here who are violent too.
The county I was born in, in 1953, McCracken County, KY, had the highest murder rate in the country at the time (We were overseas Californians). It was almost completley rural. And it was almost entirely Scotch-Irish by ancestry and culture, which is the key to the puzzle. rates for violent crimes in general are highest in states where Scotch-Irish predominate – Texas, Arkansas, parts of Kentucky, parts of Tennessee.
Black men have always be incarcerate at higher rates than anyone ele, but their lead in actual criminiality dates probably only form the 60s, though stats will be misleading based on lack of accurate reproting.
Valerie Keefe:
Why am I the only one whose concerns did not merit a response? Do you only take the time to answer people who call you names (looking at the thread for patterns, this is my best guess)? If so, that sounds like a terrible policy.
I have to second Eagle’s statement as regards the way such statistics are normally used in these debates and the reaction which that produces. I think that with both your statistics and your flights of utopian fantasy, it might behoove you to pay more heed to how the way you are presenting your positions will be perceived by others (I cackle derisively every time neurotypical SJers say that they do not and should not have to do this). Your ‘trans-inclusive lesbian utopia’ in particular can be quite triggering.
In any case, these ‘everyone should be like me’ fantasies strike me as dangerously immature and I do not see very much difference between you and any of the other numerous groups who have attempted to pathologize difference (both as a man and as an autistic person, I am often on the wrong side of such divisions; I do not think highly of a mind which could contemplate them lightly).
Valerie Keefe & Marja Erwin:
You are now ‘Crake 1’ and ‘Crake 2’. I will let you fight over which is which.
Hiding,
In what sense is Valerie’s “trans-inclusive lesbian utopia” triggering to you?
As described above, I used to hold similar sentiments. When I encounter that line of thinking now, my mind seeks back to those thoughts and to the much more unhealthy state of mind I was in at that time, and I have to exercise some self-control to avoid getting locked in a bout of intense hatred for everything male, like I did then. I do not know if this would really be considered a trigger, I am not traumatized per se over that.
RocketFrog:
At the current time, I would consider that “triggering” does not have to describe so violent a negative reaction as you suppose (for example, see Marja Erwin’s use of the term upthread).
My negative reaction is similar, although not identical, to the one you describe and reading such things tends to put me in a bad place emotionally, a condition which can linger for some time.
*Marja’s comment, to which I referred, is actually in the first “The MRM is not a Monolith” thread. My apologies for any confusion.
@RocketFrog
When I was a proponent of gendercide, I think I was pretty much advocating the same thing as Valerie: Selective abortion of male foetuses, so that within a few generations, men would be extinct and women were free to live in what Valerie calls a “lesbian utopia”.
No, that is not what I’m advocating, that is totally not what I’m advocating, why won’t people read what I’ve written? There is a huge difference between trying to eliminate genes and trying to instill proclivities in children before they are born. Spironolactone doesn’t do a goddessdamned thing to DNA.
Unfortunately, unlike Valerie, I am one, and have hated it (and myself for it) for almost my entire life. However, I also did not think men ought to be mistreated while we were still around – much like how wanting to get rid of cancer does not translate to wanting to abuse cancer patients.
I… I don’t mean to be prescriptivist but have you considered Exogenous Endocrine Intervention? If you hate your existence but find yourself politically married to it for fear of offending cis women, you remind me of me five years ago. I mean, do what you wanna do, but that might help… just saying.
@Gingko
Rates for violent crimes in general are highest in states where Scotch-Irish predominate – Texas, Arkansas, parts of Kentucky, parts of Tennessee.
I don’t have good data, but I would imagine you could find a correlation between the closed nature of communities of working-class whites before the civil war, and crime, not for ethnic reasons, but for other sociological reasons that are related to their homogeneity.
@HidingFromTheDinosaurs
Why am I the only one whose concerns did not merit a response? Do you only take the time to answer people who call you names (looking at the thread for patterns, this is my best guess)? If so, that sounds like a terrible policy.
Frankly, because 1. Sometimes you don’t play on my level, repeating stuff that has the scientific validity of an old wives’ tale, and 2. Sometimes I don’t notice and 3. Sometimes I don’t have the ability to deal with a giant torrent of crap and thus must prioritize, and so I pick low-hanging fruit like the idea that I want to exterminate men by making them neurologically like me and yet asserting that I am a man at the same time… there’s just too deep a vein of douchebaggery for me to have time to address anything else that isn’t deliberately obtused.
And yeah, I agree that it’s bad policy to take up an argument with those who degender me, but at the same time, I know how media works. They need to be a joke or I will be.
Also, triggering? Seriously?
There are more AS spectrum people represented in romantic comedy than trans lesbians by a long shot. You think I don’t get to the point where I want to break windows when someone mentions the L Word? You think I don’t live my life in a constant state of existential conflict? Think again. I frankly think any marginalized group ought to be able to consider what life would be like in their homogenous ‘utopia’ though my trans inclusive lesbian ‘utopia’ wouldn’t be that. I’d still have to deal with cis women in all their vagina as political charge card conceitedness, and most of my thoughts of a world such as that, is how one would break that oppression down.
But whatever, call an aspie and someone accused by an aspie of being an aspie as insensitive to your concerns. Frankly, I’m out of spoons and like you, I don’t enjoy being expected to instantly empathize.
I have considered castration, nullification and hormone treatments, but in my home country the two former options are illegal, the latter is only legally available to trans people.
I am not “politically married to [my existence] for fear of offending cis women”, and I am unsure what that is even supposed to mean. I do not identify as a man for any political reasons, but because it is what my midbrain thinks I am – I just happen to be a man who hates men. If I were to hinge my self-identification on politics, I would much prefer to be a woman, but that does not “feel” right at all. Whether cis women would take offense to what I chose to do with myself has never really factored into that decision; the feminists I grew up around (all of whom are largely out of my life by now) were not transphobic.
BTW; I wrote about my old thoughts on gendercide before your post immediately preceding mine had been posted, so I had not read it yet. What I wrote was what I meant when I, in my younger days, proposed using reproductive rights to get rid of all the males by simply aborting them at a very early stage. I see that your proposal is different; you want to use hormonal interventions to prevent them from developing into males – or do I misunderstand?
And as Patrick alluded to, the end result is still getting rid of all the males.
Valerie Keefe:
I certainly do not believe you live a life free of existential conflict, stress, or anger. I do not recall suggesting any such thing and I can find no mention of such topics in the comment to which you are responding.
I do not know what romantic comedies have to do with anything (although I would consider that attempts to represent autism in film generally do more harm than good), but for what it is worth I will tell you that the last time I saw an ‘aspie’ in a movie, his condition was presented as the reason for him killing his pets, then murdering his wife, chopping up her body and throwing it into the Hudson river in a weighted trash bag, and finally shooting to death a friend who knew too much (a position subsequently endorsed in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine).
Your presentation of your utopian fantasies does not make me want to “break windows”. It does not make me want to scream, or smash things, or lash out. It makes me want to hurt myself. I live most of my life (until two years ago, to be more specific) surrounded by nothing but messages telling me that I was defective; that I was nothing but an inferior imitation of a real human being; that people like me were mistakes to be corrected and that it was a horrible thing for people like me to be born. My sense of identity is still far from stable and I am extremely sensitive to things which put me back in that place. The way you are presenting your utopia does that (you are not saying ‘you should die’, but you are saying ‘your existence is a problem and a mistake; you are obsolete’; it does not matter whether you intend this or not, you are still saying it).
I will reiterate that I am not asking, and have not asked, you to stop having your fantasies or even to stop writing about your utopia, only that you do so with greater qualification. It would probably still make me feel worthless and frightened, but it might take some of the immediate sting and I cannot ask you to conform your thoughts and actions to my feelings.
I will however state plainly that I do not, and could not bring myself to, fantasize about any homogeneous utopia of my own. Such dreams strike me as emblematic of the destructive outlook of modernism and the impulse to fascism inherent in social justice thinking.
As for science, I would have to ask you to what statements you refer. I am well aware that the material sciences are not my area of expertise and so make it by policy to stay out of debate on such points as much as possible. The last comment relating to such a topic I can remember making was a wish that writers on gender issues would spend less time focusing on evolutionary psychology. The only comments of mine relating to the sciences which I can recall you ignoring were requests to know where I might educate myself on the topics being discussed. Certainly, this places me below your level in such matters, but it is hardly the confident ignorance you suggest. I will admit that I have sometimes commented here during periods of severe depression and would not like to answer for the accuracy of my memory at those times. If I have said anything as absurd as you suggest, I wish to make apologies.
“call an aspie and someone accused by an aspie of being an aspie”
To whom are you referring with this statement? Additionally, I have never called you “insensitive” and I would not be pushing for an answer if I did not think you would have something valuable to say. I will take this to mean that you do not wish to make any response to my initial comment and regretfully let that matter drop here.
” I do not know what romantic comedies have to do with anything (although I would consider that attempts to represent autism in film generally do more harm than good), but for what it is worth I will tell you that the last time I saw an ‘aspie’ in a movie, his condition was presented as the reason for him killing his pets, then murdering his wife, chopping up her body and throwing it into the Hudson river in a weighted trash bag, and finally shooting to death a friend who knew too much (a position subsequently endorsed in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine).”
What movie was this? I need to avoid it.
On a related note, I’d like people who write TV and movies to realize that Aspergers does not in fact come with a free super power, no mater what ” Sherlock” and ” Alphas” would have you belive.
If someone depends on race, class, religion, nationality, age, or lgbt status in order to recognize misandry, then they just aren’t getting it. Rule of thumb: if it doesn’t have something to do with being a man then it’s not misandry. Forget intersectionality, kyriarchy, and all the other dumb crap invented by feminism to purposefully muddy the waters. If you’re talking about race, talk about race. If you’re talking about misandry, talk about misandry.
Let me point out a few obvious things. Privilege doesn’t protect a rich black man from getting pulled over due to racial profiling. That’s racism. Privilege also doesn’t protect a rich white man from sexist family courts. That’s misandry. A historical perspective: even during the era slavery, poor white farmers sometimes depended on black slaves to share food with them. In exchange, the whites would supply guns and shelter to the black slaves when they gathered the strength for a revolt. Both groups of people were hurt by slavery – unlimited free labor gave plantation owners tremendous economic power over regular farmers. With misandry, people need to set aside their various other differences if they are to tackle it. The way in which contemporary feminists use concepts of intersectionality is no different than the way slave owners used racism: to divide and conquer. Racism was taught from religious pulpits, by design, to get poor whites to act against their own interests. Misandry is really no different. It has been taught the same way and for the same basic reasons. For example, one of the historical drivers of the lopsided family law system was what could be termed wage slavery. Industrialists promoted marriage for young men, very often also through religion, to cut down on strikes and job hopping. As labor activists were making strides on one front, puritanical women’s activists were setting men back on another. Oppressive standards of manhood along with easy divorce, alimony, child custody, etc., kept men to the grindstone for generations. In fact, in my personal opinion, the most notable achievement of 50 years of feminism has been the destruction of the labor movement. But, these are all discussions for another time. The only point that I’m making is that it’s a tired, tired old strategy. Every single time we talk about rights for men, someone comes along and says, “No, no, no, before we get to that we really have to fix this.” So we can’t fix circumcision until we fix AIDS, apparently, but as a movement we’re stuck in some debate about whether or not white men are capable of being oppressed.
Furthermore, if we’re going to go by statistics to tell us who is more oppressed, then let’s actually disentangle our emotions from the process. If we actually weigh things by their statistical significance, male pattern baldness is probably a far bigger problem than AIDS. Statistically, solving problems that affect the majority will get us more bang for the buck than solving problems that affect the minority. But we don’t really want to do things that way, I’m sure, and we have to admit that in the end it’s all very subjective. So just because there are dozens of other factors which exacerbate problems for all the other oppressed designations we can come up with doesn’t mean that “cis white men” are less oppressed, it just means that we are choosing to see slight suffering by very many people as less important than intense suffering by a few. We are trying to balance things out in a way that offers the best hope of making some headway and in the end it’s all very subjective. Feminists and their notions Patriarchy, Kyriarchy, and intersectionality are only trying to throw a bunch of pseudo-scientific drivel out there to try to convince people that there actually exists some sort of objective pecking order of oppression. The thing that really must set someone who recognizes misandry apart is that they don’t do that.
“@Gingko
Rates for violent crimes in general are highest in states where Scotch-Irish predominate – Texas, Arkansas, parts of Kentucky, parts of Tennessee.
I don’t have good data, but I would imagine you could find a correlation between the closed nature of communities of working-class whites before the civil war, and crime, not for ethnic reasons, but for other sociological reasons that are related to their homogeneity.”
I hope something like that is the case, but that’s just a hope. If it has to do with the Civil war, then we’d have to expain why the effect has lasted so long. There were other such closed communities of different ethnicity that have never shown the same levels of violence.
But here’s one difference – the Scoth-Irish have almost everywhere been at the absolute bottom of the social scale and at the absolute frontier margins of society. I think that may just be internalizing that devaluation.
Hiding,
I think it probably speaks volumes about my psyche that every time I have thought about homogenous utopias, they have always been ones without any place for me in it. My corpse would be among those on the foundations.
Like you, I grew up being told I was defective and obsolete – not because of my autism (which was first diagnosed in adulthood – when I was a child, Asperger’s was not yet formally recognized in my home country), but because of my sex. And when I actually do get triggered (some people here might remember how I completely crashed during Noah Brand’s “Nice Guy”/”Code Monkey”-shaming thread on NSWATM), I – like you – never lash out. If anything, I lash in. I self-harm, I smash my head into things, I destroy various possessions and projects, I starve myself for days, I think about castration, nullification and suicide.
I am not sure if I understand what you mean about fascism inherent in social justice, but I do think that “social justice” that does not consider class is not social justice at all.
I think one of these days I’m going to write an entire comment in bold… the comment above may be my last of my frequent comments for a while, as RL issues are taking me away 🙂
RocketFrog:
I don’t trust utopias built on corpses. The foundations tend to collapse.
Fascism stems not from a desire to oppress and discriminate, but from a belief that one knows best, that society would improve if everyone lived and acted according to one’s designs. It is inevitably in movements of people who believe they know how to correct society that fascism first takes hold (sometimes these are liberal movements advocating reforms, sometimes they are conservative movements advocating a return to past practices, but the end result is the same). Social justice thinkers can easily fall into the trap of being so confident in the superiority of their own beliefs that they attempt to force them on everyone else (this has been the bane of many a socialist movement). That sort of thinking is in line with the modernist idea of progress: achieving peace and prosperity by altering everyone to fit a single ‘ideal’ model (this is what gave us the philosophical underpinnings of colonialism).
I do remember seeing what your posts were like when that happen. I also remember that people mistreated you terribly over it.
Last time I got like that, I went out into the woods hoping that a bear would eat me (they’re not uncommon in that part of the Japanese Alps). Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on one’s point of view, it was still early spring and they hadn’t woken from hibernation yet.
Dungone:
A lengthy comment entirely in bold would probably be annoying to read and come off as an inferior version of Film Crit Hulk’s style.
@HidingFromtheDinosaurs, that’s besides the point. My statement was metaphorical, implying that sometimes I feel that some of my comments are far more important for me to get across than most of the other ones I write. Now I actually regret not making that comment bold, as it seems to have been passed over for minutia.
dungone,
FWIW, I think it is one of the most insightful comments I have read from you in a long time (and I generally think yours are good, even if I sometimes disagree).
@Gingko, Irish & Scottish men had been used for extremely brutal labour in the slavery era. Actually, they were often not considered “white.” They would often do work that required lots of transient workers and was not suitable for doing with slaves, which were a long-term business proposition for their owners. And they would often die during this kind of work. I have misgivings about the black separatist side of the Civil Rights movement (i.e. Malcom X) because they disregarded any shared history with economically oppressed whites. Really glad for Dr Martin Luther King and his vision of reconciliation. I think feminists have a few more lessons left to learn from the Civil Rights movement.
I kind of relate in my own family history, it’s not really the same thing, but several of my predecessors had been sent to concentration camps and gulags, even though they were Catholics. Both of my grandfathers were orphans after their families were wiped out – one side got killed by the Nazis while jumping form a train bound for Auschwitz and the other side was killed by the Soviets. Something like 3 million Polish Catholics were murdered in the Nazi camps, but you’ll be hard pressed to learn that much about them outside of Poland. The erasure gets to the point where I frequently encounter people who heard about the Holocaust and came to believe that all Polish people are Jews. It boggles my mind, really, considering what the reality is.
“The erasure gets to the point where I frequently encounter people who heard about the Holocaust and came to believe that all Polish people are Jews. It boggles my mind, really, considering what the reality is.”
It’s weird because I mainly heard that the Pope often comes from Poland, because they’re very Catholic.
Here’s another example of a misandric thread from Feministe:
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2012/10/01/the-myth-of-male-decline/
Just for the record: I don’t expect anyone to discuss it.
It features a more subtle blend of misandric attitudes
A. Men are the only sexists
B. Patriarchy Hurts Men Too: It’s all men’s fault for any harm they suffer
C. Blood libel: Whatever wrongs men may or may not have done in the past towards women this is simple and just payback. Bwahahahah.
D. Along with a big dose of there are no real problems anyway.
And that’s just the post, not the comments section. Snicker.
dungone,
I agree with you on the balck separatist movement. It is an important psychological stage, it’s important to quit trying to get white people to accept you, but then when you’ve reracehed that point it’s time to join the rest of the world.
There is a lot of erasure of the white working class and especially the Irish. Partly it’s because of the ancestry and clas background of the whites doing it. Not their kin, not their care. They are alienated form that class and feel alienated. It doesn’t help that they use categories like “white” that borgify people in with the very people who exploited them. And when you hear them talk, you cna tell immediately frorm their terminology where they learned all of it.
The Irish and some Scots were part of the slave class in the beginning, and AAVE shows a lot of Gaelic influence, from both languages, as a result. The ignorant notion that AAVE is soem kind of half-learned English ignores the fatc that the majority of Africans coming in as slaves were already mostly bilingual and often trilingual and would have had no problem at all learning whatever langauge they wanted to the same standard as native speakers.
In fact there are black families that have Irish surnames because theyhave Irish ancestry dating back to that time. That doesn’t fit the narrative though, so it gets erased.
There’s a lot of erasure going around. There’s the erasure of Polish sent to death camps. there’s the erasure of the ethnic cleansing of Germans, with all the death and rape that entails, from western Poland and points east.
The erasure of the white working class cost the Democrats a critical voting block 30 years ago that they only now starting to get back. How fitting it is that it’s a black president doing it.
Gingko:
How the heck..or what in the world… leads you to believe the Democratic party is getting “more popular” with white people? Maybe..maybe white women, as you can see from this post:
http://whiskeysplace.wordpress.com/2012/09/30/why-the-sailer-strategy-doesnt-work/
Mind, you a warning – the guy is a hateful bigot in some ways, but I do think he’s right about why the “Sailor strategy” doesn’t work. Basically a sizeable percentage of white women -possibly a majority- feel they have nothing in common politically with white men.
But white working-class men?
hmmm not too long ago on these forums there was an excellent link to an article about how white women vote in republicans. Anyway afaik, most people don’t even vote. Me included.
Well the way I look at things is that both the “above board” and “below the surface ” types of racial, sexual, and religious gerrymandering have ratcheted up in this election to levels not seen since at least the early days of the Civil Rights movement.
“How the heck..or what in the world… leads you to believe the Democratic party is getting “more popular” with white people? ”
I don’t think it’s very obvious, but I see a lot of pick up trucks with bumper stickers that suggest disillusionment with the Republicans. This goes back to the Bush yeras. It may be regional. It may not have anything to do with the Democrats gaining their allegiance, just with Republicans losing it, the same as the Democrats once did.
Regionalism may have something to do with it. The Christianism of the Republican Party doesn’t sell very well out here.
But as I say, it’s not really very obvious yet and I don’t fault nayone for not seing it, or for telling me I’m wrong when it turns out to be wrong.
Ahum. The Polish jews no-one (except, well, Holocaust denialists) erases were also Polish; as Polish as the Catholics (and atheists and etc.) who were sent to death camps, in fact.
But yeah, the equation “victims of Nazi terror = jews” is a big cultural meme, erasing lots of victims.
“Ahum. The Polish jews no-one (except, well, Holocaust denialists) erases were also Polish;”
The “other” Poles didn’t think so; that was a big part of the problem. There is a difference between citizenship and nationality sometimes. Legally there may or may not be, but socially there often is, and it’s the social situation that egst translated into reality in unsettled times.
And in Europe for centuries religion even more than language was often the marker of nationality anyway. That’s one reason the Spanish Inquisition became so important; it was a matter of ensuring loyalty to the throne. The same was true in England right up until – well, when did it fianlly cease to really matter? That’s true in a lot of places. Religion is the main difference between Iranians and Tajiks.