~ archived since 2018 ~

Titanic Day

avoiceformen

April 15, 2010

5 upvotes

/r/MensRights

http://avoiceformen.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=401:titanic-day&catid=1:oarticles&Itemid=19

Download the post

Want to save the post for offline use on your device? Choose one of the download options below:

PDF TXT EPUB

Post Information

Title	Titanic Day
Author	avoiceformen
Upvotes	5
Comments	12
Date	April 15, 2010 7:33 PM UTC (16 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/brg4z/titanic_day/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/titanic-day.1049854 https://theredarchive.com/post/1049854

Comments

[–]catlebrity 0 points1 point2 points 16 years ago (11 children) | Copy Link

The sinking of the Titanic happened a long time ago, before feminism and before women even had the right to vote, so it's hard to blame the evil feminazis for this one.

But that's what this post and the petition do:

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/titanic/

It is a day of reflection and contemplation for men who reject the tenets of chivalry, feminism and all other forms of male indentured servitude.

It's little more than an attempt to hijack an ancient tragedy to push a present day antifeminist agenda. And that completely undercuts the other points it is trying to make.

Also, most feminists I know -- well, all of them, really -- aren't exactly big proponents of chivalry. Women into chivalry tend to be antifeminists,

If Andrea Dworkin had been on the Titanic throwing men overboard, that would be different. (That also would have made for a much better movie, but that's a whole other topic.)

[–]avoiceformen[S] -2 points-1 points0 points 16 years ago (10 children) | Copy Link

I think you are missing the point, by a wide margin. First, there were feminists at that time. They are called the first wave, and it took them only a couple of days to seize the tragedy for political reasons. Check this reprint from the New York Times from April 21, 1912

http://mensnewsdaily.com/2010/04/15/titanic-sized-hatred-by-feminists-predates-second-wave/

Feminism is nothing more than securing the services of the state to enforce chivalry on the male population. In fact, the best way to beat feminism is to undermine chivalry. It is almost exclusively chivalrists that helped pass the feminist agenda. You may give weight to what people say they believe in. That is fine. But I actually pay attention to what happens on the larger scale.

And while I definitely push an anti feminist agenda, the purpose of this story was not an attack on feminism, except by being an attack on chivalry.

I fail to see how that could be any more plain.

[–]catlebrity 5 points6 points7 points 16 years ago* (9 children) | Copy Link

Gosh, the suffragettes -- who are not actually the same as feminists today -- discussed the tragedy using the discourse of the times, that is, of 1912.

To hold feminists today responsible for everything that suffragettes said 98 years ago seems rather idiotic. I could certainly dig up some horribly offensive and/or ridiculous quotes from anti-suffragettes, and hold you responsible for them, but that would be kind of silly now wouldn't it?

Wait a minute. I think I'll do just that:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F03E3D7163EE033A25755C2A9639C946697D6CF

How dare you say that a woman's place is at the fireside, her duty to cook and mend! How dare you say that women are inferior to men and should be put in their proper place!

Oh, wait, you didn't actually say that. Some dudes said that in 1907.

You see how annoying it is to be held responsible for something someone else said a century ago?

To return to this century: Where are the feminists calling for chivalry today? I have yet to meet one. How are the things advocated by mainstream feminists equivalent to chivalry? How on earth is anything any mainstream feminist advocates today even vaguely the equivalent of shooting men on the deck of the Titanic? (That's so crazy it's offensive -- and I would like to see the citation for those vague "reports" of the shootings you mention, as I have never heard about that.)

EDIT: As for something you actually said:

the purpose of this story was not an attack on feminism, except by being an attack on chivalry.

Yeah, that's why you described feminism as "code speak for a social classism far more pernicious than one rooted in economic status," and a "form of fatal bigotry."

[–]avoiceformen[S] -1 points0 points1 point 16 years ago (7 children) | Copy Link

I think you need to think some more before you can really wrap your head around this. I didn't hold feminists today responsible for anything said a hundred years ago. I pointed to some similarities. There actually is a difference you know. And feminist of the more modern times are responsible for a lot more hateful things than I ever brought up in that article. Those I will post next.

But save your being annoyed for what is actually bothering you. Feminist today call on chivalry by calling on the government to dedicate the lions share of protective resources to women when men need them more in many cases. A good example is the fact that we have well established offices on women's health, and more on the way in the States, and none for men, despite the fact that men die 6 years younger and suffer from all the top killer diseases more than women. Also, the absolute lions share of gender specific medical research is done for women.

That is state sponsored chivalry, pushed for by feminists and given by chivalrous men in government. And it that is indeed fatal bigotry against men. The only reason you don't see it is because you chivalrously/feministly see male life as more disposable and less important. And there are many more examples than the distribution of health resources and research.

[–]catlebrity 1 point2 points3 points 16 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

the lions share of protective resources to women when men need them more in many cases. A good example is the fact that we have well established offices on women's health,

Most of the biggest health issues faced by men are the same as those faced by women -- high blood pressure, for example, isn't really a gender issue -- and it is on things like these that the "lion's share"of govt resources go. You don't need special men's health offices to treat men for the same things as women.

Women do of course have an assortment of other issues related to reproductive biology -- cervical cancer, breast cancer, prenatal care, contraception, etc etc -- and because of this it makes sense to have health centers for women, and research specifically aimed at women's health issues. Men of course have specific health issues related to their reproductive biology, but these are fewer.

I see MRAs complaining endlessly, for example, about how breast cancer gets a lot more attention than testicular cancer, but that might just have something to do with the fact that 1 in 8 of all women get breast cancer, while only 1 in 300 men get testicular cancer. 40,000 women die each year in the US from breast cancer, while 400 men die from testicular cancer. (Yes, some men get breast cancer too, and they should get free screening along with women, but this is relatively rare.)

If you want to raise awareness about men's health issue, raise awareness about men's health issues. Don't spend your time complaining that we spend too much ("the lion's share") on things like breast cancer because of evil feminists; that's just obnoxious and unhelpful for everyone.

Sources:

http://womenshealth.about.com/cs/breastcancer/a/breastcancfacts.htm

http://www.cancer.org/docroot/cri/content/cri_2_4_1x_what_are_the_key_statistics_for_testicular_cancer_41.asp

[–]cfisi79 2 points3 points4 points 16 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

[–]catlebrity 1 point2 points3 points 16 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

That is a better comparison, though the number of deaths from that, while considerable, is still far less than deaths from breast cancer. (27,000: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/types/prostate )

The broader point of course -- to go back to avoiceformen's post and some of the other stuff that tends to get posted here -- is that it's good to have money spent on breast cancer awareness and treatment and research, and it's good to have money spent on testicular and prostate cancer awareness and research. It's not a zero-sum game where women win and men lose or vice versa. More awareness of treatable diseases saves lives.

It's one thing to advocate for more attention to be paid, and more money spent, on men's health concerns. That's a good thing. But actually complaining that money is being spent on breast cancer and other women's health issues is callous and shortsighted and unhelpful.

[–]cfisi79 2 points3 points4 points 16 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]avoiceformen[S] -2 points-1 points0 points 16 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

And, as I said, I have no need to hold feminists today responsible for what feminists said a hundred years ago. Second and third wave feminists have their own unique little gems to refer to.

"In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent." Catherine MacKinnon in Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies, p. 129..

"I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire." From Robin Morgan, "Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape" in "Going too Far," 1974. .

"When a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression..." Sheila Jeffrys .

"Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies." Andrea Dworkin

"Sex is the cross on which women are crucified ... Sex can only be adequately defined as universal rape." Hodee Edwards, ‘Rape defines Sex’

"Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat." Hillary Clinton, First Ladies' Conference on Domestic Violence in San Salvador, El Salvador on Nov. 17, 1998

"MAN: ... an obsolete life form... an ordinary creature who needs to be watched ... a contradictory baby-man ..." "TESTOSTERONE POISONING: ... 'Until now it has been though that the level of testosterone in men is normal simply because they have it. But if you consider how abnormal their behavior is, then you are led to the hypothesis that almost all men are suffering from 'testosterone poisoning.'" from A Feminist Dictionary", ed. Kramarae and Treichler, Pandora Press, 1985

"Patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself... The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their home." Gloria Steinem in Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, pp. 259-61..

"Women take their roles of caretakers very seriously and when they hear of someone who's taken advantage of a child, they react more strongly than men do." - Kathleen C. Faller, professor of social work at the University of Michigan

"I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which a man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He's just incapable of it." - Former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan

Melbourne City Councilwoman Pat Poole announced her opposition to renaming a street for Martin Luther King: "I wonder if he really accomplished things, or if he just stirred people up and caused a lot of riots."

"Our culture is depicting sex as rape so that men and women will become interested in it." Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, p. 138..

"Under patriarchy, no woman is safe to live her life, or to love, or to mother children. Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's daughter is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman," Andrea Dworkin, Liberty, p.58..

[–]avoiceformen[S] -2 points-1 points0 points 16 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

"Compare victims' reports of rape with women's reports of sex. They look a lot alike....[T]he major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it." Catherine MacKinnon, quoted in Christina Hoff Sommers, "Hard-Line Feminists Guilty of Ms.-Representation," Wall Street Journal, November 7, 1991.

"The fact is that the process of killing - both rape and battery are steps in that process- is the prime sexual act for men in reality and/or in imagination.". Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 22..

"Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire, and the first crude stone axe." Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, p. 5..

"The newest variations on this distressingly ancient theme center on hormones and DNA: men are biologically aggressive; their fetal brains were awash in androgen; their DNA, in order to perpetuate itself, hurls them into murder and rape." Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 114..

When asked: "You [Greer] were once quoted as saying your idea of the ideal man is a woman with a dick. Are you still that way inclined?" Dr Greer (denying that she said it): "I have a great deal of difficulty with the idea of the ideal man. As far as I'm concerned, men are the product of a damanged gene. They pretend to be normal but what they're doing sitting there with benign smiles on their faces is they're manufacturing sperm. They do it all the time. They never stop. I mean, we women are more reasonable. We pop one follicle every 28 days, whereas they are producing 400 million sperm for each ejaculation, most of which don't take place anywhere near an ovum. I don't know that the ecosphere can tolerate it." Germaine Greer, at a Hilton Hotel literary lunch, promoting her book #34; The Change-- Women, Aging and the Menopause#34; . From a newsreport dated 14/11/91

"One can know everything and still be unable to accept the fact that sex and murder are fused in the male consciousness, so that the one without the imminent possibly of the other is unthinkable and impossible." Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 21..

"Cosmetic surgery and the ideology of self-improvement may have made women's hope for legal recourse to justice obsolete." Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, p. 55..

"Sex as desired by the class that dominates women is held by that class to be elemental, urgent, necessary, even if or even though it appears to require the repudiation of any claim women might have to full human standing. In the subordination of women, inequality itself is sexualized, made into the experience of sexual pleasure, essential to sexual desire." Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 265..

"AIDS education will not get very far until young men are taught how not to rape young women and how to eroticize trust and consent; and until young women are supported in the way they need to be redefining their desires." Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, p. 168..

"In everything men make, they hollow out a central place for death, let its rancid smell contaminate every dimension of whatever still survives. Men especially love murder. In art they celebrate it, and in life they commit it. They embrace murder as if life without it would be devoid of passion, meaning, and action, as if murder were solace, still their sobs as they mourn the empitness and alienation of their lives." Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 214..

"One of the reasons that women are kept in a state of economic degradation- because that's what it is for most women- is because that is the best way to keep women sexually available." Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 145..

"Romance is rape embellished with meaningful looks." Andrea Dworkin in the Philadelphia Inquirer, May 21, 1995..

"Ninety-five percent of women's experiences are about being a victim. Or about being an underdog, or having to survive...women didn't go to Vietnam and blow up things up. They are not Rambo." Jodie Foster in The New York Times Magazine, January 6, 1991, p. 19..

"All men are rapists and that's all they are." Marilyn French in People, February 20, 1983..

"All men benefit from rape, because all men benefit from the fact that women are not free in this society; that women cower; that women are afraid; that women cannot assert the rights that we have, limited as those rights are, because of the ubiquitous presence of rape." Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 142..

"Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometime gain from the experience." Catherine Comins, Vassar College Assistant Dean of Student Life in Time, June 3, 1991, p. 52..

"We have long known that rape has been a way of terrorizing us and keeping us in subjection. Now we also know that we have participated, although unwittingly, in the rape of our minds." Historian Gerda Lerner in Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women, p. 55..

"Only with the occasional celebrity crime do we allow ourselves to think the nearly unthinkable: that the family may not be the ideal and perfect living arrangement after all - that it can be a nest of pathology and a cradle of gruesome violence,... Even in the ostensibly "functional," nonviolent family, where no one is killed or maimed, feelings are routinely bruised and often twisted out of shape. There is the slap or the put-down that violates a child's shaky sense of self, the cold, distracted stare that drives a spouse to tears, the little digs and rivalries... Barbara Ehrenreich in Time Magazine

"The nuclear family is a hotbed of violence and depravity." Gordon Fitch

"How will the family unit be destroyed? ...[T]he demand alone will throw the whole ideology of the family into question, so that women can begin establishing a community of work with each other and we can fight collectively. Women will feel freer to leave their husbands and become economically independent, either through a job or welfare." Roxanne Dunbar in Female Liberation

"Feminists have long criticized marriage as a place of oppression, danger, and drudgery for women. Barbara Findlen, "Is Marriage the Answer? Ms Magazine, May - June, 1995

"We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage. Robin Morgan, from Sisterhood Is Powerful (ed), 1970, p. 537

"Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership. Only when manhood is dead--and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it" Andrea Dworkin

"The cultural institutions which embody and enforce those interlocked aberrations--for instance, law, art, religion, nation-states, the family, tribe, or commune based on father-right--these institutions are real and they must be destroyed." Andrea Dworkin

"I was struck by what a beneficial alternative to the nuclear family this arrangement [communal housing and child raising] was for these women and children." Lenore Walker, after visiting one of the early shelters for battered women, as cited in The Battered Woman, p.195

"The nuclear family must be destroyed, and people must find better ways of living together.... Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process.... No woman should have to deny herself any opportunities because of her special responsibilities to her children... Families will be finally destroyed only when a revolutionary social and economic organization permits people's needs for love and security to be met in ways that do not impose divisions of labor, or any external roles, at all." Linda Gordon, "Functions of the Family," WOMEN: A Journal of Liberation, Fall, 1969

"God is going to change. We women... will change the world so much that He won't fit anymore." Naomi Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions (Quoted at beginning of From Father God to Mother Earth)

"We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men..." Elizabeth Stanton, One Woman, One Vote, Wheeler, p. 58

"Who cares how men feel or what they do or whether they suffer? They have had over 2000 years to dominate and made a complete hash of it. Now it is our turn. My only comment to men is, if you don't like it, bad luck - and if you get in my way I'll run you down." Signed: Liberated Women, Boronia. (Herald-Sun, Melbourne, Australia - 9 February 1996)

[–]catlebrity 2 points3 points4 points 16 years ago* (0 children) | Copy Link

Well, here we go again. Lots of quotes from Dworkin and MacKinnon. Lots of quotes from the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. Nothing from the past decade. Quotes from obscure women I've never heard of and who may not even be feminists -- I guess I have to take your word on that. (Who the hell is Pat Poole?) Quotes taken out of context so we can't really know what the author was really saying (I'd be interested in seeing the rest of Ehrenreich's article, for example, as she is generally a smart and sensible writer, not at all a Dworkinite.)

The Dworkin/MacKinnon wing of feminism has been criticized heavily by other feminists for decades now -- especially in the early and mid-nineties,when there was a giant battle over these issues, which the Dworkin/MacKinnon wing lost. You're not going to find a lot of feminists echoing these extreme views today, which may be why you have no quotes in your list from this century.

Again, to hold contemporary feminism responsible for everything said by any feminist anywhere decades ago seems a little less than helpful.

Should I hold you responsible for everything said by anyone calling themselves a men's rights activist? For everything said by Jay Hammers, for example? For everything said by Henry Makow?

[–]PierceHarlan -3 points-2 points-1 points 16 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link