rage level approaching "critical"
Dec. 9th, 2010 11:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gmonkey42I don't know why I do this to myself: read comments on Pharyngula. PZ Meyers may be feminist-friendly but the comments section is definitely not a safe space. It would be nice if there were more overlap between the "atheist/skeptic" and "not a douchebag" categories.
What brought this on? This post here, about a Christian version of the Mystery Method. The video is pretty funny. The comments section on the Pharyngula post is not so entertaining. The majority of people seems to get it - especially everyone laying the well-deserved smackdown on OMS! - but the ones who don't are making my blood boil.
Two types that are especially sticking in my craw today:
1. Genuine grade-A Nice Guy™ with bonus Asperger's self-diagnosis who says something like "I'm very shy and socially awkward and I feel attacked when you poke fun at this guy who is just trying to help people like me! Because I can't tell the difference between objectifying, manipulative PUA tricks and normal human social interaction! And it's unfair that all women were born with flawless social skills but men have to work at it! [seriously, someone said this, see comment #86] By telling me to respect women's boundaries, you're telling me I'm not allowed to interact with women at all! Because I am incapable of interacting with a woman without trampling all over her clearly communicated boundaries! I don't know why you're all being so mean to me! Gnar gender essentialism male sex drive (foams at mouth)"
and
2. the ones who say "a woman can proposition a strange man for sex and probably be successful but if the genders are reversed, the man gets thrown in jail [yeah, because if only those pesky women would stop getting themselves raped, they wouldn't have to be so cautious!] and this is a horrible double standard, why don't the feminists care about this type of sexism, huh?"
and as a corollary:
2a. Same as 2 except with the addition of: "And by the way I AM FEMALE, EVERYBODY GATHER 'ROUND AND ADMIRE HOW COOL I AM, DO I GET MY HONORARY PENIS NOW?"
One of the commenters who does get it posted a link to a post that bears, er, re-posting: Schrödinger's Rapist. I recommend it if you haven't already seen it.
Something came up in comments on that post (which are moderated, though I didn't read all the way down): the concern that people would respond to the post with "if women would carry a gun/take a self defense class, they wouldn't have to be cautious and then men wouldn't have to worry about this!"
Except: I am pretty damn confident in my ability to defend myself. I've practiced martial arts - first Tae Kwon Do, then briefly Jiujitsu and Aikido and now Shou Shu Kung Fu - on and off since I was a teenager, for a total of about six years. Shou Shu is by far the most practical for self-defense (well, Aikido is damn good too but that takes a lot longer to get good at). I have had some training in disabling multiple attackers and disarming an attacker with a knife or gun. I am not much smaller than the average man.
I cannot remember any time in my adult life that I actually feared that a man would hurt me. BUT there have been plenty of times, far too many to count, when I've thought a man might try to hurt me. I'm not afraid, I'm wary. I make sure I know where my exits are. I am very aware of where he is in relation to me, how he might possibly try an attack and strategies I could use to defend.
Most men and maybe some women reading this would think I'm being ridiculously paranoid. A lot of women completely understand. It's easy to mistake this type of sensible caution for irrational fear and I want to make it clear that there's a big difference. Anyone who could read these posts & comments at Pharyngula and Shapely Prose and come to the conclusion that it's women who are the problem, that if we'd just get over this crazy fear of men and be more open to meeting new people then everything would be fine? That person Does Not Get It. My point is that although for many women there actually is fear - and that's not their fault - there are those of us who have a reasonable expectation of being able to hurt out attacker worse than they can hurt us, and we don't respond well to strangers standing over us on the bus to tell us our hair is pretty either.
One of the Pharyngula thread's poor Nice Guys™ who are just shy and gosh how are they supposed to meet anybody like this? said he feels that trying to start a conversation is rude and an imposition on the person you're talking to. So he thinks the people around him (he bristled that he hadn't specified a gender and he has trouble talking to men too! because that's totally what this comment thread was about) are delicate flowers and he daren't inflict his monstrous presence upon them. This guy has, deliberately or not, exposed some serious self-esteem issues; having a mental health problem like that is unfortunate but it is HIS problem, not ours. The people around him are not responsible for fixing or even accommodating his crippling social anxiety for him. Not even if they're female people whom he'd like to date. He seems to think the world owes it to him to create social situations where he feels comfortable when 1) that doesn't happen for anybody else (not even women!) and 2) for such a self-loathing emo douche, that is clearly impossible anyway.
These Nice Guys™ and the people who say women should just take self-defense and everything would be fine are both making the same mistake: they're assuming that men have an inalienable right to have women pay attention to them at any and all times and that if women don't like that, we have to come up with some kind of solution; any solution other than the blindingly obvious: to reject this idea that men have the right to women's time and attention.
What brought this on? This post here, about a Christian version of the Mystery Method. The video is pretty funny. The comments section on the Pharyngula post is not so entertaining. The majority of people seems to get it - especially everyone laying the well-deserved smackdown on OMS! - but the ones who don't are making my blood boil.
Two types that are especially sticking in my craw today:
1. Genuine grade-A Nice Guy™ with bonus Asperger's self-diagnosis who says something like "I'm very shy and socially awkward and I feel attacked when you poke fun at this guy who is just trying to help people like me! Because I can't tell the difference between objectifying, manipulative PUA tricks and normal human social interaction! And it's unfair that all women were born with flawless social skills but men have to work at it! [seriously, someone said this, see comment #86] By telling me to respect women's boundaries, you're telling me I'm not allowed to interact with women at all! Because I am incapable of interacting with a woman without trampling all over her clearly communicated boundaries! I don't know why you're all being so mean to me! Gnar gender essentialism male sex drive (foams at mouth)"
and
2. the ones who say "a woman can proposition a strange man for sex and probably be successful but if the genders are reversed, the man gets thrown in jail [yeah, because if only those pesky women would stop getting themselves raped, they wouldn't have to be so cautious!] and this is a horrible double standard, why don't the feminists care about this type of sexism, huh?"
and as a corollary:
2a. Same as 2 except with the addition of: "And by the way I AM FEMALE, EVERYBODY GATHER 'ROUND AND ADMIRE HOW COOL I AM, DO I GET MY HONORARY PENIS NOW?"
One of the commenters who does get it posted a link to a post that bears, er, re-posting: Schrödinger's Rapist. I recommend it if you haven't already seen it.
Something came up in comments on that post (which are moderated, though I didn't read all the way down): the concern that people would respond to the post with "if women would carry a gun/take a self defense class, they wouldn't have to be cautious and then men wouldn't have to worry about this!"
Except: I am pretty damn confident in my ability to defend myself. I've practiced martial arts - first Tae Kwon Do, then briefly Jiujitsu and Aikido and now Shou Shu Kung Fu - on and off since I was a teenager, for a total of about six years. Shou Shu is by far the most practical for self-defense (well, Aikido is damn good too but that takes a lot longer to get good at). I have had some training in disabling multiple attackers and disarming an attacker with a knife or gun. I am not much smaller than the average man.
I cannot remember any time in my adult life that I actually feared that a man would hurt me. BUT there have been plenty of times, far too many to count, when I've thought a man might try to hurt me. I'm not afraid, I'm wary. I make sure I know where my exits are. I am very aware of where he is in relation to me, how he might possibly try an attack and strategies I could use to defend.
Most men and maybe some women reading this would think I'm being ridiculously paranoid. A lot of women completely understand. It's easy to mistake this type of sensible caution for irrational fear and I want to make it clear that there's a big difference. Anyone who could read these posts & comments at Pharyngula and Shapely Prose and come to the conclusion that it's women who are the problem, that if we'd just get over this crazy fear of men and be more open to meeting new people then everything would be fine? That person Does Not Get It. My point is that although for many women there actually is fear - and that's not their fault - there are those of us who have a reasonable expectation of being able to hurt out attacker worse than they can hurt us, and we don't respond well to strangers standing over us on the bus to tell us our hair is pretty either.
One of the Pharyngula thread's poor Nice Guys™ who are just shy and gosh how are they supposed to meet anybody like this? said he feels that trying to start a conversation is rude and an imposition on the person you're talking to. So he thinks the people around him (he bristled that he hadn't specified a gender and he has trouble talking to men too! because that's totally what this comment thread was about) are delicate flowers and he daren't inflict his monstrous presence upon them. This guy has, deliberately or not, exposed some serious self-esteem issues; having a mental health problem like that is unfortunate but it is HIS problem, not ours. The people around him are not responsible for fixing or even accommodating his crippling social anxiety for him. Not even if they're female people whom he'd like to date. He seems to think the world owes it to him to create social situations where he feels comfortable when 1) that doesn't happen for anybody else (not even women!) and 2) for such a self-loathing emo douche, that is clearly impossible anyway.
These Nice Guys™ and the people who say women should just take self-defense and everything would be fine are both making the same mistake: they're assuming that men have an inalienable right to have women pay attention to them at any and all times and that if women don't like that, we have to come up with some kind of solution; any solution other than the blindingly obvious: to reject this idea that men have the right to women's time and attention.
