Bridging the Inferential Distance on Desexualization

Tags

not feminism go away, ozy blog post, sex positivity, speshul snowflake trans

[Related: Etiquette for People Who Aren’t Attracted To Trans Women]

I notice that conversations about desexualization are particularly prone to people misunderstanding each other. For instance, many people seem to round any conversation about desexualization off to telling people that they have to have sex with people they don’t want to have sex with, and then say something along the lines of “didn’t the gay rights movement prove that no one should have to have sex with people they don’t want to have sex with? Rapist!” Many other people assume that the first group’s concerns are a smokescreen for not wanting to deal with their own bigotry, and thus assume that they could not have any reasonable concerns about compulsory sexuality.

I don’t have a lot to say to the second group at this time (although theunitofcaring’s Meditation on Boundaries, which has been recently going around again, is excellent, and I endorse her statement that all conversations about desexualization need to begin from the baseline that people should promptly say “no” to intimate activities that they don’t want). But I recently found an article from a few years back that I think might help explain the second group’s position to my readers who are prone to the “rapist” thing. (Please note that the author of the article is pretty mean to techies, and if you don’t want to read that you may want to skip the quoted bit.)

Here’s an excerpt:

You might think an abundance of men is a great thing, but as a wise woman once said, “The odds may be good, but the goods are odd.”

“I’ve lived in Seattle for seven years, single most of them,” Annie Pardo, a 31-year-old freelance event and communications consultant in Seattle, wrote in an email. “The only thing that has changed is the increase in men I’d never want to go out on a date with.” She added, “Can’t believe they actually strap on those new employee book bags.”

For Reifman, the number of men versus women presents a challenge for guys like him—he can’t seem to get a date or hold the attention of the women he’s courting because, presumably, he’s got so much competition. But the reality is that all he has to do is have a personality. I’m serious.

The exact same scenario has been playing out in San Francisco for the last few years. One woman, Violet, a 33-year-old who has lived in the Bay Area for eight years, with one of those in the “belly of the beast,” Palo Alto, experienced many of the same things I and other women did. They had money, but they were boring. They had a lot to say about their job, but their development as a complete human being seemed to be stunted. And they exhibited little to no interest in the other person at the table.

“There were a lot of tech men. I could talk a blue streak about them. I don’t have much positive to say. The biggest thing, the thing that bothered me the most is I felt like my intelligence was greatly devalued,” she wrote. ”I am a smart woman. I have a master’s from Berkeley in philosophy. My brain is very abstract, though, the exact opposite of so many men in tech who have very concrete/literal brains. They interpreted information as intelligence. I constantly felt like I wasn’t seen or valued by them, even though I experienced a lot of them as having a very limited view of the world.”

Carla Swiryn, a matchmatcher for Three Day Rule, a start-up that offers curated online dating services in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, said that her female clients are often hit with a double whammy: “I often hear women say they either date A-holes or nerds—or if they’re really lucky, both in one,” she said. “They feel like they’re dealing with someone who has poor social skills, not a lot of style, and isn’t that attractive, or is decently good-looking, successful, or cool, but by default knows it and acts like it, with a huge ego and selfish mind-set in tow.”

One woman, Bridget Arlene, spent three years in Seattle for graduate school, and said that she actually moved out of the city, in part because of the type of available men—most of whom had computer science or engineering degrees and worked for Google, Microsoft, or Amazon. “The type of person who is attracted to these jobs and thus to the Seattle area seems to be a socially awkward, emotionally stunted, sheltered, strangely entitled, and/or a misogynistic individual,” she wrote in an email. Arlene said that she was once contacted by a Microsoft programmer on OKCupid who required that she read Neuromancer before “he would consider taking me out on a date. He was not joking.”

It goes on like that for a while, but you get the general idea.

So here’s my guess on the reaction of most of my readers to this article:

• You are totally allowed to have a preference not to date nerds, but it is neither kind nor necessary to write thousands of words exploring exactly how undateable you find us.
• There are lots of women who want to date nerds, actually? Maybe you shouldn’t assume your own particular sexual preferences apply to every fucking woman on the planet? Lots of women don’t find “socially awkward with a poor fashion sense” to be a dealbreaker. Lots of women are socially awkward and have terrible fashion sense themselves!
• You are not actually entitled to a dating market that only has people you find attractive in it. People you don’t find attractive are allowed to try to find love too. “Asking you out while being incompatible” is not something people are doing to you.
• Obviously everyone is allowed to have their own dealbreakers, even if some of their dealbreakers are kind of stupid. But god, maybe you could try being a little more open-minded? You might be swept off your feet by a really great guy who happens to wear a new employee book bag. Also, fashion sense is totally a solvable problem, you can say to your new boyfriend “give me a $500 budget and I will buy you clothes that fit.”
• Good fucking riddance, lady, if you’re going to be this much of an asshole we don’t want to date you either.

In particular, that last point is something I want to highlight. It is desirable that the author of this article become less of an asshole, in the same way it’s desirable that any person become less of an asshole. Presumably, if she became less of an asshole, she’d be more open-minded about dating people that she currently considers to be emotionally stunted sheltered man-children with poor fashion sense and an aversion to spending money on messenger bags. But that doesn’t mean you want her to skip the “become less of an asshole” part and start dating techies right now. For one thing, then some innocent techie would be saddled with a girlfriend who hates him. For another thing, being open to dating techies is a predicted consequence of the thing you actually care about, which is her not being an asshole. If she kept her preferences once she became less of an asshole, but no longer wrote long articles about how horrible people she happens to not be attracted to are, then this would also be a fine outcome. “If you did X morally good thing, then you would probably also behave like Y” is a different claim from “you should behave like Y.” You don’t actually want people to date people they despise.

And in my experience those points are what most people who talk about desexualization in an anti-oppression context– whether it’s about race, transness, gender expression, disability, or size– are actually saying. There are legitimate complaints one can have about another person’s sex-related behavior, which are not the same thing as trying to make them have sex they don’t want.

The Cluster Structure of Genderspace

Tags

not feminism go away, ozy blog post, sex positivity, speshul snowflake trans

Categories are usually fuzzy. That is, when humans use a category, there are usually some members of the category who have all the traits you associate with that category, some members that have many of the traits, and some members where you have to make a judgment call about whether it counts or not.

The Cluster Structure of Thingspace provides several excellent and uncontroversial examples. For instance, think about birds. Robins and sparrows are very typical birds. Eagles are less typical than robins, but still very typical. Penguins are really fucking weird birds. And you have to make a judgment call about bats: for purposes of biology, a bat is not a bird, whereas for purposes of trying to decide which animals are kosher, a bat is a bird. You make the decision based on whether the more important bird trait is “related to dinosaurs” or “flies.”

Or think about mothers. A typical mother gives birth to and raises a baby who is genetically related to her. Less typical mothers include birth mothers, adoptive mothers, surrogate mothers, genetic mothers, lesbian partners of the mother who gave birth, and so on. A baby’s egg donor is still her mother in some ways– for instance, you’d want to look at the egg donor rather than the adoptive mother to figure out what the baby’s risk of getting a rare disease is– but she’s missing some very common mother traits like being pregnant with the child or raising it.

Gender is a very politicized topic. So it makes sense that while some people agree that whether bats are birds depends on whether you’re doing biology or theology, and that while penguins are birds you shouldn’t assume that they’re able to fly, this common sense goes out the window when you’re talking about gender. I am going to address two issues where poor reasoning about more and less central members of categories makes people deeply confused: biological sex and gender differences.

Biological Sex

Biological sex is actually a remarkably good classification system: something like 98% of humanity can be easily and unambiguously placed into one of two discrete categories, which has to be some kind of record. Of course, not everyone is a metaphorical robin. Eagles are quite common: men with gynecomastia and noticeable hip fat; women who can grow beards; women who have had hysterectomies; men who have had their testicles removed.

However, it all runs into trouble when we’re talking about transgender people (as well as intersex people, but I’m mostly going to focus on transness). People really, really want to insist that there is a single biological sex that we really are. They usually pick chromosomes as the deciding factor, perhaps because medical science is not currently able to change a person’s chromosomes. (I have seen people attempt to be intersex-inclusive by declaring “males” to be the ones with at least one Y chromosome and “females” the ones with no Y chromosome.) They then point out that you have to know what a person’s biological sex is for medical reasons and therefore we trans people are running around being special snowflakes by putting down our identified genders on medical forms.

Except there are actually a very small number of medical problems that are affected by sex chromosomes: for instance, whether you are XX or XY affects your risk of hemophilia or colorblindness; if your sex chromosomes are something other than XX or XY, you may be at risk of various health problems, depending on what your sex chromosomes are. It is usually possible to infer many traits from the fact that a person has XX chromosomes (well, in reality, we usually infer the fact that a person has XX chromosomes from their traits, because most people are not karyotyped). But trans people get biomedical interventions all the time.

For instance, a doctor might be concerned about prescribing a teratogen to someone who might be pregnant. In that case, what matters is whether the person is capable of getting pregnant (many trans men and some cis women are not). A doctor may need to decide whether to screen someone for breast cancer, in which case what matters is whether a person has breasts. Testosterone increases a trans man’s risk of high cholesterol, heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes, although probably not to the level that cisgender men have. And, of course, our unusual sexes present unique health issues: for instance, testosterone is a teratogen, which means that trans men who take testosterone have to be particularly careful about birth control use.

These are not theoretical issues. Trans people have been routinely denied sex-specific medical care, because insurance companies believe that there are men and there are women, and therefore there don’t exist any people who need both a prostate screening and breast cancer screenings. Intersex people even today receive cosmetic genital surgery as infants so that people don’t have to be disturbed by a person who doesn’t fit the categories very well.

The obvious solution to this issue is to say that whether a trans person’s sex is male or female depends on what question you’re asking. A trans woman on estrogen is male for the purpose of whether she should get prostate cancer screenings and female for the purpose of whether she should get breast cancer screenings. When thinking about his risk of high cholesterol, a trans man is probably best considered neither male nor female. We are bats, and you don’t have to have a firm position on whether or not we are birds.

Gender Differences

Men are more likely to use an ethic of justice, which emphasizes universal standards and impartiality. Women are more likely to use an ethic of care, which emphasizes a specific obligation to those you have interpersonal relationships with or those who are vulnerable to the consequences of your choices. The Cohen’s d of this difference (which is a measure of how different the two groups are from each other) is about 0.2.

This is a picture of a Cohen’s d of 0.2. (Picture comes from this excellent website.) It is genuinely difficult to tell that this is a picture of two bell curves instead of one. If you know someone is a man or a woman, it doesn’t tell you much of anything about whether they use an ethic of justice or an ethic of care.

Has that stopped anyone? No, it has not.

For instance, look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on feminist ethics, which includes an entire section on care-focused ethics which includes paragraphs like this:

Gilligan believes that Kohlberg’s methodology is male-biased. Its ears are tuned to male, not female, moral voices. Thus, it fails to register the different voice Gilligan claims to have heard in her study of twenty-nine women reflecting on their abortion decisions. This distinctive moral voice, says Gilligan, speaks a language of care that emphasizes relationships and responsibilities. Seemingly, this language is largely unintelligible to Kohlbergian researchers who speak the dominant moral language of traditional ethics—namely, a language of justice that stresses rights and rules.

Ah, yes, the distinctive moral voice of women. The one that sounds almost fucking exactly like the voice of men. That distinctive moral voice of women?

Putting known gender differences into the Cohen’s d chart generator is an instructive experience. For instance, here’s gender differences in masturbation and casual sex, respectively:

And here’s neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness/extroversion (the latter two have the same effect size), again in the order I listed:

Now, there are in fact some effect size charts that look like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. Here’s an example:

This is a picture of the difference in toy preferences at age three. I am not sure how useful this is for anyone who isn’t a toy marketer, but there you go. (Note that one-year-olds and five-year-olds both have less stark gendered toy preferences. Presumably male toddlers are from Mars, female toddlers are from Venus, and everyone else is from Earth.)

So what’s the takeaway here? (Besides “Ozy is fascinated with their new stats discovery,” of course.) The answer is that people are bad at categories. We learn facts about the typical man: for instance, he uses an ethic of justice, masturbates more, is okay with casual sex, is more introverted, is less neurotic, is more disagreeable, is less conscientious, and played with trucks but not dolls as a child. We then conclude from this that everyone we stick in the category “man” uses an ethic of justice and therefore we are perfectly justified in creating an entire subfield of ethics complaining about how the ethics of care is excluded because of sexism.

But that isn’t true! It is possible that people in a category are more likely to have a particular trait, but the size of this effect is not actually large enough for this to be useful information. In fact, in studies of gender differences, this is quite common!

While I’ve been picking on Carol Gilligan (and god is she an easy target to pick on), I think this kind of thought is actually more common among anti-feminists than it is among feminists.

Think about gender differences in permissive attitudes about casual sex. This is actually a fairly striking difference: about four-fifths of men have a more permissive attitude towards casual sex than the average woman does. (Of course, this might be caused by inborn tendencies, by cultural influence, or by a combination of both; you shouldn’t assume that a difference existing means it is biological.) You can see the effects of this difference clearly: for instance, it is generally easier for heterosexual women to have casual sex than it is for heterosexual men to have casual sex; gay men are more likely to have casual sex than lesbians are; there are essentially no full-service sex workers who target a solely female audience, presumably because women who want no-strings-attached casual sex rarely have to pay for it.

But there’s also a considerable amount of overlap: about seven-tenths of the two groups overlap. And that matters too! For instance, many people assume that casual sex must be a rapacious man taking advantage of an innocent woman who just wants love. But there are lots of women who like casual sex. Perhaps the women who have casual sex disproportionately come from the 20% of the female population who have more permissive attitudes about casual sex than the average man. In that case, we don’t have to be worried that hookup culture is harming women; it is merely catering to the desires of women who are a little unusual (eagles, not robins).

And I’m using a relatively stark gender difference, which would bias my case. Looking at something like neuroticism– where 65% of men are above the female mean, and there’s an 84% overlap– it’s hard to see much justification for an “essential masculine nature” or an “essential feminine nature.” Such reason is merely looking at robins and then assuming, in defiance of all the evidence, that they are the only kind of bird.

Book Post for February, Part One: Books Not About Parenting

Tags

diets cw, harry potter, not feminism go away, ozy blog post, PRECIOUS sexual energy, there is no justice and there is no judge

Fashionable Nonsense: I have conflicted feelings about this book! It consists mainly of quotes from Continental philosophers about math or science, followed by “this doesn’t actually make any sense”, “this is confusing the scientific concept of chaos with the colloquial meaning of chaos”, “none of these words are real math words”, “they mixed up ‘velocity’ and ‘acceleration'”, and “the reason fluid mechanics are hard to solve is not that people have a misogynist objection to fluid things”. They spend a lot of time bashing Lacan, which I always approve of.

To a certain extent, I feel like it’s not entirely fair to critique postmodernism for being an elaborate series of word games? That’s the thing it is. A bunch of clever people showing off how cool their wordplay is. Now, you can ask a bunch of questions about it like “why do people act like these word games are producing knowledge?” and “why is the government funding people to sit on their asses and play incomprehensible word games with each other?” But I feel like criticizing them for being word games without connection to reality is sort of missing the point.

That said, I completely agree that a cute analogy to some mathematical or scientific concept is not the same as “an argument” or “evidence” and mostly serves to give unwarranted scientific rigor to your half-assed speculations. Indeed, I often feel like shouting this to large segments of the rationalist community.

(Not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with making half-assed speculations– I do it all the time– but it’s bad form to make people feel they are all science-y when they’re not.)

I spent a lot of the chapter on Bruno Latour grousing to myself because, yeah, sure, Latour’s approach to sociology of science neglects that people might believe things because they are true, which is kind of an important part of science. But he can also write a coherent sentence! Sometimes he’s even funny! These things are not true of literally anyone else in the book Fashionable Nonsense (I guess sometimes Irigaray is funny but not, like, intentionally), and I think we should give Latour some credit for that.

Models: Attract Women Through Honesty: Finally, a PUA book that isn’t full of shit.

The basic thesis of Models is that the most important traits for a heterosexual man attempting to attract women are vulnerability and non-neediness. Non-neediness means that you care more about your opinion of you than people’s opinion of you in general and her opinion of you in specific. Vulnerability means that you are open about your tragic backstory, weird hobbies, embarrassing tastes, and other things that people might judge you for. These go together, because if a woman is like “ew! He likes bugling!” you’re not like “how can I survive if a woman does not approve of me?????” you’re like “*shrug* her loss.”

I think this is broadly accurate in terms of dating advice, although I really want to expand it to also apply to romances aimed at women. Vulnerability is right, but I feel like there are a lot of things you can say about Edward Cullen but “not needy” is not one of them. Maybe “at least one of not-neediness or murder”? When I brought this up on Tumblr people were like “Ozy, romance novels are different from real life”, which is true. But I think the primary difference is that some things which are bad in real life, like stalking and a history of committing murder, can be romantic in stories because you know that it is not going to end with Bella feeling creeped out and uncomfortable that she’s being stalked or with Edward Cullen murdering Bella Swan. I don’t think it’s true that women are attracted to needy men but understand that in real life there are negative consequences that don’t exist in fiction. There is clearly something different going on here and I want to understand it.

My favorite story from this book is when the author goes out with one of his player buddies to try to figure out The Secret Of Women. His player buddy gets drunk and starts shouting “can I pee in your butt?” at every attractive woman who walks by. Most of them are horrified, but one of them starts talking to him about rimjobs, and they go home together. A week later, the author tries saying “can I pee in your butt?” to women. He does not get laid.

The moral of the story is that subtext matters more than text, and if your subtext is “I like saying gross shit because I think it’s funny, that is who I am, I don’t care whether you laugh or flee in horror”, that is attractive, and if your subtext is “I have unlocked the magic secret to pussy, please fuck me now”, that is not.

Models argues that when someone rejects you, they’re actually doing you a favor. For instance, a lot of men complain about women rejecting them for being short. But if she rejects you for being short, she is either not attracted to you or extremely shallow. Why do you want to date a shallow person who’s not attracted to you? You should be grateful they kicked themselves out of your dating pool so you don’t have to. This is basically abundance mindset. It is really really hard to get people who can’t get laid to have abundance mindset, and I hope Models’s framing would actually work.

Women can be divided into the categories receptive, unreceptive, and neutral. Unreceptive women have boyfriends, are moving out of the country tomorrow, have taken a vow of celibacy, are lesbians, don’t share your interests, don’t share your values, think you’re ugly, etc. If you’re not certain if a woman is unreceptive, ask her out and then you’ll know. It is best to assume that you are never ever ever ever ever going to change the mind of an unreceptive woman; even if you can, it’s not worth the effort. Shrug it off and move on.  Receptive women initiate with you or enthusiastically reciprocate your flirting. If you have a receptive woman, you escalate and move things forward.

Neutral women aren’t really sure whether they’re receptive to you or not yet; they’re a tentative yes. For most men, most women are neutral when they first meet them. A lot of men assume the right thing to do with neutral women is to avoid offending them by sticking to boring jokes and talking about the weather. This is completely wrong. The longer a woman stays neutral, the more likely it is that she will become unreceptive, because you are boring. In fact, the goal is to get neutral women to become receptive or unreceptive as quickly as possible, through expressing your non-neediness and vulnerability. That way, if she doesn’t like what you’re selling, you don’t have to waste any more time on her, and if she does, then you’re not going to have fucked it up by talking about the weather instead.

There are three important factors in getting laid. Your lifestyle, status, and looks affect what percentage of women are initially receptive to you.  Your boldness, extroversion, and willingness to actually fucking ask women out affect how many women you meet in the first place. Your charisma, flirting ability, and “game” affect what percentage of neutral women become receptive. Models argues that all men who have problems with women have problems in at least one area; most have problems with two, and a few unlucky people have problems with all three.

Lifestyle. The most important principle of lifestyle is that like attracts like. If you want to attract well-educated and successful women with strong opinions on wine, putting your cap on backwards and saying “BROOOOOOOOOOO” a lot will not help. If your heart only beats for metalheads, Sisters of Mercy and Edgar Allen Poe is probably not the right choice. This also applies on a belief level: if you believe that women don’t enjoy sex or that women are all evil, guess what kind of women you’re going to attract. That said, there are also things you can do that will improve romantic success for basically everyone, such as proper grooming, wearing clothes that signal your personality and actually fit, exercising, weight loss, adopting masculine body language and vocal tones, finding unique hobbies that you like, and developing and confidently stating your opinions. (He doesn’t say this, but I would suggest only doing this if they fit with your honest, non-needy, vulnerable self. But I think most guys are not like “my best self is a person who wears clothes that don’t fit!”, they just don’t know how to buy clothes.)

In this section, Models claims that men in general tend to care more about objective indicators of beauty such as waist-to-hip ratio, boob size, and facial symmetry than about subjective indicators like what a woman’s self-presentation is signalling. Typical mind fallacy about this issue, he proposes, is what explains the popularity of weightlifting, complaining about your height, and penis pills. Is that true? Man, other people’s brains are extremely weird.

Approach Anxiety. Lots of men are afraid of things like talking to women, flirting with women, kissing women, and having sex with women. They will generally rationalize why, actually, they shouldn’t approach women: they might say that all women are shallow and terrible (which is silly, because it is far more likely that you are screwed up than that hundreds of thousands of people are all screwed up in exactly the same way), or that they don’t really care about getting a date, or that they need to learn more before they can start. You have to identify your patterns and do the things you’re anxious about anyway; it can help to tell someone who’ll ride your ass about it. He also recommends limiting porn and masturbation so that you’re so horny you’ll ignore your anxiety. Practice accepting your anxiety, recognizing that it’s normal, reframing it as the nervous excitement of being about to do something high-stakes that you’re good at, and not even bothering to hide it from women you’re attracted to. Do exposure therapy to your fear: begin by doing things you’re a little nervous of repeatedly until you are no longer nervous, then try something a little harder. Always err on the side of boldness: boldness polarizes women and turns those “maybes” into “yes” or “no”. Finally, when you are doing something unusual like asking a strange woman you just met out on a date, always acknowledge that it is unusual: for instance, you might say “excuse me, this is kind of random, but I thought you were cute and wanted to say hi.”

Flirting. Models claims that men always communicate literally and don’t do subtext. I have talked to several men in my life [citation needed] and this is absolutely not true. However, I can definitely buy that men who suck at flirting and are buying this book Models are bad at subtext. Anyway, flirting is all about subtext. The difference between teasing and insults is whether the subtext is “I like you so much I trust that you will understand I don’t really mean this” or “I hate you.”

Lots of men are afraid of being creepy when flirting. No one ever manages to 100% avoid creeping out anyone; there are always awkward situations and miscommunications. It happens, and it is not the end of the world. Creepiness is behaving in a way that makes women feel insecure sexually. You can do this by escalating too fast or by having a subtext that isn’t matched to your text (you’re asking her about the book she’s reading and staring at her tits).

When in doubt, the best pickup line is “Hey, I thought you were cute and wanted to say hi.” Don’t bother about worrying about trying to get women not to flake on you; if a woman really wants to sleep with you, she’ll make it happen. If Brad Pitt asked her out, she wouldn’t forget. Avoid movie dates and dinner dates; instead try museums, concerts, walks in interesting places, dance classes, nightclubs or grabbing a drink somewhere, as fits your style. Find a venue close to your house. Try to do multiple things on a date; it builds a sense of getting to know the person. There’s also a lot of stuff about flirting, signals women give, etc. but this review is already a million words long so I am not going into it.

The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption: Evangelical Christians made up an entirely fictional orphan crisis and then decided it was really important that they all adopt children to help end this orphan crisis that they just made up. Naturally, basic economics continues to apply: if you have millions of dollars’ worth of demand for orphans, the supply will magically appear. Parents in many developing countries put their children in orphanages because they cannot afford to feed them but continue to visit and be involved in their children’s lives; these children are often adopted. Many parents in developing countries don’t understand the Western idea of adoption and instead round it to local concepts, such as “being sent to live with a rich relative to be educated and eventually bring money back to your family.” Occasionally children are just stolen.

Domestic adoptions are also horrifying. Many crisis pregnancy centers don’t just coerce women into not having abortions; they also coerce women into giving their children up for adoption. Some actively lie to birth mothers, claiming that their open adoption is legally enforceable when it isn’t or that they can’t take the adoption back because they already signed the paperwork when in reality they could. Others tell women that they are incompetent mothers who will hurt their babies unless they give them up for adoption, or that single parenting is always wrong.

Utah is one of the most ‘pro-adoption’ states in the country. What this means is that, by virtue of consenting to sex, an unmarried man is considered to be aware that he might conceive a child who might be put up for adoption and his silence is assumed to be consent. A birth father does not have to be notified that his child exists; he has to figure it out himself and then fight for the right to take care of his own biological child. If the woman gives birth in Utah, Utahan law applies, and some adoption agencies will move the birth mother to Utah so that the birth father doesn’t have to be notified.

Part of the problem, I think, is that there are a lot of people who want to adopt babies (both infertile people and evangelical Christians who believe in the entirely fictional orphan crisis). But there aren’t a lot of people who want to go through nine months of pregnancy and then not take care of a baby afterward; most people either want to not go through the pregnancy at all (and thus have an abortion) or raise their child. Of course, foster care

Normally, I am not viscerally moved by ineffective altruism. But every time I saw a dollar sign in this book it upset me. $65,000 per child to bring a child from the Ukraine to meet prospective adoptive families equals 19 children dead of malaria. $8,000 per child for adoption fees equals two more dead children.

[The next item talks about the Holocaust.]

Quiverfull: Inside The Christian Patriarchy Movement: Not a lot of new information for me, but then I’ve been interested in Quiverfull stuff for a couple of years and have a lot of ex-Quiverfull friends and so on.

One of the theologians who really created the idea of God not wanting you to use birth control was also a Holocaust denier. Then he read one of his Holocaust denial books explaining that the gas chambers were too small to kill as many people as the Allies reported had died. Then it occurred to him that many Jewish people were children. So he made a gas-chamber-sized space with couches and cushions, called together his children, told them to stand in the mock gas chamber, noticed that they fit, and started crying. He then spent much of the rest of his life writing books debunking Holocaust denialism.

Doug Phillips, one of the more famous Quiverfull writers, is a Jewish convert to evangelical Christianity. Between this and Milo Yiannopolous pissing off the Daily Stormer [link goes to Neo-Nazi website], I have to ask: is there literally any intellectual movement that doesn’t have a Jewish person writing for it?

[The next item contains material about dieting and weight loss.]

Nutrition: A Very Short Introduction: Wow! Nutrition makes a lot more sense than I thought it did! For instance, I previously know that abdominal fat had more negative health consequences than fat on your butt and thighs does, but apparently there is a reason! Butt and thigh fat evolved for fat storage and is metabolically inactive, while abdominal fat evolved to maintain body temperature and as such is metabolically more active, stimulating the production of glucose (whether or not it is needed) and hormones that antagonize the action of insulin. The entire book is like this: explanations for facts you previously knew about but didn’t know there was an explanation for.

In terms of actionable advice, this book recommends eating lots of vegetables and fruits, not eating a lot of processed food or restaurant meals, exercising regularly, avoiding fad diets, and avoiding excessive consumption of alcohol. Which everybody knew about already, but on the other hand if a Very Short Introduction to Nutrition book was full of facts people didn’t know about I would be concerned about the effectiveness of our public health education programs.

I wish this book would have addressed in more detail the subject of why it is so difficult for people to maintain weight loss. The author briefly mentions that an appropriate diet for weight loss maintenance is the same as a sensible diet for people who have been thin all along, but I feel like this fails to answer important questions like how come my husband and I are both eating absurd quantities of post-Valentine’s on-sale candy and yet he’s the only one with a belly.

[Here there be spoilers for Shoebox Project.]

Shoebox Project: Like all the best Marauders fic, it is stealth tragedy. Not, of course, that anything about Shoebox Project is sad: Shoebox Project is commendably fluffy, happy, light, full of witty conversations and shenanigans, and completely missing anything approaching a ‘plot’. But every so often James mentions that he wants to have tons of gross old-person sex with Lily and he probably won’t even think it’s gross because that’s how much he loves her, and then you have to put the fanfic down and sob because of your overwhelming feelings about every one of the Marauders.

(A lot of people are mistaken about this, because the movies inexplicably cast reasonably-aged people to play James and Lily, but James and Lily were only 21 when they died.)

I appreciate that the pranking is treated as being fairly morally ambiguous, and that Remus is shown as having ethical qualms about it but going along because he has a hard time standing up to his friends.

Honestly, Shoebox Project probably has my favorite Peter Pettigrew ever. He feels like he’s stupider and less charming than all his friends (and that’s kind of true), he feels like none of his friends feel very much motivation to hang around with him and just do it out of inertia (and that’s kind of true), and he feels utterly neglected now that they’ve graduated from school (and that’s absolutely true). And he doesn’t even have an explanation for why everyone is neglecting him, because he doesn’t know about the Order of the Phoenix, and he certainly doesn’t know that Remus and Sirius are banging and too busy being wrapped up in new relationship energy to talk to anyone. He becomes a Death Eater because they pay attention to him and they validate his loneliness and they offer an explanation for his problems that isn’t “I’m kind of a terrible human being.” Very relatable. Someone give Peter Pettigrew a hug.

Shoebox Project is famously unfinished, but I actually feel like the ending is a satisfying ending? I mean, you can tell they didn’t intend it to be the ending, but having Peter Pettigrew’s start of darkness as the last chapter is actually a nice resolution. Shoebox Project is about the fun, fluffy part of the Marauders’ lives, and Peter Pettigrew starting to go evil is where you can draw the line and go “yep, it’s over now.”

God, remember pre-Racefail when there was a ton of Discourse about how we need to Write Men Like They’re Men and so we got a bunch of characters being Realistically Misogynist and calling each other girls all the time? Good times, good times. Feels super-weird reading it when I’m more used to reading modern fanfiction in which Remus and Sirius are more likely to have a conversation about how asexuals need to be included in the Wizard Gay-Straight Alliance.

On The Gender Wage Gap

Tags

not feminism go away, ozy blog post

People who don’t believe in the gender wage gap and people who do seem to agree on an awful lot.

Many people who think the gender wage gap doesn’t exist argue that the gap between male and female wages can be explained by other factors. Women are more likely to work in low-paying jobs and to work part-time. Women are more likely to leave the labor force to take care of children or old people. Women are more likely to seek out “family friendly” jobs that have better benefits and lower pay. When you account for all these factors, while outright wage discrimination still exists, it plays a relatively small role in why women earn less than men. (For more, here‘s a good Politifact article.)

All of the smart, well-informed feminists agree. For instance, NOW’s factsheet on pay equality talks about occupational segregation, cutting back on work to do caretaking, and the motherhood penalty. Barry Deutsch’s excellent article on the pay gap also talks about those factors. I got a gender studies degree; when we talked about the origins of the pay gap in class, we talked about caretaking and occupational segregation. While there are a lot of people who think the wage gap is purely a product of wage discrimination, they are mostly people who prefer slogans to statistics.

But I see a lot of conversations online arguing about the wage gap exists in which the participants don’t seem to realize that they agree on all the empirical facts. The anti-feminist leaves thinking that the feminist is using shitty statistical methodology to justify hating men and playing the victim, and the feminist leaves thinking that the anti-feminist is using shitty statistical methodology to justify ignoring the history of sexism against women, and they never actually argue about what they actually disagree about.

I think the actual point of disagreement between smart, well-informed anti-feminists and smart, well-informed feminists about the wage gap is whether or not occupational segregation, unequal distribution of caretaking, and so on are bad things.

My understanding of the anti-feminist position is that the wage gap is a product of women’s choices. Women want to be nurses, elementary school teachers, and social workers; women want to take care of their children and their parents. It is obviously unjust if someone is paying you less than they’d pay a man because you’re a woman, but it is not unjust to allow someone to make their own damn decisions about their own lives. If women have decided of their own free will that they care more about being able to take a day off when their kid is sick than they do about having a company car and a corner office, then there is nothing unfair or sexist about this reality. Many anti-feminists believe that these decisions are a product of innate female psychology; while of course many women have no interest in caretaking, they argue, women as a group tend to care more about taking care of others than men as a group do, perhaps for evolutionary reasons. Since caretaking professions tend to be paid less (or, in the case of parenting, to not be paid at all), they earn less money.

The feminist position is that these choices are not made in a vacuum. Of course, any individual woman can choose to become a nurse or a stay-at-home mother if she so pleases; neither I nor Barry nor the National Organization for Women has any interest in forcing women into careers they have no desire to pursue. But we don’t view the fact that this is the product of a choice to mean that there is no injustice, simply that the injustice is probably located somewhere else.

To pick an extreme example, consider a slight variant on the trolley problem. A runaway trolley is going to hit five people on the trolley tracks, and you have the ability to switch it so that it hits you instead. You do so. Would it make sense to say “there’s nothing unjust about this situation! It would have been unjust if someone had deliberately switched a trolley so that you would be hit by it, but you made the free and independent decision to be hit by the trolley yourself, so there is nothing morally wrong about this situation.” That would be silly. It is true that you have not experienced the injustice of a person deliberately hitting you with a trolley. But you may have experienced the injustice of poor trolley safety practices, or a philosophy-themed supervillain going about tying people to tracks in order to set up moral dilemmas, or similar. Your free choice in a situation does not mean the situation itself was okay.

Similarly, the injustice of the gender pay gap might be located somewhere else. Perhaps we should fix the mysterious great filter keeping women from going into STEM. Perhaps we should create special programs to encourage men to enter low-paying female-dominated professions like nurse or teacher, the same way we have these programs for women in high-paying male-dominated professions. (I actually think there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in that one, partially because a lot of feminists are opposed to affirmative action for men.) Perhaps we should fight the stigma that keeps many men from becoming primary caregivers of their children. Perhaps maternity leave causes women to bond with their babies and not want to leave them to go to work, and if we expanded paternity leave then more men would bond with their babies and not want to leave them to go to work. Perhaps daycare should be state-subsidized. Perhaps we should end the idea of “supermom” and raise awareness that if you aren’t a completely shitty parent your kids will probably turn out fine and you don’t have to feel mommy guilt about sticking your kid in front of Sesame Street instead of baking cookies with them. Perhaps reforms to the care of the elderly and the disabled would ease the burden on female caretakers. Perhaps we should buy boys more dolls.

The anti-feminist, naturally, will respond by pointing out:

(1) If you have this thoughtful, nuanced position, then how come you are spending so much time on ending wage discrimination, which is a tiny part of the problem? Why are you prioritizing the Paycheck Fairness Act instead of expanding paternity leave?

(2) Feminists tend to assume that “sexism” is the correct explanation for everything, and they should at least leave open the possibility that the wage gap is a product of legitimate preferences on the part of women that are not the product of sexism, whether internal or external.

And then we can have an interesting and productive discussion! Which we cannot have as long as both sides are confused about whether or not they agree on the empirical facts.

On Male Feminists

Tags

not feminism go away, ozy blog post

I really don’t care whether someone identifies as feminist.

A lot of other people seem to, though. That’s what’s behind the otherwise puzzling insistence on redefining feminism to mean “just thinking that men and women are equal!” (Which is ridiculous. If your definition of a gender-related movement includes both me and the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, it is not a very good definition.) It’s behind the surge of pop-feminist adulation every time a celebrity declares herself or himself to be a feminist, regardless of whether they’ve ever shown any interest in anti-sexist activism. It is behind the discourse about how all men should be feminists, and the related discourse about how no men should be feminists because the word ‘feminist’ is somehow women’s private woman-only space or something, because this is totally how language works.

So here’s my opinion: I don’t care.

There are lots of reasons a man might not identify as a feminist. It might be that he is alienated by racism, transphobia, ableism, rape apologism, or whorephobia in the feminist movement. It might be that he is a victim of oppositional sexism or of racism, ableism, or rape apologism influenced by his gender, and thus he finds that male privilege discourse doesn’t reflect his experiences. It might be that he experienced some of the toxic or frankly abusive dynamics that exist in some social justice spheres and now has a flinch reaction to anything remotely feminist-y. It might be that he personally is not particularly sexist, and he assumes that no other men are sexist either, because sexism is clearly awful, and therefore feminists must be blowing things out of proportion. It might be that he doesn’t have strong opinions on gender politics one way or the other. And, yeah, it might be that he’s a sexist dickbag.

So I don’t care about whether a guy calls himself a feminist.

Here are some questions I do care about the answer to: if you organize a big event, do you welcome children or make provisions for childcare? do you divide chores and childcare in a fair and equitable way that both you and your partner(s) are satisfied with? (would your partner agree?) do you consider housework and childcare to ‘not be real work’? have you set yourself up as the Transgender Police who is in charge of who gets to be transgender? are you a dick to sex workers? do you pressure pregnant people into getting abortions or into not getting abortions, or do you support their right to make this decision for themselves? do you respect people’s sexual boundaries? do you think everyone needs to know that you think [insert trait here] is disgusting and you personally would never have sex with someone like that? do you give women you know unsolicited criticism of their appearances? do you assume that women are ignorant about stereotypically male subjects (or that men are ignorant about stereotypically female subjects)? do you assume that a girl wants a doll and a boy wants a truck without asking about their toy preferences? do you understand how uteruses work? do you treat women you know like your mom, your secretary, a baby, or a fragile thing that needs to be protected? do you make fun of men who work in typically female professions or are the primary caregivers of children?

And so on and so forth.

Probably, as a group, men who identify as feminists are more likely than men who don’t identify as feminists to give the right answers to those questions. If nothing else, the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is probably giving the wrong answers, and thus weighing down the non-feminist side. But there are a lot of men who say all the right words about patriarchy and bell hooks, but in their private life act like the Laundry Fairy magically causes clean clothes to appear in their drawers. There are a lot of men in This Is What A Feminist Looks Like t-shirts who have no problem with guilting a woman into having an abortion she doesn’t want. And there are also a lot of men who don’t think much about feminism one way or the other– or even identify as anti-feminist– who do a lot of the really boring, unrecognized work of fighting sexism. Who make sure there’s childcare at an event. Who listen to expertise regardless of the gender of the expert. Who say “dude, she was talking” when a woman is interrupted.

And that shit’s the stuff that actually matters? Sadly, cute buttons about smashing the patriarchy have very little effect in smashing the patriarchy. What will smash the patriarchy is a bunch of individual people individually making the decision not to be sexist, and then doing that again and again, for the rest of their lives, until it isn’t even a decision anymore it’s just automatic. And that’s not something you have to identify as feminist to do.

Heteronormativity Hurts Straight People Too

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follow ozymandias271 for more sad gays, not feminism go away, ozy blog post

[content warning: slurs]

Homophobia has a tremendous effect on the lives of many heterosexual people.

In a lot of our culture, being gay is really really bad. Fortunately, we have become compassionate; even social conservatives, more often than not, will express some pity for the struggle that ‘same-sex-attracted’ people go through. But while people disagree about how this compassion ought to be expressed, there is a general consensus among straight people than gayness is a bad thing to be.

How that consensus negatively affects gay, lesbian, and bisexual people is obvious. But it also hurts straight people!

Fear of being gay is a powerful tool to police people into social conformity. I highly recommend the ethnography Dude, You’re A Fag, which is about how fear of being seen as gay is used to police boys into gender role conformity in a high-school context. Caring about clothes, failing to express appropriate attraction to women, not being interested in or good at sports, and caring too much about other men are all policed through the ‘fag’ discourse. (Seriously, though, read it, my summary doesn’t do it justice.)

One of the things I want to point out about the fag discourse is that the boys who use the word ‘fag’ articulate an anti-homophobia position. (This is true to my experience of high school as well.)

Jabes, a Filipino senior, told me, “I actually say it [fag] quite a lot, except for when I’m in the company of an actual homosexual person. Then I try not to say it at all. But when I’m just hanging out with my friends I’ll be like, ‘Shut up, I don’t want you hear you any more, you stupid fag.’ ” Similarly J. L. compared homosexuality to a disability, saying there was “no way” he’d call an actually gay guy a fag because “there’s people who are the retarded people who nobody wants to associate with. I’ll be so nice to those guys, and I hate it when people make fun of them. It’s like, ‘Bro do you realize that they can’t help that?’ And then there’s gay people. They were born that way.”

The thought process here is something like “being gay is bad (as intellectual disability is bad) and it is bad to be like gay people. Actual gay people can’t help it, so you should be nice to them and not rub it in their faces. But for you, a straight person, to be like a gay person is the worst thing.”

I do not think this thought process is reserved only for such homophobic environments as the average high school. Even in the San Francisco Bay Area, I notice this thought process. There are many straight people who would never be so gauche as to call someone a fag, but they still think, in their heart of hearts, that becoming gay would be a disaster.

I notice as well many straight people who legitimately don’t seem to think that way: they are only attracted to people of a certain gender, which is fine, and other people are attracted to people of a different gender or all genders or to no one at all, which is also fine, and if they happened to join a different category it might be inconvenient (for instance, if they were married), but it wouldn’t be in and of itself a bad thing. (That is different from being “secure in your heterosexuality”: being secure in your heterosexuality means being so sure you’re straight that you can do gay things, while these people simply don’t care whether they’re gay or not.) And I think that those people are, frankly, a lot happier.

For the most obvious example, not worrying about whether you’re gay or not opens up a lot of sexual horizons. I don’t just mean “you can hook up with boys if you happen to find a boy you’re attracted to,” either. It makes it a lot easier to date trans people, because straight men don’t have to worry that being attracted to a trans woman means they’re secretly gay, or that being attracted to a trans man also means they’re secretly gay, but in a different way this time. And they don’t have to have the long tedious freakout about whether pegging means they’re gay.

But I also feel like it opens up a lot of tremendous freedom to be gender-non-conforming. If you want, your wardrobe can contain eyeliner and skirts and bright colors! It is totally possible! (This is naturally an intersection with transmisogyny, but I’m sort of eliding transmisogyny in this post– people with a gender identity have a perfectly good reason to care whether or not they’re trans that has absolutely nothing to do with transmisogyny.)

Most important, I think, is expanding the ability of men to be friends with each other. A lot of straight men have a hard time having a deep, emotional connection with other men, because that would be gay; they have relatively shallow friendships which mostly revolve around shared hobbies, and they receive emotional support from their girlfriends or wives. Of course, if you like relatively shallow friendships, that’s fine. But a lot of men are quite lonely, and even the men that aren’t lonely are in a very fragile situation. What happens if your wife dies? What happens if your wife divorces you? All too often, that means they lose not only their closest friendship but also the only friendship in which they could talk about their feelings or process the experience of loss.

However, if you don’t care whether you’re gay or not, it doesn’t matter that having a close, intimate relationship with another man might be perceived as gay, because you don’t care about whether or not you’re gay. It just doesn’t come up as an issue. And then you have more capacity for friendship.

I want to make it clear that I don’t think that that sort of mindset is possible for most people outside of a supportive social environment. In practice, all straight people I have met who don’t care whether or not they’re straight have been in communities that are at least a quarter queer. I do not intend to blame the victim here. It is quite natural to avoid behavior that is seen as bad and punished by your community; those who manage not to internalize those attitudes are extraordinarily self-reliant and strong-willed. And if you know people will harass you for being gay, of course you’re going to avoid things that will make you be seen as gay.

I just want to point out that straight people should totally be on board with the project of ending homophobia. It helps them as much as it helps us.

Everyday Feminism Is Bad At Feminist Theory Again

Tags

not feminism go away, ozy blog post

[cw: descriptions of abuse, slurs]

There is a bad article on Everyday Feminism about masculinity again, and I’m complaining about it.

First: in my opinion, it is incredibly dangerous to talk about abuse as a normal thing that people typically do. Most people have never abused a partner. This is important because normalization of abuse is a common abusive tactic. One of the reasons people stay in abusive relationships is that they think “oh, well, all men are abusive. If I leave this guy who hits me, I’ll just find another guy who hits me– and I already know what sets this one off. There’s no point in leaving.” Normalization of abuse is also a tactic abusers use to justify abuse to themselves: they think “oh, everyone mouths those platitudes about respect in public, but in private every woman calls her husband a cunt and backhands him when he does something wrong– you have to keep men in line.” To counter this, we need to point out that while a lot of relationships are unhealthy and a lot of people deal with their feelings in suboptimal ways, most people are not abusive. Abuse is not the same thing as being a douchebag!

Second: I dislike Everyday Feminism’s conflation of masculinity and manhood. Not all men are masculine! Actually, I think the use of the word ‘masculine’ tends to conflate a whole bunch of different categories into one, and ought to be replaced with terms like “gender-conforming”, “male-socialized”, “identifying strongly with being a man”, or whatever else you would like to talk about. We can keep ‘masculine’ as a word for the burdensome social role.

It also seems unreasonable to me to discuss masculinity without talking about the work that has been done in men’s studies about the different kinds of masculinity. The masculinity of a poor black kid from the ghetto is different from the masculinity of an upper-middle-class white jock from suburbia, which in turn is different from the masculinity of a gay autistic man. All of these have very different relationships to violence, emotions, and destructiveness. The author specifies “cis masculinity”, but ignores other dimensions on which masculinity can differ.

That’s particularly important when you talk– as this article does– about masculinity as fundamentally oppressive and violent. Depending on what you mean by ‘masculinity’ and on how radical feminist I’m feeling today, I probably agree with you! Masculinity, cross-culturally, does have a current of violence: sometimes overt, sometimes hidden, but always present. And the male gender role and the behavior it leads to causes tremendous harm to men, women, and nonbinary people. But it is extremely important whenever you talk about the oppressiveness of masculinity to be completely clear that you are not calling all gender-conforming men oppressive and violent. Most gender-conforming men are not violent. And gender-conforming men are victims of sexism as well: the limiting nature of the male gender role affects them. By conflating manhood and masculinity, this author insults the very people he is trying to reach out to.

Third: I do support the project of men figuring out the ways in which they are complicit in the harm caused by patriarchy. I also support the project of women and nonbinary people figuring out the ways in which they are complicit in the harm caused by patriarchy. As it turns out, women and nonbinary people are sexist too. Just because you are harmed by a system does not mean you play no role in upholding it.

But this article adopts entirely the wrong approach. I want men to become less sexist because I think it will help other people, yes. But I also want them to become less sexist because I think it will help them. It hurts people to have to repress their emotions. It hurts people to feel like their sexuality is innately violent, innately predatory, and that they must repress it to keep from harming others. It hurts people to not have any close, intimate friendships outside of their romantic relationship. It hurts people– most of all– to wind up in situations where they must either be violent or become a victim of violence, a situation all-too-common among marginalized men.

I want male feminists to be selfish. An unselfish male feminist is likely to stop once he’s done enough that he can salve his ego, or become burned out because of how much patriarchy there is to fight, or seek his rewards in being the Good Man, the man who Gets It, the ones who gets adulations from all the cool feminists and is free to mock any woman who disagrees. A male feminist who sees that feminism is benefiting him personally will actually do the work. He has motivation.

Fourth: I disagree that much of this allegedly common behavior is common. I have a firm policy of not spending time with people who lie to me repeatedly, or call me names, or treat me poorly in order to keep me wrapped around their finger, or who yell at me, or who refuse to listen to my ‘no’, or who violate my privacy, or who limit my interaction with other friends, or who refuse to take my viewpoints and needs into account. So far, this does not seem to have resulted in me joining a lesbian feminist commune. In fact, most of my community is male!

Now, it is possible that my friends are this odd little corner of perfectly nice men and all the other men are running around lying to their partners, violating their privacy and boundaries, and calling them nasty names. Certainly there is a significant subset of the population that is doing so. But at least from my perspective the men who are that cruel to their partners are a minority.

Saying “all men struggle with urges to be abusive” is bad in a couple different ways. For one thing, it’s extraordinarily insulting to men who aren’t abusive and who have no desire to be abusive. Some men who are particularly prone to guilt issues may wind up hating themselves for being abusive, even though they have never done anything abusive. Other men may have a difficult time setting boundaries or standing up to their controlling partners because they’re afraid that that makes them abusive; after all, abuse happens to people of all genders, and “I’m not abusive! You’re the real abuser!” is a common abusive tactic.

Even if you don’t care about hurting men, this discourse lets abusers off the hook. If not abusing people is a difficult process of unlearning that all cis men struggle with and very few have completed, then it’s not that blameworthy to call your wife a cunt. After all, all cis men want to do it! It’s certainly not good, but it’s understandable giving in to temptation. On the other hand, if not abusing people is a basic expectation that the vast majority of people are fully capable of achieving, then when you call your wife a cunt, you are doing something exceptionally bad, something most men do not do and are not tempted to do.

Fifth: because this is an Everyday Feminism article, the first suggestion on how one can become less of an abuser is ‘eliminate violent and oppressive language,’ a section in which the word ‘bitch’ is called ‘the b word’, as if we are all five years old and afraid of having our mouths washed out with soap. Look, guys, I occasionally use the word ‘bitch.’ It’s a satisfying word. Has a good mouthfeel. It turns out there is nothing about the word ‘bitch’ that means you have to abuse anyone.

Of course, it is a bad idea to call your partner a stupid bitch. (Unless you happen to enjoy insulting each other, and this is a mutually agreed upon flirting or conflict resolution strategy that improves both of your lives.) But switching to saying “you foolish asshole!” doesn’t actually improve the situation. The problem is not the language you use while insulting your partner. The problem is that you’re insulting your partner.

Finally: I don’t know what it means to say that a lot of male friendships, instead of being transgressive, “reify patriarchy.” To reify means to treat an abstract concept as if it is a concrete thing. I have no idea how a friendship could do that. Do you, perhaps, mean “is patriarchal”?

Quotes From MRAs That Will Make You Rethink Trusting Feminists

Tags

not feminism go away, ozy blog post

[content warning: misandry, misogyny, violence against penises, abuse]

The comments of my last post contained several people who were like “Ozy, you are excusing feminists! You would never write a post like this about MRAs!” To which I say: challenge fucking accepted.

As far as I can tell, the genre of “two dozen out-of-context quotes without sources or anything” is not particularly popular among feminists, so instead I had to settle for this article, which doesn’t even have quotes! It is Things That MRAs did! Most of them have links! This is annoying to me.

Three items from this list have been removed because their original source is a transcriptless video, and I have auditory processing disorder. If someone in the comments wishes to provide a transcript, I’d be happy to edit it to add them in.

No Hymen, No Diamond. I have not been able to determine whether this is MRAs, redpillers, or just some trolls fucking shit up; however, the virginity of women is not characteristic of MRA thought and is very characteristic of redpiller thought. Since (as you’ll see later) this listmaker seems extremely confused about the difference between MRAs and redpillers, I suspect that I can blame this one on redpillers.

Mad Max: Fury Road is feminist propaganda. I was going to point out that this site was Return of Kings, which is generally a redpiller website, but the author of the piece, Captain Capitalism, identifies as an MRA. Anyway, this is an extraordinarily silly essay and Mad Max: Fury Road is not particularly feminist, unless you think “has female characters that do shit” and “thinks sex slavery is bad” makes something feminist propaganda. I am pleased to discover that MRAs can have media criticism as bad as feminist media criticism.

Men Will Have Their Penises Severed At All-Female Comedy Festival. A man protested the “All Dick, No Jane” all-female comedy festival by saying that all men would have their penises severed on sight. This is clearly what is technically referred to as ‘a joke’. His position that an all-female comedy festival is exclusionary of men certainly seems prima facie plausible, but perhaps falls victim to the objection that all-male comedy festivals already exist, they are just not labeled as such.

Free Self-Defense Classes For Women Are Sexist. Well… yes? While women may be disproportionately likely to be victims of sexual assault, men are disproportionately likely to be victims of other kinds of assault— which may also be traumatizing. According to the article, there is a reasonable case to be made that free self-defense classes for women only are illegal gender discrimination. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for an organization to criticize something that is potentially illegal.

It’s Hard To Blame The Iowa Mall Shooter. This consists of quotes from The Red Pill. The Red Pill is not an MRA subreddit. The MRA subreddit is called– and I am sure this will be a shock to everyone– r/mensrights. Many redpillers believe that MRA is a bullshit waste of time.  The men’s rights movement is about advocating for men to have equal rights and to not face sexism; the red pill is about men’s sexual strategy. These are two different things.

Feminists Define Rape To Exclude Male Victims. Well, uh, feminists did define rape to exclude male victims. That is a thing that feminists definitely did. The article linked is a pretty good exploration of the way that male victims of rape are ignored by society. The only point I would criticize it on is that it sort of gives the impression that this is all feminism’s fault– in reality, pre-feminism definitions of rape were even worse (the FBI’s current definition of ‘rape’ defines it as penetration, but before feminist activism the FBI defined ‘rape’ as a crime that could only happen to women). While feminist sexism and rape apologism is shameful and “about as bad as the rest of society” is not exactly something to brag about, I do think that’s important to note.

Rape Is A Natural Part of Human Evolution. A Natural History of Rape is by Craig Palmer, an anthropologist who is– once again– not a freaking MRA. While I have not read the book and do not have an opinion on the quality of its scholarship, talking about the anthropological and evolutionary basis of rape is hardly misogynist– it has been a thing feminists do going back to Brownmiller’s Against Our Will. Claiming that rape is a product of human evolution is not mutually exclusive with it being “disgusting act perpetrated by meatheads who can’t take no for an answer or psychologically damaged garbage people” (thanks, by the way, as a psychologically damaged garbage person who would never rape anyone). All behaviors are in a certain sense products of human evolution: after all, we evolved to have the capacity to build skyscrapers and post cat pictures on Tumblr, even though there is not a gene for those behaviors and they were not directly selected for. Even if rape is an adaptation that increases the inclusive genetic fitness of rapists, that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. Evolution is ruthless. Nature includes infanticide, murder, animals eating each other alive, and (yes) rape, all of which increase the inclusive genetic fitness of the individuals that practice them, and all of which are bad. For nearly all people, morality is not based on whether an action gives you more grandchildren than you would have otherwise.

MRAs Call For A Rape Accuse-A-Thon. This post appears to be satire. I do not believe that they are actually accusing her of rape; they’re saying, “look, you guys say to believe the victim, but it’s very easy to make false accusations, so you should be more skeptical”. It can certainly be criticized for being uncivil, but I am not sure that one can consistently rule out all uncivil activism as unethical.

Women Have NEVER Been Systematically Oppressed. While the manifesto does appear to ignore the history of sexism against women, some of their complaints are perfectly reasonable (the draft, receiving sympathy when emotional, mistreatment of abused men). Others are pedestalization, which tends to harm women, but which appear to be more harmful to men to a cursory look (“snips and snails and puppydog tails”, chivalry, paying on dates, protection from the opposite sex). These kids clearly have their hearts in the right place and need a good gender studies class more than they need to be mocked by Jezebel.

Gamergate Is Not Hostile To Women. I’m tempted to go “not MRA” on this one as well, but I feel like at least it’s activism against sexism against men which concentrates on feminism, which is closer than the rest of this list, and anyway “not an MRA” is a boring thing to keep saying. Anyway, I don’t have an opinion on the object-level issue of whether gaming culture is hostile to women, but “men are harassed online more than women” is a thing that some people believe in good faith. Also, as best as I can tell, the only time Gamergate in specific being hostile to women comes up is when Yiannopoulos is saying that Anita Sarkeesian is deliberately causing Gamergate to be hostile to her for personal gain, which sort of implies that Gamergate is hostile.

Women Shouldn’t Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. In the linked article, Torgerson does not say anything about whether women should write SFF or not. Instead, Torgerson says that he wants war stories, space opera, and knights battling dragons, instead of stories where orcs are the good guys, transgender socialists fight evil megacorps, or it is suddenly revealed that the heroes are the bad guys at the climax. One can certainly question Torgerson’s taste, but he never says anything about the identities of authors. Is the author of this list intending to imply that women must write about sexism and cannot write about pulpy sci-fi? Indeed, it would be extraordinarily strange if Torgerson thought women shouldn’t write pulpy sci-fi, because the Sad Puppies slate includes multiple women.

(I realize this is a tangent, but whenever Sad Puppies come up I feel the need to point out that Larry Correia has endorsed the “every character is trans until proved otherwise” school of literary interpretation, a fact which greatly improved my experience of reading the Grimnoir Chronicles.)

No Means Yes. Roosh V is not an MRA. Roosh V thinks that MRAs are sexual losers. You would think this wouldn’t be difficult to tell, because Roosh V is criticizing MRAs in the very post you’re linking to prove he’s a rape apologist. Points for linking to one of the actual Roosh V rape apologist posts instead of the satire ones, though.

Manspreading Is A Biological Need. I cannot believe I am having an opinion about ‘manspreading’, which is the dumbest made-up fictional nonexistent issue on God’s green earth. Anyway, banning ‘manspreading’ on public transit seems somewhere between a useless symbolic gesture and a really fucking bad idea, but this guy’s opinion that men have to spread their legs because biology also seems kind of silly. I have personally observed many men keep their legs closed.

Don’t Come To Our Websites If You Don’t Want Us To Kill You. This appears to be an accurately sourced, in context quote. Threatening to kill women who sign up for the ‘Manbook’ website is, indeed, batshit.

The Affordable Care Act Should Be More Focused On Men. This is a 100% reasonable complaint? Of course the ACA should cover vasectomies if it covers tubal ligations, and it’s shameful that it doesn’t? (Covering condoms is a bit more difficult, as they’re generally over-the-counter, and I don’t think female condoms are covered either.) I am genuinely puzzled about why anyone thought that was a good idea. In addition, while the article claims STI screening is covered for everyone, as best as I can tell that’s not the case: it’s covered for high-risk men and for all women. I can imagine justifications for that policy, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to be upset about it.

Women Don’t Belong In Ghostbusters. I’ve been generally cutting this list some slack because of lack of consensus about who counts as a real MRA theorist, but seriously. Every movement has at least two people who say dumb things on Twitter; the existence of a couple dumb tweets made by members of a movement about a topic does not say anything about the movement as a whole.

October Is Now Bash A Bitch Month. It is really a remarkable thing to do to quote out of context an article you are linking to so that people can check for themselves whether it is out of context. In case you’re wondering, the article is declaring October the month in which men who are physically abused by women hit them without worrying whether it would make them the real abuser to defend themselves against their abuser. This is intended to point out the worrying way in which women physically abusing men is normalized and treated as no big deal. I have absolutely no problem with people of any gender violently defending themselves against people who are currently attacking them, and am somewhat concerned about people who do. Also, it’s “Bash A Violent Bitch”. Like, come on, at least the other list used ellipses when it made disingenuous quotes.

Quotes From Feminists That Will Make You Rethink Trusting Men’s Rights Activists

Tags

my issues with anti sj let me show you them, not feminism go away, ozy blog post

[Content warning: description of rape, misandry, misogyny.]

Occasionally, lists of “horrible feminist quotes” go around the Internet. Inevitably, these quotes turn out to be misrepresentations, quotations out of context, or simply sourceless. I have been increasingly annoyed by this and thus I have identified a representative list and decided to fact-check them.

Anti-Marriage Quotes In General 

I was repeating myself a lot, so I decided to just say this bit once.

In 1979, Louisiana was the last US state to repeal its “head and master” laws, which permitted the husband to have the final say regarding all household decisions and jointly owned property without his wife’s knowledge or consent. In 1993, marital rape became illegal in all states of the US; in many states well into the twenty-first century, nonviolent marital rape continued to be legal, and marital rape continued to have lighter punishments, shorter reporting periods, or both compared to nonmarital rape. Even today, South Carolina has not criminalized marital rape without excessive force or violence. In many parts of the world, marriage legally requires consummation and a marriage without an act of sexual intercourse is invalid. That is, the state requires one person to have sex with another specific person– regardless of their opinion on the matter– in order to be validly married.

You can find a lot of quotes that say that feminism should focus on attacking marriage, that feminism requires the breakdown, of the nuclear family, that marriage is slavery, or that the foundation of marriage is legalized rape. However, nearly all such quotes come from a time in which it was perfectly legal for a man to hold down his sobbing wife and have sex with her as she begged him to stop. It seems to me this context makes these quotes somewhere between “understandable hyperbole” and “a reasonable, rational description of the facts on the ground.”

Specific Quotes

“As long as some men use physical force to subjugate females, all men need not. The knowledge that some men do suffices to threaten all women. He can beat or kill the woman he claims to love; he can rape women…he can sexually molest his daughters… THE VAST MAJORITY OF MEN IN THE WORLD DO ONE OR MORE OF THE ABOVE.” An extremely clever use of ellipses in this quote by Marilyn French. The full quote:

As long as some men use physical force to subjugate females,all men need not.  The knowledge that some men do suffices to threaten all women.  Beyond that, it is not necessary to beat up a woman to beat her down.  A man can simply refuse to hire women in well-paid jobs, extract as much or more work from women than men but pay them less, or treat women disrespectfully at work or at home.  He can fail to support a child he has engendered, demand the woman he lives with wait on him like a servant.  He can beat or kill the woman he claims to love, he can rape women, whether mate, acquaintance, or stranger; he can rape or sexually molest his daughters, nieces, stepchildren, or the children of a woman he claims to love.  The vast majority of men in the world do one or more of the above.

This seems to me to be a quite reasonable statement. I certainly know quite a lot of men who have failed to support their children, demanded to be waited on, or extracted labor from women without paying them equally; since the world includes many, many places in which sexism is far worse than it is in the San Francisco Bay Area, those places raise the average. (How many men in Saudi Arabia do you think want their wives to wait on them like a servant? More or less than ninety percent?)

“My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don’t even need to shrug. I simply don’t care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don’t matter.”–  This is from the novel The Women’s Room. It is generally considered to be poor form to present quotes from fictional characters as if they represented the considered viewpoints of their authors.

“All patriarchists exalt the home and family as sacred, demanding it remain inviolate from prying eyes. Men want privacy for their violations of women… All women learn in childhood that women as a sex are men’s prey.”– Marilyn French. I have not been able to find this quote in Marilyn French’s work; however, it seems like the sort of thing she would say. This does not seem totally unreasonable to me, however. The “all” is perhaps inaccurate, but I do recall learning in childhood that I might be raped as an adult unless I learned self-defense techniques, never walked alone at night, and watched my drink, and I do not think this is an uncommon female experience. And it is a common feminist critique that a norm of not airing one’s dirty laundry provides cover for abusers.

“All men are rapists and that’s all they are.”– Marilyn French. Again, this is from the fictional novel Women’s Room.

“We live, I am trying to say, in an epidemic of male violence against women.”– Katha Pollitt. The source is here; in context, she is clearly not saying all or even most men commit violence. Her article is perhaps blameworthy for not noticing that we also live in an equally tragic epidemic of male violence against men.

“All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman.”– Catherine MacKinnon. According to Wikiquote, this is a false attribution. While MacKinnon believes that sex and rape are difficult to distinguish, this is a belief that is also common among many of the people spreading this quote (namely anyone who believes that people can rape others by mistake or that saying “no” without meaning it without a safeword is a common part of sex). As a general heuristic, I recommend that any time a person quotes Andrea Dworkin or Catherine MacKinnon, you Google the quote; nearly always, it turns out to be misrepresented in some tremendously important way.

“I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He’s just incapable of it.”– Barbara Jordan. I have tracked down a source which claims she said this at the Leadership 2000: Investing In Our Future conference, but I have not been able to locate a transcript or any further information about the conference or the context of the sentence. I feel that, whether or not she said it, it’s probably wise to use better-sourced quotes.

“The traditional flowers of courtship are the traditional flowers of the grave, delivered to the victim before the kill. The cadaver is dressed up and made up and laid down and ritually violated and consecrated to an eternity of being used.”– Andrea Dworkin. Context. To be honest, I am not certain why the person quoted this sentence when they could have instead quoted, “Night licenses so-called romance and romance boils down to rape: forced entry into the domicile which is sometimes the home, always the body and what some call the soul.” Anyway, this is completely fair and Andrea Dworkin is batshit.

“The media treat male assaults on women like rape, beating, and murder of wives and female lovers, or male incest with children, as individual aberrations…obscuring the fact that all male violence toward women is part of a concerted campaign.”– Marilyn French. Context. This is my favorite subgenre of quote, the ellipse that elides half a page. For the record, the thing that obscures the fact that all male violence against women is part of a concerted campaign is that statistics are not kept on male violence against women as a whole, not anything about the media. I don’t mean to point this out to be like “it completely changes the meaning of the quote!”– it doesn’t– but what kind of lazy-ass person do you have to be to not just quote the sentence that your checkmate-feminists line is in?

“Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.”– Germaine Greer. In context, means the exact opposite of what the out-of-context quote is going for and is actually pretty anti-sexism-against-men:

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release. The problem of recidivism ought to have shown young men like John Greenaway just what sort of a notion security is, but there is no indication that he would understand it. Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life. Human beings are better equipped to cope with disaster and hardship than they are with unvarying security, but as long as security is the highest value in a community they can have little opportunity to decide this for themselves.

“Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometimes gain from the experience.”–Catherine Comin. Source. This is obviously a reprehensible quote, but the assistant dean of student life at Vassar is not exactly a prominent feminist thinker.

“Men renounce whatever they have in common with women so as to experience no commonality with women; and what is left…is one piece of flesh a few inches long, the penis. The penis is the man; the man is human; the penis signifies humanity.”–Andrea Dworkin. Source. In context, Andrea Dworkin’s claim is that boys recognize that being a woman under patriarchy really fucking sucks, and therefore choose to emulate other men; she points out that this is perfectly natural and girls would become men if they could. This process of emulation involves cutting themselves away from their own humanity. Andrea Dworkin herself is never particularly compassionate towards men, and can be faulted for her lack of sympathy towards men’s position here.

“You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.”– Catherine MacKinnon. In context, this quote is clearly part of a vivid description of sexual abuse which is obviously not intended to refer to every woman who exists. MacKinnon’s description is intended to help pro-porn men understand the anti-porn feminist position through vividly putting them in anti-porn feminist shoes, and I feel like that is praiseworthy.

“Man-hating is everywhere, but everywhere it is twisted and transformed, disguised, tranquilized, and qualified. It coexists, never peacefully, with the love, desire, respect, and need women also feel for men. Always man-hating is shadowed by its milder, more diplomatic and doubtful twin, ambivalence.”–Judith Levine. While I could not find the context of the quote online, it appears to be from Levine’s My Enemy, My Love, a book which comes to the conclusion that man-hating is bad and people shouldn’t do it and that patriarchy is not going to change unless people stop hating men.

“Men’s sexuality is mean and violent, and men so powerful that they can ‘reach WITHIN women to fuck/construct us from the inside out.’ Satan-like, men possess women, making their wicked fantasies and desires women’s own. A woman who has sex with a man, therefore, does so against her will, ‘even if she does not feel forced.'”–Judith Levine. This is another quote from My Enemy, My Love, and it is astonishingly disingenuous:

In the spring of 1987, a friend gave me six photocopied, stapled-together pages from a group calling itself A Southern Women’s Writing Collective: Women Against Sex (WAS). It was a manifesto, written in hermetic language and tortuous syntax, as if transcribed from a middle-of-the-night brawl between pixilated philosophy students. But its tone was ferocious, and the world it depicted was one of terror and rage, male conquest and female surrender.

In WAS’s world, men’s sexuality is mean and violent, and men so powerful that they can ‘reach WITHIN women to fuck/construct us from the inside out.’ Satan-like, men possess women, making their wicked fantasies and desires women’s own. A woman who has sex with a man, therefore, does so against her will, ‘even if she does not feel forced.’

That is literally the OPPOSITE of what Judith Levine believes.

“‘To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo.”– Valerie Solanas. While Valerie Solanas did indeed say that, I think it is quite reasonable to not hold the beliefs of an attempted murderer against feminism as a whole.

The next two quotes are about advocates of repressed memory theory calling the False Memories Society child molesters. I am not sure what this has to do with misandry in feminism, as opposed to pseudoscience in feminism; as far as I am aware, the False Memory Society includes many women among its ranks.

“The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness…can be trained to do most things.”– Jilly Cooper. The author claims that Jilly Cooper was a SCUM member, which does not appear on her Wikipedia page and seems rather unlikely given her career as an author of silly romance novels. Jilly Cooper does not, in fact, appear to identify as a feminist: when asked if she was anti-feminist, she said, “I’m not anti women doing brilliantly and running the country. I loved Mrs Thatcher, I adored her; she was very very nice to me and one tends to take as one finds. I’m not anti-feminist. I just think stridency is unattractive. I hate bullies and people being aggressive and horrible to each other. Men have had such a pasting, they seem to get so sad.” The quote is from a humor book, Men and Supermen, and does not appear to be a serious belief about men. While I agree it is bad for anyone to write books of sexist humor, I would like to point out that feminists seem to be much less likely to write books of sexist humor than anyone else, and perhaps this list-writer’s time could be better used criticizing Dave Barry.

“Women have their faults / men have only two: / everything they say / everything they do.” Apparently a popular feminist graffiti. I am not sure what makes this particularly feminist, any more than me singing “girls go to college to get more knowledge, boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider!” in third grade was feminist.

“I feel what they feel: man-hating, that volatile admixture of pity, contempt, disgust, envy, alienation, fear, and rage at men. It is hatred not only for the anonymous man who makes sucking noises on the street, not only for the rapist or the judge who acquits him, but for what the Greeks called philo-aphilos, ‘hate in love,’ for the men women share their lives with–husbands, lovers, friends, fathers, brothers, sons, coworkers.”– Judith Levine, My Enemy, My Love. Judith Levine does not think that misandry is a good thing. She is admitting honestly that she feels misandry. It is somewhat douchey to take people’s admissions of their flaws which they are working to overcome and be like “see! See! Evil!”

“There are no boundaries between affectionate sex and slavery in (the male) world. Distinctions between pleasure and danger are academic; the dirty-laundrylist of ‘sex acts’…includes rape, foot binding, fellatio, intercourse, auto eroticism, incest, anal intercourse, use and production of pornography, cunnilingus, sexual harassment, and murder.”– Judith Levine. Wow, this guy REALLY hates Judith Levine, for some reason. Anyway, this is talking about the Women Against Sex document, which Levine disagrees with. It includes a comment that she is summarizing the WAS document, but I am sort of confused by the person didn’t just quote the document in the first place. Why are feminist quotes about how misandry is bad on your list of feminist misandric quotes?

“All men are good for is fucking, and running over with a truck.”– Apparently a quote made by a feminist administrator to Richard Dinsmore. I have found an article about Mr. Dinsmore’s case which does not include the quote; the suit appears to be about whether his due process and free speech rights were violated when he was fired for harassment, not about anything a feminist administrator did or did not say to him.

“I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig.”– Andrea Dworkin. Once more, this is from the fictional, fictional novel, which is fiction, Mercy by Andrea Dworkin.

“”Men are rapists, batterers, plunderers, killers; these same men are religious prophets, poets, heroes, figures of romance, adventure, accomplishment, figures ennobled by tragedy and defeat. Men have claimed the earth, called it “Her”. Men ruin Her. Men have airplanes, guns, bombs, poisonous gases, weapons so perverse and deadly that they defy any authentically human imagination.”– Andrea Dworkin. Source. This is from the same chapter as the quote I’d discussed earlier about boys separating themselves from their humanity to become men. This quote is describing how masculinity is constructed in a sexist society.

“On the Left, on the Right, in the Middle; Authors, statesmen, thieves; so-called humanists and self-declared fascists; the adventurous and the contemplative, in every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom.”–Andrea Dworkin. Source. Again, from the same chapter, and I think in context relatively clear:

Men develop a strong loyalty to violence. Men must come to terms with violence because it is the prime component of male identity. Institutionalized in sports, the military, acculturated sexuality, the history and mythology of heroism, it is taught to boys until they become its advocates–men, not women. Men become advocates of that which they most fear. In advocacy they experience mastery of fear. In mastery of fear they experience freedom. Men transform their fear of male violence into a metaphysical commitment to male violence. Violence itself becomes the central definition of any experience that is profound and significant. So, in Love’s Body, philosopher Norman O. Brown, a sexual radical in the male system, posits that “[l]ove is violence. The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, from hot love and living hope.” In the same text, Brown defines freedom in the same way: “Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.” Swim in male culture; drown in the male romanticization of violence. On the Left, on the Right, in the Middle; authors, statesmen, thieves; so-called humanists and self-declared fascists; the adventurous and the contemplative; in every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom. Pacifist males are only apparent exceptions: repelled by some forms of violence as nearly all men are, they remain impervious to sexual violence as nearly all men do.

“I was, in reality, bred by my parents as my father’s concubine… What we take for granted as the stability of family life may well depend on the sexual slavery of our children. What’s more, this is a cynical arrangement our institutions have colluded to conceal.” –Sylvia Fraser. Sylvia Fraser has recovered memories of her father abusing her. I am not sure what is objectionable about a woman who sincerely believes that she was raped by her father saying that she was. I have not been able to find context on the last two sentences and I have no idea what she’s going for.

“We are taught, encouraged, moulded by and lulled into accepting a range of false notions about the family. As a source of some of our most profound experiences, it continues to be such an integral part of our emotional lives that it appears beyond criticism. Yet hiding from the truth of family life leaves women and children vulnerable.” –Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women. This appears to be from this report, which I have been unable to find online to figure out the context of the quote. In the absence of context, it is perfectly plausible that “the truth of family life” is “while most families are happy, some are touched by violence or rape.”

“I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.”– Robin Morgan. Source. In context, Morgan is clearly separating hatred of men as a group from hatred of all men, and points out the existence of men who are traitors to their class. However, this can still be considered fairly misandrist, as men may object to being considered ‘one of the good men’. (Although do consider the tremendous progress that feminism has made since Morgan wrote.)

“I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire.”– Robin Morgan. Source. This is actually a pretty common feminist definition of rape– it’s basically enthusiastic consent/”if it isn’t fuck yes, it’s fuck no”– and the quote is not particularly out of context. (She does later clarify that she means ‘initiator in tone, if not in action’– I’m not precisely sure what that means, but given my knowledge of other radical feminist writing I’m guessing that she doesn’t mean to say that women who enthusiastically have sex with men are raped.)

“And let’s put one lie to rest for all time: the lie that men are oppressed, too, by sexism–the lie that there can be such a thing as ‘men’s liberation groups.’ Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group, specifically because of a ‘threatening’ characteristic shared by the latter group–skin, color, sex or age, etc. The oppressors are indeed FUCKED UP by being masters, but those masters are not OPPRESSED. Any master has the alternative of divesting himself of sexism or racism–the oppressed have no alternative–for they have no power but to fight. In the long run, Women’s Liberation will of course free men–but in the short run it’s going to cost men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily. Sexism is NOT the fault of women–kill your fathers, not your mothers.”– Robin Morgan. Source. This does seem to be a fairly quoted and expressing a common feminist belief (albeit one I happen to disagree with in the case of men).

“Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women’s bodies.”– Andrea Dworkin. She never said it; she did, however, say “Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women” in Intercourse. Man, that’s just sloppy. Why are you misquoting someone when they literally said the exact thing you want them to say? Anyway, in context she’s clearly talking about intercourse-the-cultural-concept, not intercourse-the-thing-people-do-with-each-other’s-genitals (a few sentences later, she mentions that making intercourse one of many possible sex acts people can do together would fix the problem). But on the other hand she is saying that men as a whole hate women, which is pretty terrible.

“In a patriarchal society, all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent.”– Catherine MacKinnon. This is a summary of MacKinnon’s beliefs from a book called Professing Feminism, which conservative columnist Cal Thomas mistakenly attributed to her. MacKinnon does not believe that all heterosexual intercourse is rape, although she believes that much of it is.

“And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual, it may be mainly a quantitative difference.”– Susan Griffin. Source. In context, she’s not saying that all men are rapists, but she is saying that according to the scientific studies available at the time rapists tended to be normal, well-adjusted men who are different only in that they have a greater tendency to express rage and violence. (My understanding is that more recent research has shown that this is not true.)

“The institution of sexual intercourse is anti-feminist.” –Ti-Grace Atkinson. While Atkinson’s The Institution of Sexual Intercourse does not appear to be online, I suspect from my knowledge of her beliefs that this is an accurate reflection of them, whether or not it is an accurate quote. Atkinson believed that, because PIV does not usually involve clitoral stimulation and does involve risk of pregnancy that falls disproportionately on the woman, the institution of PIV was harmful to women as a whole and the only reason they did it was because of patriarchy.

“[Rape] is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear”.– Susan Brownmiller. Context. Brownmiller is not saying that all men are rapists or that all men are conspiring to rape women. She’s referring to the social role of rape: she theorizes that the origin of patriarchy was that, because women in prehistoric times could be raped by men and were not strong enough to defend themselves, they would have to each find a single man to protect them from all the other men.

“When a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression…”– Sheila Jeffreys. As best as I can tell, this quote does not appear in any of Sheila Jeffreys’s books. Is Sheila Jeffreys so lacking in batshit quotations that you have to make them up?

“Clearly you are not yet a free-thinking feminist but rather one of those women who bounce off the male-dominated, male-controlled social structures. Who cares how men feel or what they do or whether they suffer? They have had over 2000 years to dominate and made a complete hash of it. Now it is our turn. My only comment to men is: if you don’t like it, bad luck–and if you get in my way I’ll run you down.”– A 1996 letter to the editor from the Boronia Herald-Sun. Unfortunately, its archives do not appear to be online, so I cannot find context. I will point out, however, that “at least one member of this ideology has sent a dumb letter to the editor” is true of every ideology that has more than ten thousand adherents.

“If the classroom situation is very heteropatriarchal–a large beginning class of 50 to 60 students, say, with few feminist students–I am likely to define my task as largely one of recruitment…of persuading students that women are oppressed.”– Joyce Trebilcot. This quote appears in Who Stole Feminism? by Christina Hoff Sommers; while it has a citation, that is not visible in Google Books and I don’t want to buy a copy of Who Stole Feminism? to check it. However, this does not seem that unreasonable to me. Joyce Trebilcot presumably believes it is an objective fact that women are oppressed; she has spent her life studying it. Introductory-level courses are usually for teaching things, not for debate; an economics professor may very well see his task as persuading students that free trade is a good idea, or a climate science professor that the earth is warming.

“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.”– Valerie Solanas. Seriously, guys, she tried to kill Andy Warhol, stop holding her against the rest of feminism.

“Men, as a group, tend to be abusive, either verbally, sexually or emotionally. There are always the exceptions, but they are few and far between (I am married to one of them). There are different levels of violence and abuse and individual men buy into this system by varying degrees. But the male power structure always remains intact.” and “Considering the nature and pervasiveness of men’s violence, I would say that without question, children are better off being raised without the presence of men. Assaults on women and children are mostly perpetrated by men whom they are supposed to love and trust: fathers, brothers, uncles, grandfathers, step-fathers.” These are quotes from something called ‘FEMISA’, which is apparently an email list. The only FEMISA I have been able to find is a group advocating for fibroid embolization, which I assume is not the one these quotes are coming from. The apparent source says they were in response to a posting asking for people’s best arguments that men are not necessary for raising children, because the person was writing a paper about why men are necessary and wanted to counter them. For that reason, it seems at least plausible to me that both of these quotes are playing devil’s advocate and do not reflect the actual beliefs of the women writing them. Without the whole posting, it would be impossible to know.

The next two are apparently considered ‘heterophobia.’ This confuses me, because neither of them even mentions heterosexuals, and it’s not like there aren’t a bunch of really truly heterophobic feminist quotes to get mad about. (I would suggest beginning with lesbian separatists and continuing from there.)

“At Brandeis I discovered Feminism. And I instantly became a convert… writing brilliant papers in my Myths of Patriarchy class, in which I likened my fate as a woman to other victims throughout the ages.”– Heather Hart. This is a quote from Christina Hoff Sommers’s Who Stole Feminism, in which Hart is talking about her disenchantment with academic feminism. This does not necessarily imply that Hart believed that all women were victims when she was writing the papers, just that that was the spin she put on it now. Also, I think it’s kind of much when your misandry sampler keeps including quotes from other people talking about how misandric feminism is. Shouldn’t we be hearing from the misandric feminists themselves?

“Ninety-five percent of women’s experiences are about being a victim. Or about being an underdog, or having to survive… women didn’t go to Vietnam and blow things up. They are not Rambo.”–Jodie Foster. Context. Jodie Foster is an actress, and not a feminist theorist; she is discussing how she has a hard time finding movies to star in because she likes ‘heavy dramas’, which involve serious life-or-death issues but aren’t about being powerful like Wonder Woman. I’m going to guess that she probably meant “women’s experiences” to mean something like “women’s experiences involving life-or-death dramas of the sort I am interested in acting in,” rather than “women’s experiences in general”.

Living in A Gender Bubble

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my issues with sj let me show you them, not feminism go away, ozy blog post

One of the big problems in talking about gender is that there are just too many people.

“Men” is 3.5 billion people. If one assumes that most people talking about gender in English on the Internet are only intending to talk about the Anglosphere and not men in Saudi Arabia (which seems right), men is still 225 million people. That’s a lot of different people. That’s a hell of a lot of diversity.

And yet most of the time when people talk about ‘men’ and ‘women’ they aren’t basing it on survey data about those 225 million people. They’re talking about, well, their personal experiences. Over the course of their lives, they’ve met a few hundred, perhaps a thousand men. That’s not a lot. And the sample is systematically biased in a whole lot of ways. Of course, there are the obvious ways: my sample has way more trans people and way fewer black people than would normally be expected. But there are subtler things too.

Here’s an example I happen to know from my personal anecdotes. In high school, I was friends with some frankly entitled nerdy guys. They were universally under the impression that they were Nice, as shown by their willingness to pay for dates and buy their girlfriends flowers on Valentine’s Day, and that it was sheer injustice if a girl they were interested in said ‘no’, given that they were Nice. Girls more attractive than I was would occasionally find themselves subjected to severe social pressure to go out with whomever had a crush on them, and labelled a ‘bitch’ and isolated if she continued to refuse.

Right now, I’m friends with a bunch of nerdy guys who are scared shitless of women. They have never asked a girl out because it is too frightening, and when girls flirt with them they tend to radiate terrified body language which makes the flirting girl assume that she is being crushingly rejected. Many of them feel that, simply by having a crush on a girl, they’re doing something wrong; their sexuality, being male, is burdensome and creepy, and they should avoid ever letting a girl know about it.

Now, by luck, I happened to be in both groups. Imagine if I had only known entitled nerd guys: every time one of the scared guys was like “I am afraid of doing something wrong when I ask a girl out!”, my instinctive response would be “well, maybe you are doing something wrong, you fucking creep.” Or imagine if I’d only known the scared nerd guys: every time someone complained about the entitled guys pressuring them into dating them, I’d be like “Christ! Nerd guys have it hard enough! Knock it off! You’re just unfairly stigmatizing socially awkward people.”

As it happens, I’ve been in both groups, so I have a fairly nuanced viewpoint on the subject. But there are lots of cases where I’ve only been in one group, and I don’t know which ones. I can’t make my thoughts more nuanced when I don’t even know what ways my samples are distorted.

So whenever I say something about ‘men’ or ‘women’, take it as ‘this is the pattern I have noticed among people I have happened to interact with, which may or may not be similar to people that you have interacted with.’ And when you get into arguments with people about whether men are sexist or women can’t communicate, have as a hypothesis “both of us are telling the truth about different groups of people.”