Posted on 01/10/2006 1:49:22 AM PST by nickcarraway
SUSHI DAS discovers what men think about feminism.
'FEMINISM has turned women into selfish, spoiled, spiteful, powerless victims," shrieked the email. "Men are talking, can't you hear it? Marriage rates are down, birthrates are down, men are using women for their pleasure and then leaving them."
If it was only one of a handful of emails I received, I might not have given it much thought. But there were many more. "I do not think it's men or boys that need reforming. I think women are the main instigators of hate against one half of the population," wrote another man.
Then there was this: "I have healthy relationships with women and always have protected sex to avoid entrapment … why should I risk losing everything I own and having my children taken away from me?"
And this: "The modern guy is not looking for the 'services' past generations did, they often just want a nice person to share their life with, rather than someone who is going to be climbing corporate ladders, getting pregnant when she chooses and then assuming complete control of a child's life. That is not to say they are not supportive of women's careers and goals."
The emails were a response to a challenge I posed to men on this page a couple of weeks ago. Specifically, I asked them to engage in debates relating to "feminist issues" and show they understood that equality, women's rights, the work/life imbalance, the declining birthrate, sexual politics and relationships generally are important to everybody, not just women.
I received, a tsunami of emails. Many were considered arguments. A significant number were the bitter outpourings of men hurt by women. Some elucidated the frustrations of men who couldn't find Ms Right. Sadly, many were simply vitriolic or abusive.
In the hundreds of emails, anger appeared to be the underlying emotion because the writers believed the pendulum had swung too far in favour of women. There were some common threads: men were angry that women's needs took priority over theirs; they felt men constituted the majority of the unemployed, the homeless, the victims of industrial accidents and suicides, that men's health received less funding than women's, and that boys' education was poor. In relationships, they felt some women were "not very nice to men" and were often too selfish to consider their needs. These concerns are real,
but how many can really be blamed on feminism?
Essentially, men raised three broad concerns over why they did not engage in the debate on feminist issues. First, they were scared of being howled down by aggressive feminists who dismissed their views. Second, they felt they were victims too, but women didn't listen to them. Third, they were confused about what women really wanted and what constituted appropriate behaviour.
On the first issue, I agree, some women are dismissive of men's views simply because they are men. Men who speak out, wrote one man, are "smashed upon the rocks of indignation" and this made it "a very, very scary debate to engage with". Another said: "Opting out of an argument in which we cannot hope to be allowed an equal voice let alone a fair outcome is a perfectly rational response."
My response? Get over it. If you're a man and you have an opinion, speak out. Put your case. It will stand or fall on its merit. Stop being scared. There are plenty of women willing to listen. And if you get howled down, get up and say it again. That's how women got their voices heard in the 1970s.
On the issue of men as victims, some argued women too are violent, that men have few rights on abortion, that female teachers get off more lightly when they sexually abuse male students, that men are vilified as pedophiles, that affirmative action is discriminatory, that women frequently win the custody battle. Clearly these concerns require attention. Perhaps it is governments that are not listening to men, rather than women.
Finally, some men were unsure of their role in society. This is complex, and women must recognise this. But men should also let common decency be their guide to appropriate behaviour. Being a decent human being shouldn't be that hard.
Equality is a prerequisite for development. When the shouting from our respective corners is over, perhaps resentment from both sides will melt.
Many emails I received were a cry from the heart from men. But it's not just about women listening to their words, it's about men taking action to improve their own lives. This means speaking out, whatever the consequences — engaging in the debate on equality or feminism or whatever it is called these days.
With that in mind, I'll leave the last words to a man: "Damned if we do, damned if we don't. We need to speak though. We do not want our daughters growing up stunted by arguments or situations that could have been campaigned away. Equally, our sons require education. But how do we do this with integrity? That's the challenge for all involved."
Goodbye
May be God wants you to adopt a child who is left alone in a crib somewhere in China, India, or Russia. Maybe, God wants you to do a million other things other than get married again.
Well we don't and it is rude. It is an impudent invasion of other people's business. I am deliberately being rude to you in return (a gentlemen is never rude unintentionally, and I have been very intentionally rude in this thread), because you need to know exactly how it feels and exactly how impudent it is. And then you need to stop doing it, forever. If you have an opinion about, say, mail order brides, here is what you do with it. You shut up. You occasionally discuss it with people in your own family. And you leave everybody else alone.
Because not a particle of it is the slightest business of yours. Not one iota.
This is a discussion forum bub, where we discuss many issues and give our opinions on them. THERE IS NOTHING RUDE ABOUT IT. NO one is stopping anyone from doing anything they want to do.
You can give all the facts you want to give. But you do it to be spiteful and to hurt decent, traditional American women on this forum and elsewhere who have fought feminism (and suffered because of it) just as much as men have. You do it to discourage them from seeking happiness.
I on the otherhand am stating there are many women in the good ole U.S.A., with whom conservative men can seek happiness. A number of them are right under their noses, on this board.
What you are attempting to do is far worse. Threads like this are payback time for you. You are a nasty, malicious, meansprited, spiteful guy who was hurt by women and wants to hurt back. And you will use the montra of the conservative cause to do it but fool yourself into believing it's for the good of family and country.
Men like YOU do more to help the feminist cause than the feminists themselves.
I have begun a list of abusive woman haters on this forum who I intend to SHUN and IGNORE. YOU ARE NUMBER ONE!!!!!!!!
I merely asked. Never been married? You could knock me over with a feather, I'm so surprised. :)
why?
Excellent recommendations - I thank you. I have put them in my Amazon Wish List.
There was nothing at all beastly in those expressed opinions, and the subjects were none of the responders' business anyway. They jumped on them and criticized them because they thought it there place to do so, because feminism has trained them to be rude to men over such matters and intrude on them constantly, as though their approval were necessary to anyone else. So I told them off, being just as rude as they had been. They dish it out but can't take it.
There is nothing traditional or decent, or even polite, let alone moral, in the baseless slander directed at entirely reasonable conservative posters earlier in this thread. After I threw a little of it back, I was treated to several helpings of the same baseless slander. For no offense at all, besides no putting up with feminist claptrap and deliberately challenging those who dish it out.
You see, if innocent people hadn't been baselessly smeared before I even got here, I would have been as polite and composed as you please, and all your "you must be a monster" ad homimens would never have occurred to you. None of it would have even come up. So who is it again that is spitefully attacking decent conservative men, for no actual offense?
Then I'm sorry so many had that experience, which obviously formed your outlook. I'm from a family of long, strong marriages, and that has formed mine.
F de C opens with the stunner that we fail to understand the Greeks and Romans because do not understand their religious lives, and the religious base of all their basic institutions. Which he lays out with startling clarity in just a few pages - their religious ideas stem from ancient, prehistoric ideas about death and the afterlife.
Then he shows all the quirks of those institutions that seem strange to us follow directly from those ideas. It weakens a bit later on, though his overall diagnosis remains sound. Basically he explains the course of ancient politics as the revolution that occurred when their actual beliefs no longer corresponded to those on which their social institutions were originally founded. Just in passing, you find out what patriarchy really was and where it came from, as opposed to the modern left's version of it as mere class oppression. That's F de C.
RP Harrison comes from reading Heidegger, F de C, and Vico, and asks some startling questions about the role of the dead and tradition, and our problematic relations to both, in founding human culture. He says at one point that culture is a relation between the dead and the unborn, of which the living are only the ligature. Or on the tendency of the human mind to externalize itself, in language, rites, institutions, architecture, and so transmit itself independently of subjective understanding. He runs through a half a dozen literary examples, not all of them equally useful frankly, but there are some serious sparks along the way.
I submit that no one of intelligence, no good anthropologist, no philosophically inclined or spiritually sensitive person, can read both and think of family as an affair of separated, atomic individuals, ever again. At any rate they are worth reading and will make one think.
There was NO feminist claptrap on this thread, Sorry. And NO slander. You have an annoying little habit of gross exaggeration. It was a normal discussion thread, very typical of FR.
There were women who disagreed with the idea of mail-order brides and don't like being told that men don't want American women. YOU jumped on this thread, defending those men and attacking American women.
YOU are no friend to American women or women anywhere. Men like YOU are as much a NIGHTMARE to women as are the feminists, JASON. Frankly, you angry, unfair and unreasonable posts are frightening and are nothing more than cowardly attempts to HURT women and heap your revenge upon them. This fight is all about YOU, and your own selfish motives. Instead of being for the rights and betterment of us all, you are about what you perceive as the rights of men. You have become exactly like the enemy.
There are many good women leading the fight against feminism. Women like Kate O'Beirne (who has a new book about feminism), Elaine Donnelly and Phyllis Schlafley... wonderful women all of whom I personally met years ago. We will do well in our fight against feminism with women like them at the helm. We don't need the involvement of vicious, vindictive woman haters like yourself who undo much of the good that we accomplish. There is no foreseeable way we can win the fight against feminism with men like you.
You've not been married. You apparently recognize no moral authority outside of yourself yet you try to preach here on the meaning of marriage. You don't know what you are talking about (like an unmarried marriage counselor)
And to be truthful, JasocC, Your posts are reading more and more like parodies of real discussion
Excellent post TA :~D
Maybe, God wants you to do a million other things other than get married again.
Perhaps true. But until He lets me know that blatantly I have to go on what I do know. I was made to be a daddy. He gave me the burning desire for more kids (to go forth and multiply) and He left me with a daughter who needs a mom as much as (more than?) I need a wife. At this point I can't see how me living single and additional childless from here on in lines up with any of the promises He's given me or character He's built in me.
But then again He is God and He will get His way.
Now, to the ridiculous claim that this thread has not been all about shrill, bigoted, feminist women screeching their hatred of conservative men and calling them ogres, despite repeated and patient correction by a score of posters, all before I entered, try taking it all in a lump and see how is sounds.
they want a power differential in their marriage. They want a lesser, not a partner.
There isn't enough Excedrin on the planet for me to deal with this thread.
Somewhere between being told I have a shelf life and my primary duty was to reproduce
Meeting someone on a website promoting foriegn mail order brides is hardly 'just happening to find someone who happened to be a foreigner'
Those who went shopping for foriegn brides via the internet and mail order services are just a bunch of losers who weren't finding dates in the good ol' USA. Maybe with the occasional misogynist who wants a doormat for a wife tossed in for good measure.
Life's losers who are unable to attract the girl next door are driven to those sites in the hopes that a little American cash, and a whole lot of foriegn poverty can do for them what their looks and personalities could never do for them at home.
I happen to think they are chasing a dream. A dream that they can still have some imagined traditional marriage where men ruled the home and women were obedient concubines.
You're attitude is exactly what men hate about Maureen Dowd If this is not women bashing, objectifying and hatred, then what is it?
are men who have a hard time getting a woman here to pay attention to them, or want a woman that is a Golden Retriever with less body hair.
Aside - Please note who started the "dog" theme, and ascribed to whom. Someone is deeply threatened.
some men are in for a big honkin' surprise when they see how fast these women adjust to American life
married for her green card and now is divorced and on the prowl. Scary chick....I liked her
90% of those who are looking overseas are social misfits who failed miserably in the American market. The vast majority are seeking out of desperation because American women have rejected them in the dating market.
A shallow, selfish dream about what relationships really should be like
Perhaps the natural byproduct of freedom for all, men and women, in this country is that we will have to learn better how to relate to a spouse that is truely free.
It's difficult to articulate exactly what I think about it and remain tactful.
It doesn't mean that you sit there on the sofa with the remote control while your wife cooks, cleans, takes care of the kids,and does the laundry (all at the same time).
You won't get married either to a nice conservative woman with that kind of behavior.
there will be a counter movement among FReeper men that is equally and oppositely destructive to our political goals because it drives women away.
I love it when people use anonymous forums to say all the things good manners and normal polite decency should tell him to keep to himself.
I don't understand marrying someone just because of their looks.
I'm glad my husband didn't have the attitude that I see by lots of the men on this thread.
bitching about feminism is too vague.
We have the "I hate my mommie" boys who proclaim that women have a shelf life because they can not cope with mommie aged women. If a woman is older than 30, forget it, she's too smart for these little boys to deal with. Get 'em while they are young and stupid. (But I bet they have some problems in attracting the young ones cause they are way too wounded to be successful men.) We have the "The Whiney Oprah Boys" who have thrown in the towel having been rejected by women one too many times. Now they leaving the country to buy wives who don't know them. Maybe going to a third world sh!t hole for a hard up babe who will marry anything calling itself American to get the heck out of female head chopping land and into America is the only option they see for themselves at this point. They try to make themselves feel better about their submission to failure by telling themselves "American women don't deserve me anyway. Girls suck." Talking to these wounded puppies is like "I know you are but what am I." They probably live in California, bless their hearts. Finally, we have the "scary boy group" who refer to women as bitches and pigs and who "don't talk to them." These angry little boys in men's bodies are probably dangerous to themselves and others. It is best not to talk to them either.
By traditional do you mean a society where women live in constant fear of their husbands? Is it the traditional burhkas and beheadings, or the silence in public and foot binding that you wish we had more of in this country?
the rather harsh methods men had used to make sure women remain enslaved as second class citizens in those countries...I wondered how you intend to keep those fear-based obedient women in line in a country that is free.
You care more about their looks than they do themselves?
I'm not the only one who thinks that Ann is way too damned mean. She reminds me a lot of a venomous snake with a typewriter...She's like nails on a chalkboard
She's not a puppy...Wait till he sees what happens the first time he raps one on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper!
It's very difficult for me to read these threads though because of the anger, hostility and outright hatred directed at all women
There's some cave men here...We aren't gonna get the cavemen to go away or change overnight... They need to be confronted... We don't want to be shrill (sic)
These men want the upperhand and want to control their women. And they keep them on a short leash. It's pitiful.
have a warped view of relationships, and a need for power over somebody. They don't do well in relationships in this country.
He thinks the men on this board are probably dangerous. Pretty soon the meninists on FreeRepublic will be sitting around ranting about women with one another alone Good words of advice. Your husband is probably right.
to read the above is particularly nauseating...I think it's pretty nauseating no matter what your background.
the men are willing to give it and take it for free too, aren't they???? Why should women respect them?
I think you're trying to spin it to make the losers feel better about themselves.
when these women attempt to speak and obviously want to AND I look at them exclusively (and not at their husbands), their husbands talk over them until they shut up.
chauvinism is still alive and well in the U.S. - both the old version and the new.
You're just a fountain of charm - jerk.
men have a shelf life too.
What you really need is a WOMB. Too bad wombs come with women, huh
I'm not sure sure we're really a clique, we don't agree on much except that there's been a rash of pretty bitter sounding threads lately.
Shelflife,lol?
not a private men's club to bitch about women - The above deserves to be repeated again and again
Between your attitude and your somewhat outmoded theory that $50 can cover dinner and drinks for two, I'm guessin' you haven't been out for a good long time. There's probably a calculation factor in there as well based on how many tattoos both you and the female in question possess, as well as how many teeth (between you)
Women are raped by men, figuratively and in other ways
comments about women reveal just the kind of man you are, and you sir are neither FAIR or a gentleman. (said of one of the gentlest men on FR, who shows the patience of the saints)
Bitter loveless men seeking a vagina that can vacuum. (after twice saying she had nothing more to say)
Look - maybe you're a nice guy who uses this forum o 'vent' as FF says. But something tells me you've got some serious garbage in your head.
Bless your heart for carrying the standard and fighting the Bitter Boy Dragons
If you were HONEST and FAIR you would NEVER have made the above statement. YOU are part of the problem
men don't age as healthy as most women...you might as well open a vein in front of a vampire. Your youth is sucked away.... Don't do it.
this myth about men losing everything and never seeing their kids isn't just a lot of internet gnashing of teeth
These threads are a war zone. Vent my azz, it's a bloodbath.
a woman has it instilled in her by her culture that men are superior (and can set you on fire if you anger them),
That is the crux of what makes this creepy.
If you don't see it, you are blind.
I'd be called six kinds of shallow and creepy too.
Women see you as looking for a uterus. That is what I've meant before when I say men shop for refrigerators
that comment by you that women have a shelf life. Men have shelf lives too. Most 25 to 35 year old women, won't be interested in 45 year old you. And many men in their 40's have fertility problems. Women are hurt by men every bit as much as men are hurt by women. These are all "truths" you seem to enjoy ignoring. You are most selective about the truth. The good men I know and have known, would never have made the comments you made, and thank God are and were FAIR men. YOU are not.
The remark about women having a shelf life was, well, thoughtlessly cruel. No one likes being told their only value is in their looks and their 'body' (about 250 posts after people joked about it and male infertility)
earlier posts revealed exactly what he is and has been attempting to backtrack
You don't want to turn off your prospective mate with the same language that's gotten you in trouble here.
Is this - conservatism? No. It might be DU trolls. You were called on it repeatedly, all pointed out that you were being uncharitable, that the slurs were unwarranted, etc. Each in turn was called a monster for refusing to bow to your feminist ideology. None of them every did a thing to you. You insulted them as rudely as you could manage.
You may not like being told than men don't want American women, but this thread is a perfect indication of its general truth. 5/8ths of US women vote for rats. If this is what passes for "conservatism" and recognizing the damage done by feminism in the remainder, of course conservative US men are going to look elsewhere. "But there are wonderful conservative women here at home who" - who are outnumbered by the wonderful conservative men here at home, who have never done anything to deserve this slander and hatred, and do not need to put up with a minute of it.
Not one poster on this thread was in the class you were most concerned to smear, but most defended their right to do as they jolly well please in the matter, and several told you directly that you were being bigots. You might have quietly registered your opinion on the subject. You did not. You personally attacked anyone who disagreed with your position, as necessarily some loser or monster. Straight out of the stalinist playbook.
When you unjustly attack people who have done nothing to you, by ordinary morality you deserve our contempt. You got mine, as did those who behaved in the same way. You deserved it. You ought to apologize for what you have said in this thread, ascribing entirely imaginary sins to other members of FR.
I have plenty of respect for women who fight feminism and the destruction it has caused, but you are not one of them. You are causing more of it instead, right here, right now. Out of a misguided loyalty to an evil political movement that deliberately separated otherwise decent people from each other.
And all you need to do to win the fight against feminism, is to utterly reject it yourself. To stop looking around for offenses men can commit against its holy pieties, stop labeling individual men or classes of men beyond some feminist pale. There is no feminist pale. Any man can have any opinion he likes about marriage or any of the rest of it, and needs zero permission from you or anybody else. It does not pick your pocket or break your leg. It is none of your damn business.
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