Hey, everybody, here’s another massive list of ridiculous comments from the Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit on the subjects of women, feminists and feminism. Some, er, highlights:
Never trust a woman. When you are out and they are around, go the other way. Your life may actually depend on you crossing the street or not taking that elevator or not working late in a office with another lonely woman.
Women are keen to assert all of the benefits that modern society affords them, but at the same time quick to twist their hair into pigtails and play the “I’m just a girl” defense when the traditional benefits of being a woman would suit them better.
Misandrist feminists want gender based apartheid, and the male population culled to lest than 10%
Feminism does NOT create strong women – it creates dependency and a stunted intellect.
In the feminist community, bigotry is met with a groundswell of support, and is very rarely called out.
That last one is just a teensy bit ironic, given that most of the comments above were heavily upvoted – in other words, “met with a groundswell of support.” Further evidence of this irony: oh, just the hundreds of misogynistic statements from MRAs I’ve linked to on this blog.
For links to the original comments in context, see the full list on Reddit. Props to the Redditor known as Squibbling for having the patience to assemble all of this.
“It paints men as potential predators, creatures around whom a woman must be on guard at all times.”
This just proves your privilege. As a man, how many times are you wary walking by a group of men or been catcalled and/or harassed?
Maybe if we had better education in formal logic in our schools, we’d have more people who can comprehend the difference between “any man could be a rapist” and “every man is a rapist.”
Or the difference between “here’s how to avoid sexually coercing someone” and “you are a rapist.”
I wonder if the latter is related to the idea that rapists are some identifiable species, slavering and lumbering wherever they go, so if you aren’t a slavering beast it’s impossible for you to commit rape, and schools should know better than to impose such education upon nice non-slavering boys, and women should know better than to spend time with slavering fellas.
I posted a long comment, but it looks like WordPress ate it 🙁 But I think other people have covered all of what I was going to say.
Except that, NWO, why would it be called “She’s a Liar” instead of “He Fears You”?
One in six women are raped. One in six men are not falsely accused of rape.
Also, I’d like to point out that, once again, we are falling into the “false accusations are the male equivalent of rape!” trap. No. RAPE is the male equivalent of rape.
If, that is, false rape accusations were the male equivalent of rape. Which, as other people have said, they’re not.
Holly: Probably! Or even the difference between “every man could be a rapist” (trivially true; every woman could be a rapist too) and “women are socialized into being afraid of men because they might be rapists and, given the rate of rape in our culture, that’s not necessarily unwise.”
The Slavering Beast Theory is a major part of rape culture, I think.
Analogy time! When I use a condom during sex, I am not accusing you of having an STD. I am simply acknowledging that a lot of very nice clean normal-looking people have STDs, and I have no way to know if you do or not.
(I’ve met people who have trouble with this too, but hopefully it gets the idea across.)
@Absinthedexterous
Oh, please tell me what “Kabbalah Jews” are! (or what this guy who thinks he knows what they are). I think it’d be a great laugh.
I’m also amused that the Schrodinger’s Rapist post is “telling women to be afraid of men,” when it starts out: “Gentlemen. Thank you for reading.”
It’s saying that men need to be aware of the signals that they’re sending to women and how they can be interpreted in a threatening manner.
A woman on a favorite forum of mine has a story that clearly illustrates this: she was driving slowly down the road in front of her home at 1 a.m., passing an unfamiliar guy walking a dog. When she got into her driveway, the guy was standing about 4 feet away from the driver’s door.
An unfamiliar man standing over you at 1 in the morning is threatening behavior. Sorry guys…standing over anyone, particularly someone sitting in an awkward position (as in swinging one’s legs out of a car) is a THREAT. And this isn’t just feminism…look at any kind of art during a time of human history that involved war. Notice the cowering figures while a taller (usually armed) figure stands above them?
In short: your body language and actions have meanings. Be aware of them.
To be honest, I think the wording of Schrodinger’s rapist is a bit much at times, but it does have a good point. In terms of situational awareness, I think Schrodinger’s Rapist poses women to be a bit more neurotic than is true. Women are not on high alert at all times. Code red is the step of having identified a threat and taking action. No one lives on that level, because threats are not constant. A lower level of awareness, noticing a potential threat and deciding whether to go up to code red is what happens when an unknown man (idiotically) stands over someone in a threatening gesture. Also, doesn’t happen all the time. We can’t always look at a guy as a potential threat, if there’s nothing else to suggest he might be. That’s where body language, surroundings, clothing, etc. might all come into play.
General situational awareness, like noticing one’s surroundings, where they alleys are, what traffic is doing at any given moment, etc. is where we should all be living. If you can get down stairs and cross a busy street without dying, you’re probably pretty good at it. That level of awareness is probably where most women are, until another factor gets added into the mix.
Ozy – I’m gonna try and write a post on Slavering Beast Theory after I get done with classes today.
And so in one paragraph we have male-blaming, snark and personal attacks. Ladies and gents, welcome to feminism.
You have to admire* the mulishness of someone who comes into a blog calling out MRAdom for frothing tinfoilhat hatred of women, attacks on women and female-blaming, looks around, and sniffs “Feminists are *snarky*!”
Clearly, if we just called on American women to shunt “Ameridicks”, darkly predicted that MRAs secretly wanted to eliminate all but 10% of women and cautioned all women to avoid men because they just want to rape and kill you, we’d be paragons of logic and calm reason.
*Okay, no, you don’t.
Rutee:
And as I’ve said elsewhere, someone writing, in 1971, that (frex) a marriage license was a license to rape, she wasn’t indulging in man-hating, she was stating a fact. I suspect there are a lot of facts mentioned by Daly that make men look bad and that are not currently true. But they were true at the time, and pointing them out at the time was not hypoerbolic misandry by reason of being neither of those things.
Mags:
Not mutually exclusive.
Hengist:
I know, right? I checked http://hengist.tumblr.com and it wasn’t there.
You mean we don’t see it from feminists qua feminists? Well … no. Why would you expect to?
Unless one is a Warren Farrell devotee, as then one would fall into the ‘unemployment is the male equivalent of rape’ trap.
Wow that’s a lot of ridiculous comments. Poor Squibbling.
We’ve always been at war with East MRAsia?
Which would leave 75% of the remaining abortions to be female embryos.
Super-SMRT engineering math fail.
No wonder Pepsi didn’t hire you.
You also fail to notice that a majority of children raised to full adulthood are done by women.
Super-SMRT engineering stastics fail.
And Super-SMRT engineering demographics fail. Because hey, the world’s population continues to rise even in “feminist” countries.
Cynickal – I think what NWO is saying is:
50% of all pregnancies are aborted. (It’s actually more like 22% – source – but whatever.)
Half of these are male fetuses. Therefore, women kill 25% of all potential men!
However, what he’s failing to factor in is that 25% (er, 11%, but it doesn’t even matter, it’s obviously the same number is the only important part) of all female fetuses are also aborted, So the sex ratio at birth is the same.
By NWO logic, if we stopped abortion, there would be two men for every woman.
What I find most curious about debates on the subject of rape is that MRA’s and anti-feminists are more than happy to characterize the male gender as being predisposed to rape when the logical conclusion is that women should withdraw from public life, stay indoors, be quiet and obedient, and exchange liberty for dubious “protection”. They are perfectly happy to lecture women on how it is women’s responsibility to dress and conduct themselves just right when their point is that rape is a fact of life, and women should just suck it up. They are perfectly happy to argue that rape is solely about sex, and that men are incapable of controlling their sexual urges, for which rape is a “natural” outlet, when the gist of the argument is that women are to blame when men do bad things to them. But suggest that perhaps saying things like that is what we refer to as “rape culture”, which grooms boys and young men to be rapists, and anti-feminists scream bloody murder, because how DARE man-haters suggest that rape is tolerated and rationalized, or even common. That’s why I see the topic of false rape accusations as a red herring: anti-feminists don’t see false rape accusations as a problem, they see all rape accusations as a problem, with the narrow exception of cases where the perpetrator is a socially inferior stranger. They want rape to be a male prerogative, at least with respect to women from more modest socio-economic backgrounds. And to justify that, they don’t hesitate to make mutually exclusive claims.
You want women to not have to be wary around men due to fear of rapists? How about you stop victim blaming then. If you tell a woman she needs to do X, Y, and Z (not wear short skirts, not walk at night, not have had consensual sex before, not drink, etc.) or she is asking to be raped, what do you expect but a cautious attitude towards worrisome encounters. If a woman walks alone at night, drunk, and is raped, the MRAs will be the first to enquire as to why she wasn’t more cautious. So what do you lot expect but caution from women? If she is cautious, she is a man hating bitch, if she is not cautious, the rape is partially her fault for not taking greater care, no woman can win in MRA rape apologism land.
Amused, your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Don’t quote me on this, but I’m pretty sure that the term is one used by racists in the English-speaking world to differentiate the Jews of the Old Testament, or “Israelites,” (good, our spiritual ancestors) from modern Jews, “Kabbalah Jews” (evil, etc etc etc). I’ve heard “Torah Jew” to mean about the same thing, used in the 19th century.
Amused – The two positions are semi-coherent if you believe that rape is only done by Bad People, who are easy to spot (they have glowing red eyes and fangs) and only commit violent stranger rape.
Women should stay inside and dress modestly because they might run into a Bad Person. Bad People are monsters and have evil in their blood, so only solution is avoidance.
But feminists should not attempt to educate Nice Clean-Cut Boys on rape prevention, as these boys do not have red eyes or fangs, so feminists are just insulting them by implying that they could possibly be capable of the things that Bad People do.
(Note that this also resolves the dichotomy between “she should have known what would happen when she went home with that thug” and “why won’t she go home with me?”–that thug had red eyes and fangs, and the person saying these things does not. The woman could clearly see this, and thus her choice was completely irrational.)
Hold on though; how does that fit with the narrative that we’ve got to cover up lest we provoke Nice Clean Cut Boys to temptation? I think all men are secretly Bad People in this narrative, just women’s malign influence can bring it out of otherwise Nice men. Which is also why, when discussing avoiding DV, it’s the woman’s responsibility (1) not to date a Bad Person (2) not to provoke her Nice Clean-Cut lover/husband.
No, but that’s already been answered repeatedly and you’ve ignored it everytime.
Also please explaing why you’ve not been falsely accused of murder since you interact with thousands of people over your lifetime and the average murder per capita is 4.8 per 100,000 in the US.
Using Hengist logic you should have been accused of being a murderer by now.
VoIP – Well, first of all, it’s not a perfectly consistent worldview, being bullshit and all that.
But secondly, it does include the idea that Nice Clean-Cut Boys are still capable of harming women when they’re pushed. This doesn’t mean that they become Bad People, only that every human being has their breaking point, right?
It’s interesting how, in MRA Land, it’s always the evil feminists who are painting all men as violent rapists. The only person in my life who’s ever given me a “men are only after one thing and you can’t trust them” lecture is my father, and his beliefs are hardly feminist.
“Don’t quote me on this, but I’m pretty sure that the term is one used by racists in the English-speaking world to differentiate the Jews of the Old Testament, or “Israelites,” (good, our spiritual ancestors) from modern Jews, “Kabbalah Jews” (evil, etc etc etc). I’ve heard “Torah Jew” to mean about the same thing, used in the 19th century.”
BAH! That’s a lot less amusing than I wanted it to be. I was hoping for a conspiracy of some sort. I was trying to figure out how the heck the scientific method could become an encoded reference to the sphirot on the Tree of Life or as a reference to the four worlds. I was thinking way too hard, apparently.
The hilarious thing is that I don’t think that most modern Jews know a friggin’ thing about Kabbalah, outside of what Madonna calls Kabbalah. Most Kabbalistic references seem to have been well edited from the average siddur. And on the off chance that some reference survives (references to four levels of an issue, the names of the sphirot, or less-known names of God embedded into acrostics) not many people actually recognize them for what they are.
Re the False Rape Accusation thing – one of the reasons the MRA crowd give for those accusations being so very very common is this:
1) A woman sleeps with a man, consensually.
2) She’s worried someone might call her a slut.
3) She accuses him of rape.
Which, logically, would lead one to think that maybe if sexually active women weren’t afraid of being called sluts, the number of false rape accusations would decrease. And all anyone has to do is stop calling women sluts. It’s win win.
NWO, Hengist — your thoughts?