Lords of their Dingalings: Men’s Rightsers outraged at Time writer for noting the lack of female characters in The Hobbit
Can you find the woman in this picture?
Uh oh! It seems that some woman is offering some opinions about Tolkien!
Over on Time.com, Ruth Davis Konigsberg has a brief personal essay reflecting on the almost complete lack of female characters in the new Hobbit film, and in Tolkien’s ouvre generally. As she notes, it’s not until about two hours in to the nearly three-hour movie that “we finally meet someone without a Y chromosome,” namely Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel — and she was added into the originally all-male story by the screenwriters. Blanchette’s is the only female name out of 37 named in the cast list – though there are a couple of unnamed female characters who make brief appearances.
“I did not read The Hobbit or the The Lord of the Rings trilogy as a child, and I have always felt a bit alienated from the fandom surrounding them,” Konigsberg observes.
Now I think I know why: Tolkien seems to have wiped women off the face of Middle-earth. I suppose it’s understandable that a story in which the primary activity seems to be chopping off each other’s body parts for no particular reason might be a little heavy on male characters — although it’s not as though Tolkien had to hew to historical accuracy when he created his fantastical world. The problem is one of biological accuracy. Tolkien’s characters defy the basics of reproduction: dwarf fathers beget dwarf sons, hobbit uncles pass rings down to hobbit nephews. If there are any mothers or daughters, aunts or nieces, they make no appearances. Trolls and orcs especially seem to rely on asexual reproduction, breeding whole male populations, which of course come in handy when amassing an army to attack the dwarves and elves.
Yes, yes, as she admits, Tolkien’s few female characters tend to be powerful. But that hardly changes the basic fact that the Hobbit, and Tolkien generally, is overloaded with dudes.
These fairly commonplace observations have, naturally, sent the orcs and the elf princesses of the Men’s Rights subreddit into an uproar. Naturally, none of them seem to have bothered to read any of Konigsberg’s brief piece before setting forth their opinions, which sometimes accuse her of ignoring things she specifically acknowledged (like that whole powerful-female-character thing), and completely miss that the bit about reproduction is, you know, a joke on Konigsberg’s part.
Here are some of my favorite idiotic comments from the “discussion.” (Click on the yellow comments to see the originals on Reddit.)
Uh, Jane Austen’s books are filled with dudes. Especially Pride and Prejudice 2: Mr. Darcy’s Revenge, which was later adapted into a buddy cop movie starring Robin Williams and Danny Glover.
EDITED TO ADD: Somehow forgot to include two of my favorite comments:
Oh, and if you were unable to find a woman in the picture above, try this one instead:
Like this:
Posted on December 31, 2012, in all about the menz, antifeminism, dozens of upvotes, I am making a joke, misogyny, MRA, no girls allowed, patriarchy, reddit, straw feminists and tagged gender, lord of the rings, men's rights, misogyny, MRA, reddit, the hobbit. Bookmark the permalink. 759 Comments.
Or a radio show?
@ pecunium
Have you seen Little Britain? I know what you mean about the Pythons, and they all tend to do the same thing on other projects too, but one of the things I like about them is that the poking fun at various groups of people doesn’t feel as mean-spirited as a lot of other shows can get.
(I’m sometimes OK with jokes being mean-spirited, but not so much when it’s a group of public school/Oxbridge grads sending up people who live on council estates.)
re Meller: ithiliania being away for awhile got me to making sure the nasty little spirochette wasn’t allowed to pretend he doesn’t think murdering women is a reasonable thing for an “upset” man to do.
And I’m too lazy (which is a bad thing, as it ends up costing me more time/effort, later on) to have a saved file of that little bit of his vile, and villainous nature. So I get reminded of all the other ways in which he actually supports terrorising women, when I enter “David K Meller Murder” into google (it’s a pretty scary list of hits).
In some ways, for all his freakishly clowny way of presenting, he is one of the more insidious, and wicked, of the repetitive reprobates who come to berate us about our blindess to “the way things ought to be”.
He hates that women are treated as people; with rights and feelings and agency. He thinks having some men who are willing to beat them and rape them and kill them (when they are, “provoked”) is a positive good for society.
He is on a sort list: If I ever find out he has died, I will be pleased. That puts him on a par with Bush, and Cheney, and Rumsfeld. In some ways he is worse than all of them. They did their evil for personal profit, he does it for pleasure.
Cassandra: No, I’ve not seen Little Britain. I like Python, and when they manage it, the joke are perfect (the running gags in many episodes are close to this, though some of them are just a little too much too).
The parrot sketch, and the cheese shop manage it; and it’s not that either of them is short. It’s that they keep the bit going with actual variations on the theme.
But I can’t watch more than about two episodes at a stretch.
How would you find out? A news story with the headline “Local man dies, 600 dolls in Victorian dress removed from home and disinfected before being given to children’s charity”?
Re: class and Python, the sketch about the coal miner son of an artist couple is hilarious.
I like a lot of the Python stuff, although I feel that they’ve gotten this status as legends so many people can’t admit that not EVERYTHING they did were great. Some of the sketches drag on for too long and some just isn’t funny. But lots of it is.
I thought the cheese shop was, like, their least funny sketch ever. Different strokes…
The coal miner son is hilarious. Also the upper class twit games.
Meller’s demise
Cassandra: Since DKM is pretty plainly a nom-de-net, I don’t expect to ever find out (though I’m pretty sure I know what city he lived in, from comments he’s made elseweb).
So, barring an announcement at the Spearhead, or on a Goldbug/Glibertarian/Racist site about him, I am never likely to know.
Which is fine. At some point he will stop showing up, and life (for us) will be better.
@Dvärghundspossen
“You know what he’s like after a few novels!” Brilliant!
Here’s one of my favorites:
As awful as he is he actually doesn’t upset me at all. Maybe it’s a sign of me being meaner than the rest of you? I find his obvious unhappiness amusing. We don’t even have to wait for him to go to Hell/be reincarnated as a roach, he’s already managed to make his own life pretty hellish.
Re: Moore, Watchmen.
I think some of that was the place and time that Watchmen came around. You have to be kind of into geekish pursuits with a sort of unawareness of the implications. Watchmen is excellent as a vehicle for pointing out ‘hey, Batman and the guys like him are not just doing illegal things but actively making the world a worse place by existing.’ A society-wide deconstruction of why we love super heroes, what it says about us, what it makes us? “Whatever happened to the American Dream?”
But then on the re-read all you notice are the little plotholes.
Re: Pratchett, Gaiman
I adore them both, but for such different reasons. Gaiman’s stuff is existensially dark. He writes about a world where the bogeyman is coming to kill you and there is no way to stop it and there has never been a way to stop it and the bogeyman can no more be reasoned with than time itself because the bogeyman is time, and he doesn’t kill you he makes you into the monster you always feared, the father who bullied you, and you become a shambling creature of habit with no joy who inflicts it on your children.
And it’s wicked depressing, if you think about it too much.
Pratchett, on the other hand, writes about (spoiler warning) the bogeyman who came and gave the kids a little scare each night (a freindly little scare to teach them how to handle their fear and be grownups) and grew to love them so much that he decided to protect them as best he could forever and ever because wouldn’t you do that if you visited kids every night? And what kind of monster could be unaffected by all those kids, visited all those times? BECAUSE THEY’RE JUST KIDS, DAMMIT.
And it’s sometimes pat and treacly, but who can blame him? The kids are adorable, after all.
“We don’t even have to wait for him to go to Hell/be reincarnated as a roach, he’s already managed to make his own life pretty hellish.”
That’s an awesome way to put it. lots of misogynists and MRAs are probably the same way. Reminds me of my miserable brother.
As a person, I think he’s miserable. As a presence, I worry that his persistence (elsewhere) makes him more effective than I’d like to think. He is, for a certain class of people, one of those with a more reasonable tone. He shares views with NWO, for example.
When he doesn’t go too much into the odd dictional tics he can almost sound reasonable.
He has decided to forego all restraint here, but not everywhere.
That roach line reminds me of this:
He’s so easy to provoke into losing his cool and showing his real self, though. If you really think people might be taking him seriously maybe we need a Meller task force to poke him into ranting about sex slaves and killing cats that scratch everywhere he comments.
Note: I have maintained this rosy view of children by staying far, far away from them. From a distance they are very cute indeed.
Re: Watchmen, and re: my earlier comments about women put in impractical clothing just to look sexy: WHY DO BOTH SILK SPECTRES WEAR HIGH HEELS? Moore wanted to explore the question what the world would be like if there really were super heroes. Well, I’ll tell you one thing - super heroines wouldn’t wear fucking high heels in real life!
But I’m very fond of Watchmen anyway. Reading the news articles about Silk Spectre 1 made me remember some old news articles about an old woman I once knew who was the first female engineer in Sweden and worked on aeroplane engines. They had the same bemused/patronising tone to them…
It’s hard to explain what doesn’t work for me about Gaiman, but it’s definitely not the darkness, it’s something to do with his writing style. The subject matter I like, it’s the execution that bugs. There’s something about him that I just find irritating, especially when he’s writing for young people.
Someone made a joke about Liefeld that he doesn’t know how to draw women’s legs and butts without heels. Maybe Moore has that issue too?
Not that Moore is exceptionally strong wrt women, but the Silk Spectres are indeed a deconstruction of women as super heroes and how they’re reduced to their gender. Silk Spectre I embraces this and makes “pretty and female” her trademark, which is why she wears heels and a pretty ridiculous outfit; Silk Spectre II not so much but she is largely overshadowed and controlled by her mother.
@Atomicgrizzly: That’s a great one too! Although “mangos in syrup” sounds as if they could do quite a lot of damage, if they’re still in the can when you attack someone with them…
@Howardbann1ster: Note: I have maintained this rosy view of children by staying far, far away from them. From a distance they are very cute indeed.
Not sure if you are riffing off Pratchett or not — but in fact, that’s the exact philosophy of HOGFATHER — the sound of children playing is lovely if you are far enough away not to hear the specifics.
Pratchett manages to beautifully show the terrors of childhood AND the ways many adults romanticize childhood!
@Katz: That’s a reason to wear sexy costumes, but seriously, both Spectres were supposed to actually be able to fight, and that would be pretty impossible in those heels… But yeah, this is my pet peeve.
Remember the bit about Teatime’s inner child in Hogfather? Pratchett definitely doesn’t think children are all sweetness and light.
That “self defence against fruit” thing reminds me of Black Adder goes fourth. Can’t find it on youtube now, but George asks captain Black Adder why he embarked on a military career if he hates war so much. Black Adder explains that when he started out as a soldier, British soldiers went to the colonies. The ideal enemy was considered a three-feet pygmé armed with dry grass. If they had spears, you almost thought twice about attacking. He wasn’t prepared for one day facing a million Germans with machine guns.
Later on there’s this storyline about how Black Adder once saved the life of a fellow officer “in the colonies”. Eventually it’s revealed that Black Adder killed a woman who tried to hit the fellow officer with a piece of mango. “But it was a sharp piece of mango! Very sharp!”.
I see DKM is still trying to sneak into older threads and give his last disgusting word. Coward.
For me the thing that keeps me fond is how Alan Moore reacts to people who are all fanboyish about Rorschach. D: …because when you brilliantly excoriate Objectivism, the last thing you expect is for the Objectivists to just miss the point, right? (insert pithy excoriation of Objectivists and Ayn Rand here)
Cassandra: no, I was trying to capture something about both Pratchett and Gaiman there. Not just the darkness of it, but the particular flavor of it. Not just a Lovecraftian sense that the universe is against, but that sense that maybe you are, in fact, the worst part of a bad world. I don’t know how to clarify that better. And with Pratchett and kids, not generally the sense that kids are terrific, but that in spite of them being much better from a distance, and over-romanticized, that sense that they’re worth fighting for.
But now Gaiman sounds terrible. That’s not exactly a defense of him, now is it?
I have to say that this is the nicest discussion of “things I don’t like” that I have ever been involved in. (At least one the internet, although this is a fair bit nicer that a lot of irl ones as well.)
Slightly off topic, but there’s a Sandman quote I HATE. It’s said by Death when she’s taking a baby away. The baby says something like “was that all?” and Death goes “You got what everyone gets; a life-time”.
Okay, that wasn’t anything that really bothered me when I read the comic. Maybe she just wanted to cheer the baby up or whatever. But then I saw that there’s actually this piece of merchandise (which is NOT Neil Gaiman’s fault, since he doesn’t own the characters) with an ankh and the quote written on it. Because there are apparently lots of people out there who thinks this is some deep truth.
Look. If I discovered I was only paid a fraction of what my colleagues are paid every month, and I went to my boss to complain, and he said “You get what everyone gets; a salary”, he wouldn’t be PROFOUND, he would be a DOUCHE.
I think that particular quote was a lot more biting when given to the immortal who’d lived 700 years, always avoiding death and never living; when it was applied to the baby it sort of scraped away a layer of romanticism and kind of hurt a little bit. It bothered me.
It felt to me like the author pointing out the two sides of the coin, the arbitrary unfairness of it. Death may be natural and normal, but it’s rarely fair. I’m not sure if it’s a Deepity (that is, a thought that sounds Deep, but ain’t really) or if it’s uncomfortable because it should be.
But, then, the first time I read it, I was a wingnut, and so my views towards Death are a bit different now.
It’s one of the reasons I really love this place. You disagree with me? But that’s okay because we’re all adults? Wha-huh? THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN IT’S UNPOSSIBLE AAAAAA
@Howard:
Yeah, if you think Rorschach is wonderful you’re clearly a moron.
Although it was fairly recently I learnt that “objectivism” can also mean “the philosophy of Ayn Rand”. You think I should know these things, being a philosophy professor and all, but for some strange reason Rand gets overlooked in every serious History of Moral Philosophy ever written, and you never see ANY current moral philosopher (I mean actual philosophers who get their stuff published in peer reviewed papers) who refers to Rand, so maybe that’s why. The thing is, “objectivism” has a standard meaning in metaethics, which is “theory according to which there is a true morality which is independent of time and culture” or something like that. It’s consistent with objectivism in this sense that the true morality is utilitarianism, Kantianism, some kind of religious ethics or whatever.
SO in my head I rather labelled Rorschach “a nasty kind of retributivist deontologist” or something like that. When internet geeks went “Rorschach is such an objectivist” I was like “Yeah… But Ozymandias is probably one too, only a utilitarian one”.
So many internet discussions suddenly became comprehensible to me once I learnt that if you’re not an actual philosopher, you mean “Ayn Rand’s philosophy” when you say “objectivist”.
One of the things I liked about American Gods is that there was a lot of “dark” in it, but that the dark wasn’t something inherent; that some of it, maybe the greater part of it was internal to oneself, and that it could be destroyed/put at bay.
Objectivist vs. objectivist. Suble, but important distinctions.
Particularly subtle when you begin the sentence with the former.
Actually I guess it’s subtle regardless which order you put them in.
Dark is good, I like dark. That’s not what grates on me about Gaiman’s style, it’s the sort of pantomime-y tone. I found Neverwhere particularly annoying, even though I loved the underlying concept.
I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one left cold by Gaiman’s writing.
One of the reasons I recommend the Sandman is I know that technically, it’s very, very good, and it resonates with a lot of people, so when I suggest it I actually hope the person I’m offering it to gets more out of it than I did. That’s the way I am with everything he reads – Technically fantastic, but it just doesn’t touch me like it does with others.
Actually the only reason I ever picked it up in the first place, back when I was very new to the world of comics, is because I read somewhere that the first volume of the trade had a Scarecrow cameo, and the Scarecrow is my favorite comic character of all time. I’ll give it to Gaiman – I did love that Scarecrow cameo.
Howard, I actually forgot that she said that to the 700-year-old man too. Right. In that context, it might be supposed to point out that there’s no fairness in life.
But when people sport an ankh with that quote, it strikes me as a deepity.
What does wingnut mean?
I started reading Sandman when someone said “you look just like Death in Sandman!”.
a wingnut is someone who is far out on the extreme of a position. Abnoy is a wingnut boy-gamer.
Meller is a wingnut gLibertarian.
Etc.
Just so. And I was using it here as shorthand for right-wing religious wingnut, or fundie.
Cassandra: I’m trying to picture what you meant by pantomime-y, here, but all I can think of are the really creepy bits of Coraline (the movie) where the not-quite-human things are trying to fake it.
Which is, of course, so utterly accurate of Objectivism, with the caveat that in Objectivism you get to make up the rules, keep them to yourself, and judge everybody else by them. (I was going someplace with that, but this nice gentleman named Godwin told me to leave it hanging right there, because you’re all smart folks who understand the implications of that kind of starting point. I like him! He’s nice! But I like everybody.)
By and large the other thing is that wingnut is a perjorative way of putting someone on the extreme.
So one doesn’t often put those who are “out there” on one’s own side of the divide into the “wingnut” category. I suspect it’s because we are afraid people won’t see the differences we do with them.
Whoa, I totally missed Meller’s resurfacing. He’s like a boil or something, ain’t he?
My personal interpretation of V for Vendetta was that V was NEVER intended to be considered ‘better’ than the government. The only reason he didn’t cause as much damage as the government was because he didn’t have their power. Like, he’s charming, charismatic, and compelling… but he’s just as bad.
The torture as means to personal revelation thing also really bothered me from day one. I mean, I was sexually abused for a year because my abuser had delusions of doing the same thing. He just needed to break me to make me better! Instead, our brain split into sentient pieces that turned against him, threw him out, and made him cry. Because that’s how shit goes down in real life; people break in different ways, and if they happen to break in a way that’s beneficial, it’s THEM doing it, not their tormenters.
Much to my horror, I find myself… admiring Rorschach, in a demented way. Like, he’s a horrible human being, with horrible views… but in a perverse way, I envy his sheer raw drive. (And yes, I realize that probably the only reason he MAINTAINS that drive is because he’s a wingnut.) Especially compared to Dan, who is more humane but I constantly wanted to throttle.
Fandom bitched that the Silk Spectre was passive, and I never got that. She stood down the equivalent of a GOD. The only action Dan initiated was to break Rorschach out of jail, and that I interpreted as because Rorschach has enough drive and initiative for a goddamn platoon and could tell Dan what to do.
“When she wants to be included/treated like a human being”
Your side goes on and on about it all the time, but what does it even mean? Don’t you realize that the reason why human males sexually “objectify” human females is precisely because they recognize them as fellow beings of the opposite gender? Even when human males sexually objectify non-humans (living and non-living), half the time it’s because of their resemblance/resonance to human females. Do you want human males to lose sexual interest in human females altogether? Would that stop your whining once and for all? But even when they do, there are still complaints, like with the case of so-called “herbivores”. Women are just too fickle. They don’t like it when men notice them sexually, they don’t like it when men ignore them sexually. Huh, make up your minds! Oh, I know, your side wants human males to have a sex drive, but only the way your side, likes it i.e. “gentleman”, but then how come the ladies reject the “nice guys” for the “bad boys”, at least until they hit the wall and/or their biological starts ticking it’s countdown, whichever comes first (i.e. women wise up only when they’re washed up).
Btw, on the topic of fun sci-fi, has anyone else read “the dancers at the end of time” (An alien heat, the hollow lands, the end of all songs) series by Michael Moorcock? It’s part of his vast “eternal champion” series, but can be read independently. There are only a few things you’ll miss if you haven’t read the rest of the books. And it has a totally different tone from the other eternal champion books, where the hero is all dark and brooding.
The male protagonist in “dancers” is called Jherek Carnelian. He lives in the far far far far far future. People have “power rings” which allows you to create anything you want out of anything with your mind. The rings somehow draw their energy from the stars, but nobody knows how they work any longer, since it was ages since there were any proper scientists. If someone dies, they can just be resurrected by using a power ring. There’s no illness and no lack of anything. Everyone just spend there time partying, having sex and doing art installations. Jherek has a thing for nineteenth century Europe, so he does lots of installations on that theme, although he gets most stuff wrong since everyone is pretty clueless about actual history.
One day Mrs Amelia Underwood unexpectedly arrives from actual nineteenth century London. She’s been kidnapped and dropped off in Jherek’s time by a time-traveller (for reasons that are eventually revealed). Jherek decides that he’s gonna fall in love with her as part of his art installation, and lots of hilarity ensues from his complete misconceptions about how “falling in love according to nineteenth century costumes” is supposed to work. Eventually, Amelia ends up living in his house as a friend while she’s trying the best she can to find out a way to go back to her time and place. She is returned, but by then Jherek has (of course) fallen in love with her for real and decides to pursue her through time.
They’re both great characters; Amelia is deeply religious but no fanatic, and portrayed as fairly open-minded (explained by her growing up in different countries with her father who was a missionary). She’s intelligent and resourceful and has the ability to grind her teeth together and try to solve the problem rather than break down, even as her entire world seems to be collapsing around her. Jherek is, as Amelia also points out, in a way incredibly innocent, since he’s never had to face any problems in his entire life. And he’s also incredibly kind, to the point where he’s just puzzled as to why anyone would do such a thing when a much more brutal nineteenth century man punches him. But it seems like a pretty credible way to end up, if you’ve really lived a completely and utterly problem-free life.
So, want to read some really funny and original sci-fi, this is a recommendation.
Does anyone else here a strange hum? Like a machine failing the Turing test? (Not you Dvärghundspossen)
Adams wrote Dirk Gently? I managed about two pages of one of those and tossed it. I’m not into reading books about main characters I loathe. “Manipulative creepy fucker” is pretty much the opinion I’d formed of Gently in that short time. Not amusing and not someone I’d waste my time on in fiction or in real life.
Playing belated catch-up on this thread - everyone’s been online while I’ve been watching Sleepers.
Not so much a hum as a scratching sound, like a cat clawing at something it knows it’s not supposed to just so you’ll go chase it.
Valid point, so let me treat him as I do the cat when she does that. I actually just emailed that mess to my not-an-ex with a note to enjoy zir word salad breakfast, because dude, the otaku comments at least managed to follow a (completely pointless) line of argument. This mess? Well…
*takes that parental scolding tone* This is completely unacceptable behavior!
Argenti - like a mechanical mosquito. Or a record with a scratch in it.
Ithiliana - good thing I didn’t post that line from Hogfather about the sound of children playing right after reading Howard’s comment. You beat me to it by a long time!
Little Britain - watched a few episodes, didn’t care for it. I liked David Walliams in Ted and Alice (anyone see that? Dawn French and Stephen Tompkinson in a romance between an alien and an earthling. In the Lake District).
Python, yeah, I adored it as a teenager, and some sketches I still love. I found the Parrot Sketch and the Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook worked much better as they filmed them for And Now For Something Completely Different than in the series. They seem to be performed more tightly. Plus of course Parrot segues into the Lumberjack Song (OMG I’m now seeing Michael Palin playing Pierre). The Fish Slapping Dance, well, can’t go wrong with that.
Pecunium - re only being able to watch a couple of eps at a time; I got like that with the whole series of Fawlty Towers. Watched it with glee the first couple of times it was on and then just couldn’t stand it any more. Some of it is really laboured, too, now, and some of the humour (as with Python) is a bit side-eye after thirty-plus years. Same with Dave Allen; I loved his show as a kid and there are some bits that are still hilarious, but some of it is a bit off.
I don’t suppose any USians here knows the Goon Show? There wouldn’t have been a Python without them, they are the ones who were really seminal in absurd English humour. (Fellow Aussies might know it, it still gets airtime after some sixty years.)
What we need is a water pistol that can send virtual squirts along the intertubes, and emerge as real water to make trolls’ computers go FZZZZBANGFLASHBOOM.
I wonder if he knows about One Billion Rising yet. I fully expect all the usual suspects to shit bricks next month.
@Kitten:
I liked the first Dirk Gently merely because of the way all of the seemingly disconnected plot threads (and they seemed REALLY disconnected; a monk meditating on an alien planet, a sofa that got stuck in a staircase and can’t possibly be dislodged) eventually were tied up neatly at the end, just as Dirk had insisted through out the book that they would turn out to be because QUANTUM MECHANICS.
The second Dirk Gently, pretty crappy. Merely the tired old pop culture trope “all gods exist as long as people believe in them” trotted out all over again.
Abnoy: “When she wants to be included/treated like a human being”
Your side goes on and on about it all the time, but what does it even mean?
Our side? So you admit to not thinking women ought to be treated as equals, with all the rights of any other human being.
Ok, now that the easy shot is taken (easy because it’s true, but you so rarely admit it), it means just that. Treated like a human being. Your next comment makes it plain you aren’t quite clear on the concept.
Don’t you realize that the reason why human males sexually “objectify” human females is precisely because they recognize them as fellow beings of the opposite gender?
Nope, that’s not what it means. I see women as fellow beings. Their gender is irrelevant to the equation. When someone sees a woman as… let me see, I think their is another post which has something about this:
That’s not seeing them as women. It’s seeing them as objects (hence, “objectification”). You lot go on, and on (and on, and on, and on, and on, and on) about this. Intentionally screwing it up (that, or you are too stupid to learn, because everytime you try this, some [often more than one] explains it to you, and then you ignore it and try to argue for this inanity again).
Do I look at women I don’t know, and think, “Damn, she’s hot!”? Yes, I do.
Sometimes I even wonder how much fun it would be to have sex with her. Sometimes I even try to see if she want’s to have sex with me.
None of that (not one single portion of it) is objectifiying her.
I have a chair. It’s a nice chair. I don’t care how it feels (ok, I do care that it feels nice under my ass, being anti-misandry, and all). If it gets less than pleasant, or I change my mind, or someone gets me a new chair I like better, I’ll get rid of it.
It’s a wooden chair. I might burn it. Maybe break it into pieces and make it into something else. Perhaps I’ll put it on the curb with a sign, “free to a good home” and forget about it.
I don’t ask the chair if it minds before I do any of these things. That’s because the chair is an object.
Looking at someone is fine. Thinking someone is sexy, is fine. Not giving a damn what they think, is not fine.
You, with your whiny-ass, titty-baby complaint that, “The wimmenz is rooning my fun!!!!!!!!” are denying them agency. You are telling them what they feel/want/believe don’t mean shit, because you are a man, and this is “for men only”.
That’s fucked up. It’s a form of, if not objectification, infantilisation. It’s bullshit.
Do you want human males to lose sexual interest in human females altogether?
Are you that fucking stupid? (wait, don’t answer that… it’s better not to know, and to pretend you are just engaging in political posturing).
Read all the stuff I said above. I’m a human male. I have a strong interest in women, a sexual interest. I do, however, see them as more than a warm place to bury my cock. If they want to read SF, or be, “Gamers” or work as riveters, or design airplanes, or be soldiers, or any other damn thing, that’s fine with me.
Will that change my life? Sure. Some of being in a combat zone would have been easier with only one sex. But that’s not the way it is (and it’s not the way it ought to be, because it doesn’t need to be) so the men, and the women, came to a modus vivendi
You, and your ilk, don’t want that. You want women to be in the background, until you need a sandwich, or a blowjob, or your nappy-changed. Fuck that shit.
Oh, I know, your side wants human males to have a sex drive, but only the way your side, likes it i.e. “gentleman”, but then how come the ladies reject the “nice guys” for the “bad boys”, at least until they hit the wall and/or their biological starts ticking it’s countdown, whichever comes first (i.e. women wise up only when they’re washed up).
More bullshit. Tell me what makes for a, “bad boy”.
I’ll bet that most of those definitions… I meet.
What males who say that really mean is, “the hot chicks I want to bang go for other dudes.” Then when (as most relationships do) they break up, and she’s feeling bad, you preen that, “it would have been different if she’d been willing to fuck me”.
Of course, if she leaves such a male, he’s all, “Damn c*nt was just a lying whore! No woman is ever faithful!”
There are bad boys. They are often, at best, borderline rapists (at worst they are serial rapists), who take advantage of shitbirds like you, and Meller, providing social cover, and prey on vulnerable women. When they do, you laugh, and say, “she wasn’t raped, it’s buyer’s remorse, because she fucked a ‘bad boy, instead of a nice guy.”
Which is you still treating women like objects: Only valuable when not bothering you (by liking things you like, and expecting to be treated decently), or putting out.
*leads standing ovation for Pecunium brilliantly and comprehensively taking down the Abnoy bullshit*