"'A key that can open many locks is called a master key, but a lock that can be opened by many keys is a shitty lock.'”

It’s not that I don’t have a sense of humor, it’s that you’re unoriginal and sexist.

Ha ha, what a funny joke, right?

No.

Quoth Ricecake:

That’s a pretty shitty analogy. It only holds if you already accept the conclusion. I can come up with several that make just as much sense, but would lead to different conclusions.

If you have a pencil that can be sharpened by any sharpener, you have a normal pencil; if you have a sharpener that will only sharpen certain pencils, you have a shitty sharpener.

A man who can ride any horse is a cowboy; a horse anyone can ride is a good horse.

A function that can be computed by any machine is a simple function; a machine that can compute any computable function is a Universal Turing Machine.

A man who’ll dance with anyone is fun at a party; A woman who’ll dance with anyone is fun at a party.

A better way for you to have phrased it would have been “look at it this way: ‘ I approve of promiscuous males, and I disapprove of promiscuous females.'”

Emphasis mine. Face it, the joke is only funny if you’re already a misogynist who is against female promiscuity.

And if someone says that to you, and reason is not an option just retort with this:

“Sooo… you’re about two inches long and often found in the hands of authority figures? Sounds about right, from what I’ve heard.”

Quote of the Day: Staring at women's bodies

Should women take it as a compliment when men catcall them or stare at them? No!

In response to this comment, SRSister Kelderwick replied:

Not sure if “subjugate” is actual transcribed word or a totally clueless yet perfect mis-remembered “objectify”. (Despite shitthatneverhappened.txt)

But okay really dudes. Thought experiment thing time yeah? You are at the gym, running, and your workout clothes are somewhat showy and fairly form-fitting. In the mirror you notice Jane Random Runner inspecting you – awesome, says you. Okay sure, whatever. What if JRR is still staring at you ten minutes later – are you still fine? That’s not intrusive at all? Now pretend her expression isn’t neutral – she’s obviously interested. Doesn’t say a word, just stares at you or takes long glances. The whole time. You are still not affected at all by this? She keeps watching you.

Sure. Now, it isn’t just JRR anymore. Now she has 10 peers all using machines behind you. Some of them don’t look, one of them stares like JRR, some of them take the odd glance. One of them wrinkles her nose in disapproval because she doesn’t find you attractive, or so she whispers to her friend beside her. Thinks she’s being quiet, probably, but maybe not? Wait, was that a camera her friend just slipped away? Hmmm. Oh well.

But now it’s not just JRR and her peers, it’s your female co-workers. Most of them are decent enough folks and don’t bother you. But Gwen does. She leans in too close when you talk, she watches you a bit too long when you wear shorts. Whenever you go to office parties Gwen always corners you and tries to make conversation. She doesn’t take well to rejection. But she’s nice enough most of them time, right? And she’s never, you know, said anything – she is married, after all. Definitely hasn’t done anything either. Well okay there was that one time she put her hand… It doesn’t matter, she was a bit upset that day (home stuff and all that). Besides, you talked to Stephanie and she figures you just over-analyzed the whole thing.

Okay. But now it’s not just JRR and her peers and your female co-workers and Stephanie. Now it’s women on the street. Some of them whistle at you. Some are rather more lewd. Usually you’re too tired or too determined and just ignore them. But if you flip them off and reject them, sometimes they get mad.

They get real mad.

And their friends get mad too.

Now listen, you bunch of shitlord smugfucks who’ve never experienced fucking anything like this, who have no comprehension of the experiences of women who are subjected to this very predominantly male behaviour, get a fuckin’ clue: they are people out there. They have to fuckin’ live a whole life in this context. You, you who felt so stung about getting called out, or vicariously felt so, or were so morally stoked by the thought of such happening that you made it up to circlejerk with your like-minded shitlord friends like a bunch of fucking leeches writhing in a pool of liquid fucking manure, fuck off. Your little sting, that was nothing – one hair pulled out from the arse of an elephant. There is no thing, no habit from women or overbearing cultural narrative and tropes, there is no thing that gives you any fucking perspective on this.

P.S. You, shitlord, do not think this means that gender-flipping situations will be a good tool for analyzing every situation. It is not.

This is actually a very common complaint from men and a prime example of how male privilege works. For us that we have never experienced anything like this in our day-to-day lives, it’s impossible to intuitively comprehend why staring/leering/creeping at random women is not flattering to them. The thought process above is exactly what is meant when one asks us to “Check our Privilege”.

/inb4biotruths

"But men are sexually objectified too!"

Ah, the rallying cry of every privilege denying male who is being told that their geek hobby of choice (comics, vidya games etc) objectifies women to an obscene degree regularly. “But men are sexually objectified too. They are all look like walking tanks, with bulging muscles.” they will retort in smug indignation. You know the drill.

These people just are not able to understand that male protagonists in these media are not a female sexual fantasy, but rather a male power fantasy. I.e. such presentation of the male gender is tailored to a male audience. Unfortunately, even though this has been refuted in depth, this annoying reply persists in practically every conversation about objectification of women in geek culture.

Perhaps it might serve to provide a sample of how male protagonists would look and act, if they were in fact crafted to appeal female sexual fantasy. But how could we craft an accurate such example? Well, as luck would have it, the Nostalgia Chick has posted a video about the 10 “Hottest” Animated Guys, which provides a democratic answer to this question.

Take a look and now consider that if video games wanted to appeal to women sexually, your protagonist in games would be far more like Aladdin than Kratos.

Everything I know about feminism I learned on reddit

MRAs are hilarious. We just write down things that they say.

a user in /r/ShitRedditSays (/r/SRS for short) has created a sort of Hall of Fame of quotes from men’s rights “activists” on reddit who presume to define feminism and feminists. In their own words:

How do magnets work? What makes the sky blue? What are the Olay seven signs of ageing? These are just a few of the questions science has yet to answer. But by far the biggest mystery of all is feminism. What is it? Who subscribes to it? And what does it portend? Until comparatively recently science had no answers to these difficult questions. But now, thanks to the combined collective wisdom of reddit, its Byzantine intricacies have been unravelled. In this thread, I will present the sum of reddit’s expansive knowledge on feminism. And as you might expect, most of the quotes below are indeed from the people who talk about feminism more than any other group on earth: mens rights advocates!

The results are hilarious, and not at all surprising for anyone who has spent a minuscule amount of time arguing from a feminist perspective on reddit. And don’t think that the quotes themselves are hard to find or anything. According to the OP, it took a couple of hours to create this huge-ass compilation of redditry, just by doing a fairly simple search for the “feminism” keyword. This is because it’s MRA that like to talk about the term itself, while actual feminists discuss the actual sociopolitical issues.

Some choice quotes to give you an idea:

  • Misandrist feminists want gender based apartheid, and the male population culled to lest than 10%
  • They sure do love their homosexuals, those feminists…
  • Feminism will not fight for men because its very purpose is to fight AGAINST men. How much more evidence do the men here need that feminism hates you?
  • Feminism IS the system
  • Feminism has ALWAYS been about promoting the needs of women above those of men.
  • feminism taken to it’s logical conclusion: Oppression everywhere you look. Paranoia and suspicion about every word you hear. The patriarchy is out to get you. Women are oppressed by evil men with impunity. Big Father is watching you. Big Father will rape you. Your only function as a woman in this “patriarchy” is to be raped and killed. Women have been so brainwashed by the patriarchy that they can never be free. The only solution – the final solution – is to remove the male from the planet and cut out the cancer before it kills you. Do you want to be free? You’re not free. You’ll never be free. The only path to freedom is to destroy the male that keeps you down. 77 cents on the dollar. 1 in 4. Rape, rape and more rape. Everything, everywhere is rape. Rape is around every corner. Sexism spews from the mouths of everyone around you. Look what men have done to you. Look how they hold you back. There’s not enough female electrical engineers because the patriarchy holds them back. You could rule the world. You DESERVE to rule the world. If women ruled the world there would be no war, there would be no sickness, there would be no pollution, there would be no discrimination, the would be no hate. If women ruled the world all the problems would be solved – forever! Doesn’t the world deserve better than what MEN can give it? Don’t you see how men everywhere are nothing more than a disgusting cancer rotting our world from the inside out? Don’t you see it makes sense that men and masculinity should be destroyed? Don’t you??!!

And that’s just the tip of the penis iceberg. Take a gander yourself and laugh your heart out.

/inb4 MRAs tell me how they find nothing funny or questionable about these quotes.

 

Criticizing authors based on the characters

I just read this post and while it makes some compelling points I’m not sure I agree with the author completely. Is it accurate to do a reverse psychology on an storyteller based on the flaws of the protagonists they’re making?

While I can understand the various story fails that Buffy and Firefly has, I can also understand that a story cannot have perfect characters. If Whendon was just designing flawless women all the time, it would just not make very compelling stories and people would rightly call him out for it. And if you’re going to have a flawed but empowered female character, she’s allowed to be flawed in her empowerment.

In the Firefly case for example, the author criticizes Inara for failing at her own empowerment at times, but doesn’t this make for a compelling story? Sure, Mal “saves” her (and it’s arguable that Inara didn’t need his help), but in the end she has to save him in turn from his own stupidity.

So yeah, Mal is very flawed, and Inara as well (albeit less so imho), but I’m not sure I’d characterize Whendon from the personality of such characters and particularly Inara’s story, especially when there’s others like Zoe who are nothing like Inara and don’t need any such help (and in fact end up saving Mal and her own husband more than once).

I’m also concerned about the “key points” for “Nice Guys” that the author is making. I used to be a Nice Guy and I never thought, for example, that “Men Are Evil, Male Sexuality is Evil“. Not even close. In face, I do not believe I held any of those Key Points as true in my Nice Guy phase. Rather, I was just very shy, inexperienced and awkward with females and my shyness was preventing me from making clear that I wanted a sexual relation, thus ending up bypassing it.

Perhaps I wasn’t the kind of Nice Guy the author is talking about as my phase only lasted until my early twenties, but given how little the Nice Guy Key Points describe my former self, I’m not keen on accepting them at face value.

In which I am told that women in the Dark Ages were not oppressed.

Population advantage clearly proves who holds the power. Which is why the poor have it best of all in life.

Ah MRAs, the group that must be in some of the most startling degrees of denial ever experienced in the human race. I did the mistake of getting into a discussion with such a fine young man, who gladly informed me that women can’t be oppressed because they compose 52% of the population and as such, the numerical superiority proves that it’s impossible for them to have truly been oppressed. When I inquired deeper into the subject of whether women of 500 years ago were not oppressed either (since, after all, they still had similar numbers), I was informed…

Depends on how we want to define “oppression”. Were there gender roles? Oh hell yes. Did both genders have roles? Yes. But if we want to define “oppression” as a relative or comparative term, then no. The average woman had a better life than the average man since… well since recorded history at least.

Right. I have been enlightened.

You hear that females? Ignore such things as not having the right to talk or even participate in discussions or the fact that female abuse (AKA “moderate correction”) was accepted and even enshrined by law. Since you held the majority of the population, clearly that was what women intended to have to improve their life. Not only had we had true equality as far back as the Roman Empire, but things were clearly skewed in your favour.

And now, all this 3rd wave feminist crap has made things even more skewed and the poor ole men need all the help they can get.