“Feminists don’t even think of men as human,” and other insights from Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit.
This, oddly, was one of the first results in a Google image search for "hatred of women." So I'm going with it.
Hey, everybody, here’s another massive list of ridiculous comments from the Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit on the subjects of women, feminists and feminism. Some, er, highlights:
Never trust a woman. When you are out and they are around, go the other way. Your life may actually depend on you crossing the street or not taking that elevator or not working late in a office with another lonely woman.
Women are keen to assert all of the benefits that modern society affords them, but at the same time quick to twist their hair into pigtails and play the “I’m just a girl” defense when the traditional benefits of being a woman would suit them better.
Misandrist feminists want gender based apartheid, and the male population culled to lest than 10%
Feminism does NOT create strong women - it creates dependency and a stunted intellect.
In the feminist community, bigotry is met with a groundswell of support, and is very rarely called out.
That last one is just a teensy bit ironic, given that most of the comments above were heavily upvoted – in other words, “met with a groundswell of support.” Further evidence of this irony: oh, just the hundreds of misogynistic statements from MRAs I’ve linked to on this blog.
For links to the original comments in context, see the full list on Reddit. Props to the Redditor known as Squibbling for having the patience to assemble all of this.
Posted on October 3, 2011, in antifeminism, false accusations, misogyny, MRA, reddit. Bookmark the permalink. 330 Comments.
Ninja bf - aw yeah!
Also, I know it’s been said that sexual frustration is not the end of the world, but NWO seems to conflate sexual frustration with sexual arousal of all kinds. And, sexual arousal is nice. And, call me strange or whatever, but a little bit of sexual frustration can be kindof nice, that delicious waiting until your partner gets back from a holiday, or the flirty glances all night when you know you have to wait until next week cos contraception or whatever*…I agree a lot of sexual frustration is not cool, but seriously, why do we have strip clubs if sexual frustration/arousal is like the most maddeningly upsetting thing ever?
*Sorry, my examples are monogamous relationship ones - that’s how I roll and my brain is too tired for more example-making
On the whole topic of men just gotta rape anything delicious walking by. All the men in my life have a functioning prefrontal cortex and they know how to use it—just saying.
“short skirt=coercion”
There’s a new one for the Book of Larnin’.
NWO, why do you hate men so much? You obviously consider them animals who can’t control themselves. Pretty misandrist of you.
You know what I think of every time I see these lacking in prefrontal cortex guys talking about sex? (Well, other than “wow you are creepy”.) I just keep thinking that sex with them would be like being mauled by an angry bear. Except the bear would have a grudge against you prior to the commencement of the mauling, and the ability to whine about how your frantic attempts to escape mauling were terribly unfair.
And then the bear would try to file a lawsuit against you for not letting it eat you. And a thousand other bears would join in to say “yeah, why don’t people just stand still and let us maul them? people are such assholes”.
Note - Most men do not remind me of angry bears. Most men are just fellow human beings who happen to have a penis. These guys, on the other hand…well, see above comment about prefrontal cortex.
Simon: Why can’t Keith Edwards just be quiet and leave us alone or at the very least just tell his ideas to people who freely WANT to listen to him?
What, did he lock you in a room and force you to listen to that and write it down?
Or did you find it on a website somewhere?
Honestly I don’t see anything wrong with that statement; rapists can be (often are) “nice” people, who have caring relationships. They sometimes have them with their victims. A lot of it has to do with what rape is, vs. how rape is understood.
Simon: I have a fair bit of sex. Hard as it may be for you to believe, I have it with partners who are enthusiastic. A fair bit of the time they are asking for my consent.
Why do you think it’s hard for me to believe that might be the case???
Because you said Maybe it’s just the truth, that men wouldn’t practically have any sex when they would refrain from sleeping with women that just “going along with it”.
If that is what you think is the truth, that men would have practically no sex if they weren’t willing to have it with partners who are, “just going along with it,”, then you seem to find it hard to believe that there are lots of men who aren’t doing that, but having it with women who are enthusiastic.
I don’t know what to make of the “you’re not in a position to ridicule,” because 1: I am not ridiculing, I am disagreeing. 2: I have evidence, empirically I have lots of friends who are, according to them, having eager; and enthusiastic sex. They are male and female. Some of them have had it with me, some have told me about it (my former housemate, female, has had a lot more sex than I have in the past three years; with a few more partners than I have (I think, I wasn’t really keeping tabs, and she didn’t always share identifications). I know some of her partners, and have been to parties where dozens of people were having just that sort of sex. Some of those parties had explicit rules about getting consent, free and obvious, for everything.
So you can think, all you like, that I don’t have evidence. You are wrong. What I don’t have are stats. Which means I may be unable to convince you, but you also have no chance to convince me; because you don’t have stats, and you haven’t offered evidence.
You have, in fact, admitted to ignorance, “How much men or women want sex is a secret shrouded in mystery for me,” It’s not a mystery to me. They want it a lot, or it wouldn’t be the subject of so much interest. The mystery for me is how much any specific person, with whom I might like to have sex, is interested in it; with me.
Anecdotal evidence, contrary to your assertion, does help. It tells me that women like sex. It tells me that if I let them know I am interested we can discuss it, and if we have a similar interest we can fuck.
Collect enough anecdotal evidence, under controlled conditions and you have data, but the plural of anecdote is data.
“Your desiring an attractive women no more gives you the right to rape or harass her than my desiring a Ferrari gives me the right to steal or vandalize it…nor to harass or assault the owner for making me want it.”
Hear! Hear!
Which is where analogies like NWO’s fail. It’s why he is evil. He would argue (at length) that property is precious, and sacrosanct: but he also argues that women aren’t.
So women are less than property to him, and he thinks this is treating them fairly, and justly; he even believes it is a Christian viewpoint.
Well to Hell with him.
In all fairness to bears, they have waaay more of a functional prefrontal cortex than these guys. And unlike these guys bears tend to be better at actually Going Their Own Way (as long as you hang your food up.)
Funny, I manage to be sexually attracted to people in public and not attack them. I also do not have a desire to rape people, quite the opposite, in fact. I suspect that is true of most men as well. Someone who genuinely wants to horribly violate the bodily autonomy of another, or just flagrantly doesn’t give a shit about doing it, is an evil piece of shit (the vast majority of people with rape fantasies do not genuinely want to rape, this comment does not include those people).
Wow Pecunium, you really take this internet arguing thing seriously, don’t you. Yet for all the verbal diarrhea you spew, you haven’t actually said much. My point was, if men can be blamed and told ‘women fear them’ because a tiny percentage of them are rapists, why shouldn’t we have an event where black folks are told white people fear them because a small percentage of them have, at some point, mugged a white guy? Of course we shouldn’t. It’d be absurd in both cases. Unfortunately, one of them is real.
As for Schrodinger’s rapist, I repeat… statistics show that in 85% of rape cases the victim knew the attacker and was often in a relationship with him. The “violent rape by a stranger” is comparatively quite rare, so why blame and demonize all men for something a tiny fraction of them will ever think about, let alone actually do?
Not that I’m expecting a straight answer to these, of course. You seem like the kind of person who doesn’t care about the issues so much as ‘winning’ internet arguments by dancing around the issue and using fancy wordplay.
I actually understand what that guy means. A lot of women will never give the kind of ‘enthusiastic consent’ feminists talk about. The most they’ll do is “let” the guy have sex with them. If a guy waits for every woman to throw herself at him before he agrees to have sex, he’ll probably go without for a long time, not to mention a lot of women who actually wanted it but couldn’t/didn’t want to be that assertive about it might end up thinking he wasn’t into them after all.
Knowing the attacker isn’t tantamount to knowing ahead of time that your friend/father/date/teacher/co-worker is going to rape you. Moreover, what’s this with “violent rape”? Is there any other kind? The fact that you betray this very entitlement — that a prior “relationship” somehow creates an excuse for forcing women to have sex and renders the violence non-existent, and the rape not “rape rape”, in short, that men are kinda sorta entitled to force themselves on “their” women, or women improvident enough to be acquainted with them — this is the very sort of mentality that cultivates rapists. No one here is demonizing all men; but when you put the onus of figuring out which one of her relatives or acquaintances is going to assault her entirely on the woman, you are forcing women into a corner where we have no choice but to assume, for our own safety, that all men are rapists.
Amused: I was referring to women being told they should be wary of strangers, and of men being told they’re guilty for making strange women uncomfortable by existing within close proximity of them. What’s this talk about friends and relatives? That’s actually in agreement with what I was saying.
I have never, ever heard of a man told to “feel guilty for existing in proximity to a woman.” I HAVE, quite frequently, heard men told, “Hey, just so you know, when you do X thing, it often makes women uncomfortable. So if you don’t want to make women uncomfortable, you probably shouldn’t do that.” Somehow, that gets twisted in a few guys’ heads into, “OMG someone is criticizing something I might once have done! As I am constitutionally incapable of self-reflection, I will just decide that said critics are horrible bitches who want to make me feel guilty for simply BEING.”
For the record, I am totally cool with guys not feeling guilty for the stupid shit they did that made women uncomfortable. I do not see anything terribly productive about their potential self-flagellation. You are welcome to dismiss your past mistakes with a laugh, as far as I’m concerned. I just want those past mistakes to stay past mistakes, and not mistakes that are repeated over and over because it’s easier to yell “nuh-uh!” than to say, “Oh, I didn’t actually realize how (for example) cornering someone in an enclosed space to hit on her could be read as threatening. I see that now. I will do my hitting-on in spaces where she can actually escape in future, since even though I know I wouldn’t take advantage of the enclosed space to trap her there and hurt her, she has no way to know I’m not someone who would, and so it makes sense for her to be somewhat nervous.”
Potato, potahto. When men are accused of being creepy and oppressive for walking within 10 feet of a woman on a street at night, or taking an elevator, or as I said, generally existing in proximity of a woman, and then told it’s their fault for making her feel uncomfortable, I’m gonna have a problem with it.
That’s very magnanimous of you, but what you go on to say sounds like “I’m willing to forgive guys for their mistakes as long as they acknowledge that I’m right and they were wrong”. Sorry, no.
*sigh* I don’t know why I bother trying, but one last stab…
There’s no “right” and “wrong” here. If Alice has panic attacks every time someone whistles “Yankee Doodle,” and she tells Bill, “Hey, just so you know, I have panic attacks when people whistle Yankee Doodle around me,” then he probably shouldn’t whistle Yankee Doodle if he doesn’t want her to have a panic attack. That has nothing to do with blame or fault or guilt. It has to do with common freaking sense. If a large number of women get nervous when cornered in an enclosed space by a strange dude, then you probably shouldn’t corner women in enclosed spaces unless you want to make them nervous. You can yell, “But it’s not FAIR that people react to the things I do!” all day if it makes you happy, but people are going to go right on having reactions to the people around them, and if you genuinely don’t care enough to take minimal efforts not to make the people around you afraid or unhappy, then, yeah, that’s creepy. It doesn’t matter how inherently innocent “Yankee Doodle” is; if Bill continues to whistle it around Alice while fully aware that he’s freaking her out, Bill is acting like a douchebag.
Bill continues to whistle it around Alice while fully aware that he’s freaking her out, Bill is acting like a douchebag.
No he’s not. It’s not Bill’s responsibility to be aware of all of Alice’s little quirks and phobias and accommodate for them. It’s her responsibility to act like a grown-up human being in control of herself and her mental state.
As Samuel L. Jackson would say…English, motherfucker, do you read it?
if Bill continues to whistle it around Alice while fully aware that he’s freaking her out
I don’t CARE how stupid someone’s reason for being afraid is. If you know you are making them afraid and you continue behaving that way anyway, you are deliberately making them afraid, and that’s a dickish thing to do.
(Also, wow, could you be a little more repugnantly ableist? Phobias are now equivalent to “quirks” and “grown-ups” don’t have them (or PTSD, or anxiety disorders)? Please, next time you run into a war hero who suffers from PTSD, tell him that if he were a “grown-up,” he’d never get freaked out when something flashes him back to watching his friends get killed, and insist that you are ALLOWED to keep singing the song that was on the radio when his Humvee exploded and took off both his legs and it doesn’t make you the least bit dickish. Jesus Christ.)
…are you shitting me.
Hengist: Wow Pecunium, you really take this internet arguing thing seriously, don’t you. Yet for all the verbal diarrhea you spew, you haven’t actually said much. My point was, if men can be blamed and told ‘women fear them’ because a tiny percentage of them are rapists, why shouldn’t we have an event where black folks are told white people fear them because a small percentage of them have, at some point, mugged a white guy? Of course we shouldn’t. It’d be absurd in both cases. Unfortunately, one of them is real.
You are trying to defend the racist argument that blacks need to understand why whites are afraid of them, by saying that since some whites are attacked by some blacks whites are justified in saying blacks are all crooks.
Wait… you aren’t, “really” saying that. Instead you are saying the number of rapes is so insignificant that women shouldn’t be afraid of men. They shouldn’t think that just any man might rape them.
In support you say, As for Schrodinger’s rapist, I repeat… statistics show that in 85% of rape cases the victim knew the attacker, and was often in a relationhip with him*”. Seems to me that undercuts your case.
If 85 percent of the rapes are performed by people who are known, and whom the victim has some level of relational trust… that means 85 percent of the rapes were committed by “safe” men. Men who didn’t look like rapists.
Shrödinger’s rapist.
*This is where that II take arguing seriously, internet, face to face, critical papers, letters to the editor, etc., comes into play. You are presenting this as if it means they had a romantic/sexual relationship. This isn’t true, and it’s not what the statistics say. I have a relationship with my former housemate. Had I raped her that is how it would be decribed, “known relationship”. In most cases I could afford to leave that out, because it’s semantically null, but if I did, you’d bring it up as a sign of my being less than honest.
But hey, you accuse me of not caring about the issues, when you are what… in a pure pursuit for the truth?
Hengist: Amused: I was referring to women being told they should be wary of strangers
You were? I thought you were saying it’s unfair for women to look at any man as if he might be a rapist, you know, the problem of, Shrödinger’s rapist.
Have you ever had a panic attack? It’s not exactly something you control. And in the example, she told him that what he was doing was causing panic attacks. If what you are doing is causing someone else distress, it is your responsibility as a FUCKING HUMAN BEING to stop doing what is causing distress. How is this such a difficult thing to comprehend?
…well, don’t you sound like a great and caring friend? /sarcasm
Seriously, if it was so easy to control, I’m pretty sure Alice would just do exactly that.
I’m seconding Polliwog: try that shit on a war veteran with PTSD.
I’m seconding Polliwog: try that shit on a war veteran with PTSD.
No, don’t. The odds are it won’t do anything but screw with the vet. Most of us don’t lash out and assault people. Hell, most of us don’t have the sort of triggers that someone can set off on purpose (with the exception of fireworks).
“The “violent rape by a stranger” is comparatively quite rare, so why blame and demonize all men for something a tiny fraction of them will ever think about, let alone actually do?”
Because it’s not about blaming men, it’s about women doing what they have to in order to stay safe. 15% is still enough of a risk to be worth taking into account.
Also I don’t think you understand the stat you’re quoting. For the purposes of that statistic they’re counting men who the women “knew” in the sense of a guy you see and say hi to on the bus sometimes, or the barista who makes you coffee a few times a week. It’s not a “good friends and family only” sort of classification, so telling women that they shouldn’t be concerned about men who they see out and about who they get a bad vibe from is silly, because the stat includes “that creepy guy who always tries to talk to me on the train” as men who the victim knows.
Oh, just to be clear, I don’t actually advocate saying repulsive things about people with PTSD to anyone, let alone people with PTSD, because that is awful. I just think people who say those repulsive things should think a bit more about some of the people they’re saying them about, which doesn’t just include icky little vagina-bearing assault survivors like me, but also big manly heroic men of the sort they purportedly support.
Or, to put that another way, if you wouldn’t call the war hero less than “grown-up” for having a traumatic reaction to triggers, you probably shouldn’t say it about anyone else, either.
Also RE our Bill and Alice hypothetical…I have a friend who’s scared of both clowns and those little mechanical monkey-with-a-drum things. Now, both of those are in fact rather silly fears, since most clowns are not the monster from It, and it means that she’s scared of Ronald McDonald, which makes no sense to me at all. However, since I am not a giant asshole, I make a point of avoiding exposing her to clowns, since they scare her. I do not invite her to the circus and then berate her for having such an unreasonable fear, because again, not an asshole.
@CassandraSays:
it means that she’s scared of Ronald McDonald, which makes no sense to me at all.
Considering the shit he’s selling, I think being afraid of Ronald McDonald is quite rational. But I don’t think that’s what your friend has in mind.
@ CB - I think I’d be most afraid of the fact that according to research the playground is full of ecoli bacteria. And yet look at that clown, blatantly enticing children to go play there. K is right - he is evil.
Not to mention blatantly getting them hooked on junk food, and suing anyone who says his food isn’t healthy. Satan himself envies the clown his evilness.
Yeah, I’m the hand-washing fascist around my house for that very reason. Germs! Germs everywhere!
That is true, of course ):
It was more of a rhetorical thing, since I think even Hengist would understand that making fun of vets with PTSD is a really, really fucking assholish thing to do, and hopefully wouldn’t take that dare seriously, right?
I mean, there can’t actually be people who are THAT much of sociopathic douchebags… r-right?
But just in case:
Hengist: Don’t actually try that shit on war vets.
OK, so here’s a problem. The “85 percent of the rapes are performed by people who are known” part is correct, but the “and whom the victim has some level of rational trust” part is not. “People who are known” includes blind dates, the janitor at your school, the lady down the street who waves at you, your friend’s coworker who you talked to that one time, etc. These are people who the victim has come into contact with, not necessarily people they have formed any kind of relationship with.
Oh, Bee, trying to get Hengist to see nuance is impossible.
Wow, you people are obsessed with rape. I’m half expecting some pics of Futrelle hogtied on a picnic bench getting it from a gang of bull-dykes with strap-ons soon.
Bee: Ok, if one is looking at anyone who is passing familiar, then the level of, “rational trust” one has is less. But if we are talking levels of acquaintance which lets the rapist into a position where the rape is easier to initiate, then some level of reasoned trust was applied. Even at the level of, “this guys seems nice enough to go on a date with”, is a level (if not all that high a bar) of rational trust.
nugganu: We aren’t the one’s writing the posts being mocked, so the obsession seems to be with the MRA types.
As to your fantasies… well if it works for you, go to town, but change the sheets before dates.
…and burn them after.
@Pecunium:
Regarding Keith Edwards: yes, it nearly boils down to locking me up in a room and forcing me to listen to him, for example as I know, his rape prevention programs are obligatory for students in colleges. Keith also says the exact opposite of what you think. He says something like: It’s in the interest of men to end campus rape because then they’re not seen as rapists anymore but as capable of entering caring and emotion-based relationships.
If you take that serious, you could really think that feminists don’t think of men as humans, to get back to the topic.
I always thought, that we should want to stop the really serious crimes without extra motivation. Wouldn’t it be offensive to say “Dear Muslims, if you could stop Islamic terrorism, your religion would be seen as peaceful, wouldn’t that be AWESOME?”, too?
The “capable of entering caring…” part oh God, daaamn, I don’t care if I’m seen as “capable of entering caring and emotion-based relationships”, I’m as aromantic as you can be and still I don’t go around raping women.
It’s so funny when you always complain about the MRAs that compare being a gold-digger or adultery with rape, now it’s ok, if someone uses such insinuations on men.
What if nwoslave says: “Keith Edwards is right, but since women don’t allow men to enter caring relationships, we have so many rapists!!!!”?
Of course I made a “from A => B follows that B => A” errors here, but I made it deliberately, because that’s what our coward Keith Edwards deserves, who constantly tries to connect things, that have absolutely nothing to do with each other, in that manner.
Simon: If you could stop the MRAs saying women are scum that would make Men’s Rights seem reasonable.
I have to say that I’ve never heard of him. None of my college aged friends have mentioned him. I just spent a couple of years attending general ed classes at an undergraduate institution, his name never came up (nor was there any mandatory anti-rape training).
And if he’s daft, he’s daft, ignore him and move on.
But, I always figured that if I wasn’t committing crimes (like the lectures I got, annually, on how to avoid breaching various protocols regarding classified information, or the one’s about the Geneva Conventions,and how not to violate them, and the one’s about torture,and the allowable limits in interrogations), that I could listen, see if there was anything that applied to me, and go about my business.
Why? Because there are people who forget about how to maintain OpSec on classified material, and people who forget what the limits of Geneva are, or who need to be reminded they can’t tell people they will be hanged as a spy if they don’t talk, etc.
And seeing to it those people are kept on the straight and narrow is just fine with me. So when I see a list of things that relate to changing attitudes about rape, I read them, nod my head (taking note of anything which is new) and go about my life.
Why? Because I like women, and I’d like for them to not be raped. The only way to do that is convince the people who are raping them that it’s not acceptable. That no means no (whenever it’s said) an enthusiastic consent is the order of the day.
The 85 percent figure includes acquaintances, relatives, friends, dates, and people the victim barely knows at all but has seen before and knows who they are. Just because one doesn’t run screaming from the grocery store stocker doesn’t mean one trusts him to any degree.
nugganu: Yeah, having your bodily integrity violated is such a teeny thing in the long run, right? Can’t cause permanent mental or physical scars, just… one of those things.
Simon, I read your bolded sentence, and your objection to it. Are you saying you would rather be seen as a rapist than be seen as capable of entering caring and emotion-based relationships?
As for Schrodinger’s rapist, I repeat… statistics show that in 85% of rape cases the victim knew the attacker
FFS. Is there something about being an MRA that makes you forget how statistics work? This is like saying “Since less than a dozen people per year are killed by sharks, my chances of dying from a shark attack are miniscule. Therefore, if I go swimming in waters full of aggressive sharks at a time when there are fishing boats throwing chum in the water, I am perfectly safe.”
85% says nothing about how to evaluate the behavior of a particular man. It says nothing about recognizing predator behavior in humans and appropriately using it to measure a potential threat. The real reason MRAs hate it is not that it is inaccurate; they hate it because it suggests that ‘act however the fuck you want’ is not an optimal mating strategy.
i don’t know…i act like i want, but i have mated (and even have the kid to prove it.)
Ah, but changing the sheets before dates wouldn’t fit well into his repertoire of awesome revenge tactics.
‘Ha, I got her to give me PIV, unknowingly on the same sheets where I’d jacked off, shortly before, to imaginary pics of Futrelle hogtied on a picnic bench getting it from a gang of bull-dykes with strap-ons.’
nugganu, I think you can do better than that. That sexual fantasy was just not shocking or disgusting at all. Protip: sex acts involving poop, vomit, or animals are more likely to be considered disgusting, especially if you’re trying to shock hardened internet veterans. Regular old anal sex and bondage just won’t cut it.
Let’s revisit this. Between this thread and the most recent one about Slutwalks, Hengist wants to simultaneously argue that a) women are responsible for doing whatever necessary to avoid being raped and b) women who are wary of strange men are misandrist oppressors.
blitzgal: Thats because, from the evidence, Hengist does have a coherent position: women are to blame for things which happen to women.
Once that becomes plain, then the rest follows. No, it isn’t consistent, if you think that men might have agency. But they don’t. The underlying theme in this is, “women cause rape”. If she doesn’t do the perfect thing, then some man will rape her. That men are so different as to make it impossible to do the,”right things” to avoid any man ever being driven to it, is her problem, because it’s not the rapists fault, not really.
We blame him, if we decide it was a “real rape”, but she could have died her hair, bound her breasts, not worn Doc Marten’s, chosen a longer skirt, worn tight jeans, bought a protective coloration wedding ring, avoided the medical library’s more distant stacks, etc., since men have been known to commit rapes in those places, “because” of those stimuli, and she could have adjusted her behavior, so she has to bear responsibility, QED.
So, once you accept that women cause rape, and accept it, then you see the underlying consistency.