LOL: The Ten Biggest Feminist 'Myths', Femnism Harms Women

[roddma]

This sounds like an anti-feminist site. There is another post on the site about how feminism hurts women. It is from 2009 but still getting comments obviously. I go a laugh at a few comments.

http://www.pellebilling.com/2009/12/top ... mment-9615

Here was my comment:

Yes men were more valued at one time than women because they could earn a living. Girls were married to the highest bidder to ease family finances. They were seen as nothing but baby makers. While i agree men can be victims of domestic abuse, it also wasn’t that long ago men could almost get away with domestic battery. Even today we have politicians making comments about legitimate rape and female rape victims are still blamed for the crime. For years, men could get a divorce easier than women. Women waited for Prince Charming because marriage was their only goal. I think some of you need to reread your history books.

Here's a more recent post on another site claiming the harm of feminism

feminismhurtswomen.blog.com/

[Miggy]

I really hate this tug-of-war thing. Are women discriminated against? Yes. Do men suffer because of feminism? Yes. Do we need to fight about this? No. Life in the developed world is better now than it has ever been and life is miserable for those living in the third world. How about we fix injustice wherever we see it?

I added a comment too;

How about we all stop fighting about whether it is men or women who are worse off and instead, concentrate our efforts on dealing with the problems in the world? Domestic abuse needs to be stopped, whether against a man or a woman. Men & woman both use sex as a way to gain power although they do this differently. It doesn't matter whether it is men or woman who do this more often. It only matters that it is stopped. War is unacceptable no matter what the situation. Instead of blaming politicans for starting it or the voters who gave them power, we should all be out working towards peace in every situation. People living in poverty often turn to crime or prostitution out of desperation to survive. What about helping these communities out of poverty instead of criticising the behaviour? (Microloans are proving very successful.) Let us stop behaving like children squabbling in the school yard over who suffers more and behave like the adults we are.

[Angharad Crewe]

I tend to agree with Miggy that we need to focus on correcting social issues for everyone rather than get riled up over who is more oppressed. That said, it's difficult for me to remain neutral reading comments like the one below:

There are other issues not mentioned here. As much as women were objects in the days of old, they were also afforded alot of slack, pandered to such. There was no expectation that she behave responsibly, contribute financially or much of anything else. Men were, and still are financial objects to women.

Feminism also moves to hyperbole in their accounts of how women were treated as a whole. Most men loved their wives, and although chauvinism was certainly an issue, it is unlikely that the average husband spent his days beating and raping the woman he loved twice a day. This image is however held as undeniable truth when speaking about such things.

As my mother once put it “There were certain advantages to being the engendered sex, job, no responsibilities and very few standards. All we had to do was sit back and wait for prince charming to show up give us everything we wanted in exchange for a little domesticated behavior and the occasional blowjob.â€

Clearly, this came at a cost, and only a fool would deny that.

Now it is expected that a man still do those things. He is to provide, financial and otherwise. He must bear an equal portion of the housework, all of the social responsibility, financial responsibility for any children and be blamed solely for any problem that arise in the relationship. A woman is entitled to choose whether or not she works or stays home. She is entitled to custody of the children regardless of her character. Simply put, when a woman wants to be treated like it was 1950, a man is obliged to accommodate whereas if she desires to be treated as an equal for a specific thing the man is also obliged to succumb to that desire.

The commentator's mother's quote particularly bothers me. The attitude that throughout history, women sat around and had everything handed to them "in exchange for the occasional blowjob" is just so out of touch. Maybe that was the case for upper-class women, but not so for working class women. I seem to remember from one of my history classes that during the Industrial Revolution, women supplied a large bulk of the labor in factories.

Also, the commentator asserts that women value men only according to their economic status, while men are somehow more sophisticated emotionally because "most men loved their wives." More "all women are hypergamous" shit that you see with MRAs.

[B5SnowDog]

I really hate this tug-of-war thing. Are women discriminated against? Yes. Do men suffer because of feminism? Yes. Do we need to fight about this? No. Life in the developed world is better now than it has ever been and life is miserable for those living in the third world. How about we fix injustice wherever we see it?

Can you give me an example of how men suffer because of feminism?

[roddma]

Yes that comment bothered me too but I agree, issues exist for both genders. However, I take the 'war on men' from conservative sites is derived from women not just taking any jerk off the street and actually allowed choices. Plus they don't realize men and women suffer under patriarchy.

[B5SnowDog]

Yes that comment bothered me too but I agree, issues exist for both genders. However, I take the 'war on men' from conservative sites is derived from women not just taking any jerk off the street and actually allowed choices. Plus they don't realize men and women suffer under patriarchy.

Yes, I think a lot of the suffering is just the scale becoming balanced.

[jenny_islander]

The "myths," from the bottom:

"10. Society values men higher than women."

The last time I checked, a woman doing the exact same job as a man averaged 77 percent of his salary. If you analyze this figure by race, visibly brown women get even less. Also, "women and children first" is a modern romantic myth, and if you look at detailed mortality figures for (e.g.) the Titanic disaster, it doesn't hold true even among the privileged class that invented it.

In the non-financial sphere, ever noticed how news articles focus on women's appearance in situations when men's appearance doesn't get a mention? Do male actors get the same kind of stupid questions about diets and makeup? Think of all the pixels devoted to the First Lady's figure; does the President have to put up with similar commentary about his? And that one where the hotel maid dared to accuse the rich man of rape: how many times did people discuss her looks? As if they mattered?

Men are valued for what they do. Women for what they look like. That is a lesser valuation.

"9. Girls are shortchanged in schools."

I think this is slowly getting better. Official shortchanging of girls in public schools has pretty much gone by the wayside. However, there is still an atmosphere that I think is best summed up by this XKCD: http://3d.xkcd.com/385/

"8. Women work two jobs, men only one."

This gap is also closing, due in no small part to feminists pointing out that it existed!

"7. Domestic violence means a man hitting a woman."

This is not a feminist myth. This is a cultural myth. Feminist activists focus on the ways in which women are discouraged from protecting themselves and their children from men and impoverished or endangered simply by leaving men because feminists focus on injustice done to women by the existing power structure. The long silence about violence in same-sex relationships, and violence done to men by women, is not an artifact of feminist belief.

"6. Women earn less earn less money than men for the same job, which is terribly unfair."

See "myth" no. 1. Sweden is perhaps not the best place to look for statistics about the devaluation of women (eyewitness report here: http://survivinglifeinsweden.blogspot.c ... n-too.html). Warren Farell's study appears in his book, Why Men Earn More, which, in a nutshell, points out that there is a pay gap, hence the title!

"5. Men oppress women in third world [sic] countries."

Women and girls living in virtual rabbit hutches as domestic servants, genital mutilation of girls as a sign that they are now proper women, marriage by rape, soldiers sent into enemy territory specifically to commit mass rape--does this blogger even watch the news?

"4. Men dominate women through human sexuality."

These days, damn right. From the silly (look up Escher Girls) to the horrific (ever noticed that posters of tips to stop rape are all about how to avoid rapists--never about how not to be one?), men are on top, in control, and still pissing and moaning about women daring to say no.

"3. Men dominate women by saying that a woman's place is in the home."

The first tactic of an abuser is isolation from friends and allies. By keeping the victim where?

"2. Men create wars."

In cultures where men are socialized to be active and aggressive and women to be passive and submissive, yes, men create wars. In more egalitarian cultures, not so much.

"1. The male gender role is more privileged than the female gender role."

Privileged to have more control over their own lives, make more money, be listened to instead of talked over or spoken for, be the baseline for medical testing even though women will be using the medicine too, and so on. Still, it's better than the Good Old Days, when a woman could not even open a bank account and her husband could legally decide for her on medical issues without first having her declared non compos mentis. How did we get from there to here? Gee. I wonder.

If you successfully argue that both men and women are shortchanged by their assigned gender roles, then you have successfully pointed out that assigned gender roles are a stupid idea.

[JenniferJuniper]

Can you give me an example of how men suffer because of feminism?

I second that request.

How do men "suffer" because of feminism?

[roddma]

Then there is concern over 'the rise of singleness' in America which is blamed in feminism. A rhread was started a while back on the documentary 'Unmarried the Rise of Singleness". Funny this wasn't an issue before women had rights.

[Janes Heir]

The "myths," from the bottom...

If you successfully argue that both men and women are shortchanged by their assigned gender roles, then you have successfully pointed out that assigned gender roles are a stupid idea.

:clap:

[Cran]

I didn't go to the site posted in the OP, read through the topic and came to jenny_islander's post, and thought: "Well, WTF, this blog isn't anti-feminism at all, they are telling the truth!"

And then it dawned on my those points where the supposed "myths" :shock:

Once again, I am disappointed in my rather optimistic view that people share some common knowledge or have at least some common sense.