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Archive for the 'Men Hate You' Category
You may have followed a link I recently posted, wherein it was revealed that in the State of Texas it is now considered perfectly awesome to force women seeking abortions to undergo a repellent, rape-like pronging with a vaginal ultrasound probe during which the state-controlled doctor forces them to listen to irrelevant, non-medical blather about the cute baby-like features of the fetus. Well, a similar bill recently turned up in the Virginia State Senate, but with a surprisingly heartwarming amendment.
To protest a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion, State Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax)on Monday attached an amendment that would require men to have a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before obtaining a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication. [HuffPo]
Ha-ho! Janet Howell! You go girl! Honorary Blamer of the Week!
Tragically, Howell’s amendment was rejected by 3 votes, and the senate went on to give the nod to the fucking misogynist mandatory ultrasound bill. It’s always the way.
But anyway, inspired by Howell’s Do-It-To-The-Men-Instead initiative, blamer Incognotter sent Spinster HQ a nice email expanding on the Do-It-To-The-Men-Instead theme (one of my favorite themes). She says:
I am beginning to think we are fighting for reproductive rights in the wrong way. If the point is to have big-government interventionism that negates bodily sovereignty as a “solution” to a perceived moral problem, then we should neuter all men at puberty and bank their sperm. It could be used consensually for the purpose of reproduction. No more abortion issues, no more birth control issues, much less war on women. If they had to face that they might suddenly reconsider this big invasive bullshit. Can you imagine the reaction to the realization that a woman had to sign her consent to get knocked up?
The caliber of blaming exhibited here is impressive. Neuter all the dudes! It hits the blaming trifecta: elegant, just, and diabolical! Unwanted pregnancies? Gone, daddy, gone! Abortion? Obsolete! Ghastly “Teen Mom” reality shows on the Aberrant Human Behavior Channel? Cancelled! Babies in trash cans? A thing of the past! Compulsory pregnancy as punishment for slutty behavior? Over! Stuck having to make do with the inferior sperm of your partner? Done!
Imagine the shitstorm if one were to take this — merely as a thought experiment — to the Internet for dude review. Ludicrous! Inhuman! Man-hating! Unnatural! Sacreligious! You castrating bitch! I hope you die in a rape fire, feminazi!
All the while women are in actuality expected to endure much higher and more toxic levels of state intervention simply as a consequence of being female.
This glaring double standard should be all the proof you need that men hate you. If you want to know whether Virginia State Senator Jill Vogel hates you, well, she’s the original sponsor of her state’s rape-the-abortion-seekers bill, so you decide.
On a final note, I must point out that Spinster HQ is fundamentally opposed to human reproduction of any kind. But it is a frustrating reality that reproduction is widely regarded as a “right,” or at least some sort of godly duty, despite the undisputed fact that current human population levels are unsustainable. So as long as they’re gonna do it anyway, and as long as the state is gonna interfere with it wherever it can, it might as well place as much of the burden on men as possible, if for no other reason than an elegant poetic justice/reparations for past abuses combo.
When this remark
Yup. This is the only place I don’t comment under a male pseudonym.
showed up in the comments this morning I got to wondering. The Internet is even more openly hostile to Vagina-Americans than real life is. Do you ever use a dudely nom de blog when you flit about the matrix? What has been the outcome? Have you ever successfully argued a point (feminist or not) while, if not exactly posing as a dude, then at least keeping your non-dudeliness to yourself?
If this topic bores you, feel free to jaw about anything you want in the comments.
Update: The comments are turning into a Hugo Schwyzer beatdown, with my blessing. Fuck that fucking fuck.
Yes, I just got through bashing the Huffington Post as unreadable and sexist, but while giving it one last nose-thumb I ran across this little piece of 411, posted on the UK site by “MSc Student and Boxing Dilettante” Elizabeth Plank:
Amateur International Boxing Association (AIBA) met yesterday to discuss the games and draw up recommendations, including suitable dress requirements. One of the items up for discussion was whether female boxers should have to wear skirts.
Last year, they suggested that wearing skirts would make female athletes look ‘elegant’ and help ‘distinguish’ them from their male counterparts. In other words, they are recommending that a female boxer’s performance as an athlete should align with her performance as a feminine woman.
Elizabeth Plank gets a Savage Death Island Chin-Nod for complaining about this sexist shit. But get out your umbrellas, tacqueaux, because my lobe is about to pull a Mt. St. Helens.
Because lard help me, I read the comments.
Why would I do a thing like that? Is not the First Law of Internet Blaming “Never Read The Comments”? Did I really think I would not see this:
I’m as far from being some kind of swivel-eyed mysoginist as it gets but IMHO girl’s bodies arent designed to take the kind of punishment that men’s are and therefore women’s boxing should be outlawed on medical grounds [sic]
?
Or this:
Won’t watch, though as I don’t like seeing women getting hit, by women, by men, by anybody. Therefore, what women wear while they do something I won’t see, is irrelevant to me.
?
Or this:
Anyhow, why is it you girls want to be so like men? Do you girls feel inferior or something?
?
There was even some guy who explained that women shouldn’t box in shorts because they accentuate “the labia.” Who even thinks up moron shit like that, let alone writes it on some woman’s totally innocuous blog post?
No matter what, no matter how reasonable a woman is, or how polite, or how deferential, whenever she tries to make even the mildest feminist point anywhere on the flipping internet, there is an immediate “mysoginist” jacknut pile-on of trolls, fuckwads, mansplainers, and dicks. That’s the Second Law of Internet Blaming.
Admittedly this is no ground-breaking insight, but much like UK celebrity and HuffPo contributor Labrinth, “it’s like there’s this big, wild universe in my head and I love to express it!!!”
In keeping with my new policy of barely writing posts ever, I suggest you check out this essay written by Lisa at A Radical Transfeminist. The article enlarges with no small eloquence on my favorite topic, women’n'consent. I snip a large-ish chunk of it here for your consideration.
Here Lisa discusses the nature of the dudely habit of deliberately misunderstanding refusal. You know, when they suddenly experience an utterly confounding ambiguity in standard modes of refusal that, in all non-boink-related contexts, are completely transparent? This purposeful denial of women’s humanity, it’s pretty much the nub of patriarchal oppression.
I’d like to ask the reader to do a brief mental exercise. (If you’d rather not, just skip to the next paragraph.) I’d like you to remember the last time you found it difficult to give an explicit “no” to somebody in a non-sexual context. Maybe they asked you to do them a favour, or to join them for a drink. Did you speak up and say, outright, “No”? Did you apologise for your “no”? Did you qualify it and say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t make it today“? If you gave an outright “no”, what privileged positions do you occupy in society, and how does your answer differ from the answers of people occupying more marginalised positions?
This form of refusal was analysed in 1999 by Kitzinger and Frith (K&F) in Just Say No? The Use of Conversation Analysis in Developing a Feminist Perspective on Sexual Refusal. Despite the seeming ambiguity in question/refusal acts like, “We were wondering if you wanted to come over Saturday for dinner”, “Well, uhh, it’d be great but we promised Carol already”, they are widely understood by the participants as straightforward refusals.
K&F conclude by saying that, “For men to claim [in a sexual context] that they do not ‘understand’ such refusals to be refusals (because, for example, they do not include the word ‘no’) is to lay claim to an astounding and implausible ignorance of normative conversational patterns.”
Especially intriguing is the notion that the unequivocal “no” is the exclusive purview of privilege.
In which I say pretty much the same thing I said yesterday, only with bigger words and longer run-on sentences.
Mark my words. Malignant narcissist Dominique Strauss-Kahn will get off scott-free, scattering in his smug, entitled wake a bloody trail of ruined lives torn asunder.
Powerful elite white dudes simply don’t go down for rape. The Global Accords Governing the Fair Use of Women guarantee that assaulting disenfranchised hotel cleaners and young women whose mothers have political agendas is entirely consistent with the purpose for which these (and all) women were designed.
Then again, most rapists in general simply don’t go down for rape. Rapists are always set free to roam the countryside because their violent actions are invested with the sovereign authority of established patriarchal principles. One of these principles is that women are responsible for base male impulses. She wanted it, she was a tease, she was a prostitute, she fucked me last week, she’s my ex-wife, she was walking alone at night without a flame-thrower and three trained attack dogs, she was drinking in a bar, she was wearing high heels, she didn’t fight back too hard, she said she likes it rough.
Another of these principles is that women are liars. That’s why rape victims universally suffer from “credibility issues.” Strauss-Kahn’s hotel victim isn’t Joan of Arc’s saintlier twin, so she’s got “credibility issues” that conveniently allow prosecutors to look the other way. Likewise, Tristane Banon is obviously making shit up just to derail Strauss-Kahn’s political career:
Banon describes “his fingers in my mouth, his hands in my pants … [He] grabbed my hand and arm, I asked him to let me go … He pulled me toward him, we came down and we fought on the ground for several minutes … He was violent. When I realized he really wanted to rape me, I started to give him a kick with my boots, I was terrified and I told him: “You’re not going to rape me?” And then I managed to free myself, I ran downstairs …”
The author of the Slate article from which I nicked the above quotation, by the way, urges the reader not to take Banon’s word for it. It is Banon, not the Great Seducer Strauss-Kahn, who “deserves” to have her story gone over with a fine-toothed comb.
Meanwhile, it will come as no surprise that I’m not done with the aforementioned established patriarchal principles. As the world’s foremost authority on the adjudication of rape cases, you can take it from me: Established Patriarchal Principle #1 is that women legally and culturally abide in a persistent and perpetual state of consent.
This means that the essence of women — that is, the primary property possessed by women, the very foundation of our being, our ‘constituent substance’, the ‘indispensable and necessary attribute’ without which we would not even be women — is: fuck-toilet. Women don’t have sex, women are sex. By universal decree, getting fucked is what women are for, therefore women are unrapeable; you can’t rape a thing the primary function of which is fuck-toilet, and you can’t take by force something that by definition is already freely available.
Rape laws only exist because of male vanity. Men don’t want to think of themselves as filthy stinking rapists; they prefer to imagine that they’re James Bond, idealized versions of themselves as noble protectors of their females’ honor, so deeply imbued with charisma and magnetism that women voluntarily acquiesce to them. So, to distance themselves from rape, dude culture invented some special circumstances — the most non-negotiable of which is that the victim must be of absolutely unimpeachable saintliness in word, deed, and costume, and be willing to undergo no small quantity of public humiliation — under which only the most deviant, dissipated pieces of human filth may occasionally be deemed by the courts to have crossed that vague line between consensual boinking and sexual assault.
With this ingenious victim-blaming system, only the occasional debased douchebag is a rapist. Convicting an insensate monster every once in a while leaves the rest of Dude Nation free to not be “that guy,” and to enjoy with impunity their birthright as frat boys, pimps, rakes, ladies’ men, Great Seducers, predators, bosses, college advisers, boyfriends, husbands, fathers, heads of international monetary funds, and creepy uncles.
It is, incidentally, a direct result of the mainstreaming of stupid shit like BDSM that the claim “she said she likes it rough” is ever even considered a plausible defense in a sexual assault case.
Got a mean boyfriend who gets mad at you all the time?
DUMP HIM. DUMP HIM NOW.
Reluctant to completely change your life based on the exhortation of some random Internet feminist? Then at least try out youarenotcrazy.com for some No. 1 Verbal Abuse Information. Tragically, the entire website suffers from gratuitous Flash, which makes it challenging to navigate (and copy text from), but slog through it anyway, because I promise you, you don’t deserve the shit that asshole is dishing out.
An excerpt from the “Defective?” section:
The ramifications of abuse are yours, and the payoff is his. If you feel crazy, he’s in control. These things add up to an all-around anxiety of being crazy:
• I often feel disconnected and confused, wobbly.
• I engage in introverted dissections of our conflicts to figure out what went wrong.
• I’m wary and distrust my own ability to form friendships.
• I feel as if an important dream shattered, but I can’t remember what that dream was.
• I have a growing doubt in myself and my self-respect.
• I feel like the whole world is muffled and out of my reach.
• Emptiness lingers around me like an endless fog, and I’m afraid to tell anyone.
• I must carefully edit anything I say because I’m not normal.
• I used to love doing some activities, now I just can’t muster the enthusiasm.
• I don’t know why I’m not happier within my relationship.
• I’m ill at ease in his presence, but I know I love him.
• I often don’t trust that my perceptions are valid.
• I have an intense desire to NOT be the way I am (as in “too sensitive”).
As the alumna of several abusive relationships (hell, who isn’t?), and as the observer of about 1753 more of my friends’ abusive relationships, I am the world’s foremost authoritative expert know-it-all wise old crone on the subject. I can attest that the information contained in youarenotcrazy.com is quality stuff.
The “Quiz” section, for example, contains an actual audio recording of an actual dickhead boyfriend verbally abusing the author, and will make you throw up as you play “spot the abusive tactic”. It’s awesome (if navigationally confusing) because the author’s hypothesis — that women often do not recognize verbal abuse when they hear it — is spot on.
Another of my favorites is the “Abusers Are Rarely Motivated To Change” section. I love this section because almost universally, the abused woman thinks her abusive dude can be turned into a nice guy if she can just get him to understand that he’s been acting like an entitled prick. For instance, she wants dude to go with her to couples therapy, where she believes the therapist will validate her concerns in front of the dude, whereupon she will be vindicated as not-crazy, and the dude, confronted with his horribleness at last, will be shamed into changing his ways, and they will be a happy loving couple again.
Say I: Don’t waste your time! Dump him now!
Says our author:
It’s rare for an abusive man to truly become nonabusive; even men that take part in renowned abuser programs. Sadly, in therapy, most men just learn to abuse without looking bad, using new skills and psychological jargon to avoid taking responsibility for the pain they inflict.
One thing I didn’t see at youarenotcrazy.com is the “but he’s not like that all the time” bit. Sometimes abusive dudes go through phases where they act like they like you. This can be mistaken for love, but listen girls, love is not sporadic episodes of quasi-decency punctuated with rage. A pal of mine recently called me up in tears because of her mean boyfriend. She told me “he can’t help being mean to me, he ran out of weed last week.” All his empathy and compassion were in that dime bag, I guess.
DUMP HIM.
Tangentially, I would like to take this opportunity to pooh-pooh self-help books that purport to take you inside the mind of your abuser so that you may understand his motivations. Who cares about his motivations? DUMP HIM NOW.
Shout-out to veteran blamer Jezebella for hipping me to this website.
The other day I dared to impugn the feminist credentials of a global religious leader, head of state complete with palace and throne, and internationally revered dude whose every antic goes virtually unquestioned by the entire world. I caught a little flak for this impugnment.
The impugnment to which I allude, of course, is that of the Dalai Lama. I said “he is no feminist,” and I meant it, by gum.
The Dalai Lama, successfully marketed to “spiritual” Western iconoclasts as a god among men, is problematic from a radical feminist viewpoint. I have already explained why this is so, but I don’t mind repeating myself. The Dalai Lama is 1) a global religious leader, 2) a head of state complete with palace and throne, and 3) an internationally revered dude whose every antic goes virtually unquestioned by the entire Western world. These are three dude-qualities that without exception spell, and have always spelled, trouble for women. Why feminists think it’s OK to overlook these in the case of the ridiculously enpedestalized dudely Dalai Lama I cannot say.
What I can say is that Buddhism, the Dalai Lama’s ism of choice, is just as goofy and fucked up as any other dude-invented religion. I mean, reincarnation? Seriously? What a load.
You know, no jokey essay on Buddhism would be complete without a fond remembrance of delusional ex-movie star tough guy-turned-reality TV Deputy Dork Steven Seagal, who came out as a reincarnated lama, evidently having paid his personal guru-monk to ordain him.
Anyway, while those moments when spinster aunts may be observed to endure gasbag Christopher Hitchens are as rare as feminists on TV, it is difficult to suppress a chuckle at Hitch’s assessment of Buddhism, from his infamous 1998 Dalai takedown, as “the sinister if not indeed crazy belief that death is but a stage in a grand cycle of what appears to be futility and subjection.”
Even if you are, for some reason, okay with Buddhism’s fairy tales of magic and rebirth and ascendance, you may consider it useful to know whether or not your religion hates you. One way to divine the attitude toward women of any given venerable institution is to inspect its power structure for evidence of female representation. So how many Buddhist lamas, tulkus, monks, or poobahs are women?
Zippo.
They got nuns, though. Long-suffering nuns (is there any other kind?):
“[Nunnery founder] Shugseb Jetsun Rinpoche was particularly known for holding a lineage of Chöd, the meditation practice of offering one’s own body for the benefit of others.”
Sound familiar?
Here is a list, handed down by the Buddha Himself, of the crap (the Eight Garudharmas) that nuns are expected to endure on accounta they are members of the sex class:
1. A nun who has been ordained (even) for a century must greet respectfully, rise up from her seat, salute with joined palms, do proper homage to a monk ordained but that day.
2. A nun must not spend the rains in a residence where there is no monk.
3. Every half month a nun should desire two things from the Order of monks : the asking (as to the date) of the Observance day, and the coming for the exhortation (of a monk).
4. After the rains a nun must invite before both the Orders in respect of three matters; what was seen, what was heard and what was suspected.
5. A nun, offending against an important rule, must undergo manatta (discipline) for half a month before both the Orders.
6. When, as a probationers, she has been trained in the six rules for two years, she should seek ordination from both the Orders.
7. A monk must not be abused or reviled in any way by a nun.
8. From today admonition of monks by nuns is forbidden, admonition by monks is not forbidden.
The Buddhist website from which I swiped the above list claims that these gender-based injunctions are not intended to control women, but are actually for the nun’s own protection.
Sound familiar?
Women are, in fact, specifically prohibited from attaining Enlightenment, period. Per El Buddho himself: “It is impossible that a woman should be the Universal Monarch/King of Death/Brahmaa.”
Yes, women are the sex class, yes, even for those chill, enlightened Buddhists! Busy Buddhism-mocking spinster aunts on the go are nothing if not shoddy scholars, so here’s a little blurb supporting my argument from — I say it loud and proud — Wikipedia.
“According to [professor of Buddhism at Stanford] Diana Paul, Buddhism inherited a view of women whereby if they are not represented as mothers then they are portrayed as either lustful temptresses or as evil incarnate.”
Sound familiar?
I was eventually able to transcend Wikipedia to turn up a paper authored by this same Diana Y Paul which contains this unpleasant but hardly surprising revelation concerning Buddhism’s elemental misogyny:
“If a woman is acknowledged as having the spiritual potential of becoming a Bodhisattva, then she has access to the way of enlightenment. If she is denied this capacity, she is denied the religious goal of Mahayana Buddhism. Some texts, such as the Pure Land Sutra, deny women birth in the Pure Land unless they despise their female nature. Despising the female nature results in rebirth as a man in the Pure Land. Vows to be reborn as men were seen as acts of piety performed by devout Buddhist women. In texts of this kind, the female sex is subordinated to the male sex as inferior — as defective and impure in body. Only through denial of one’s feminine body in this lifetime is there spiritual attainment in the next. While men too were to deny their sexual and bodily needs in order to gain rebirth in the Pure Land, there was never a specific vow for them to despise their own body. Sexual transformation from female to male is taken literally — that is, a women dies and is reborn as a man.”
Paul is quick to suggest that not all Buddhist sutras reflect this high-grade misogyny. However, she acknowledges that such “liberal portraits of women a religious beings” comprise an “extremely small percentage” of these religious texts.
But I digress. Back to the Dalai Lama. Surprise. He hates Buddhist homos, promotes religious intolerance, eats meat, opposes abortion, and sees nothing oppressive about men paying to rape women.
“Men-to-men and women-to-women is generally considered sexual misconduct,” he asserts.
And here he’s just blatantly buttering up the faithful:
“To have sexual relations with a prostitute paid by you and not by a third person does not constitute improper behavior.” But if your best man buys you a hooker for your bachelor party, karma gonna get you. You’ll probably be reincarnated as one of those poor body-offering nuns.
The Dalai Lama, it turns out, is just another liberal dude in a gaudy toga, imbued with misogynist dudeliness, like all liberal dudes.
No time to post! But here’s a fun comment from blamer Fictional Queen. Enjoy.
It’s awesome that a movement of women supposedly hating men is complete and irrefutable proof that [women are] wrong, but all the woman-hating men are Great Men and great artists and cool, admired role models, like rappers or rock stars or all of those philosophers who thought women were inferior. Imaginary man-hating is condemned and yet real woman-hating is celebrated. Why shouldn’t I hate men? Clearly they hate me and that impacts my life daily.
I would aver that the supposed movement of manhaters is also considered proof that women are not merely wrong, but also evil, repellent, and deserving of punishment by Great Men.
No time to post! So I leave you with this remarkable remark from this morning’s BBC news feed, a story on the habit of certain segments of Indian society to selectively abort female fetuses, and the resulting “gender disparity” in India.
“Clinics from Punjab were boasting that they had 10 years’ experience in eliminating girl children and inviting parents to come to them.”
Here at Spinster HQ we’re all for women aborting whatever pregnancies they don’t want, for whatever reasons they do want. But we strenuously object when the objective is “eliminating girl children”, the practice is limited to female fetuses, and is mandated against women’s will by churlish husbands who beat their wives for “producing” females, and who only want male children so they can collect dowries when the son and heir gets married.
As a result of this fucked up setup wherein female children automatically incur a negative cash flow, and wherein “infanticide, abuse and neglect of girl children” is not uncommon, there are, according to the Census of India, only 914 girls for every 1000 boys under the age of 7.
It’s gynocide.
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