Everytime i see that picture it upsets me. See how there are no women around him? That tells you all you need to know about conservatives and the “pro-life” crowd.

“I get why women will engage in this—-like I said above, it makes you feel like one of the boys.  [...]  I just don’t get why it’s so satisfying to so many men to put women down, especially with regards to sex.”

Because it makes them feel like one of the boys.

Think of a place like Hooters where scantily clad women are literally serving you, and you’ll see what I mean.

Why isn’t there a restaurant /bar chain called, say, “Salamis,” in which scantily-clad, well-endowed young men serve customers?

Why?  I think it’s simple enough…basic insecurity.  If women are people and have choices, they can say no.  No is BAD.  Right of refusal means Theoretical Male Idiot will never get laid, never have children, etc.  Face it, the entirety of “male culture” is based on making everyone else around you feel insecure and inferior.  If one posits that women are equal beings with equal desires and rights, well, they can just go out and choose not to be with you, you miserable not-manly-enough slob.

This feeds into so many twisted psychologies.  Handsome/pretty men - Brad Pitt, for instance - must be gay, of course, because if they aren’t your woman is going to jump them/fantasize about them because you’re an inferior lump.  Because you’re not manly/macho enough, if a gay man approaches within the possible Gay Infection Zone, you will suddenly become gay because the barest of defenses stands between you (you miserable inferior insecure wimp) and becoming a flaming gay guy.

The pathology is constantly reinforced.  Don’t like sports?  You’re a loser because sports is macho.  Don’t like NASCAR? Ditto.  The advertising industry is built on this sense of inferiority - if your car, your beer, your grill, your power tools, whatever are not of Brand A your status on the Universal Male Scale of Merit is threatened.  Socialization constantly reinforces this ideal of hierarchy, where some theoretical man is at the top of the list and all others are inferior.

Thus every insecure man has to have SOMEONE over whom to have power - lest they be at the absolute bottom of this matrix - and a woman is the one chosen.  If the woman - the only inferior said insecure male can be superior to - somehow gains rights/control over her own destiny that threatens the last bastion between the Insecure Male and total worthlessness.  As a result some of these Insecure Males will go to any extent - stalking, rape, murder - to maintain this tenuous superiority at all costs, because in the end murder is an affirmative “macho” reaction to insecurity as opposed to “just taking it like a wimp.”

I don’t think it necessarily answers your question, but I recall years ago a working class chicano gentleman I dated observed that if he were not at least certain he was superior to women, he would have been considered socially inferior to everyone.  Along with that, I recall a bit o’ history to the effect that when women finally got the vote, we got it from a Republican Congress because the union guys that were the base for the Democrats wouldn’t hear of it.  I can also remember things police officers said when they saw me at demonstrations in the 70s, insulting things they said loudly so I would hear them.  I remember how those remarks always made me think of my own dad and feel grateful to him for being so feminist before feminism was even a word that existed.  That’s the best I can come up with.  Maybe it’s just habit for these guys, like my neighbors who mistreat their dogs.  Maybe people who know they are already close to the bottom of the social order are especially defensive and stubborn.

“Obviously, babies come from women supplying every bit of the material and energy except for 50% of the DNA,”

Less than 50% actually. 

As to misogyny, conditioning I’d say.  You really already hit on it.  People are taught the world works a certain way.  Everyone breaks out of their mold to some extent, but the more comforting the idea fit, the more they cling to it.  How comforting is the idea that you are strong and powerful and that someone else is weak and needs you, powerful you to protect them and guard them.  Everyone wants to be needed/wanted.

Obviously, you will disagree, but I don’t see misogny and the anti-abortion/pro-life position (what you call anti-choice) necessarily connected. They are two different things. The former (misogyny) I agree is bad. The later I see as generally a good thing.* And (I’m sure you’ve heard this before) pro-choice advocates like Larry Flint and Hugh Hefner certainly are not living embodiments of the feminist ideal.

Finally, I wish to share a video that has been making its rounds today on the pro-life blogosphere. It fits perfectly, considering today is the Roe V Wade anniversary and the third day of a new administration:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2CaBR3z85c

*although I am open to the argument that it might not always be the best idea, in all situations, to outlaw abortion, I do believe equal rights should be extended to those in the womb. I believe in equal rights for all. Gay rights, minority rights, unborn rights. That many anti-abortion people wrongly oppose gay rights does not make them wrong when they go marching in the March for Life.

“Imagine”: lots of people start out thinking like you, and then as time goes on get completely disillusioned with trying to find common ground with the anti-abortion crowd because they turn out to have a much more messed up set of issues related to the desire to control others.

lightly gets the dynamic of misogyny down pretty well with the quote from her chicano ex-boyfriend: with the benefit of misogyny, men who would otherwise be really low on the social totem pole get a “boost” up into the top half, by dint of being superior to women.

I’ve seen this dynamic before in circumstances where a rather mediocre man is surrounded by successful women… it angers them that they can’t get “credit” for being a man but instead are forced to compete with women head-to-head on their own professional and social terms. Since this ends up being a losing battle for them, misogyny seems like a good alternative… plus, it allows them to claim ownership of women socially/academically/professionally higher than they because it allows them to feel like their social superior.

So Imagine doesn’t agree, but won’t say why, other than to say not all pro-choice men are non-misogynistic.  Which supports Amanda’s worldview (there’s lots of misogyny, of which anti-abortion is only a part) more than it does his.  Fail.

Interesting anecdote here. My MBA course has a Legal Aspects class, and last night we had an item about things that -are- illegal but who are rarely or never charged or persecuted. Here in Brazil, abortion is illegal, but rarely charged as a crime despite having stiff prescribed penalties in the letter of the law.

The teacher then went on explaining the legal definition of life, agency, as a way showing that every legal resolution we achieve in regard to abortion rights is a construct based on what we know, what we feel is right, and what society will allow. It was quite neutral and instructive.

Then a woman in her 40s piped up saying that we already -know- everything we have to know on the issue, that abortion was murder and every aborted fetus was a criminal victim of his mother’s immorality.

Being perhaps the only overt leftist in that MBA class, I felt I couldn’t let that go unchallenged. I drppped the fact that Chile (outlawed abortion) had far more abortions going on than Canada (triple the population, legal abortion). I added that nowhere in the West are people forced to abort if they do not wish to, while in some countries ectopic pregnancy has become a death sentence due to the reverse law being in effect. And i expounded some on one of the points the teacher made, that we allow organs to be harvested from live patients with no brain-waves, therefore our definition of the sanctity of life does not include -potential- life.

I tried to explain it in a very soft, calm manner, but I was surprised at how hostile people became at me, for (I perceive) taking the opposite stance against a woman claiming the moral high ground.

I have a bit of a different view on it. It’s basically a chain.

They don’t like abortion and homosexuality because they see it as people living a different lifestyle from themselves. People simply can’t comprehend this.

People living a different lifestyle from themselves are often not competing with them. They’re living their own lives with their own goals and interests. In thus, you can’t compete with them..and worse..you can’t beat thm, in fact, you may just very well ENVY them.

The lack of competition means that the sociological hierachy goes down the tubes. Instead of competing to go up the ladder….they’re getting their own ladder.

And without that hierarchy, the patriarchy is basically nothing.

Yes. It’s all about the patriarchy. (It’s also that I’ve really seen nothing to change me of my mind that the real sexism is how our society rewards male traits and punishes feminine traits)

As long as there are social rewards for misogyny, going back at least as far as junior high, it will be the starting point for most hetero males. And the effort/laziness ratio of the male population will beget the odds of those social rewards changing over time.

Within my lifetime? I’m not optimistic.

Every social and/or romantic interaction with a woman in a man’s life either blunts or sharpens a given point on the moral compass. Who are the women he has contact with? How does his interaction with them affect his interaction with his male friends?

We under the progressive umbrella speak a lot about community. But in truth, community is often the problem. Communities reinforce behaviors, whether good or ill. To belong, you cannot reject the community’s values wholesale. Yes, people have done exactly that when their moral judgement drove them to do so. But more often than not, their communities subsequently rejected them.

To not be misogynistic is to be a pain in the ass to the community at large. Some of us enjoy that. Others don’t, and I can understand why.

Don’t know who ‘Imagine’ is trying to fool.  The only one fooled by her(?) argument is her(?).  I still can’t understand mysogony or any of the other elements that hinder choice.  We have a character back here in Kentucky who went on a rant about the restrict choice movement and their take on choice doughnuts.  I’m so tired of the hate rhetoric.  I don’t even use the term straight any more.

I don’t understand the hate.  Hate for other:  colors, genders, politics, sex or social status.  The crowd I’ve encountered with the least amount of hate has been the Jews.  They are so well grounded in their collective and individual selves.  Fundamentalist christians on the other hand ... hate everything - except what’s in the mirror.  I’ve not been able to sift through all the rhetoric yet about fundamentalist moslims;  read one that says we’re good guys and then one that says we aren’t; it’s time to rid the planet of infidels.

On the other hand, liberal theology in all religions seems dedicated to tolerance and choice.  Go figure.

No choice,  no democracy!
No choice, no capitalism!
.

Why isn’t there a restaurant /bar chain called, say, “Salamis,” in which scantily-clad, well-endowed young men serve customers?

George Saunders, who does a lot of really dystopic stuff, has a short story where one of the characters works at a place just like that. In that same short story, he also has the characters watching a television show called “The Worst That Could Possibly Happen.” I think he’s brilliant. He takes all the obscene, grotesque, materialistic, petty aspects of our culture and creates a future world where that is all that is left and it’s suffocated anything beautiful or humane, but he still is able to paint the people living in this world in a very empathetic and human way.

The majority of anti-choice wackaloons I’ve encountered are straight men

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered an anti-choice person being vocal about it in proximity to me, but of the people I have known to express some passion for the cause when I’m _not_ around (going to demonstrations, etc.), 100% of them have been young women.  I think they buy in heavily to the “motherhood is the special feminine gift” outlook, which I don’t think they’ve affected in order to be “one of the boys” or have been conditioned into wanting to impress said boys.  The whole thing seems to be quite deliberately and consciously wrapped in “femininity” and even power.  While the movement may be organized by and around male privilege and male interest, I’m not entirely comfortable describing women like them as pawns of misogyny or misogynistic themselves.  I suppose it’s because they’re rhetorically more interested in affirming motherhood than in shaming sluts.  Even if the political/policy effect is the same, the motivation is different (but still sad).

Yeah, I think the punishment/reward system for men and masculinity is a big reason for misogynist appeal. By ratcheting up the requirements for manning it up with also violent punishment and rape meted out on those who fall outside of it (the oft-stated frat boy challenge of whether you’d be the butch or bitch in prison highlights this well) propped up by the violence in the system. Bad sex education that tries and link perceived masculinity to “sexual success”, a “sexual success” system inherently built around the idea that it is the quantity of women you sleep with by any means necessary that is more important than the quality of those sexual encounters or the respect of the women involved. These systems reinforce violently the idea of being “right” or punished and “right” is a hideous mess. Religion adds a whole ‘nother level to it.

I suspect a huge problem in the strength of resistance though is directly tied to capitalism and the idea that if someone else gets ahead, you fall behind. The massive Southern resistance to black civil rights was very openly rooted in the idea that if blacks weren’t beneath poor whites that poor whites would fall to the bottom of the pecking order. The idea that if “we weren’t better than the n***s then we wouldn’t be anything”. I believe the same applies with women. If women aren’t property, then they’re obviously equal by sheer political force and if they’re equal, then men will slip down the ladder.

For richer men who fund misogyny education in society, this must be especially daunting as they realize their privileged positions are entirely to do with competition to their jobs being eliminated to most of the country. If that were to change with regards to the sexes or races, they’d be fucked and more likely to fall to a position befitting their actual talents.

Capitalism in general though, prevents people from realizing that improvements to any disempowered group actually aids all groups and that by building coalitions rather than fighting each other, they can win huge societal gains that improve everyone’s lives. Instead, they only see that they’d go down on the hierarchy and they already feel low enough and so are more pliable to the rich men’s agenda of keeping everyone down.

That and it’s also change and change is scary and requires growth and thoughts. Furthermore, change means you might not know one of the changed things immediately and admitting ignorance is seen as a sign of weakness in this culture. As such, it is a direct threat to your social standing to embrace change and admit it’s occurring, because you might have to admit to personal error.

While I enjoyed your post and agreed with it for the most part I feel like I have to object over your apparent vilification of BDSM… I don’t know whether that’s what you meant, but your comments about “mean-spirited pornography” or “hateful porn” where men spit on women or call them names or whatever were kind of offensive.  Isn’t that one of the tenets of feminism that women should do what makes them happy?  Who are you to judge women who enjoy being spat on or who make pornography like that because they choose to?  Would it be less objectionable if it were a man being spat on and humiliated in the porn?  Because they have that too.  I don’t see why one’s sexual preferences should have anything to do with being a feminist or a misogynist.

So someone actually brought up the “What if…!?!?!” argument??  That always makes me think:

What if Napoleon had a B-52 at Waterloo!?!??

and - antichoice = misogyny.  no doubt about that.  all anti-choicers are misogynists, but not all misogynists are antichoicers.  I think another factor is fear - and the concomitant need for control.

A lot of anti-choice and authoritarian mindset (especially the Mushy Middle and people who get all weepy about the widdle babies but don’t actively want women to go to jail), IME, comes from a combination of basic narcissism and narrative dissociation.

The encompassing narcissism is the nut of the authoritarianism: “I wouldn’t have an abortion so no one else should”, “I’m so glad my mom didn’t abort me, how would you feel if you’d been aborted”—these are mindsets that point to a general lack of understanding that the universe does not revolve around you. Your experience and resources are not the general experience and resources of the people around you, your choices will reflect your experience and their choices will reflect theirs. If you’d been aborted, you wouldn’t have anything to be glad or sad about, because you wouldn’t exist—even in the Judeo-Christian belief structure a soul doesn’t just hang around waiting for a body to inhabit, pining for its lack of body, it’s something that arrives upon birth. If a soul really is a matter of consciousness, then it would require more than minimal brainwaves, and in fact may not be present until a few months after birth before the Cartesian “cogito ergo sum” equation can be applied.

One offshoot of this narcissistic drive is the need to create narratives for everything based on an ideal set of behaviors governed by the authoritarian. So every aborted baby is a potential Cancer-Curing President, and none of them are potential Charlie Mansons. Every pregnancy would proceed perfectly if it weren’t for the abortion and even complications are just a narrative excuse for a miracle to happen. So for example, when Amanda writes “(That many men would rather not risk pregnancy every time they have sex doesn’t seem to change the belief that contraception is emasculating for anti-choice nuts)” is dismissable by the anti-choice in the usual Pangloss fashion by declaring that we would be a more industrious society if the men of the family knew they would have to work harder and earn more money to support their growing brood. That some men would just declare “fuck it” and take off is not part of their narrative, or it allows for a more exciting, romantic narrative of the hardworking single mom who overcomes odds or (better yet) is rescued by some Nice Guy who loves her children as his own. Child abuse and neglect, poverty, depression, and abandonment are either ignored or shaped into some challenge to be overcome in heroic fashion worthy of a Victorian novel.

Misogyny is definitely there, and we see it all the time in the trolls who constantly post to these threads, but that’s the spunk frosting on the shitcake of narcissism and authoritarianism, IMO.

Imagine: I’m in favor of fetuses having the exact same rights as full-grown human beings to use my organs against my will, i.e., none whatsoever.

Mighty Ponygirl,

“The spunk frosting on the shitcake” is my new favorite phrase. I thank you.

And being a woman, I have a pretty good grasp on what makes being a female misogynist appealing.  You’re emotionally rewarded by men for it

That’s the main appeal for men, too, at least initially (i.e. when we’re younger and more malleable socially).

My experience has been that relatively secure men either are passionately pro-choice or tend to think that it’s not their issue because it’s women’s bodies and therefore women’s problem.

That’s funny, that’s exactly backwards from my own personal experience. I always was pro-choice, even when I had those Major Issues. Indeed, being pro-choice helped drive a lot of those away, because I wouldn’t tolerate beliefs that implied anything less than full Choice, so I would eventually discard any which come into conflict with being pro-choice.

I believe in equal rights for all. Gay rights, minority rights, unborn rights. That many anti-abortion people wrongly oppose gay rights does not make them wrong when they go marching in the March for Life.

Well, here’s your problem, Imagine. “The unborn” deserve equal rights? Have you really thought that through? I rather doubt it - it makes no sense. The idea that, at the moment of conception, a complete human being has magically poofed into existence inside a woman’s uterus is not only insanely childish, it forms a major part of the misogynistic bedrock of the anti-choice movement. Think about this for just a second - when “unborn rights,” as you call them, are threatened - as it were, that is - then they always come into direct conflict with the rights of the mother, be it her right to autonomy, health, safety, whatever. We MUST make a choice. The idea of rights for “the unborn,” is not about equal rights, it’s about allowing the supposed rights of an undeveloped, non-person to trump the rights or even the health of the thinking, feeling, fully alive and autonomous human being carrying that zygote, embryo or fetus. And you’re trying to tell us that being pro-life/anti-choice is NOT misogynistic? Horseshit. Believing that a fetus is more valuable than the woman carrying it is the definition of misogyny. It comes right back to the ideas that Amanda has already described - the Magic of Semen, and the insistence that women aren’t really the ones that make babies. And that it is not, in fact, a feminine process that takes a long time, but a single masculine event, that Magical Manly Moment of depositing semen in a vagina. What a trip. Nope, I’m not buying the “equal rights” schtick. There can be no such thing. Women are people. They get rights. Embryos and fetuses do not.

D, I assume that when you say “less than 50%” of the DNA you are referring to the strictly maternal heredity of mitochondrial DNA?

Kalkin,

I don’t think she’s talking about BDSM. She is talking about all the porn out there (non-BDSM) thats about “tricking” women or otherwise humiliating them in a non-fetish way. There are videos of making women choke, offering to pay but then not paying, just look for a minute on youporn or whatever and you will see it.

Its fucking weird. It tends to be referred to as “reality porn”. In general of course its not real in anyway, these are paid porn performers (sometimes famous stars) who pretend to be young women getting tricked by unscrupulous porn producers. You have to wonder what drives that clearly misogynist fantasy, the fantasy that somehow women could be tricked in to sex and then humiliated. What’s sexy about that?

MH - Same logical fallacy as Imagine (on a different subject, natch.)  All secure men are A or B.  You were not secure, but you were A.  These don’t contradict eachother.  The contradiction would be if she’d said ONLY secure men are passionately pro-choice, etc.

And ks actually just made a better argument on rights than I did. Awesome.

I’ve always wondered about the last name thing. I thought it was to assert that children were property like women are to men in patriarchal societies. With how my mind rationalizes it “Your two teaspoons of genetic material resulting from 30 seconds of mating is worth more than the life and health threatening 9 months of swollen feet, changed hormones, and frequent potty breaks with frequent trips to the doctor, a change in diet, restricted exercise, back pain, mood swings, a strain on bodily functions and morning sickless. I see your still able to have your Mountain Dew, intense workout at the gym, and the same body build from the start to end of your little bit.” That’s usually what I think of the whole father’s name thing.

Imagine, even if you truly believe that life begins at conception, and that a fetus is a living being, I don’t see how there’s any way you can make a case for a fetus being a person.

Animals are living beings, but we have the right to terminate their lives for many reasons. Fetuses might be alive, especially once they have a heartbeat, but they aren’t people. They don’t have opinions or autonomy or character traits. There really just parasites. If I get a tapeworm, I’m certainly going to dispose of it. And in my experience, pregnancy was a lot more debilitating than a tapeworm. I did it anyway, because I wanted the child that would result, but while it was inside me, no matter how much I wanted it, it was still a parasite.

Though, I guess you could make the argument that it was really a symbiote since I was getting something I wanted out of it.

It tends to be referred to as “reality porn”. In general of course its not real in anyway, these are paid porn performers (sometimes famous stars) who pretend to be young women getting tricked by unscrupulous porn producers.

Last time I looked into that particular abyss, I came across a website that was based around girls tresspassing on public land being caught by park rangers and coming to an “understanding”. There was a link to a site that specialized in faux cops implying that were a girl sucked his dick, said faux cop wouldn’t give her a speeding ticket. That was pretty much it for me and internet porn, we could no longer agree on just what was erotic.

100% of them have been young women.  I think they buy in heavily to the “motherhood is the special feminine gift” outlook

Seems to me that the most likely explanation is that since their access to any other kind of power is restricted or barred, young women will of course cling to that meager motherhood bauble. They don’t want to admit that society is tilted against them in innumerable ways, so they fixate, telling themselves, “WELL AT LEAST I CAN BE A MOTHER!”

They HAVE to buy into that outlook, because society provides no other opportunity for self-esteem. Motherhood is, as it were, the only game in town.

The Matthew Show: you’re welcome. BTW, did you know that the original cover art for the DVD release of the movie Lilo & Stitch has Robert Ebert declaring that this was “A Disney Movie with spunk!” I wonder how many people were disappointed…

Yes, this is a bit of blog-whoring, BUT:

I think people like Imagine can’t imagine why anti-choicers are inherently misogynistic because they can’t imagine an alternative. So much of their religious and political beliefs are based on enforcing gender roles that they can’t see outside of that
My Blog for Choice Day post, which is prompted because I found out on Monday that I’m pregnant with a girl, is about how much my soon-to-be daughter will benefit from Roe v. Wade. In short:

I expect the same for my daughter. I have no life plan mapped out for her. She may go to college, she may not. She may have children, she may not. She may marry, or not, and may have sex with 15 women or only one man over her life, as she so chooses.

Because of this, my daughter will be luckier than most, happier than most, and healthier than most. And that, right there, is the legacy of Roe v. Wade.

/blog-whoring

grolby, I think D was referring to the fact that the Y chromosome is smaller than the X chromosome. Males can either donate an X or a Y, while women must donate an X. So on average, male genetic contributions come out at < female genetic contributions.

“Guys just overflowing with seething anger related to women, but who, in most other parts of their lives, are usually decent people (at least to all appearances).”

I’d argue that overflowing with seething anger towards women precludes being a decent person.  How much of your life could conceivably be woman-free where the seething anger is gone, allowing all that “decency” to shine?

I’m sure it’s already been pointed out, but women contribute slightly more DNA than men because all organelle DNA comes from the mother.

MH - Same logical fallacy as Imagine (on a different subject, natch.) All secure men are A or B.  You were not secure, but you were A.  These don’t contradict eachother.  The contradiction would be if she’d said ONLY secure men are passionately pro-choice, etc.

Nothing you said makes any sense, because I put forth no logical proposition (that could be fallacious or not), just a simple recitation of fact. I was just saying that my experiences were different than those of the men she’s known. I was not using them to attempt to prove or disprove anything, just relating my experiences.

D, I assume that when you say “less than 50%” of the DNA you are referring to the strictly maternal heredity of mitochondrial DNA?

As cyrano noted, the Y chromosome has less genetic information than the X.

most misogynists I’ve known were insecure (or, from my point of view, had reason to be), probably had more athletic girls picked before them in gym class back in elementary, and never got over it.

I’ve heard it said that part of the issue (psychologically) is that there’s a clear moment when you can say a girl has become an adult (menstruation), but there is no such moment for boys.  So most societies have created rituals for boys to go through, at the end of which they’re recognized as adults by the rest of the community.  In the modern Western world, we don’t really have those (maybe the bar mitzvah or confirmation), so guys end up stumbling around trying to figure out at what point they can say they’re men, not boys.

The other problem is that, to a large extent, masculinity in this culture is defined by absence.  The guy has to constantly prove a negative:  he’s not a woman, he’s not gay, he’s not a wimp, etc. etc.

I’m convinced that a large number of anti-choice people (both men and women) have some bad parenting in their backgrounds.  They feel on some level that if their mother had not been forced to have them, they never would have been born, because her actions showed that she didn’t really want them.  Really, there are very few more hurtful things you can say to a child than to tell them you wish they’d never been born.

Ashley—I think an important part of what you’re saying includes raising a daughter who knows what she wants. So that when you ask her what she wants, she can answer truthfully and without coercion. If your daughter comes to you pregnant under less-than-ideal situations, you asking her what she wants shouldn’t be the first time her opinion actually matters (not that I’m saying it would be for her—but for a lot of girls, it is). She should be able to differentiate her wants and desires from those of her boyfriend, her parents, etc. For a lot of women, the decision is made for them, one way or the other—They’re either packed off for a quick abortion or strongarmed into keeping a pregnancy that they aren’t ready for.

But it’s also important that her decision be made in a realistic light and that she isn’t over-simplifying pregnancy and motherhood (for good or bad). She needs to be able to think ahead in order to make the best decision.

I’m sure it’s already been pointed out, but women contribute slightly more DNA than men because all organelle DNA comes from the mother.

Also true. And there are maternal signals in utero which coach the development of the fetus by altering gene expression, though there is still some debate over how much of that signaling is heritable.

grolby,
Mainly that, but the Y chromosome is also smaller, which is ever only provided by the male.

Because women own 100% of the pussy market, that power (at least its potential) is always there.

Hasn’t this been thoroughly debunked already? I’m tired of hearing it.

Nothing you said makes any sense, because I put forth no logical proposition (that could be fallacious or not), just a simple recitation of fact.

Clearly I need to make this simpler.  Your experience is not the opposite of what she said.  They’re not contradictory.

For me, a big part of it was my (perceived) lack of sexual attractiveness.  It’s a bit of a chicken/egg problem; assertiveness and confidence are attractive, but there’s nothing to help assertiveness and confidence like being sexually fulfilled.  But then I flirted with being a Nice Guy for a long time.

My problem, such as it was, is that no one walked me through this.  It was simply inconceivable to me that anyone would find me sexually attractive, so “sex” was this immense power that “women” (the girls and women I interacted with) had that “men” (I) didn’t.  Add to this the weirdness of the intensity of a teenage boy’s sex drive,* and you get some deep unhappiness.  I can definitely see where a sense of hating women and/or needing to feel that they are your social inferiors would be a salve to that pain.

There was a separate issue of not meeting girls who were my intellectual equal, but coming to understand that as a societal, rather than a biological, phenomenon solved that one.

*No statements on teenaged girls’ sex drive implied; I only lived through one of them.

Really, there are very few more hurtful things you can say to a child than to tell them you wish they’d never been born.

That right there is the center of the shrubbery maze. Abandonment issues, I’m convinced, are the foundation of misogynist behavior. Men who suffer from these issues are terrified of being left alone. In their world, women really do hold all the cards, because men need women to feel safe while women don’t seem to need anyone at all. That makes them bitter. Then the patriarchal structure of our society kicks in and validates all that shit, and lets them find boys’ clubs where like-minded guys confirm their prejudices.

It’s the same fear that animates conservative hatred of liberal college professors: the idea that the left is going to brainwash your kids and take them away from you.

Wanted to add something I forgotten.

In that video with the women against feminism. Did the one woman actually say that the two parents working outside the home and the children in the care of government child care specialist was communism/Marxism and then went on to say that she felt that the state should decide the roles of the parents rather than the parents have their own autonomy? Isn’t that a dictatorship?

MightyPonygirl: Of course. I’m only 20 weeks pregnant with my first, and I’m by no means going to go into all of my parenting philosophies here, but suffice to say that I hold bodily autonomy, personal expression, and generally speaking the assertion of individuality and what my children truly want to be of the utmost importance. As has been thoroughly discussed with the spousal unit for years, we have no intention of imposing our views on our children’s choices once they’re old enough to make said choices (and the subject in question, from school to appearance to religion, will determine the age of choice).

Stephen, Matt T.  - thank you.  I’m so sick of the “who are you to judge” smokescreen vis a vis porn. 

No one cares what what others like regarding porn (assuming its legal).  Do, watch, what you want.  But don’t frigging pretend that just because some women like it, it’s not misogynsitic, not harmful or not indicative of a deeper social disease.  The entire post is about how women participate in patriarchy for rewards - is it really that hard to extrapolate that idea into porn, ffs?

Even writing this paragraph is hard for me, because I know that saying something like, “Obviously, babies come from women supplying every bit of the material and energy except for 50% of the DNA,” will not be a statement that’s greeted with open arms.  It may be a bona fide taboo.

The metaphor I like is of a new house being built - the man drops off half of the plans, while the woman takes her half of the plans and spends the next 9 months taking bits and pieces of her house to build this new one, from the foundation to the walls, roof, plumbing, electrical - heck, even the interior decorating.

And then there’s the ribbon cutting ceremony and the man shows back up to take half the credit.

And, like Amanda, I’ve found that people react very negatively when you point this out.

Hey now, before you jump on Punditus, remember that he gave that as an example of his INcorrect thinking. Women do not actually have 100% of the pussy power—but when you’re an idiot teen and your sample size is 1 (you), you can’t always be trusted to reason your own way out of that idea.

I think that the reason you, and so many others, struggle with understanding misogyny (and the anti-choice byproduct) is because it’s a complicated force.  You could take a group of 10 misogynistic men and find 100 different roots for that misogyny. 

I know I’m a misogynist at times, which is part of why I read this blog.  To become less of a misogynist.  And I think I’ve done that.  Heck, when I started reading, I was pretty much a “Nice Guy.”

Amanda exposed how ridiculous and horrifying it was to be a “Nice Guy” and I was freed from that awful lifestyle, I finally started just being myself.  Lo and behold, women liked me a lot more. 

But, at the same time, I was never anti-choice.  I started off in the “woman’s body, woman’s issue” area, thinking that men have no right to be involved in the abortion debate.  What do we know.

As time wore on, I became adamantly pro-choice, because neutrality felt more and more like I was condoning the anti-choice side, and I couldn’t do that. 

At the same time, the seeds of misogyny are planted in many men’s minds at a very young age.  Misogynist parents, teachers, grandparents, siblings, friends, etc can plant many seeds.  Dad could be a jerk toward Mom, maybe abusive.  Bible school could teach a kid that women are servants.  The boys could be encouraged by teachers while the girls are discouraged. 

By the time you’re in Junior High, the peer pressure kicks in.  The most misogynist guys in class tend to be the ones that the other boys want to emulate, they’re loud, abrasive, and they seem cool.  Plus, the men in society who seem cool to a prepubescent boy are often misogynists.  Plus you may start seeing women as sex objects.  Every boy in junior high knows someone who brought a playboy to school.  Or somebody steals a porno from their Dad. 

Adoloscence tends to reinforce those notions, especially with the horniness kicked in.  But at that point, the hate for women is already established, so if it’s there, it’s just getting amplified.

I’m not saying any of these things are going to make a boy grow up into a misogynistic man, but misogyny is introduced, taught, and reinforced as you grow up. 

And maturity can help any boy grow up into a less-misogynistic man.  Aside from the very ill-conceived “nice-guy” routine, I don’t think I had a hatred of women deep down inside.  I was very socially inept, and there were things that made me head down the nice guy road.  It was a very sad and pathetic chapter in my life.

“Obviously, babies come from women supplying every bit of the material and energy except for 50% of the DNA,”

I love that sentence.

See, back in the caveman days cavechicks would sometimes graze on abortifacient plants and the only cavedude who knew was the shaman: frequently gaii, always fabulous. This explains everything, including the popes hat.

What’s with all the clown photos today?

Abortion is horrifying because it’s a reminder that men do not actually make babies, but that women do through a 9 month process, and that if a woman chooses to interrupt that process, there will not be a baby.  Which is pretty conclusive proof that men don’t make babies.

This, all the way. I correspond via e-mail with a very bright, compassionate, liberal, self-aware young man who nonetheless can’t seem to wrap his head around the fact that the lion’s share of the work to make new people is, by necessity of our biology as placental mammals, done by women, and men make only a token contribution. Back when we were specifically discussing the topic, he kept trying to convince me that because the man’s contribution is needed, it is therefore equal in importance to the woman’s. And he loved the sperm = seed, womb = soil metaphor, despite my pointing out that a seed is actually a plant embryo, and thus the womb analogue here is a fruit or cone, and pollen is the sperm. Not only poetically, but in literal fact. That’s what pollen is. You allergy-sufferers…just try not to think about it, okay?

Anyway, he couldn’t seem to let go of the other metaphor, even though he admitted it was mostly his male ego insisting that baby-making is a collaborative effort between a man and a woman, and not what it is, which is a woman’s arduous task after an initial miniscule investment by a man. I suggested that much of patriarchy is rooted in men’s fear that they aren’t really necessary for the continuation and health of the species, at least not in the numbers in which they exist. I don’t remember how my e-pal reacted to that suggestion, but it still makes a lot of sense to me.

there’s a clear moment when you can say a girl has become an adult (menstruation)

I have serious issues with this idea. I started puberty before I started bleeding, why isn’t that the “moment”? And overall, puberty took YEARS, I was most definitely NOT an adult at 13. The actual bleeding seems irrelevant.

In the modern Western world, we don’t really have those (maybe the bar mitzvah or confirmation), so guys end up stumbling around trying to figure out at what point they can say they’re men, not boys.

I thought our culture celebrated 18 as the age both sexes are adults. Or maybe 21, and celebrated by drinking too much?

Just to add, if men want to feel more responsible for the creation of new people, how about putting in the work AFTER the kid is born? There is no biological barrier to being a good father. In fact, a good father needn’t even have his sperm present at the kid’s conception.

Getting from zygote to adulthood takes much longer than 9 months. Be there for as much of that time as possible, and you’ll get plenty of credit.

PARENT.

I meant “There is no biological barrier to being a good PARENT.” Obviously there’s a biological barrier to being a FATHER of any sort.

Criminy.

“Pregnancy has a powerful symbolic meaning for fans of the patriarchy, and it’s not just that it’s the process by which we make new people. It’s because it gets interpreted as biological proof that women exist for men, and our metaphorically understanding of pregnancy reflects this—-men are characterized as cooks putting buns in ovens or gardeners sowing seed in passive ground.”

Precisely. Which is why it’s so maddening to confront misogyny in the form of anti-choice/pregnancy enforcement, because pregnancy seems by all rational measures to prove that women’s bodies belong to themselves. OBVIOUSLY when they’re pregnant, and by extension, all the time, because no one’s body can become or stay pregnant *solely* because of a man. Even Christ McGod, if he’s construed as a man in the traditional, conservative ideology of things, can’t get his only-Son on without a woman in whose body fundamentally inheres the capacity to control her own reproduction. I don’t believe in the necessity of reproductive parts to be a woman, but I do believe that the ass-backwardness of disqualifying women from personhood but qualifying fetuses for it at women’s
expense is patently obvious. Also, the anti-choice argument for preserving fetal life is so close to the pro-slavery argument for taking enslaved children away from their enslaved mothers that I need them to wear different hats to tell them apart.

Amanda:Maybe on the gay thing, but most anti-choice sex phobes do have sex.  And often they use contraception and abortion.  They tend to see themselves as the exception to the rule, though.

It’s not a matter of having sex or not, at least I don’t think. It’s the “choice” of having children or not, in a very simplistic way. I know that my wife for making the choice to not have children gets quite a bit of flack for it, and the tone of it FEELS like anti-abortion/anti-homosexuality rhetoric.

Like I said, I could be wrong on all this. It’s just my perspective. As I mentioned, I suspect that a big part of it is that they’re jealous and they suspect that all those OTHER people are living more fufilling, sexier, more happy, and more spiritual lives than they are. And they don’t like it one bit.

I think the interesting thing is that it is possible for a man to be in a relationship with a woman where he is needed, and feels needed. But he has to work for it, he can’t just swan in and expect her dependence on him by the sheer force of his penis rendering her helpless. It is often in the more egalitarian couples where I see the man has really made himself indispensable by really helping the woman shoulder the burden with housework and childrearing, and not just paying lipservice to how much he respects women and what an important job it is that they do while he’s off playing World of Warcraft.

I think that these males become abusive because they are emotionally starved.  It seems to me that the ascetic white puritanical culture that is the norm, wherever white puritanical types exist, gives people a feeling of loneliness and incompleteness.  They feel starved for sensuality and deeper human connections. 

In their confusion and lack of training, many who feel emotionally starved look upon women as representing the emotional plenitude they seek.  Women remind them of their mothers, and how their mothers used to care for them during the first few years of their lives.  However they didn’t receive enough love and reassurance due to the puritanical nature of the culture around them.  So they look to women and feel a yearning for that kind of care, and then they become angry because it seems to them that women are withholding that kind of love and attention from them that they so desperately crave. 

These men don’t know how to go about getting the affection from women that they crave.  They have had poor social training, and they are often out of touch with their feelings because of the coldness of their later upbringing (under a puritanical culture).  So, they conclude that the only way to get women’s love and attention is if they take it from the women by force.

The mistaken understanding of their own condition and how women really fit into the big picture of all of that is the reason the wingnut men opt for trying to take control of women by force.  Actually, they cannot get the love and affection they crave by taking this approach, but they do not know of any other way to go about it.

Having seen some of what comes up on these threads, I can’t even begin to imagine the totality of what Amanda and other feminist bloggers have had to deal with from rabid misogynists over the years.  I do think it’s worth remembering that it’s like the evening news covering car wrecks and housefires so you start to think they are really common, but they aren’t—the feminist blogosphere does a lot of great things, but it is also, unfortunately, a magnet for woman-hating lunatics.  That doesn’t mean they are *that* common in the population at large.

Still, I’d love to get a clear answer to Amanda’s question:  what the hey?  And even if the woman-hating lunatics are a tiny band, what is the deal with the huge social tolerance of them, as in the conventional wisdom that one has to be really gingerly respectful of the “pro-life” view even in disagreeing with it?  I totes, totes, totes do not get it.

Shorter ks and grolby:

“There is not enough room in one body for the rights of two people.”

‘Imagine’, if you’re even reading this far, I hope you will consider the logical fallacies embedded in your position.

By its very nature, the bestowing of so-called “equal rights” to a blastocyst or fetus, in practice, results in the woman losing her rights to bodily autonomy and self-determination.  The fetus IS the entity with supremacy in your scenario.  The woman’s rights are secondary to the fetus, and therefore nullified—and most definitely not equal. 

How do you propose to solve this conflict without violating the equal protection clause?

Jennifer… isn’t that a little Beauty and the Beast?

I mean, how many women have endured horribly abusive relationships because they felt that the power of their love could change someone who is nothing more than an abusive asshole?

>long with that, I recall a bit o’ history to the effect that when women finally got the vote, we got it from a Republican Congress because the union guys that were the base for the Democrats wouldn’t hear of it.

Hmm. Don’t actually recall that the Democrats at that time were particularly pro-Union. Breaking strikes by beating up workers was a bipartisan sport.

Another reason for misogyny is self-hatred of men by men.  In order to feel real and respected they must hate and despise others, be they people of color, women, or foreigners.

Sure, and how many guys have stopped being directionless losers because they met a girl who fell for them and finally found in themselves the capacity to be something resembling the person she appears to think he is?

(Sorry if I repeat any themes that have been discussed further up thread- I wanted to get a comment in here before I’ve had a chance to read all of the earlier comments).

I think the best analogy I can come up with for understanding where misogyny comes from a reinterpretation of a well known parable- the parable of the sour grapes.

In the parable, we have a fox, who spies some really delicious looking grapes. He decides that grapes would be a wonderful treat, and goes about trying to obtain the grapes. He tries, and tries, and tries, but ultimately fails… and to console himself, he concludes, “those grapes were probably really sour, anyway”.

In the conventional interpretation of this parable, the fox is the classic “sore loser”. And indeed, when we use the phrase “sour grapes” in the vernacular, we generally are describing the typical grumblings and excuses made by a sore loser.

But there’s an interesting subtlety to this story that I think is relevant to the phenomenon of misogyny. In the story, the grapes do not change in any way; they are what they are at beginning, end and throughout the parable, and they don’t do anything to, for, or about the fox. However, in the mind of the fox, they go from being delicious to being sour based solely on the rationalizations in the fox’s own mind.

So, now imagine that, in his life, this fox has this problem with not being able to get grapes a lot, not just this one time. Also, suppose that there are lots of other foxes that the fox hangs out with, and they all have varying levels of difficulty with obtaining grapes. What would happen?

Well, in that group of foxes, they would probably indulge in some group pity, all agreeing how generally sour grapes tend to be (a few of the smarter foxes would probably realize that it’s ridiculous to make this general conclusion this about grapes, because the whole dynamic of the parable is obviously really about the failings of the foxes, not the grapes… but pointing out the failures of your fellow foxes probably wouldn’t earn you many fox friends).

In this obviously unhealthy dynamic, it’s interesting to speculate about what happens on those occasions when a fox actually does manage to get some grapes. He’d probably be ridiculed by the other foxes, who are obviously actually jealous… and he would probably feel a lot of pressure to continue to speak negatively about the grapes, even though he doesn’t himself believe it. And indeed, just because the fox successfully found grapes this time doesn’t mean he always will… and he probably concludes that it’s probably a good idea to keep his “all grapes are probably sour” defense mechanism in good repair, in case he needs it later.

So, this analogy isn’t perfect, but it captures some important elements of the misogyny dynamic. (If the grapes in the [expanded] parable could talk, I think we can be sure that they’d wonder WTF is wrong with foxes, for God’s sake… the grapes did nothing at all to earn the ire that so obviously exists, and they’d have to find that bewildering).

OK, I’ve beaten this analogy thoroughly into the ground, and it’s starting to sound a little silly. But I still think there’s a valid point in here somewhere, despite my tortured prose.

Amanda, I think the best place to explore this question is in one of the aspects you touched on briefly in your post:

Women are socially constructed as men’s inferiors and often in a servile role.  But at the same time, sexual attraction makes men feel especially vulnerable to women, which hurts the ego.  After all, if women are supposed to be in a servile role, but still have a right to reject you, that’s got to be maddening.  Much of our society is organized around putting women in their place to rectify this situation for insecure men.

This is spot on. It is human nature to want to degrade (or even demonize) things you desire, but cannot have (or worse, do not desire you). Mix that with immaturity, horniness, and group (mob) mentality… and you’ve got systemic misogyny. Analysis of this would fill a book.

Actually, it really would. Amanda, if you ever get a change to publish another book, this would be one you could hit out of the park.

See my first post on the thread re: narrative dissociation.

You aren’t guaranteed to change a person based on the power of your love. It might happen, but it’s nothing to bank on.

Karalora:  Anyway, he couldn’t seem to let go of the other metaphor, even though he admitted it was mostly his male ego insisting that baby-making is a collaborative effort between a man and a woman

Ooh, I think I know this one!  I’ll draw upon my own youth and its very liberal but not quite feminist politics.  It is a, perhaps THE, cardinal virtue of liberalism that collaboration is good, and equality is good, and it’s a very useful prime directive for ethical conduct in many, many cases.  So when a feminist woman makes a claim that women are in fact different, or _more_ important, or incommensurable somehow, Liberal Man 1.0 gets completely stymied.  He doesn’t know what the right answer is anymore, because the right and virtuous answer has always had to due with sharing, equality, and cooperation, and the feminist woman is rejecting his efforts to share and cooperate.

I remember as a college freshman being at an anti-apartheid event (thus showing my advanced age) and hearing a protest anthem—I wish I could recall the specifics—that included a lot of words like “men” and “his.”  The campus feminist organization was represented at the event, and their protesters were substituting “women” and “hers.”  OK, fair enough, it’s better to be inclusive, I remember thinking.  But the song also included “mothers,” and they weren’t changing that into “parents,” and that seemed somehow unfair, because the righteous stance in my younger well-intentioned liberal mind would have been to gender-neutralize _all_ such terms.  It really bugged me at the time.  I wasn’t factoring in current, actual power relations, and was hung up on the importance of a genderless and thereby even-handed political ideal.

Liberal Man 1.0 takes a beating from Feminist Woman 3.0, and he’s admittedly kind of a cousin to the dreaded Nice Guy, but he means well and he’s basically on the right track.  I hope…

If a fetus is to be declared a person with rights, does that mean that they get assigned social security numbers and the parents get a tax credit for the time the child is in the womb?  Do we count them in the census too?  These people clearly haven’t thought the issue through to its logical conclusion.

(If the grapes in the [expanded] parable could talk, I think we can be sure that they’d wonder WTF is wrong with foxes, for God’s sake)

I love the idea of telling the fable from the grapes’ point of view.  XD

The campus feminist organization was represented at the event, and their protesters were substituting “women” and “hers.” OK, fair enough, it’s better to be inclusive, I remember thinking.

Ooops, I botched my own memory, and it was kind of important.  They were saying “people” instead of “men,” or _adding_ “and women” to mentions of “men.”  D’oh!

There are 3 negative emotions - just 3 basic ones: sadness, fear, and anger. While hatred would seem to fall under the category of anger, and often does, it can also be a subset of fear. Thus, when you say you don’t understand the anger at women, which you later refer to as fear, you demonstrate that you do, in fact, understand insecure, primarily straight men’s misogyny. They’re actually afraid.

The problem, as you also elucidate, is that straight guys have a conflict between sexual attraction and disdain. The attraction makes them inferior while they need to feel superior. In some cultures they throw burqas on women because they’re terrified, only to subject them to atrocities. It’s the second half of this equation I call the Pappy Finn syndrome. Huckleberry’s dad, the original white trash racist, needed to be better than somebody, so he railed against the n——er who went to college, of which he was incapable. Homophobia’s another example, as is misogyny. Scratch a secure person, and you’ll never uncover such resentment.

So Amanda, you do get it. Always did. They gotta be better than somebody, preferably an entire demographic, because they really fear they aren’t. We healthy types don’t NEED to feel that way.

I think that these males become abusive because they are emotionally starved.  It seems to me that the ascetic white puritanical culture that is the norm, wherever white puritanical types exist, gives people a feeling of loneliness and incompleteness.  They feel starved for sensuality and deeper human connections.

So how do you explain abuse and domination of women in cultures that are not puritanical?  90+ percent of the world’s population has no Puritan history whatsoever and, yet, domination and abuse of women is the norm in most cultures, to varying degrees.

I’ll also add that in many cultures male children are coddled and loved while female children are tossed aside.  What explains misogyny in these cultures?  It’s certainly not due to mothers’ not loving their sons enough.

@ Amanda

“Most secure people get over thinking, “What if I was never born?” by they time they reach junior high.  “What if?” is a fruitless game, because everything that exists now could have been changed by any sort of random event in the past.  Otherwise, “Back To The Future” wouldn’t have worked as a movie.”

Word. I have kind of a unique take on this one… My Mom found out about her pregnancy (me) and her cancer at the same time. She was advised to get and abortion and treatment. She refused both, I was born two months early, and she ended up with a hysterectomy.

All that being said, you’d think I’d be one of the strongest “OMG WHAT IF I HAD BEEN ABORTED?!?!11?” voices around. However, if a woman I knew was in the same situation (three kids already extant, shiftless husband, night clerk job at the 7-11)... I’d tell her to get the abortion.

Ooh, I think I know this one!  I’ll draw upon my own youth and its very liberal but not quite feminist politics.  It is a, perhaps THE, cardinal virtue of liberalism that collaboration is good, and equality is good, and it’s a very useful prime directive for ethical conduct in many, many cases.  So when a feminist woman makes a claim that women are in fact different, or _more_ important, or incommensurable somehow, Liberal Man 1.0 gets completely stymied.  He doesn’t know what the right answer is anymore, because the right and virtuous answer has always had to due with sharing, equality, and cooperation, and the feminist woman is rejecting his efforts to share and cooperate.

You’re absolutely right, not only in the general case but in this specific case, as S(mart) L(iberal) G(uy) and I managed to figure out. He kept getting hung up on the is-ought fallacy, and failing to consider that the reproductive imbalance is no one’s fault, just the way nature’s dice landed, and in the absence of a means to correct the imbalance on the biological end of things, pretty much the only thing we can do to even things out is apply a counterbalance on the legal end.

He even said he was less concerned about men’s rights regarding their children than about their responsibilities, and there is definitely a problem with men thinking that they lack the former and thus should not have to shoulder the latter, e.g. MRAs demanding “financial abortions.” Even I think the current setup isn’t fair…but it’s as fair as we are able to make it, at least until someone invents a process for joint gestation of a fetus.

Floyd, I love your housebuilding analogy.  And I agree with everyone who’s noted that a lot of anti-choice sentiment (I won’t call it reasoning), not to mention misogyny, comes from a very childish form of existential fear.  What if Mom could have said no?  ooooh—booga booga, I might not exist.  Once you get used to the notion that your existence was far from a foregone conclusion, you begin to realize that the fact your mom could have aborted you but didn’t is only one of a bazillion contingencies, any one of which might not have happened, that somehow led to *you* existing.  Fer cryin’ out loud, if your parents had waited (or not waited) half a minute before doing the deed, *you* wouldn’t exist.  Boo effin’ hoo.  Internalize that, and you’re at least partway to not being a dickwad about women’s autonomy.

Otherwise, “Back To The Future” wouldn’t have worked as a movie.

Correction - without Bif Tannen, BTTF wouldn’t have worked as a movie.

The rest is really just details.

Abortion is horrifying because it’s a reminder that men do not actually make babies, but that women do through a 9 month process, and that if a woman chooses to interrupt that process, there will not be a baby.  Which is pretty conclusive proof that men don’t make babies.

Things to get out the way before I respond to this: Anti-choice is wrong and ineffective, misogyny is real and widespread, and many many anti-choice people are authoritarian jerks. All true.

BUT, all this talk about “reminders men don’t make babies” and “magic sperm” and “ALL anti-choice is misogyny,” is a whole lot of mind-reading neo-freudian bullshit. Academic psychology took decades to recover from this kind of thinking, hopefully feminist theory can recover faster.

Let’s do a thought experiment here: Let’s imagine that god snapped her fingers, and starting tomorrow it would be men who carried the babies for 9 months, not women. I’m willing to bet that there’d STILL be a whole lot of people vehemently opposed to abortion, because killing widdle babies is wrong. Why? Not because they’ve suddenly switched magical freudian complexes, and now are jealous that men get all the power AND now have the male privilege to decide whether the babies lives or dies (see how easy it is to make up bullshit plausible sounding theories)... It would be because people get emotionally irrational about babies and reproduction and terminating human life. We’re just wired to. Most of us find the Spartans morally appalling for throwing “defective” babies off cliffs, and *rationally* that’s different from abortion only by a matter of a day or two. Most of us would find repugnant the idea of shooting street people drug addicts, even if we could somehow (magically) say for sure that this person would never recover, and would only go on to bring more pain and suffering to themselves and those who love them, and perpetuating exploitation of those who grew and transported the drugs. It might even, in some way, be a sensible thing to do, but it would still feel outrageously wrong to us. Morality is weird like that.
It produces violent emotions in us, and we get very protective about those emotions when we are challenged, and yes, come up with all kinds of weird rationalizations for them.

Oh, and how would the women out there feel about being told that they were barely contributing to the child at all because they just took 30 seconds to chuck an egg in and don’t actually have to carry the thing?

Oh, and as far as young women sometimes being anti-choice and all about the “mom” role, that’s another instance of existential fear expressing itself.  It’s no coincidence that this sort of attitude crops up in some young women—it comes up at a time when a young woman is coming into adulthood and finding herself looking for self-definition in a reality that is fairly harsh to young people in general, but certainly to young women.  The role of “mom” carries with it both an identity and a certain level of social approval.  Romanticized motherhood also carries with it the romanticized child—the darling little person who needs you and will love you no matter what.  The romanticized child (which includes fetus-fetishism, obviously) is the necessary fictional and social counterpart of the “mom who can’t say no,” who has to love you no matter what.

the anti-choice argument for preserving fetal life is so close to the pro-slavery argument for taking enslaved children away from their enslaved mothers that I need them to wear different hats to tell them apart.

Do tell, please, or link me. This is the first time I’ve ever heard this and I’m really intrigued.

I think misogyny starts much earlier – very young boys are taught to be a “man” they must reject all things feminine.  This rejection can easily be encouraged to tip over into hate by role models & peer groups. After all the stronger your rejection of all things feminine the more masculine you are right? Bigger better louder stronger

Quoting Dorothy Rowe

“Men who hate gays are not always physically weak, indeed they are often physically very strong, but they are sure they have a despicable weakness inside of them which they must hide from others. This weakness is their own homoerotic feelings. The way our society socialises boys means that for most boys their closest relationships are with other boys with the result that as they are growing up they have many different experiences which could be called homoerotic. Men who accept themselves and are able to live comfortably with themselves accept that, while their sexual feelings are largely heterosexual, they also contain an element of homosexual understanding and interest. Men who cannot live comfortably with themselves cannot accept the homosexual component in their sexual feelings. They hate this in themselves and they deal with this hatred by projecting it on to homosexual men and attacking them, perhaps just verbally, but sometimes physically.”

Same with hating women, it is fear motivating the hatred. They have been taught that women are weak, irrational and basically pathetic. God if they can’t be “better” than a woman what hope have they got? 

Perversely the more a person is a hater the more obvious their weakness and fragility of mind.

I don’t get misogyny, bigotry or racism, what an incredible waste of a life to spend so much time and energy propping up a hating mindset

A lot of people have attempted to explain misogyny by alluding to “pussy power” or men’s frustration at being rejected by women (or a woman).
Women are sexually attracted to men, too.  So it should follow that a large number of women hate men - that misandry is a widespread social ill - because just like men, women are rejected by those to whom they’re attracted. 
The “pussy power” explanation is male-centric and ignores the fact that women experience romantic disappointment and unrequited love.

“young boys are taught to be a “man” they must reject all things feminine.”

But where did that misogyny come from?

The romanticized child (which includes fetus-fetishism, obviously) is the necessary fictional and social counterpart of the “mom who can’t say no,” who has to love you no matter what.

This rings very true—the anti-choice woman would be identifying with both the loving mom and the loving child in the pietà she imagines vividly, and is appalled that a woman who has an abortion is daring to break that idealized relation.  “Who wouldn’t want to _be_ a mom?” meets “Who wouldn’t want to _have_ a mom?”:  two powerful channels of sympathy reinforcing each other.

someone’s gonna call me-

1) I still comfortable calling anti-choicers misgynist.  It’s either active misgynony, or didn’t think it thorugh misgynony (like Amanda’s mentioned already).  If genders were switched, a) I don’t think there’d be as many people against abortion and b) it would be passive/active misandry.

2) Re the Spartans:  NO, not at all.  Abortion is about personal autonomy (ie, the right for women to do what they want with their body).  Chucking babies off a cliff is about murder. It’s not the same thing AT ALL.  Not on the same spectrum, no rational bullshit anything.  Pro-choicers don’t talk about how much they love killing babies.

3)  As to your hypothetical, if guys did the work, then yeah, all I would do is throw out an egg, and I wouldn’t care about calling it that.  Why would it?

I don’t know the answer to any of these freaking questions, but you wrote a kick-ass post, and I agree with almost all of it.  As far as what goes on in the minds of those kind of men, who cares?  I don’t.  I stopped trying to figure it out a while ago.  There is nothing in this world hotter than a man who so unconsciously secure in his masculinity and is a feminist while retaining that effortless masculinity because he never even thinks to question it.  Seek them out, they are there.  It’s the best sex going.

Someone’s gonna call me a troll in 3… 2…, when, after your hypothetical, you say, “Oh, and how would the women out there feel about being told that they were barely contributing to the child at all because they just took 30 seconds to chuck an egg in and don’t actually have to carry the thing?” you seem to be confirming Amanda’s point that pointing out the fact the men only contribute a portion of the DNA and it is women who over the course of 9 months create a baby makes men uncomfortable.  Or were you claiming that more effort than a simple contribution of sperm is required of men to create a baby?

The “pussy power” explanation is male-centric and ignores the fact that women experience romantic disappointment and unrequited love.

Ah, but that’s where the frustrated man thinks lesbians come from!  Frustrated women solve their dilemma by “turning gay.”  Ergo, in the long run, there are no romantically disappointed straight women.  Women might have temporary sexual frustration, but every guy knows that any woman could find a ready and willing partner instantly at the nearest bar.  That’s why it’s haaaaard to be Teh Menz.

SarahMC on 01/22 at 07:27 PM

No idea where it all started - love to know myself.
When were women not classified as livestock in ancient history?

Just on serial misogyny trolls
Hatred which goes on and on, whether acknowledged or not, becomes part of the person’s sense of identity. The person sees forgiveness and compromise as a despicable weakness.
His world is structured by his enmity, divided into good and bad, his territory and his enemy’s territory, and his every decision takes his enemy into account.
His enemy becomes more important to him than his friends and family.
Such a person comes to feel that if he gives up hating his enemy he will lose his identity.

Pathetic isn’t it?

I wish we could find a self-identified misgynist and ask them why they were that way.  Unfortunately, I don’t know too many who self-identify, and most get really defensive when you ask them about their sexism.

Antigone:

1) Is “didn’t think it through” misogyny really hating women? As SarahMC points out, there’s a lot of women who are frustrated that their strongly desired romantic entanglements with men don’t work out.
Look, people are wired up to want romance and sex, and men, particularly, seem often to be wired up to strongly desire romantic gratification through their dicks (lets be blunt here). If those men are gay then they can easily find lots of other people who feel the same way, and you get a whole bunch of anonymous sex in bathhouses and dance clubs and what have you - sex that is gratuitous, that flat out unabashadly uses their partners bodies for pleasure (and yes, lots of gay men have the emotionally plugged in quality kind too, but don’t pretend bathhouses don’t exist). Straight men don’t have a lot of partners available who want that kind of sex, and yeah, some of them get bitter and grumpy about it. Sure, the minute they start taking that frustration out on people, that makes them a jerk, and they need to grow up in a hurry, but the root of the problem isn’t *necessarily* that they start out (or even end up) hating women… Misogyny surely exists, but one can also find it places where it doesn’t.

2) Re the Spartans: Person A decides that they don’t want to use their body to bring to term a fetus, for their own personal reasons, and so pays a doctor to abort it. Person B decides that they don’t want to devote what they must to raising a child, for their own personal reasons, and so leave it in a dumpster / throw it off a cliff (same effect). “Murder” is defined as “wrongful killing”. That’s how a soldier killing another soldier on duty isn’t murder, but killing the same person that evening in a bar is. It’s the word “wrongful” there that has some squish in it.

3) Do you really have no emotional connection to your own unborn progeny beyond the physical work and morning sickness it takes to keep it alive? Seriously? If your boyfriend came home and put his hand on his belly and said “honey, we’re pregnant,” you would just shrug “whatever”???? I’m not saying that this feeling gives you a veto on his life, but to say that you wouldn’t be entitled to even feel that connection? That just sounds psychopathic to me.

Antigone, I’m pretty sure any misogynist you ask would just say “because women suck,” or some variation on that.

Women might have temporary sexual frustration, but every guy knows that any woman could find a ready and willing partner instantly at the nearest bar.

Right, so then why are so many men getting their sole impressions of women’s sexual experiences from porn? The question remains.

Honestly, I don’t even really think it matters how misogyny started. It started and sustained itself and built on itself, and knowing how it came to be isn’t necessary to understand why it sucks or how to get rid of it. It would be interesting in its own right, but I don’t see how we’re going to do better than just-so stories.

I think a lot of sexists would agree with the statement “I think women are inferior to men” with only mild embarrassment or perhaps even smirky pride.  But they would still disagree, vociferously, with the statement “I hate women for being women.”  That explicit hatred component is where they’ll balk.  Because you can think someone is inferior and still desire her, and desire is the opposite of hate, right?  Ugh, I hate imagining myself in this headspace…

Fatman, I’m not sure what this strange fetish is that you have for obsessing over the relative amounts of genetic contribution. If I have a baby with my spouse, then does it really matter a jot if I provided 10%, 49%, or 99% of the genetic material? Are you suggesting that if men contributed, say, 95% of the DNA to a kid, then it would be ok for him to feel an emotional stake, but being as it’s only, say, 45% then it’s just possessive for him to feel this? What if I carry the child in my belly for 9 months, but my partner provides 99.9% of the DNA, who then gets to be not-quite-a-real-parent?

Feminism is supposed to be about gender equity, people. EQUITY.

Straight men don’t have a lot of partners available who want that kind of sex, and yeah, some of them get bitter and grumpy about it.

I don’t buy that there are that many more men than women who want anonymous sex. Most garden-variety misogynistic “women suck because I can’t get laid” young guys I know seem freaked out by women who want a purely sexual relationship. Misogynists want to be liked, respected, and loved as much as anyone else. If all they wanted from women was friction, it’s hard to believe they’d be so angry and hurt about it. It’s just too bad for them that they have misogyny clouding their brains and keeping them from forming the relationships they want.

Women might have temporary sexual frustration, but every guy knows that any woman could find a ready and willing partner instantly at the nearest bar.

(Incidentally, for the sake of clarity, this is not how I feel myself, but my impression of conventional Guy wisdom.)

Bad poetry - loved the grapes analogy.  Thanks for adding this tool to my rhetorical arsenal.

My wife and I have four swell kids. Should God bless us with more we would love them too.

There is a ton of love in a house.
Not easy mind you but worth all the work.

Too bad most folks here will never know what that is like.

FlipYrWhig, you get all kinds of prejudice.

There’s “old fashioned prejudice”: “those uppity n***ers / cold b**chs”
There’s “modern prejudice”: “Look, I don’t hate black people, but why do they have to be so pushy with their agenda.”
There’s “ambivalent sexism”: “Women are pure gentles creatures who need a man to protect them”
There’s “implicit sexism”: “Women are just mentally associated with weakness in ways I’m not even aware of”
There’s even “reverse sexism”: “Men are all ignorant jerks who hate women.”

The really good arguments are over whether modern prejudice types are secretly genuinely prejudiced, but just suppress it, or whether they have a few prejudiced associations that they want to squash, and do whenever they are made aware of them. That one can keep academics up nights.

Too bad most folks here will never know what that is like.

Too bad you can’t be happy with what you have, and make yourself feel better by lashing out at other people for not wanting it too.

I don’t buy that there are that many more men than women who want anonymous sex. Most garden-variety misogynistic “women suck because I can’t get laid” young guys I know seem freaked out by women who want a purely sexual relationship.

LOL, you make a good point, but you’re forgetting how messy life is. OF COURSE those young guys are scared of women who want purely sexual relationships - real sex is an emotionally messy thing, so you can’t really blame them can you for lusting after anonymous sex, but then feeling frightened and messed up when a real person looks them in the eye about it. So yeah, they are messed up about it. It’s tough being human. Some of them even like the porn fantasies of women being tricked into sex, probably BECAUSE it removes a lot of the emotional complexity from things (caveat, they like the FANTASY - if they start trying to trick actual real people, that’s obviously fucked up and wrong).

Again, I agree that SOME guys are genuinely misogynistic. It does happen. What I’m challenging here are the universal statements that are getting made about “all guys who X are misogynists”. People are more complicated than that.

BTW, michael mcgreevy, you should leave your shelter and get out more in life. You’d be surprised by what you’d find. The original post here has some pretty egregious Freduian bullshit, you have an even more massively egregious lack of basic facts.

If you were truly satisfied, Michael McGreevy, you would not try to force others to live the same lifestyle you do in an attempt to validate your choices.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my solitary existance, which is completely devoid of love.

“young boys are taught to be a “man” they must reject all things feminine.”

But where did that misogyny come from?

Easy—it’s misogyny all the way down! 

I just dont know of to many Pandagons who would wellcome a large famly. That’s sad.

“Most garden-variety misogynistic “women suck because I can’t get laid” young guys I know seem freaked out by women who want a purely sexual relationship.”

This happens all the time.  For the last couple of weeks (and the next four) I’ve been in close quarters with guys that can be really honest about their need to control women’s bodies.  When I introduced them to my more sex-forward friends, they actually back out.  They need to HARASS women into having sex with them, or at least paying attention.  They won’t go with a more aggressive woman, no matter how young or attractive, no matter how much they’ve been bitching about how horny they are or how much women suck because they never give it up. 

In their own words, they feel emasculated by take-charge women, they are afraid of these “crazy” girls (even though they are much more subtle than they themselves usually are), they are concerned about what might happen to them, they are afraid of making fools of themselves in front of women who already know what they are doing.  And they will say it too, no shame.  Weird, huh?

I just don’t know of too many heterosexual pro soccer players who like sucking cock. That’s sad.

Q: What I don’t get is why anyone gives a shit.  I just don’t understand the levels of insecurity that drive men to have this burning need to see women debased, especially sexually debased.

A: Because our society participates in a long tradition I’ve been calling “The Dominator Paradigm.”</blockqoute>

Oh for Occam’s sake. Sometimes, yeah. Other times its just the way people cope with a difficult world when they are trying to reconcile different things that they want and often can’t all get. Example:

<blockquote>I’ve been in close quarters with guys that can be really honest about their need to control women’s bodies.  When I introduced them to my more sex-forward friends, they actually back out.

Right. They want to play the video game on the “easy” setting where they can feel more in control and less harshly judged and to still get their rocks off. That sounds totally <s>human</s> misogynistic. When they have a bit more confidence in themselves that usually starts to get boring for them, and then they want to move on to real actual relationships that are more rewarding.

I didn’t use preview. I’m a bad person.

“One guy i knew would give the shirt off his back, had a very strong sense of morality, a lot of good characteristics.  And he hated his (soon to be ex) wife.  The whole concept of women in “men’s” sphere was something he was marginal with. “

I’d much rather hang out with non-repressed misogynists than these “chivalrous” misogynist types.  At least with the former, you can be just as crass back at them.  The Nice Guys® act so hurt when you don’t want them to open your bottled water… they make me want to vomit.

“There was a separate issue of not meeting girls who were my intellectual equal, but coming to understand that as a societal, rather than a biological, phenomenon solved that one.”

The societal problem being that as a snotty misogynist anti-social, boy-brat, unless said girl was Hermione Granger, and graduating from MIT at age 14, you’d still think you were smarter than her.

Yes, we men are brutes.

Really sorry, though.  Really.

Changing as much as I can.

Signed,
A Man

he Nice Guys® act so hurt when you don’t want them to open your bottled water… they make me want to vomit.

oh, THAT’s what you mean by Nice Guys. Ambivalent sexists. Yeah.

I would guess that there are many fewer women who actively pursue anonymous sex because it’s so much more dangerous for women, both physically and socially. So if men actually want anonymous sex… the best way to get it is to tear down the social structures which make it more dangerous to women.

Not that this would solve the physical dangers, nor the emotional ones (to all parties involved)...

But anyway, *I* am comfortable with the idea that men are generally inclined to be more promiscuous than women.

Exhibit a) gay men (as a group) are notoriously more promiscuous than lesbians,
Exhibit b) someone’s actually done the study where you send a young attractive experimenter around and ask random opposite gender people “would you sleep with me tonight? No strings attached?” Men say yes at a far higher rate than women (I forget the numbers, but it was something very very approximately like 40% to 5%).

and I’d expect raspberryjamba’s right, and most of the men who claim they do are really just after kudos from their friends

Or they’re horny and conflicted. Why do people always go for the difficult explanation here when there’s an easier one?

@jennifer cascadia,

Everything you said, is so true.  That’s the way I see it too.  They are always in need for attention, and love, and they think they are going to fail if they pursue it whole-heartedly, so they might as well just piss women off on purpose.  Pretend they don’t need them.

Someone-
1) Has been addressed elsewhere re: wanting anon. sex

</blockquote>
2) Re the Spartans: Person A decides that they don’t want to use their body to bring to term a fetus, for their own personal reasons, and so pays a doctor to abort it. Person B decides that they don’t want to devote what they must to raising a child, for their own personal reasons, and so leave it in a dumpster / throw it off a cliff (same effect). “Murder” is defined as “wrongful killing”. That’s how a soldier killing another soldier on duty isn’t murder, but killing the same person that evening in a bar is. It’s the word “wrongful” there that has some squish in it.
</blockquote>

In the case of person B, they can give it to other people to raise, which you can’t do as Person A.  If there was some sort of surgical procedure that one transfers over to some sort of artifical womb or something, I’m sure most women would do that.  You seem to be stuck on this idea that pregnancies don’t actually have physical consequences for women.

</blockquote>3) Do you really have no emotional connection to your own unborn progeny beyond the physical work and morning sickness it takes to keep it alive? Seriously? If your boyfriend came home and put his hand on his belly and said “honey, we’re pregnant,” you would just shrug “whatever”???? I’m not saying that this feeling gives you a veto on his life, but to say that you wouldn’t be entitled to even feel that connection? That just sounds psychopathic to me. </blockquote>

) I’m married, so it’d be my husband.  If he walked in pregnant, we’d be having a horribly uncomfortable conversation about where we’re going to scrape up 500 dollars for an abortion (if he wanted) or where we were going to get the cash to raise the kid (if that’s what he wanted).  It would be his decision. I wouldn’t worry about my level of genetic contribution; mine would be minimal compared to his.  That doesn’t have anything to do with any emotional connection to my possible progeny.  Nothing about the “you didn’t contribute as much to this process” says “You have no right to an emotional connection”.  It’s just a statement of fact.

MM

I have a huge family.  I have 20 biological aunts and uncles, about the same number of new in-laws, and dozens of cousins.  I have 2 sister, and 2 siblings-in-law.  More importantly, I have scores of close friends that I refer to as siblings, because I would (and have) open my home and money to them.

What?  “Family” only means “husband, wife, and kids”?  Yeah, expand your definition a little bit.

I know my comment won’t get read, being at the bottom - I don’t have time to read 130 comments myself, but I thought I would add this, just in case.  We learn about sex differences and assign gender roles before we can even think.  Boys and girls don’t remember when they first learned that boys can’t have babies, but I do remember simulating birth with my mother when I was a very little girl.  In the first few years of life, being born and where one came from is a big big event.  As I aged, knowing that I came out of my mother, I didn’t worry about it too much.  But for boys, they might notice that they don’t have this skill that their mother has.  This primary difference, if coupled with other factors like mental imbalance or bad family situations leads to an unconcious anxiety about one’s worth. 

Also, without complete trust or complete control of a person with a womb, a person without a womb can never be sure to actually pass on their genetic material.  It is much easier to keep people with wombs insecure and malnourished so they can be easily controled than to trust them to want to have sex with selfish, badly behaved, or just plan ugly non-womb-havers.  The patriarchy ensures that even the least desirable non-womb-haver can pass on their not-very-worthy genetic material.  Of course, since we have a 50/50 ratio, we don’t really need this extra push to allow everyone to procreate.  What it does do is take half of the population out of competition for attention and creates a willing, servile class of humans.  If you’re not in that class and have no consideration for the humans cast in that role, then the patriarchy is great.

@badpoetry,
This would make sense except you’re comparing women to inanimate fruit and men to animate foxes trying to get them.  This is like when my mom told me if I had sex I’d be like an uncorked bottle of champagne.  It’s already bad to compare women to things but food is specially bad.  You were trying to make a good point, but this is kinda insulting.

Yes, we men are brutes.

Eh, not really. If I had the kind of encouragement men have, I might be an entitled asshole too, and god knows I can’t possibly be a brute.

Seriously, though, I don’t think this is about anyone being a bad person, or needing to self-eviscerate. Unless you’re a wingnut. Then you really should hate yourself.

What they fail to understand is that “life begins at conception” is a misogynist statement. It’s the erasure of a woman’s role in making new people, and a claim that the only effort that counts is the effort a man put into ejaculating.  Abortion is horrifying because it’s a reminder that men do not actually make babies, but that women do through a 9 month process, and that if a woman chooses to interrupt that process, there will not be a baby.  Which is pretty conclusive proof that men don’t make babies.  Which directly contradicts the misogynist belief that only men are capable of really doing jobs worth doing.

This is quite possibly the greatest thing I’ve ever read in my life.

I’m with you, raspberryjamba.  In the sour grapes analogy, the foxes (men) are subjects whilst grapes (women) are objects.  That is misogynist!

“I don’t buy that there are that many more men than women who want anonymous sex”

I only have my own experience and that that has been shared with me but as a bisexual man I do buy it. Judging by whats available for me out there with bi and gay men vice straight women there does seem to be a lot more men who are just looking to get off. At all ages. The reasons for that are well beyond me but even my most sexually empowered female friends or sexual partners wouldnt meet up in a safe environment every day of the week and have safe, consensual anonymous sex like many of my male friends do. This has been the case in every state Ive lived in. YMMV

Fascinating thread.

I kinda of saw that to RE: grapes and foxes, but then the grapes were talking and moving, so I pictured the fruit from the “Muppet Show” and I was too busy giggling.

“Exhibit a) gay men (as a group) are notoriously more promiscuous than lesbians,
Exhibit b) someone’s actually done the study where you send a young attractive experimenter around and ask random opposite gender people “would you sleep with me tonight? No strings attached?” Men say yes at a far higher rate than women (I forget the numbers, but it was something very very approximately like 40% to 5%). “

Except both of those can be pretty easily explained by the cultural stud/slut double standard, which is in itself a product of misogyny.

Someone seems very invested in defending bad behavior.

Given that we’re not morons, we realize that misogyny can stem from ignorance and immaturity just as readily as it can from outright evil.  Under no circumstances is misogyny acceptable, regardless of the cause (and trying to make excuses for it is part of how you perpetuate it).

Whether a woman is gay or straight, she is bombarded with daily messages about female sexuality and the inherent dangers of being an overtly sexual person.  Regardless of whether she is gay or straight, there will likely be some degree of societal programming absorbed that inhibits her sexual expression.  Saying that men are somehow genetically more promiscuous and ignoring the mountains of conditioning that we’re all buried under from Day 1 is blatantly ignoring reality.

Given the HUGE discrepancy in body contribution, health risks and potential costs involved between a man and a woman when it comes to having a child together, saying that they are somehow putting in EQUAL effort is also blatantly ignoring reality.  Men do not have anywhere NEAR as much at personal stake.

@someone’s going to call me…

When you have to come up with sci-fi scenarios to illustrate your point it generally means even you know your theory doesn’t hold water in reality.

I just dont know of to many Pandagons who would wellcome a large famly. That’s sad.

You know what I find sad? People whose sole contribution to humanity is to serve as a warning against mixing narcissism and stupidity. I realize that it’s necessary, and I suppose I should thank you for it, but it’s still depressing as hell to see it in action.

The real difference between you and us, Michael, is that we don’t secretly hate our huge families and resent other people for not having one of their own. I hope you’ll notice that no one has returned your ire by making fun of you for having four kids, even in the face of your continued nastiness regarding people who don’t want to be parents. Mindlessly lashing out at people for not wanting or needing the same things you want or need isn’t something that emotionally and socially healthy people do. In fact, that’s pretty much the exact point of this post.

@ McGreevy,
I had four siblings (five kids including me) and my parents are pro-choice.  I bet there is more love in my house than yours.  Too bad you’ll never know how good it feels to know no one was forced to have you.

I just don’t know of too many heterosexual pro soccer players who like sucking cock. That’s sad.

And MAJeff wins the thread.

A: “I can understand the dynamics of how a man turns into a misogynist, but I just don’t understand the amount of energy they put into it is what I guess I’m saying here.  Any theories, commenting hive? “

Honestly, can there be one reason? I think it’s the whole shebang: patriarchy, religion, “tradition”, religion, religion, religion, and also some religion. Which came first- religions which teach that man is the ruler of women, second only to god/s, or societal traditions which teach men to loathe emotions and vulnerability? Which came first - religions which teach that humans are loathesome sinners born dirty and flawed, or societal traditions which teach men that they are debased animals with no self-control but women are even worse?

I think a lot of men (and women) hate themselves. But they are also human, with vulnerability and a desire for relationships with women- sexual, familial and/or platonic. But they must be strong! And women are lesser (and dirty, and even sinnier than men)! So they hate women. And themselves. And women. Back and forth: desire the company of women; to desire is weakness; women are shameful and powerless; to desire them is weak; must hate the women! Women tempt/disgust me! Desire the company of women. Desire is weakness! Ad infinitum.

Not very clear but that’s what I think. It’d be better if I could act it out for you, with gestures and jazz hands and stuff.

Even if your mother was really nice to you, and you don’t worry about whether she might have decided not to have you, by golly in a traditional household she was the most powerful person in your life. Power of life and death. Or approval/disapproval/humiliation, which is even worse. When you’re a grown man, of course anything having to do with women is going to disturb the eff out of you. If you’re a woman, you’re going to be pissed when you discover that all that power you wanted to emulate isn’t the “real” power in the world.

Sure it’s simplistic and a little neofreudian, but where the heck else did all that crap about “the eternal feminine” come from?

The idea of Woman, in a patriarchal society, is the ultimate bait-and-switch: mothers can never do enough for their children. If you’re a young man, all those beautiful young things are going out with everybody but you, and if you’re a young woman being a beautiful young thing isn’t nearly what it was cracked up to be. Then the guy gets a girl, or the girl gets a guy, and we know how well that tends to turn out if what they’re looking for is A Woman or A Man. Same thing for the rest of their lives. So obviously, if you’re a guy writing the history, it’s every individual woman’s fault for not being Woman…

A point to the Someone’s Going to Call me a Troll person:  I’m not sure if this was already addressed, but you continually equate that which has the potential to be a child with actual children in your posts.  This is not the case.  The fetus is not a child until it is viable outside of my body.  Until then it is part of my body.  And I get to choose.  Deal with it.

raspberry:

I had four siblings (five kids including me) and my parents are pro-choice. I bet there is more love in my house than yours. Too bad you’ll never know how good it feels to know no one was forced to have you.

Yeah, I was going to respond to Michael using my huge and universally liberal family as an example, too, but what’s the point? You can’t argue with a narcissist by suggesting that your life experiences are valid enough to be taken account of in his worldview.

Great thread.

Agree with Publius, way upthread, who sounded a lot like me in high school and the first couple years of college—I was a classic Nice Guy, until I figured out that passively hoping that women would fall out of the sky into my lap wasn’t really going to work.

Michael, my wife and I have two lovely children, and that’s all we ever wanted. Four children, for me, and still more for my wife, would be a trial (not to mention almost unaffordable). For you it’s a joy. That’s great—for you.

I frequently joke with my wife that all I did for the babies we had was contribute one cell. She did the rest. And having watched her go through labor and delivery twice (the first was a grueling 30-hour labor that nearly killed her) I can say I’m quite happy with my stubby little Y-chromosome…

@someone’s gonna call me…

They’re NOT horny and conflicted.  As someone up-thread said, they are just trying to get kudos from the other guys.  Fortunately, these guys are actually funny about their shit, so it isn’t as grating as it could be, but it’s clear as crystal that they are not looking for sex, just reassurance that they belong.

Let’s imagine that god snapped her fingers, and starting tomorrow it would be men who carried the babies for 9 months, not women.

I think it’s already a matter of some jealousy for men that they have to cede to women the ability (power?) to do something they cannot, in any situation, do.  Birth babies.  It seriously grosses me out when I hear men, and women, say “We’re pregnant.”  No, WE are not pregnant.  She is.  It has always struck me that men say this because, god forbid, there is something going on his life that he cannot absolutely control, so he has to assert himself.  He’s pregnant, too. No, he is not.  What an epic fail.  And I really, really hate it when women say “We’re pregnant.”

You do not see female primates in nature with 12 kids.  You surely don’t see those primates having the first 5 of those kids in just 5 years.  But my dad is #4 of 12, and there were several miscarriages in my grandma’s life too.  The family was catholic and ran a few buisnesses on their property, including a barn full of dairy cows and numerous fruit bearing flora.  My grandparents needed the labor and used it, grandma being the taskmaster because she was the one that loved working hard.  She did it right up until the last moment too. 

But I digress… In San Diego at a National Park, I saw a video about whales (I wonder who else knows about this video).  When we walked in, a female whale was giving birth to a new baby and we learned about how she nursed the baby, etc.  Then she set out on the trek from the waters off California to the Arctic with her baby.  Along the way, they had to travel through an area with several bull whales ready to mate with females.  Since she had an infant with her, being pregnant again would be a bad thing.  This did not matter to the male whales and they chased her, trying to mate with her.  She escaped the potential rape with her baby and made it up to the Arctic to raise her baby properly.

It got me thinking.  This is a perfect metaphor for human behavior as well.  Only, if this whale were a human female, she would have probably been kept naive to the real intentions of the male whales.  She also would have been undernouished all her life so she wouldn’t be strong enough to swim faster than the two or three males pursuing her.  She would have had needless intercourse and her baby might have gotten killed in the fray.  That female whale knew that she did not want to be pregnant and all human females have similar knowledge about themselves.  Likewise, we also know when we want to be pregnant.  One of the ways humans avoid unwanted pregnancy is using verbal cues which in English speaking cultures is symbolized by the word “no”. 

Of course, we’re all also incredibly horny and I somehow doubt that every sexual encounter that my grandparents had was my grandfather insisting my grandmother have sex.  Maybe it was, I can’t say, the parties that would know can no longer tell me.  Regardless, my grandma was practically a superhero, even though I was scared to death of her as a child.  I could eulogize her forever.  My grandpa, on the other hand barely spoke during my life, and according to my dad, during much of his life.

Interestingly, female chimpanzees (our closest relative, with very similar emotional behavior) raise their children with no males around.  In fact, it seems like a large number of female mammals don’t need males around to raise their babies either.  It seems that even after birth, fathers have very little importance in rasing new life.  But this isn’t how it has to be, of course.  We are the same species and I recently read that under the right psychological circumstances, men can even breastfeed.  We’re all in this together, we are all horny and we all have the ability for compassion and nurture.  It seems that our ability to think about things just fucked things up for a while.  I’m hoping I can spread my enlightenment without having to also pass on genetic material and so far, so good.

2) Re the Spartans: Person A decides that they don’t want to use their body to bring to term a fetus, for their own personal reasons, and so pays a doctor to abort it. Person B decides that they don’t want to devote what they must to raising a child, for their own personal reasons, and so leave it in a dumpster / throw it off a cliff (same effect). “Murder” is defined as “wrongful killing”. That’s how a soldier killing another soldier on duty isn’t murder, but killing the same person that evening in a bar is. It’s the word “wrongful” there that has some squish in it.

3) Do you really have no emotional connection to your own unborn progeny beyond the physical work and morning sickness it takes to keep it alive? Seriously? If your boyfriend came home and put his hand on his belly and said “honey, we’re pregnant,” you would just shrug “whatever”???? I’m not saying that this feeling gives you a veto on his life, but to say that you wouldn’t be entitled to even feel that connection? That just sounds psychopathic to me.

Too bad most folks here will never know what that is like.

@someone’s going to call me . . . :

A fetus isn’t a kid. And you can feel tremendous connection to your fetus, but that doesn’t make it a kid. You don’t love your fetus as a distinct personality, you love the fact that you’re going to have a child.

Look. before I had my son, I had a couple of miscarriages. They were awful and I was heartbroken and I grieved. But I was grieving for myself. I wanted a baby, and it hadn’t happened after I thought it was going to. If, Discomouseball, God, and any other deities who happen to be listening forbid, something happened to my son, I can list a million things about him I would miss. He’s a person. All I miss about those two previous fetuses are possibilities. They were just cells.

@Michael McGreevy:

Can we not pretend any one kind of family is better than others? I loved growing up in a small family - I thought we were perfect. I’m glad you’re happy with your large family, but your happiness doesn’t make your family any more valid than mine.

<i<The super sweet pious old ladies who are against abortion always seem like they’re mean people who’ve found a socially acceptable way to lash out. </i>

Word.  I just finished watching the NRLC presser on C-Span 2.  Old ladies and white men. Well, one Hispanic man who stressed that the single greatest issue and threat facing Hispanic populations is abortion.  Not immigration.  Not poverty.  Not lack of access to healthcare.  Abortion. 

Almost never have I heard so much bullshit and outright lies spew forth under the guise of “scientific.”  A huge fail when the oft-repeated phrases in those circles - “contracepting” and “aborted women” are major scientific talking points.  Also an epic reminder that women can be way more misogynist than men.  I find it much more disturbing when women lie to each other and go out of their way to fuck up their sisters.

I just dont know of to many Pandagons who would wellcome a large famly. That’s sad.

My husband & I are raising 4 grandkids.  It’s pro-choice, not anti-family, ass.

IP MASKER: KILLSCRIPT

Ignore it folks.

Damn, MAJeff, it’s hard. 

In the case of person B, they can give it to other people to raise, which you can’t do as Person A.  If there was some sort of surgical procedure that one transfers over to some sort of artifical womb or something, I’m sure most women would do that.

True, and I thought about that. I suppose what I’m saying is this:
The argument I’m objecting to is essentially that: “Forcing a woman to carry a child is a moral wrong, and there is no moral wrong suffered by the fetus in aborting it, ergo pro choice is objectively right.” While the first part is unquestionably true, the second part is debatable. How can we confidently say the fetus suffers NO wrong? We think that killing 2 month old babies is evil, right? Why? Well it just IS. Can you give me an explanation of why it is wrong to kill a 2 month old baby that does not also apply to a fetus? Seriously, I’d like to hear it.

That’s not, as people here seem to keep insisting, why the anti-choice argument is wrong. It’s wrong because the mother’s right to health OUTWEIGHS the fetuses’, and it’s wrong because objectively it is a counter-productive policy: It doesn’t prevent any abortions it just kills women who get butchered in back alleys. People who oppose abortion aren’t *necessarily* misogynist, unless they’ve thought this latter part through. At which point, if they’re still anti-choice I’m right there with you writing them up as woman hating asshats of the highest order.

You seem to be stuck on this idea that pregnancies don’t actually have physical consequences for women.

I never said this at all. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen even the craziest wingnut argue this. Where did you get this idea from? Or do you imagine that the anti-choice position is only possible to someone who believes this?

What?  “Family” only means “husband, wife, and kids”?  Yeah, expand your definition a little bit.

Again, I never said this either. I too have quite a few family members who aren’t related to me at all. Careful with those assumptions.

But for boys, they might notice that they don’t have this skill that their mother has.  This primary difference, if coupled with other factors like mental imbalance or bad family situations leads to an unconcious anxiety about one’s worth.

Oh my sweet goodness, we have achieved actual literal Freudian thinking. And let me guess, women are all messed up too, because when they are little they see their father naked and then they get confused about why they don’t have a penis and feel ashamed?
:headdesk::headdesk:

Except both of those can be pretty easily explained by the cultural stud/slut double standard, which is in itself a product of misogyny.

I never said where it CAME from, just that I believed that it was true that men were more promiscuous (on average) than women.

As it happens, it’s probably a mixture of culture, genetic, and biology.
On the genetics front, you generally see greater promiscuity in all species from the gender that does not do the primary child care, and you see less promiscuity in species where childcare is more evenly shared. Female sea horses, are, apparently, positively slutty (male sea horses carry the young and are more picky).
On the biology front, as someone noted above, women have greater risks inherent in promiscuous sex - both from pregnancy & diseases.

Of course, whether we think that this is good or bad, and whether we encourage or discourage it, THAT is all down to culture.

Someone seems very invested in defending bad behavior. Given that we’re not morons, we realize that misogyny can stem from ignorance and immaturity just as readily as it can from outright evil.

LOL. I take it you think that someone is me. If so, you’re looking in the wrong place, I’m not looking to defend anything. I’m just objecting to some of the weird mechanisms people are proposing about how that bad behavior is arrived at.

I guess part of what I’m saying is that if you have an immature ignorant guy who’s driving the women he knows unreasonably crazy by playing weird approach/avoidance games, maybe it’s cos he’s an asshat who hates women and wants to toy with them for the power trip, and maybe it’s because he’s vacillating like a 4 year old looking at a cookie on a hot stove. Either way he’s annoying as hell and needs to grow the hell up, but only one of those ways does he qualify as a misogynist. I’m sure you’d find plenty of instances of both if you looked out there.

And BTW, the hot stove analogy isn’t: “ZOMG, wimminz is fire, they burnz u”, it’s just pointing out that with romance we’re ALL playing with fire. Even the toughest of us get burned, and most of us worry about it at times (especially when we are immature and ignorant - sadly a natural stage in the development of most homo sapiens).

Whether a woman is gay or straight, she is bombarded with daily messages about female sexuality and the inherent dangers of being an overtly sexual person.  Regardless of whether she is gay or straight, there will likely be some degree of societal programming absorbed that inhibits her sexual expression.  Saying that men are somehow genetically more promiscuous and ignoring the mountains of conditioning that we’re all buried under from Day 1 is blatantly ignoring reality.

Completely with you 100% until the last sentence, and I’m 75% with you on that one too. Nobody is claiming that there aren’t significant cultural influences on promiscuity. Have you ever sat in one of those undergrad psychology courses where they keep asking: “Personality, is it genetic or learned? OMG it’s an interaction!” and “gender, is it genetic or learned? OMG it’s an interaction!”  Well… uh… promiscuity… same thing.

Given the HUGE discrepancy in body contribution, health risks and potential costs involved between a man and a woman when it comes to having a child together, saying that they are somehow putting in EQUAL effort is also blatantly ignoring reality.  Men do not have anywhere NEAR as much at personal stake.

Granted. True. 100%. For 9 months it is far far FAR more on the mother than the father. And that gives her the final say on abortion or no abortion. I agree.

Now can we also agree that passing Fathers off as inconsequential is a pretty damn snotty thing to do?

When you have to come up with sci-fi scenarios to illustrate your point it generally means even you know your theory doesn’t hold water in reality.

LOL. Y’know I knew that Einstein guy was full of shit as soon as he started telling us to think about spaceships passing each other at near the speed of light. What a sci fi lovin’ moron.

Or, wait, can you read my mind too, and tell me that the reason I called you on your neoFreudian mindreading crap is because I have a morbid unacknowledged fear of the intertubes, that I subliminate into snarking at innocent blog posters? Or is this all down to me being immature, combined with some bizarre psychosexual trauma when I was 6? Please do tell me good doctor!

MAJeff, I feel like a dog looking at a squirrel.  I am shaking!

raspberryjamba, here’s a tennis ball…..

someone’s gonna call me:
Please stop it with the fucking cookies.

MAJeff: 
LOL! Spot on!

someone-

The family comment was to Micheal McGreavy, not you.  Thus the “MM”.

Someone’s gonna call me:
You called me on my NeoFreudian what?  This was not meant for me, right?

You know, I don’t have the book with me now, but I am pretty sure Einstein didn’t have to come up with the spaceship image to illustrate his point.  His point was made on a physics paper with published in a peer review journal (IIRC).  This image of the passing space ships was made by someone else, thinking that the masses would need some patronizing.  Maybe a journalist?  I don’t remember.

And also, are you comparing your argument to Einstein’s theory of relativity?  Cause I’m not clear on this.

Also, things move at or near the speed of light in very real reality all the time, but there is not God in reality that snaps his/her fingers and decides shit.

you continually equate that which has the potential to be a child with actual children in your posts.  This is not the case.  The fetus is not a child until it is viable outside of my body.  Until then it is part of my body.  And I get to choose.  Deal with it.

See, this is a belief, not a fact. I happen to agree with you, but whether or not a fetus and a born child are morally equivalent is a statement that no scientist will ever be able to resolve. Arguments over it are exactly the same as “there is a god” “no there isn’t” “yes there is.” This isn’t where the unambiguous win is for the pro-choice side, and pretending that it is just contributes to the myth that pro & anti-choice are two solitudes that speak past each other.

They’re NOT horny and conflicted.  As someone up-thread said, they are just trying to get kudos from the other guys.

They’re your friends, I’ll believe you. It ain’t exactly an unheard of behavior you describe

I think it’s already a matter of some jealousy for men that they have to cede to women the ability (power?) to do something they cannot, in any situation, do.  Birth babies.

Can I just roll my eyes at this and move on please.

It seriously grosses me out when I hear men, and women, say ”We’re pregnant.” No, WE are not pregnant.

Because god forbid we try and emotionally include a man in the birth of his own child. What will they think of next, people saying “we did it!” when sports teams that they aren’t, personally, on win championships? Disgusting, and misogynist too no doubt.

The super sweet pious old ladies who are against abortion always seem like they’re mean people who’ve found a socially acceptable way to lash out.

BTW, this describes my mother-in-law, but I happen to know she isn’t otherwise mean. I think she’s seized on it as an identity thing to give her something to feel outraged about. There’s nothing to make you feel alive like proper outrage over widdle babies being killed, oh noes!

Yeah, I know it’s just cells, and you know it’s just cells, but good luck ever getting her to believe that. It has a soul don’cha know… So unless you want to go all crazy Hitchens/Dawkins “religion is a big evil lie” on us…

And just to clarify that I am not just hating on you, because I do like some of your points of view, my initial disdain for your argument came because you are stating this “what if” that already is. 

Men that get pregnant = this exists, it is called women.  If you agree with me that the only actual difference between men and women is that women are at risk of getting pregnant, then you wouldn’t need this “what if”.  To me, this the only real difference between men and women, the only thing that keeps women away from living at the potential their male counterparts enjoy, the only thing that could possibly fuel misogyny.  You don’t need the “what if” for something that already is.

raspberryjamba, sorry for the confusion. All I was suggesting is that thought experiments aren’t necessarily terrible things. Einstein was fond of them, whether or not the passing spaceships one was his original thought or not (dunno, leave that to the historians). Anyway, I don’t claim to be any form of Einstein. The things I think are neo-freudian are bits like this:

Pregnancy has a powerful symbolic meaning for fans of the patriarchy, and it’s not just that it’s the process by which we make new people. It’s because it gets interpreted as biological proof that women exist for men, and our metaphorically understanding of pregnancy reflects this—-men are characterized as cooks putting buns in ovens or gardeners sowing seed in passive ground

OMG, unconscious symbolism? Or maybe they’re just… y’know, metaphors. If I say that a guy “rubbed one out,” does that mean that I’ve objectified men and hate them? By the standard of this post, that would be iron clad proof, right.
BTW, I’ve never met a good baker or a gardener who thought of buns or the ground as particularly passive anythings.

Or this one:

What they fail to understand is that “life begins at conception” is a misogynist statement. It’s the erasure of a woman’s role in making new people, and a claim that the only effort that counts is the effort a man put into ejaculating.

This is just a flat out non-sequitur. If “Life begins at conception” means “only the man’s sperm matters,” then does “life begins at birth” mean “only the woman’s egg matters?”  Or does “life begins at implantation” mean that only people in point hats are important?

People are anti-choice for lots of reasons. Many of them involve authoritarianism, or its cousin, system justification. But I know people who believe that life begins at conception for religious reasons, who are even pro-choice - she realizes that as bad as she thinks abortion is, banning it is worse. So can we please stop with the half baked psychoanalysis. Please and thankyou?

Eh… I’ll say there’s more to male/female than the ability to get pregnant (would that make women with hysterectomies essentially men?). That said, a lot of people go the other way and exagerate the differences stupidly.

But I’m Canadian, I’m into the whole cultural mosaic thing. I think that it’s not only ok for people to be different, it’s pretty awesome that they are, and that by appreciating the differences around us (without assuming that we’re better than anyone else) life becomes a richer and more interesting place. That’s why I’m not upset that there might be some genetic contribution to promiscuity. What if there is? So long as we’re all being respectful and responsible about not hurting each other, then vive la difference.

“OMG, unconscious symbolism? Or maybe they’re just… y’know, metaphors.”

Yeah, but after a lifetime of being the food in everyone’s metaphors, it kinda gets to you.  And it gets to you even more that the metaphors that are valid in this society are only the ones that come from the male point of view.  Maybe a guy could think having a child is like putting a bun in the oven.  A woman would NEVER come up with that kind of non-sense.

Just to point out: A woman’s genetic contribution to a new human outweighs a man’s by staggering proportions.  The man provides exactly one half of a single diploid set of chromosomes.  Everything else comes from the mother, including all those [big number here] of copies of the that one-half set that came from a sperm.  The legal rights and responsibilities around pregnancy should not be equal because the biological demands aren’t equal.  To suggest otherwise is blatantly misogynistic.

someone’s gonna call you a troll because you’re trolling.  Shocking, ain’t it?</bugs>

I just dont know of to many Pandagons who would wellcome a large famly. That’ssad

You don’t know us and can’t say that. The difference between you and most pandagonians is that we don’t incessently talk about what kind of families we have or want to have.

I think here’s something you might not understand: we visit here because we have other things we want to talk about other than the specifics of our family life and what kids we may or may not have, whereas you seem to have nothing else on your mind to discuss.

someone’s gonna call me…:

Please name one difference between males and females that doesn’t stem from the fact that females are the ones who get pregnant. 

“(would that make women with hysterectomies essentially men?)”
Are you trying to sound naive?

someone:

OMG, unconscious symbolism? Or maybe they’re just… y’know, metaphors. If I say that a guy “rubbed one out,” does that mean that I’ve objectified men and hate them?

1) You mean you really can’t see how using “rub one out” as a euphemism for masturbation has an extremely literal component (for both sexes, not just for men), while “bun in the oven” and “sowing a seed” as metaphors for pregnancy don’t?

2) A metaphor is a form of symbolic language. It describes a literal thing in a non-literal way through the use of analogical symbolism. Symbols are complex things, with lots of conscious and unconscious cultural-historical-social elements to them. In fact, there’s a whole field of philosophy — semiotics — that’s dedicated just to the study of how signification works. In short, there is no such thing as “just” a metaphor. Metaphors wouldn’t work if they weren’t pregnant (if you will) with meaning.

BTW, I’ve never met a good baker or a gardener who thought of buns or the ground as particularly passive anythings.

Actually, it would be the oven that’s the passive component of “bun in the oven.” And you have to remember that the “sowing seeds” metaphor is thousdands of years old, long before humans had a good understanding of how the earth works.

Even if your mother was really nice to you, and you don’t worry about whether she might have decided not to have you, by golly in a traditional household she was the most powerful person in your life. Power of life and death. Or approval/disapproval/humiliation, which is even worse.

That certainly wasn’t my experience, and it doesn’t even fit the stereotypical “you just wait ‘til your father gets home and I tell him what you’ve done!” family model. Sure, “traditional” moms make your meals and wash your clothes, but it’s the traditional dads who mete out punishments and tell the moms what to do and when to do it. Moms’re only powerful compared to *you* the kid; compared to a father she’s not powerful at all (and is, in fact, infantilized to put her in her—*your*—place relative to the father) and you’d better believe “traditional” dads make this hierarchy clear both subtly and overtly as often as they can. Eventually the son is expected to emulate the father and dominate his own wife, right?

So your basic premise of “mom power” is pretty much dead wrong, and I’m not even getting *into* the conclusions you draw from it…

Can you give me an explanation of why it is wrong to kill a 2 month old baby that does not also apply to a fetus? Seriously, I’d like to hear it.

It’s been given several times in this very thread.  A fetus is, by its nature, dependent on the use of a single specific woman’s body to survive.  The analogous situation is not adoption, but organ donation.  We do not require a person to donate an organ to save another person’s life even if they are the only person in the world whose organ could be transplanted without rejection.

A child—and we have different words for fetuses and children because they are, in fact, different, though many of us refer to both as babies—can be cared for by someone else.  Fetuses hook into a woman’s bloodstream for nutrition; children are fed.  Formula is available, lactation can be hormonally induced (in any human, male or female), and anyone could do it.

You don’t see the difference because you’re invested in the idea that men’s contributions are somehow equivalent to women’s.  Which conclusion you can reach only if you believe that sperm are magic.

OK, I found the word I was looking for: Handicap. 
Pregnancy is a huge handicap that only women have to suffer. 
People trying to force pregnancy on others are then misogynists by definition.

So your basic premise of “mom power” is pretty much dead wrong

I disagree. A child’s relationship with his mother is always going to be stronger than the bond between father and child. There’s a reason that people in stadiums hold signs that say “Hi Mom!” rather than “Hi Dad!” hoping to get noticed.

The dynamic is much more complex than you realize. Even in a traditionally patriarchal marriage, and in fact because of its patriarchal structure, a mother is going to find ways to exert her power where she can, and usually that is by making the most possible use of her power over the children.

”...men are characterized as cooks putting buns in ovens or gardeners sowing seed in passive ground…”

OMG, unconscious symbolism? Or maybe they’re just… y’know, metaphors.

Like how the whole wildly popular homunculus theory of pregnancy was just a metaphor, and *not* in fact a blatant erasure of any female participation in making babies? Because the the language with which something is described *never* influences how the public perceives it… 9.9

In other words, I don’t think it’s “unconscious” at all.

Michael McGreevy, I am a regular reader of Pandagon, and a firm believer in the right to choose and I have nine children.  I am happy to have had nine children.  But my mother had only two, and didn’t like it much; she should never have had any.  Never mind about how"I wouldn’t be here then.”  Someone would be.

By the way, some of my children are adopted, but that doesn’t change my opinions on this point, nor do I think that other women should have been forced to carry their pregnancies to term in order to supply me with kids to adopt.

Oh, and how would the women out there feel about being told that they were barely contributing to the child at all because they just took 30 seconds to chuck an egg in and don’t actually have to carry the thing?

Relieved, sweetie-honey-pumkinchunks.  The idea of shoving eight to ten pounds of baby through my vagina (most likely tearing it open, shitting myself in front of my doctors and loved ones, etc, etc, or alternatively having the doctor cut open my abdomen to remove the baby) has never appealed; if guys want to carry the fucking thing and do the childbirth themselves, my response is more fucking power to you!  I’m fucking lazy, fond of my body, and afraid of pain; if you can magically reverse biology, I would be EXTREMELY pleased. 

(P.S. my period is no fun either, please give that to a dude too.  i promise i will be jealus of his “ability to create life” or whatever.)

p.p.s. childbirth, periods, please do take them, but: you can have my clitoris when you pry it from my cold dead hands.  THAT ONE IS MINE ALL MINE HAHAHA.)

Seriously, you are a horrible person, though, mostly because let’s be honest: the chances of a man dying as a result of pregnancy are zero.  My friend - sweet nineteen-year-old girl, very healthy, had a strong pregnancy - she had her baby in July and she kept working right up until June of last year.  She started bleeding in the middle of the birth.  She could have died.  So seriously, fuck you for this “men and women do an equal amount of work during reproduction” shit.

“This is just a flat out non-sequitur. If “Life begins at conception” means “only the man’s sperm matters,” then does “life begins at birth” mean “only the woman’s egg matters?” Or does “life begins at implantation” mean that only people in point hats are important?”

Um, right. I suggest, someone, that you put down Freud or whatever academic gobbledygook you’re currently stuck on and pick up a basic anatomy text. Conception occurs before implantation. At this point, the woman’s body has merely served as a passive receptacle for the man’s sperm. To give full personhood to a zygote discounts the “work” that the woman’s body performs following implantation. It promotes a view of pregnancy as a time period during which the “finishing touches” are made rather than the core foundation (brain, heart, lungs, skeleton…). Most biologists will tell you that “when life begins” is an ephemeral thing, but to say that personhood begins at birth is a sure thing, IMO, because that is the moment when one finally enters the world as a “finished” individual. It doesn’t mean “only” the woman’s contribution to the process matters, but that it is more *significant* than the man’s. It seems that in the interest of objectivity a lot of people latch onto the idea of “balance”, seeing it where it doesn’t necessarily exist. Seconds of ejaculation = Months of pregnancy & labor. 13 dead Israelis = 1,000+ dead Palestinians. I’m sure you could come up with your own examples.

It seriously grosses me out when I hear men, and women, say ”We’re pregnant.”

To hark back to a comment I made earlier, if I may… 

As far as I know, the phrase “We’re pregnant” emerged relatively recently.  It’s not traditionalist or misogynistic in intent (although your mileage may vary on the effect).  It’s another case where the man is signaling that he’s being cooperative and sharing.  Saying “we’re pregnant” is supposed to reinforce verbally the idea that both man and woman are involved in the total process.  The old model—or the old modern model, at least—was that pregnancy and birth were, in fact, something for which the woman was entirely responsible, and the man pretty much drove to the hospital, paced the waiting room, and then was invited in afterwards.  “We’re pregnant” is part of the same outlook as having the man in the delivery room from the beginning.  You may hear it as creepy or saccharine or passive-aggressive (“what about meeee?”) or even as a political act of usurpation, and it may be any or all of those things by now, but IMHO its origins are at least tepidly feminist-allied.

As for badpoetry’s fox and grapes thing, I didn’t think there was a subject-object stereotype in place, because the aspect of predation was all in the foxes’ minds, and badpoetry specified that it was in fact an unhealthy way to view the world.  And because in the revised fable the grapes were sentient too.

“Because god forbid we try and emotionally include a man in the birth of his own child. What will they think of next, people saying “we did it!” when sports teams that they aren’t, personally, on win championships? Disgusting, and misogynist too no doubt.”

There’s a difference between emotional inclusion and taking credit where it isn’t due, but that’s a point often lost on insecure men. And there’s a lot to say about the world of sports fandom you seem to hold above reproach, but I don’t feel like wasting any more time on pseudo-intellectual trolls.

There’s a difference between emotional inclusion and taking credit where it isn’t due, but that’s a point often lost on insecure men.

Well said.

Great thread I made it most of the way through all the comments but if I say anything that’s already been said my apologies.

First, to MikeEss from waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay at the top of the thread regarding “pussy whipped” and no female equivalent. Amongst my group of friends and some of the entertainment gossip blogs I read, I’ve heard of “dick whipped” and “dickmatized” as used for women who put up with douchebags who they should dump. There’s also a series of hilarious videos by a woman named Alexis K. Taylor who has crazy rants about women being “addicted” to the dick. It’s not as prominent as men’s “pussy whipped” but perhaps we should give it a few years (just kidding).

I used to have a co-worker who for the most part was a cool guy who I got along with and hung out with but we’d sometimes get on these men/women discussions and I’m thankful to have been reading Feministing and Pandagon for so many years so that, for the most part, I could shut that ignorant shit down cold. However, this one particular discussion I was outnumbered and we got into a headed debate about who’s last name should go to the children in a marriage. Now, I don’t ever want kids (not a ONE Michael McGreevy, please weep for me and all the babies I’ll never have and when you cry picture me scuba diving in Honolulu) but I said if I did then the kids would get my last name seeing as I’d put in the most work. Of course, all the men at the table got PISSED, and my co-worker brought up the bun in the oven analogy, which drives me insane. I argued that women put in WAY more effort (and thanks for the building a house analogy upthread, I’m so gonna use it!) and one guy got smug and said that were it not for men’s “seed” there wouldn’t be a baby at all, so there.

I was stunned by his stupidity and asked him if he was seriously comparing ejaculating to 9 months of pregnancy (and then birth, and then possibly breast feeding if the mother so chooses) he said while women have to be pregnant they still have to depend on men for babies at all.

So yeah, long story long this shit is still out there and there are men, young men, you believe that cumming in a woman equates with pregnancy and entitles them. Though I thank Amanda and all the commenters for giving me better ammunition the next time this shit comes up.

Unsurprisingly, I love that the man I married is very very much NOT a misogynist.

As I mentioned upthread, I’m currently pregnant, and I can say that without a doubt my husband is envious of me. Sure, he’s thrilled that he doesn’t have to deal with the morning sickness and back pain, but he does NOT have the same connection to our offspring that I do. I’ve been feeling her move for weeks; the only positive sign of her existence he’s seen are the positive pregnancy tests and the ultrasounds. I live day in and day out with the physical reality of our offspring, to him it can be little more than an idea. Of course, because he’s NOT a misogynist he deals with this rather well, but I think in a lot of ways he’s sad that there’s inherently less of a connection between him and the offspring and me and the offspring.

Because of this, he’s very very motivated to be an involved father. Again, shocking, I know.

And even though he is the biological father, in our unique situation that really doesn’t matter so much. Judging from the past 3 generations of both of our families, it is incredibly likely that this child will look exactly like me (seriously, obvious gender differences aside, me and my 1st cousin could be twins, I’m all but identical to my father, and his father, etc.), and that there will be very little obvious evidence of his genetic contribution. Of course, his roulette-wheel of genetics could overpower my super-identical-genetics, and we come out with a purple alien.

So even though he has contributed ~49% of the genes, they (probably) won’t show. I find the (probable) graphic illustration of the mother’s contribution seriously outweighing the father’s quite amusing.

In short, when it comes to reproducing with me, my husband has the proverbial short end of the stick, and because he’s a decent human being IT DOESN’T MATTER! Because parenting goes way beyond just genetics, something he’s realized intimately and something that many pro-lifers can’t get (like anyone who thinks sperm contributers have a right to a pregnancy)

As a tangent to my last comment, I really despise the fact that discussions on abortion ultimately devolve to philosophy, idealized theoretical situations, and very abstract nit picky crap. I suspect this is because, for men, that’s all pregnancy is.

My husband saw a pink line on a test and blob on the screen. I spent two months unable to eat real food and throwing up 3 times a day, had an emergency room visit, and had to quit my job because of the god damn hormones throwing out my hips. My husband saw another picture on a screen, and my waist get thicker. I felt flutters and what I swear is a deranged hamster running around my innards. My husband saw yet another (final) picture on a screen, and I’m the one who is literally getting the piss kicked out of them (pregnancy is not fun).

From the beginning this has been, at best, abstract for him, and very physically real for me. And thus in any abortion debate I focus on the physical realities women must face (forced pregnancy = torture and by any reasonable application violates Geneva Conventions) and not any damn “moment when the fetus becomes a LIFE.”

pepito and everyone - HELL FUCK NO THAT WAS NOT ME

again, i beg the mods to remove my name

further, yet again whomever it was that highjacked my name came off completly OPPOSITE of what i normally say.

thank you pepito for realizing it wasnt me.

two options - asshole troll and asshole roommate, but roomate would have to have access to my comp today hich he did NOT. also, he believes in gay marriage and abortion. so i think it a name straling fucker.

are there more of them? some one nicely went to my LJ to show me the sickness about Michelle Obama posted under my name. if there are anymore, i am denelian at LJ, and .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

i am literally SICK about this. please, amanda or jesse or pam or aguste,... please please take my name of of this and the sick Michelle one.

i have take my night meds so i may not be very coherent. sorry

whoever sent me that anon LJ - who are you so i may thank you as you deserve

one guy got smug and said that were it not for men’s “seed” there wouldn’t be a baby at all

Um, is he under the impression that the “seed” works on its own?

MAJeff said:

“Ignore it folks. “

I LOVE YOU, MAJeff!!!

mcgreevy michael, when I read your first post about the love in your family, etc.,

“There is a ton of love in a house.
Not easy mind you but worth all the work.

Too bad most folks here will never know what that is like. “

I was shocked.  I am a mother, and I have a husband and a child, and there is a ton of love in my house, as well.  I am also a “Pandagon “.  The reason we don’t have more children is because of health reasons.  What makes you think that people who read this blog don’t have or don’t want families?

I can barely believe that asshole is using “I’m a Canadian!” as an excuse for his misogyny. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me.

I wonder why these people don’t get that we are so much more progressive (and, therefore, smarter than) them.

FYI, I don’t mean Canadians, I mean actual progressives.

Just to point out: A woman’s genetic contribution to a new human outweighs a man’s by staggering proportions.

Ok, yes. So that’s true. And you think this is important because?

Please name one difference between males and females that doesn’t stem from the fact that females are the ones who get pregnant.

Uhhh… Men have deeper voices and tend to find fart jokes funnier when they’re 12. Most people are romantically attracted to only one gender (and don’t tell me that’s only about reproduction). I didn’t say the differences were IMPORTANT, just that they add flavor to life. It was never a requirement of feminism that men and women abandon all differences and act in all ways identically, just as it was never a requirement of religious tolerance that everyone give up their individual beliefs and all worship the same god. Diversity, when paired with respect and understanding is a beautiful thing.

You mean you really can’t see how using “rub one out” as a euphemism for masturbation has an extremely literal component (for both sexes, not just for men), while “bun in the oven” and “sowing a seed” as metaphors for pregnancy don’t?

Uh huh. And wiener is a pretty literal food-based description of a penis, and “limp dicked c***sucker” is a slam custom invented to belittle men. We could get into what Rabbi I-forget-his-name calls the “suffering Olympics,” where every group compares its grievances, and women would clearly win over men, but the fact that there are food-based metaphors for pregnancy are largely irrelevant to that fact.

sowing seeds” metaphor is thousdands of years old, long before humans had a good understanding of how the earth works.

Or how eggs worked. But they knew that if a seed gets to just the right place, and if conditions are right and you are lucky, life sprouts… Now there may be a point that “sewing seed” implies that the person doing the planting is the one with agency (as opposed to “taking seed” or something), and that probably reflects that men were making the terms up… but we’re getting a bit subtle here.

It’s been given several times in this very thread.

I sense an entirely new argument about to come out…

We do not require a person to donate an organ to save another person’s life even if they are the only person

And there it is, the old organ donor analogy. So we can get into the permutations of “you go to a party and wake up to discover that your mad surgeon uncle has attached a child to your kidney, and a new kidney won’t be available for 9 months, so you can only get them off your body, leaching your blood, by taking a knife and chopping them off, which would kill them, so is it still murder”... But that is STILL a) a judgment call, b) a “science fiction” thought experiment, c) semantic abstract word games.

And even then it’s still in the realm of an ethical decision, with no objective right or wrong, where a sane person could make a case either way and feel deeply moved by their case.

Again, this is not the part of the argument that pro-choice wins slam dunk on, and if we keep pretending it is, we’ll just have more and more enraged dialogues in which both sides are convinced the other isn’t listening. Please, let’s be less indignant about how others could disagree on THIS one, and be indignant about how they don’t agree over the other stronger objective reasons.

You don’t see the difference because you’re invested in the idea that men’s contributions are somehow equivalent to women’s. Which conclusion you can reach only if you believe that sperm are magic.

You know how I said “women contribute more.” What I meant by that is “men and women don’t have equivalent contributions.” :headdesk: I can haz literacy plz?
How about I agree that sperm are not magic [rolls eyes], and you agree that men are allowed to have emotions too. Y’know, along with women, as if they’re the same species or something.

People trying to force pregnancy on others are then misogynists by definition.

Then if God exists, she is one enormous misogynist. Pregnancy handicaps AND monthly bleeding, why does she hate women so?

Like how the whole wildly popular homunculus theory of pregnancy

Not familiar, sorry. But if your point is that there are many actually misogynist people in the world, and some of them code it into language, then you are right. Can we move on from there?

In other words, I don’t think it’s “unconscious” at all.

So it was a conscious decision. I see. And pray tell, what do you believe the conscious thought process that lead to this was? What did the internal monologue sound like that brought this to be?

Seriously, you are a horrible person, though, mostly because let’s be honest: the chances of a man dying as a result of pregnancy are zero…  So seriously, fuck you for this “men and women do an equal amount of work during reproduction” shit.

Huh? So I make one hypothetical: “If X then Y,” and now I’m a horrible person because I’m making fun of X, and I clearly don’t care about Y, and how dare I state that Z is a fact. Reading comprehension much?

I can barely believe that asshole is using “I’m a Canadian!” as an excuse for his misogyny. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me.

aaaand we can call it here at 2:26 that someone finally called me a misogynist.
Would you please tell me exactly what it is that I have said which makes you believe that I hate women? Is it a failure of ideological purity, or something else? I’m fascinated to know (really, seriously, I’m not winding you up here, I actually would like to know). And please give an actual quote, not a “you say that women should be forced to have pregnancies, and you think men suffer just as much as women in pregnancy.” What is it that I have *ACTUALLY* said?

Conception occurs before implantation. At this point, the woman’s body has merely served as a passive receptacle for the man’s sperm. To give full personhood to a zygote discounts the “work” that the woman’s body performs following implantation…

Sorry, but you’re splitting a lot of semantic hairs here. Life starts before conception because sperm and egg are both alive, right.

There are multiple arbitrary points you can pick for the start of personhood. There’s conception (which makes sense because that’s when all the component bits come together, and everything after that is just splitting), there’s viability (which makes sense because that’s when they are their own independent being), there’s birth, there’s when the brain develops (which makes sense because their personality is a function of their brain), there’s when language develops… you could make a case for many of them, and people do. Then there’s your (WEIRD) theory that “if you think personhood starts before the woman’s body has had a chance to nurture the zygote enough, you’re not giving her her proper due.” Believe that if you want, but don’t call me misogynist for not believing it, and PLEASE don’t claim that this means I believe that sperm are magic. That is such a strange meme.

There’s a difference between emotional inclusion and taking credit where it isn’t due, but that’s a point often lost on insecure men.

Actually I thought FlipYrWhig was bang on here, it’s a mildly lame attempt at reframing pregnancy into the start of a shared lifelong venture, which is a generally sweet, inclusive, and bonding thought. And now here you’re getting proprietary and demanding that “insecure men stop pretending because THEY AREN’T THE ONE SUFFERING!!1!” I mean, do you seriously imagine that someone would hear “we’re pregnant” and then ask the man “oh my God, are you in pain? You hero!” Why impute the worst possible motives when there’s a reasonable chance they’re at least TRYING to be egalitarian?

I mean, if that’s And there’s a lot to say about the world of sports fandom you seem to hold above reproach

So I use one sports fans as an example, and now I’m a person who places sports at the highest esteem. Wow, really lucky I didn’t use the word “robber,” or who knows what you’d think of me.

I really despise the fact that discussions on abortion ultimately devolve to philosophy, idealized theoretical situations, and very abstract nit picky crap.

Bravo! Now THAT is a strong and compelling pro choice argument! I agree completely, the nit picky crap leads to endless circular semantic arguments (see above). It’s all heat, no illumination. This, here, cuts through the BS nicely.

Because god forbid we try and emotionally include a man in the birth of his own child. What will they think of next, people saying “we did it!” when sports teams that they aren’t, personally, on win championships? Disgusting, and misogynist too no doubt.

Why not just say “My wife/partner/whatever is pregnant?”  Other than the initial fuck and sperm, men contribute very little to actual pregnancy.  I’m not talking about raising a child.  I’m talking about actually being physically pregnant.

My theory on men and sports and “we did it?”  Frustrated armchair jocks, quite possibly.

You may hear it as creepy or saccharine or passive-aggressive (“what about meeee?”) or even as a political act of usurpation, and it may be any or all of those things by now, but IMHO its origins are at least tepidly feminist-allied.

What it’s origins are, I have no idea.  If it is, as you suggest, feminist-allied, it is still creepy.  Yes, “feminist-allied” can still be creepy and disturbing.  I look at it EXACTLY as the man whining “what about meeeeeeeeee?”  When the woman is pregnant, more attention is typically focused on her.  I know a lot of men who find that just about unbearable.

There’s a difference between emotional inclusion and taking credit where it isn’t due, but that’s a point often lost on insecure men.

Dead on, Flip.

tl;dr

Deb—do not feed the troll. MM is here solely to antagonize, and get people to disclose personal details about themselves. He’s not here in good faith, he’s making the equivalent statements of “so when did you stop beating your wife, Mr. Chairman?”

Why isn’t there a restaurant /bar chain called, say, “Salamis,” in which scantily-clad, well-endowed young men serve customers?

If there was, most of the customers would be gay men, not women.

In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen even the craziest wingnut argue this.

I have. Not on here, and not recently, but I have. Once it was a woman arguing this, too. When it was pointed out that some women have life-threatening conditions that would kill them in pregnancy, she acknowledged that this might be true, but that it was just too bad and that was no reason not to continue a pregnancy.

It’s not an unheard-of tack to pretend that pregnancy is not a big deal.

The man : cookie :: man : woman and fox: grape :: man : woman analogies are simply bad!  And they DO reveal a lot about how the speaker/writer views women.  Both men and foxes are animals who can act, but women are not inanimate foodstuff.  WE have wants, needs, and desires too, and we are able to act on them.

IP MASKER: KILLSCRIPT

Both men and foxes are animals who can act, but women are not inanimate foodstuff.  WE have wants, needs, and desires too, and we are able to act on them.

I see your point, but I thought it worked because it underscored the way the “foxes” view women as inanimate consumables. I don’t think it means that badpoetry thinks this way.

Troll has now equated my real-life concern about control over my own body with science fiction.  Fuck you, troll.

I think Ashley’s point about the concreteness of pregnancy for women is an important one, but it also extends to the cultural ways in which men are shielded from pregnancy and infant care. Anybody who raises questions like “what’s the difference between a fetus and a two-month-old baby?” pretty much has to be working in some abstract universe where neither he (ahem) nor his readers have ever come in contact with either.

First one point about the “egg and sperm are ALIVE” argument.  Viruses are alive.  Cancer is alive.  We still view the fact that the health of the host is more important then the “live cells”.  Heck tapeworms are live but we still get rid of the suckers.  Now I’m not saying that cancer=babies, I’m just saying that that argument is silly. 

As for the what if men got preggers thing, my hubby and I adopted 4 years ago.  We both went through physicals, shots, interviews, paperwork, classes and fingerprinting.  We both suffered though 2 potential adoptions falling through.  Our journey lasted for almost 2 years before we ended up with the smartest girl in the world.  We are still pro choice and my hubby has stated that adoption was hard enough, he could never imagine himself giving birth. 

BTW have to tell you story about my daughter.  I told her about MLK and how he wanted everyone to love each other no matter what they looked like.  I explained that some people are scared of people who are different, be it the color of their skin or if they are boys or girls.  My five year old squinched up her face and said kinda puzzled “that’s silly, that’s like hating someone ‘cause of the shirt they are wearing.”

From the video:

I have come to the conclusion that people in the world truly hate children.

Um, excuse me, Sister Psycho, but aren’t you one of us “people in the world”?  Or are you speaking from a different planet?  I guess the second question answers itself.  Jesus H. Christ; how many millions of these delusional assholes are there in this country?

And there it is, the old organ donor analogy. So we can get into the permutations of “you go to a party and wake up to discover that your mad surgeon uncle has attached a child to your kidney, and a new kidney won’t be available for 9 months, so you can only get them off your body, leaching your blood, by taking a knife and chopping them off, which would kill them, so is it still murder”… But that is STILL a) a judgment call, b) a “science fiction” thought experiment, c) semantic abstract word games.

Being pregnant is the ULTIMATE organ donation.  Your entire body, every organ, gives itself over to the fetus.  Which ultimately caused my kidneys to be in danger of failing and - 23 years later - still causes problems.

Anybody who raises questions like “what’s the difference between a fetus and a two-month-old baby?” pretty much has to be working in some abstract universe where neither he (ahem) nor his readers have ever come in contact with either.

This.  They’re not even working in an abstract universe - they don’t have enough imagination to do that.  I actually heard a speaker at the March on Life (yes, I know what I just wrote) say last night that they will not stop their “war” until civil rights are granted at the moment of fertilization of the pre-born.  Talk about an abstract universe.

I hate these people.  I really do.  Women mean nothing to them.  Absolutely nothing.  Less than nothing.  We have one purpose and one purpose only:  bearing children.  If it kills us in the process or fucks our lives up forever, so be it.  Small price to pay for getting the baybeeeeeeez born.  After that?  They pretty much don’t give a shit.  They look at children as being disposable after they’re born.

“Uhhh… Men have deeper voices and tend to find fart jokes funnier when they’re 12. Most people are romantically attracted to only one gender (and don’t tell me that’s only about reproduction). “

How is that not about reproduction?  Please admit that you are wrong and move on.

To Sam Holloway in re. “People in the World” -

You just need to understand fundy lingo.  They’re well aware that they’re standing on the planet Earth.  Thing is, they’re Saved, part of the Kingdom of God, which sets them apart from the rest of the sinful world.

So if you translate “people in the world” as “filthy sinners” - which is exactly what this woman means by it - it’ll make a lot more sense.

“It was never a requirement of feminism that men and women abandon all differences and act in all ways identically,”

Someone:  People are calling you misogynist because you are, and if this embarrasses you, then you can fix it.  This sentence above gives you away as an ambivalent misogynist, or at least someone who hasn’t thought through his/her thoughts a lot.  There is no “men behavior” and “women behavior”.  All people behave differently, even though misogynists are always trying to come up with “differences” (like your farting joke example).  You say you advocate diversity because you “accept” (why, thank you, that is most gracious) female and male behavior, but such a thing does not thing, and therefore you are not accepting diversity, but boxing people into very narrow behavior parameters.  It is as if you said you are not a racist because you accept black people’s behavior.

“Then if God exists, she is one enormous misogynist. Pregnancy handicaps AND monthly bleeding, why does she hate women so?”

What does this even mean?  Are you using the christian’s God everlasting love for all humans as PROOF that pregnancy is not a handicap?  Are you justifying men’s misogyny by saying God is mysogynist, too?  Are you assuming I believe in God and therefore this troubles me? 

I come to this website to read smart arguments made by people smarter than me, who have thought about these matters more than I have, who can express themselves better than me.  Please respect that and try to phrase your arguments more clearly.

Such a thing does not EXIST.  I forgot to use preview.

No. Just no. Once more, and slowly: Life begins before conception (eggs, sperm, cancer, gerbils, all alive things).

Again we hear the “magic sperm” argument.  Are you talking about a human person’s life?  Eggs and sperm separately do not a human being make.  Say it as slowly as you want it; that doesn’t make it true. To answer somebody upthread…No, they obviously don’t teach biology anymore.

It’s just poetic license for heavens sake. If I said I was “on top of the moon,” would you say “no you’re not. You’re right here on the ground. Why are you insane and in denial?”

Maybe you are just insane and in denial?  If you fail to see the differences between “we’re pregnant” and on-top-of-the-moon poetic license, you are thick as a plank.  Quit making specious rationalizations every time you get caught out in a fuck-up.

321,  you are being obtuse again.  Obviously it takes BOTH sperm and egg to make a human life.  Sperm and egg, INDIVIDUALLY, without the other, do not make a life.  You don’t agree with that?

Thinking that sperm is all it takes to create life is the “magic sperm” argument. 

Somehow, I don’t think you’re the feminist you seem to think you are.

  It’s like Jack Benny putting his arm around Rochester and saying “We are victims of racism.”

Huh? I’m sorry, I don’t follow your logic there at all. Please explain.

Of course you don’t follow the logic.  That simple sentence speaks volumes about your arguments here.

3, 2, numbered man; you say:
“I’d agree with that, but this is because we share a materialist conception of the universe which holds that there is no ‘essence’ to a person beyond the brain activity they produce. It’s a pretty reasonable assumption, but one that a) we can never prove, and b) many of our fellow humans don’t share. It seems a little presumptuous of us to demand that they all see it our way given that we can’t prove it, no? “

here is my problem. these people, pro-lifers or whatever you want to call the fundy set, WANT TO FORCE ME TO LIVE MY LIFE ACCORDING TO THEIR VIEWS. they DEMAND i believe as they do, act as they do, and that i be punished strenously if i do NOT exactly toe their line. they cannot prove their views are universally true any more than we can - so why, after all their attacks, their abuses, their acts of terror and terrorism and bigotry and worse, should i be expected to lie down and NOT try to defend myself, my beliefs and my way of life?

because that is exactly what you are saying we should do. if we do not strongly oppose the fundy mindset where ever we find it, we are in essence giving in to their demands and beliefs. we cannot “prove” to them that our mindset is the “truth”, they cannot “prove” that theirs is the “truth”, but if we do not fight them EVERY TIME THEY SPEAK, if we don’t keep trying to show people our side and our beliefs, THEN THEY WIN. what they say becomes true.

you may feel you are arguing in good faith. yo may ACTUALLY be arguing in good faith. but fundys do NOT. they do not care what they do or say or who they hurt so long as their world-view is propigated, and you defending them as you (or at least saying that we don’t have the right to impose our world view on them, even though that is exactly what they are trying to do to us) looks to be dishonest because of that.