Some married men like to jokingly refer to their wife as “the boss,” generally in a patronizing manner that suggests she’s nominally in charge of the boring everyday stuff in the household that he doesn’t really care about anyway.
But our old nemesis Vox Day isn’t having any of it. To refer to your wife as the boss, even as a joke, is to threaten to loose the forces of anarchy and chaos and feminism upon your family. Also, women are dogs. On his Alpha Game blog, he writes,
If you let a dog think he’s the boss, he will cease to defer to you and begin objecting, violently, when you interfere with what he now believes are his prerogatives. Women are no different.
That’s right. Give in an inch to your wife, and the next thing you know she’ll be sitting on the furniture and insisting on eating “people food” at the table.
It’s a tad ironic that Vox here has decided to degrade women by comparing them to dogs, when his whole “alpha” schtick is based on misguided notions about the behavior of “alpha dogs” and wolves.
It’s one thing to turn over your social calendar to your wife due to a lack of interest in the various social obligations of the family. But checking in to see if there is scheduling conflict, or simply being courteous enough to see if your wife minds if you go to the football game does not make you an employee or a child. Therefore, it does not make her the boss. And what might have been an ironic jest in the days of Mad Men is often taken quite literally now.
Marriage: an endless power struggle in which the wife must always lose.
What a lovely vision of the world!
I should also add that you should never ever, even jokingly, refer to Bruce Springsteen as “the boss” either, because if you do he’s going to be hounding you to hand in your TPS reports and forcing you to work on Saturdays. You don’t want that.
EDITED TO ADD: In the comments on Alpha Game, cailcorishev expands a bit on the whole “women-as-dogs” thing in what he evidently thinks is a humorous way:
Since you mentioned dogs: virtually everything about disciplining a dog and being the pack leader applies to leading a woman (or children). I’m convinced that, if you took a woman on a 45-minute walk every day, as Cesar Millan recommended for dogs, it would eliminate a lot of her problems. Just make sure you lead her, having her take your arm and follow you where you want to go — or use a leash if she’s into that kind of thing.
I can only hope his wife — if there is an unfortunate woman holding this position — pees on the rug and chews up all his important paperwork.
Yep! Should be big enough for photos in a couple of days though. And maybe the big guy from the first batch will come out for the camera even (big girl? The females are larger but idk if that applies this far before maturity!)
Regarding Ashley’s bullshit, and some newbies. Don’t most people lurk a lot before making their first comments? I assume they lurk to look at the comments of other people and not just the OP itself. Surely they must have seen more than once that the community here includes lots of people with various mental conditions (myself included) and that using ableist terms does not go over very well here. Yet so often we have newbies coming out with “MRAs be crazy!” in their first comment. Enough already! Lurk more ffs. As with others, I have my own slips in meatspace, and before spending a lot of time here, I used ableist terms too. I get it. But when it’s obvious that shit doesn’t fly in a certain space, why would you keep doing it? I doubt every newbie who makes an ableist comment isn’t aware of how it’s received here. Do they think they’ll be the special exception or something? And is it just me, or does there seem to be a lot of “It’s David’s blog!!! I will be an asshole till he tells me stop or bans me!!!” from the last few trolls lately? /rant
Yeah, Alex, I dunno what is with the rash of crazy comments lately. I swear, we’ve been stomping on them with every post these days. It’s tiresome and aggravating; if I wanted this shit, I’d just bum around meatspace!
“And is it just me, or does there seem to be a lot of “It’s David’s blog!!! I will be an asshole till he tells me stop or bans me!!!” from the last few trolls lately? /rant”
It’s not just you.
Cuttlefish!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aquanerds/27324010/sizes/z/in/photostream/
via Pharyngula, where I intermittently lurk.
I, too, notice crazy as a disparaging term a lot more since hanging out here, especially on Rachel Maddow, when she’s describing the seriously irrational behaviour by various politicians and lobbyists. It’s frustrating.
If someone is engaging in cruel behaviour for ideological reasons, then they’re wrong, and cruel, and irrational, and possibly not very smart. But they’re not crazy, and saying that they are sort of removes from them the responsibility for their actions.
Speaking of cruel, for any Canadians out there, The Harper Government™ is sneaking a provision into the new budget that will make it harder for workers to refuse dangerous work.
http://www.canadianlabour.ca/right-to-refuse-unsafe-work
They’re sneaking all the cruel provisions into omnibus budget bills. Fuckers.
“Don’t most people lurk a lot before making their first comments? I assume they lurk to look at the comments of other people and not just the OP itself. Surely they must have seen more than once that the community here includes lots of people with various mental conditions (myself included) and that using ableist terms does not go over very well here.”
Exactly! This is my second comment ever, in spite of being a long time lurker. I don’t post much because by the time I think of a way to articulate a response, someone else has already said it better! Meh.
As for the respectful language issue; I actually credit this blog and a few others I lurk on for helping me bring my language usage in line with my values. Its amazing how often people use terms like ‘crazy’, ‘fat’ and ‘gay’ as an unrelated insult IRL. Even people who know better. I don’t anymore myself, but I still haven’t gotten to the point where I really feel comfortable correcting other people yet. : /
Cassandra — I tried a photoshoot just for you, but they’re too tiny to make out and the big guy is apparently not feeling photogenic. Sorry.
Also, LITTLE TINY SHINY CUTTLEFISH!!
@LBT
Ditto on the seeming to be more of them, but I just got back so idk how long that’s been going on. :/ Luckily the people I hang around in meatspace most often with (aka family) seem to eventually apologize for their ableist shit, and shockingly enough, without trying to invoke some ‘if dad tells me’ shit. (which is reallly good cuz the people I have to call out the most are my parents.)
@unimaginitave
^QFT.
@Unimaginative: Sadly, I’m really not that surprised about that. Hopefully you guys can finally toss that jerkass Harper to the curb sometime soon. =(
Ah ol Voxy my favorite. You know what really gets under this guys skin? As Dowd has correctly noted, men are obsolete. While women have less and less need for men, the reverse is not true. Men still very much need women. dudebros like Vox can’t stand the fact that men are in the weaker position so they have to constantly reassert their manhood. Amusing but pathetic.
I don’t even…
Women no longer need men to provide an income so they can, you know, not starve on the streets. Men never had that need, or any of the similar needs. So yes, women have less need for men. But no need, making men obsolete? I don’t even…
Women, like men, still have emotional and sexual needs that many like to have fulfilled by men. As in, women have less need of men than they used to, but no less need for men than men have for them. So no, men aren’t in “the weaker position”.
What they are in is a position of less power than they used to have, and these guys are terrified by the idea of being on a level playing field with women. They want the era were women had to marry to survive back, complete with marital rape not being a crime. Those days being a thing of the past neither means that men are in some “weaker position” than women, nor that men are becoming obsolete.
Men aren’t obsolete, and never will be. Sexism and male privilege? That’s another story. The War on Women is a pretty blatant attempt to bring ’em back, and these guys complain that THEY’re the ones under siege? Projection!
The whole “X is obsolete” plays into a nasty idea that humans are some sort of utilities or technology. I’ll grant that MRAs are complete tools, but other than that, humans just are.