For those of you who’ve been following Jamie and me as we engage with(or, depending on your perspective, condescend to, or waste our time with, or go to war with) the Men’s Rights Advocates at GlennSacks.com, you may remember such reactions, from us, as the following:
Ouch.
Stop it. That hurts.
Why won’t you listen to me?
Fuck you, fuckball.
Waaaaahhhh.
Can’t we all just get along?
You also, if you delved into (or participated in) the comments threads after our posts to Glenn’s blog, may remember this response, offered to us a number of times, in response to our various expressions of bewilderment and hurt feelings.
If you think this is bad, you should try offering an anti- or non-feminist perspective over at a blog like Feministing.
With that in mind, I spent a few minutes today hanging out, at Feministing, in the comments following this post, titled "Yeah, what about the men?"
Via several readers comes this cartoon from Toothpaste For Dinner:
Click image to enlarge.Reminds me of a real-life troll who showed up when Jessica and I spoke at the University of Missouri a few weeks ago. The guy raised his hand and asked us, "How come you never talk about men? You don’t blog about areas where men are underrepresented!" Exactly which areas those were, he couldn’t say…
My provisional conclusions are the following (I notice I’m using the word "following" a lot today; interesting, or maybe not):
1) Feministing can be kind of smug. In fact, smug is one of their default positions.
2) There is room at Feministing, in the comments section at least, for a perspective that argues that men get the shaft in certain ways, or that feminism needs to look at the needs of men more (for strategic reasons if nothing else). A guy who goes in with good intentions, but some differences of opinion, would be given a chance by a good percentage of the fellow commenters, arguably more of a chance than Jamie and I were given, at least initially, by the Glenn Sacks posse.
3) If you endeavor to participate in the comments threads at Feministing, you’ll have a much easier time if you accept, from the beginning, the existence of the Patriarchy. In this respect, there is a kind of formal resemblance to GlennSacks.com, which expects you to accept the existence of certain kinds of systemic discrimination against men, and think you’re an ass if you don’t.
4) I’m not trying to do a pox-on-both-their houses, moral equivalence kind of dealie. Well, I am, but only insofar as I think that it serves neither side to require agreement on all the major points before you engage in argument; that kind of limits the scope of the argument. I recognize that it absolutely matters which of the various premises we’re being asked to accept are true. Is there a patriarchy? If so, well, then the feminists are on firmer ground than the MRAs. Is there more of a bias in the media against men than against women? If so, then score one for the MRAs.
5) (I’m not sure why I’m still numbering these things. It’s kind of stupid). There’s a basic misapprehension of the nature of the universe that’s shared, often, by both feminists and MRAs — a kind of implicit idea that there’s a law of the conservation of justice, that if you’re attending to the needs of, say, women, then there simply isn’t time to think about the needs of men (and vice versa).
It’s true that there are a lot of good reasons, aside from the profound philosophical differences, why it wouldn’t make sense for NOW to create an MRA-oriented division of the organization, but there’s no good reason why NOW, or Feministing.com, or GlennSacks.com, or Feminist Critics, can’t take into account the needs, feeling, anxieties, concerns, issues, etc of other groups in the way that they craft their advocacy for their particular group.
