Another entry from the anti-feminists teaming up with right-wingers to sneer at women who say yes actually Elliot Rodger was motivated by misogyny, you can tell that by looking at his manifesto and his farewell video.
The link is to The National Review, not exactly a known bastion of skepticism. Let’s see what Heather MacDonald has to say.
Over 77 percent of all U.S. murder victims in 2012 were male; targets of non-lethal shootings are even more disproportionately male. Four of the six homicide victims of Elliot Rodger, the lunatic narcissist who went on a killing spree in Santa Barbara in revenge for female rejection, were male. And yet the feminist industry immediately turned this heartbreaking bloodbath into a symbol of America’s war on women.
“The feminist industry?” As opposed to the conservative industry that employs The National Review? And then, a symbol? No. A reality. The point was that organized hatred of women shaped Rodger’s thinking (such as it was) and that that deserves attention rather than sneers.
…the fundamental premise of the feminist analysis of Rodger’s massacre — that the U.S. is “misogynist” — is patently absurd. To the contrary, ours is a culture obsessed with promoting and celebrating female success. There is not a science faculty or lab in the country that is not under relentless pressure from university administrators and the federal government to hire female professors and researchers, regardless of the lack of competitive candidates and the cost to meritocratic standards.
Why is there such pressure (where there is)? Because the numbers are so bad and because they’ve been getting worse instead of better, and there is a lot of research indicating that women stay away partly because of harassment and sexism and even misogyny. I don’t see our culture as “obsessed with promoting and celebrating female success”: I see it as obsessed with leering at female hotness and raging at female unhotness, along with watching tv shows that present women as neurotic idiots who are always tearing each other apart.
Girls hear a constant message that “strong women can do it all,” including raise children on their own. Any female even remotely in the public realm who is not deeply conscious that she has been the “beneficiary” of the pressure to stock conference panels, media slots, and op-ed pages with females is fooling herself.
Hang on. Which is it? A constant message that strong women can do it all, or a constant message that we’re in the public realm only because of the pressure to stock conference panels, media slots, and op-ed pages with females?
Corporate boards and management seek women with hungry desperation.
And then don’t promote them. Something is keeping the numbers down, at any rate. Maybe it’s just that women are so stupid.
Women “face harassment every day,” a double global-studies and feminist-studies major told the New York Times…This portrait of a public realm filled with leering, grasping men may have described 1950s Italy and perhaps some Latin American countries today, but it bears no resemblance to contemporary America. Construction workers have largely been tamed. Groping on subways is thankfully rare — and it is committed by perverts. No one condones such behavior.
No one condones such behavior. Is that a fact?! Ask Pamela Gay if no one condones such behavior.
And then, the cherry on the cake, we get the Dear Muslima.
Here’s a suggestion to offended females: Laugh off such crude manifestations of the unconstrained male sex drive, then put them in perspective. Go to Afghanistan, India, or Nigeria if you want to combat sexual inequality. But don’t pretend that as a gender-studies student in the academic hothouse, you are a brave victim fighting against your own oppression and that of the American sisterhood.
Heather MacDonald and Richard Dawkins must be so grateful to Afghanistan, India, and Nigeria for giving them such a fabulous pretext for telling feminists in their own world to shut up and be grateful.
Not even wrong.
Grothe isn’t a skeptic, he’s a “skeptic”… he figured out that Bigfoot is fake and hasn’t had an intelligent or meaningful thought since.
Oh, and I almost forgot to comment on the blatant racism in the quoted article. Jesus fuck these people are bad at thinking.
All the Americans who were shocked and complained about the Boston bombing should keep things in perspective. This type of thing is a daily occurrence in other countries and they should be grateful to be in such a safe place. Besides, the Tsarnaev brothers were mentally ill so it’s not as if there’s something to conclude about the event.
/sarcasm
I really hate the “male sex drive” excuse as if men were beasts who can’t control themselves. It also stems from the notion that women are not sexual beings who derive pleasure from sex, they are sexual objects. The myth that men think about sex most often than women has been debunked over and over and over again, but it doesn’t fit the opinions of conservative jerks.
As an ex-Muslim woman from the Middle East and a victim of oppressive misogyny at the hands of Islamist power structures, I absolutely condemn continued attempts to use the plight of Muslim women to trivialize harassment and misogyny in the United States. My oppression is not a tool to be used to bolster anti-feminism. Those who hold such opinions, Dawkins included, can kindly fuck off.
Is there any way we could bury Dear Muslima? Disintegrate it? Reduce it to ashes and scatter it to the four corners of the earth?
My immediate thought on seeing the title of this post was “What culture would that be?”
If you could somehow resurrect Rodger from the dead he no doubt would be quite upset to find out he only killed 2 women. You have to be willfully uncomprehending to claim his manifesto isn’t proof of his hatred of women, and that said hatred was the reason for his rampage.
What Marwa said. Yeah.
I was thinking, earlier, after someone said in an earlier thread that Dawkins & Co don’t really care about women in Islamist countries and the like, that I’m not sure about that, I think they do care, it’s just that yadda yadda.
But then it occurred to me how VERY fucking useful it is to them to have places that are so starkly oppressive to women so that they can always always always compare the two.
And I changed my mind.
When a gay atheist stoops to praising the National Review (!!!) to malign feminists, that’s gotta be the point where the mental warning bells get too loud to ignore. Surely now that he’s found himself heartily agreeing with one of the most homophobic, archconservative, piously Christian publications in the country, it’s high time for such an astute, skeptical mind to stop, take a step back and do a liiiittle reassessing of his reasoning? I mean… right?
Of course, it’s not gonna happen. Go figure.
Wait til someone notices that Google’s doodles have had a distinctly feminist feel over the last 6 months. My partner has been really enjoying learning about all the female scientists she never heard of while studying science at uni.
Amazing that it took some google doodles to educate her about this, given the overwhelmingly feminised world we live in. /s
If we were to clean up this country, the USA, I mean, so there was no misogyny, no abuse or oppression of women, we could then look the Muslim countries in the eye and tell them it can be done. As it is, there are probably people in Muslim countries saying that if the US can’t do any better, why should the Muslims?
As things are, we can say that women who don’t wear burkas don’t get immediately attacked, and that women can vote and can drive. But we need to be able to say that those things are simple, obvious and basic, and that we are trying hard to make things better for women, and for all people in all countries.
@Menyambal #12,
“As it is, there are probably people in Muslim countries saying that if the US can’t do any better, why should the Muslims?”
Yes, and more. There are already 8 Muslim countries that have had female leaders, years before we have.
http://www.juancole.com/2014/03/muslims-publics-leaders.html
thalarctos! Haven’t seen you in forever!
Hope you’re doing well.
See, my first thought on reading that title was “Ooh, that sounds nice. Where can we get one of those?”
“Strong female” messages always sound like “Intelligent African-American” to me. I was going to call it a backhanded compliment, but that is probably too kind.
Wait, I thought the harassment didn’t exist?
Wasn’t that something that only happens in Italy of the past and with those dirty furreiners in Latin America (I always felt much safer in Cuba than in any European country I lived in…)
And yeah, the time the guy followed me to the dark car park and then tried to reach me before I reached the car was totally funny. Hahaha. Can hardly stop laughing…
@Marwa Berro #6
Exactly! And these are the same people who complain about feminists exploiting tragedy for political ends…
And yet…
What Happens Before? A Field Experiment Exploring How Pay and Representation Differentially Shape Bias on the Pathway into Organizations.
It’s almost as if there were more to it than “Meritocracy” and “Equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome” after all…
Oh FFS, I saw all this shit as a child, before I’d ever even heard of feminism, and I certainly wasn’t raised in feminism, even if it was a fairly liberal Catholic upbringing. Feminist theory and frameworks come after the existence of misogyny. And anyone not overly programmed with misogyny can see the unfairness and bigoted treatment of women even if they don’t have a coherent global picture or a theory for it.
Oh wow.
Here’s some more Heather Mac Donald. I wonder, does DJ Grothe find this to his taste, too? I’d actually really fucking like to know…
From last year (via the Atlantic Wire):
The Worst Argument Against Women In Combat Yet: They’re Sad Rape Victims
Justin Berrier at Media Matters quotes Mac Donald:
And, from just a couple weeks ago, here’s Mac Donald’s take on campus sexual assault. (You can tell where this is going by the fact that “Deserving Victims” is right there in the title — that’s got to be the vilest I-see-what-you-did-there ‘joke’ I’ve ever seen.)
The Obama Administration’s Deserving Victims
(there’s so, so much more from that article. “the campus-rape industry”, “regretted sex”, … It’s like a supernova of terrible.)
And that’s not even getting into Mac Donald’s well-documented racism. But hey, she’s a self-described “secular,” so it’s all good, right? Welcome aboard the “movement,” Heather!
Ugh.
Thanks for that, artymorty. (I changed the time stamp on this because it got held overnight because of the links.)
Vaguely on topic, I’ve been reading a few reddit discussions about Rodger’s actions (because, yes, I hate being happy) and I’ve learnt some interesting things.
– It’s totally rational and skeptical to deny that his explicitly stated motivation was his actual motivation.
– The fact that he killed more men than women proves that his motivations weren’t misogynistic (but let’s not even consider the 13 wounded (I have no idea the genders of those 13, but I imagine that information would give more insight)).
– While the above assumptions are entirely rational, it’s an irrational leap of logic to assume that he committed suicide when he did, not because he considered his “vengeance” to be complete, but because he panicked or realised the awfulness of what he was doing.
– Attempting to discuss the idea of male entitlement as a possible causative factor is insensitively and callously using a national tragedy in order to benefit our own ideology.
– Asserting that he was just crazy, which was the one and only cause of his actions, and nothing could be done neither demonises people who suffer with mental illnesses, nor is it an irresponsible refusal to recognise that things like this can be prevented if we care to change the way that society deals with these issues.
And on the main topic, I sometimes wonder if crank magnetism can drag someone out of skepticism entirely. I’m used to hearing fallacious arguments from skeptics on the topic of feminism, but linking to the national review? What the fuck is going on there? (And why did I read the comments… augh, my braincells! Apparently, “the right to not be raped goes hand in hand with the right to not be provocative,” so I’m just going to file that away in my “things to think about when you’re tired of being happy” drawer. This particular brand of conservative libertarianism really does just want to live in Mad Max world, doesn’t it?)
I know a lot of skeptics are offended by the idea that we might all have a blind spot somewhere, but surely if ignoring it can lead to considering that kind of nonsense a reliable source, you’d want to know so you can keep an eye out for it? I know I certainly want some form of warning sign if I’m drifting into irrational thinking.
@Ophelia
But then it occurred to me how VERY fucking useful it is to them to have places that are so starkly oppressive to women so that they can always always always compare the two.
But then it would also be so hypocritical to complain about all the other stuff they do complain about (prayer in schools, prayer at govt meetings, pandering to religious crap) when there are so many worse things that you can find religion doing…
The funny thing is that the religious side use that argument very often in those kinds of discussions. “Why are you complaining about allowing children to pray in school while people are being murdered in Scaribad and Foreignistan?”
It’s almost as if they took it as a prototype, rather than recognising the fallacies in it.
The ‘funny’ (i.e. rage inducing stoopid) thing about following multiple discussions of this on several atheist boards is the crossover between gun porn and misogyny.
There is a lot of (what’s the fallacy called? Simple reason fallacy?) trying to pin this on a single thing. The gun nuts and the MRAs both want to blame it on mental illness (and only mental illness), but there is an amusing overlap of the three where some of the gun nuts want to blame it on the MRAs, and some of the MRAs want to blame it on the gun nuts and lack of regulation.
They are both right in some ways, but not in the ways they want to recognize…..
SC (Salty Current), OM: good to see you, too! doing well, now, thanks!