Men’s Liber-urination: How installing home urinals will save the world from misandry
Men’s Liberation starts here!
What’s the deal with MRAs and urinals? You may recall the highly touted “URLs @ urinals” campaign from last year, a plan to plaster little posters over urinals in public bathrooms to lure peeing men to Men’s Rights websites; evidently the way to a man’s heart is through his urethra?
Then there was that big to-do in the Men’s Rights subreddit when a Canadian restauranteur removed a urinal shaped like a woman’s lips after some feminists complained about it.
Oh, and who can forget GirlWritesWhat’s weird FemRA lament that men hanging out in men’s bathrooms can’t even bitch about women any more due the encroachment of evil mangina language police. (Note: Men in public bathrooms do not actually talk to one another.)
Well, now the MRA videoblogger who goes by the nom-de-internet of ManWomanMyth has weighed in on the Urinal Problem in a long and rambling blog post titled, and I am not making this up, “Urinals – a genesis for male psychology?”
MWM (let’s just call him that) argues that “male spaces” have been so encroached upon by evil feminists that men have no place they can truly call their own.
Why are female spaces inviolate and male spaces forcibly opened to females?
Why are males spaces not seen to be equally as important as female spaces?
I’ll tell you why, it’s because under our Feminist governance, anything that maintains or leads to any concept of male camaraderie or the enhancement of male self-awareness is actively attacked and suppressed. It’s vital in our society to strip men of their identity as ‘men’ so that they can be assaulted in the myriad ways. …
By preventing the development of male-bonding and understanding between men (which is difficult enough, even under the best of circumstances) men are successfully kept isolated from each other and more easily used and abused.
Seriously, he’s got a point here. If you look at the various photos of corporate Boards of Directors I gathered together in this old post, you’ll notice that a couple of them even have some ladies in them!
So what does this have to do with urinals? MWM explains:
This is where urinals-in-the-home comes in. …
By installing one in your home, what I think is being done is making a claim to a portion of space and making that claim based solely on the fact of your manhood.
Only men can successfully stand up to pee, women have no choice but to sit down. This is a point of difference that has little relevance in normal daily life, but has every relevance to male psychology.
You see, the urinal is just for you as a man. It’s impossible for her to use it. It’s for you. For your son. For your male friends.
In other words, MWM thinks that men (cis men, anyway) should have them installed in their bathrooms for no other reason than that (cis) woman can’t use them. In your face, bitches! Try peeing in THIS! YOU CAN’T!!
Though I should note that this does not stop women from trying, as this album cover from the 1970s clearly documents:
MWM goes on to explain the logic behind this new crusade:
There is no means by which the exclusive use of the urinal can be taken away from you by any claims of unfairness or any other irrational female claim.
There can be no quotas for the female use of urinals; there can be no Presidential Council for Women and Girls calling for more ‘Women into Urinals’; the UK Minister for Women could create no tax-payer funded programme to encourage girls to be the same as men and use urinals.
It’s yours because you are male and can only remain yours.
Now you might ask yourself, why the fuck would anyone care about this? MWM has an answer to that question as well:
Why is this important?
I think that this is an example of a beginning, a genesis for male self-awareness. Particularly if you have a young boy in the household. It could well be the first thing and perhaps even the only thing he will ever encounter in his young life that is not ‘equally’ open to girls and there is no ‘equalities’ agency that can do anything about it.
Most boys grow up today having to play every sport and share every activity with girls and woe betide him if he seeks to win or is too aggressive. …
The urinal could be the only thing in his life that is for him and exclusively for him and others who are like him in only one essential way: they are also male. …
This is a little space in the bathroom, a little space in his life, where his sister can’t go and doesn’t want to go and couldn’t go if she did want to. It’s off limits because she is not male. …
A urinal is not particularity interesting in itself, but it may well be a first step in the development of a sense of self for boys and men that otherwise typically never happens or else is savagely crushed in men. A catalyst towards a sense of what it means to be male and a first seed of understanding of the essential difference between the sexes which goes beyond mere anatomy. …
This is where anti-misandry starts.
While all this is very moving, I don’t think it goes far enough. Consider the Home Pregnancy Test. This is something that woman can pee on, but men can’t – at least not without being ridiculed by society for peeing on such a girly thing.
Wait, you might say. If (cis) men get urinals to pee on, why can’t (cis) women have these little sticks that they can pee on? Because these pregnancy tests involve little chemical strips that CHANGE COLOR when you pee on them, depending on whether or not you’re pregnant. Urinals don’t change color! And that’s not FAIR!
STICKS FOR DICKS!
Now THAT’S where anti-misandry really starts!
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Posted on July 21, 2012, in actual activism, antifeminism, FemRAs, I'm totally being sarcastic, misogyny, MRA, oppressed men, penises, precious bodily fluids, urinals. Bookmark the permalink. 148 Comments.
Yup.
The other reason I spent gym class wishing all the boys would go away was that it was somehow anathema to make the boys do “girly” sports. I mentioned that I was a varsity athlete; I played field hockey, which is a sport that, in the US, is inexplicably coded as being for girls only. Which meant that not once, in all the years I had gym class, did we ever play any field hockey at all, despite my school having all the equipment to accommodate it, but we could play flag football 800,000 times. We also could not do any form of dance, yoga, gymnastics, archery, or really anything that sounded particularly fun to me. The few times students suggested such things, we were told, “No, we have to do things everyone will enjoy,” which was sort of hilarious given that the whole point of those suggestions was generally, “Please, for the love of god, stop making us play flag football and volleyball over and over.”
(Excluding dance was particularly stupid and obviously gender-based because my school had a national-championship-winning dance team with a truly awesome coach who repeatedly volunteered to teach a gym class unit on dance. She could not be taken up on that, but apparently we could regularly have the school’s soccer coach - who had helpfully led the boys’ soccer team to a succession of spectacularly losing seasons - come scream at us about how we were even worse than the actual soccer team. Not that that was hard, given that his entire coaching technique appeared to consist of yelling, “KICK THE BALL, DAMMIT” a lot.)
Jean: You might want to pay attention to what you are agreeing with. Meller’s argument is (and has been) that women who are abused/killed, did something to provoke it.
You say has a valid point. You agree with him. Don’t be so defensive about it.
I played field hockey, which is a sport that, in the US, is inexplicably coded as being for girls only - Polliwog
Thankyou! I’d picked up the idea that field hockey was female-coded from somewhere and I had no idea where it came from. It was in the back of my mind bugging me, since it’s generally not gender-coded over here (in my experience, anyway) so I didn’t know whether i’d just made it up.
It’s annoying when you pick up something cross-culturally and then have no idea where it came from.
“Argenti and Cliff-you both may want to take a long nap and then get out into the fresh air for awhile. You seem to always be on the defensive and bitter and pounce on anything that doesn’t fit into your narrow view of things.”
I just woke up, you still seem like another incarnation of our standard hateful trolls.
@Not-JeanM — I have remembered though that my freshman year, before I transferred, required PE, with the “do what you want” clause. I swam, a lot (indoor pool, so the weather didn’t stop me). I can’t imagine there’s enough difference between college frosh and HS students that HS students wouldn’t do something given the option to do whatever sport/activity they wanted. I’m the type to see any body of water as an excuse to swim laps, so maybe I’m an outlier here?
I was a fat, uncoordinated kid who had trouble doing laps around the gym in middle school, and yet my most humiliating gym experience was in college. I had to get a couple of PE credit hours as a requirement, so I signed up for a PE class my freshman year. The first thing that happened was everyone was weighed and they had a measurement test where they pinched up the skin of the thigh and measured it with calipers. We were given to understand that our grade would be based in part on losing weight if we came up overweight on that test.
We also had a walking test I remember, in the cold, grey morning one week. We had to do X laps around the track without running (plenty of people cheated), and we were graded on our total time. The coach had a printout with some walking times broken into percentiles based on some study, I didn’t get a good look at it. So if you turned out to be in the 90th percentile, your grade was 90. You had to be faster than three-quarters of the people in the study to get a passing grade on this thing. In hindsight, I don’t blame people for jogging a bit and cheating. The thing was bullshit.
Anyway, I still had three or so laps to go, I turned out to be the last one on the track, and from the far curve of the track, I saw the coach pack up and go in.
I was so humiliated I burst into tears. Then I went in because it was fucking freezing and I didn’t see the point.
I barely squeaked past that class. I don’t remember doing basketball or anything. I do remember watching as a class a video involving footage of football injuries as they occurred. The one that stayed with me [GRAPHIC] was jura bar cynlre gnpxyrq gur bgure ng whfg gur evtug natyr naq sbepr gung gur xarr bs gur thl orvat gnpxyrq sbyqrq gur jebat jnl. The entire class gasped or exclaimed at that.
I think of field hockey as being coded for women. Probably has something to do with how my college had a field hockey girls’ team and no boys’ team. The boys had football and soccer and basketball and baseball (the girls had soccer and basket ball and softball). I guess they thought that football being exclusively a boys’ sport and field hockey being exclusively a girls’ sport balanced out.
OH and do I really have to rant about how girls are allowed to play baseball only if they pitch underhanded? Can we stipulate that I have done so?
“jura bar cynlre gnpxyrq gur bgure ng whfg gur evtug natyr naq sbepr gung gur xarr bs gur thl orvat gnpxyrq sbyqrq gur jebat jnl”
I know someone who had basically that happen — iirc it was soccer (though maybe that’s what you meant, we need to stipulate to calling American football that, or something) — but he spent a couple of months on crutches.
Yet another reason I do not do ball sports, jut put me in the pool, please.
*just put me in the pool
Damned typo faery.
@Argenti — Nope, American football.