Women against feminism? Please, just, no...

Ergh. Looking at this website is painful. But I did it a bit, if only to gauge the quality of their arguments. I was not impressed.

Whilst it seems most of it had been penned by those sympathetic to Mike Buchanan, I am unsure about how much weight to attribute to this opinion. The last thing I want to do is ignore women's genuine views.

On the other hand, it would be disrespectful also to put too much credence to opinions I didn't find convincing myself, at least to some extent. So I'm keeping an eye on women's participation in anti-feminism. It seems like a small minority at the moment, so they don't have much influence on my thoughts. In order to do so, they'll have to do better than these easily refuted arguments:

“If women actually got paid less for the same work and the same paid hours, don't you think businesses would hire only women?”

No. Some business do hire almost exclusively women. But businesses in general can't only hire women simply because women only make up a portion of the workforce (less than 50% I believe) and there aren't enough women to fill all the jobs. That is a really poor attempt to justify stopping equal pay campaigns. Sheesh. That's apart from skill and availability matching problems (e.g. Shortage of women in particular fields / skillsets). The pay gap is NOT a myth. It is slowly improving, although as I have shown before when I previously linked to a study, the situation in STEM fields is bleak.

“Man who doesn't want to take car of a kid: Deadbeat Dad. Woman who doesn't want to do the same: Pro-choice”.

Yeah, right. This misses the rather important fact that the former case is referring to a man's behaviour after the birth, and a woman behaviour before it. If we equalise the timescales, the argument is shown to be flimsy: During early pregnancy: The man would be asking for the woman to consider abortion (he should have a say in this, although not the ultimate decision) and could put together a good case to not take further part in child's life if the woman refused. I don't see why he'd be called a deadbeat dad if he made his intentions known & consulted solicitors early in the process. After birth: Either man or woman would be equally in the wrong.

+++

“I love feminism because...I love whining about everything and doing nothing about it”

K.

That's plainly not true.

(insert here Caroline Criado-Perez' amazing recent bank note triumphs, for which she has, deplorably, been threatened with rape. I'm sure the anti-feminists weren't involved in that though)

AND

“Too many male CEOs...Number of male suicides, homeless and workplace deaths is just fine”.

Do I detect just a hint of hypocrisy there? I agree those latter things are problems, so why not try and solve them in a direct, positive way by appealing to authorities and charities, rather than fight feminists?

Because they procrastinate on this, I could just as validly put:

“I love Male Rights Activism and Anti-Feminism because...I love whining about everything and doing nothing about it”

AND

“Too much awful feminism...all that talking and empathy....number of rapes, rape culture, misogyny, street harassment and abuse, Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall etc., victim blaming, daily news reports of VAWG and male suicides killing their wife and kids first rather than just themselves, is just fine”

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Picture of Anita Sarkeesian: “Not enough female heroes...The fact that most villains are male is perfectly fine”

Nope. Most video game characters full stop are male, so there's bound to be more male villains. More females = more female villains. Go figure. Also, it's not Sarkeesian's job to deal with number of males. If you want less male baddies, campaign for that yourself. Leave her alone.

Then there's a couple of stupid pictures covering the already-refuted argument that says we should only concentrate on REAL problems and ignore things that are only a BIT wrong. Nope – doesn't work (ref. Rebecca Watson widely regarded as being right about elevatorgate).

This was just a small selection from the stuff there, but gives you an idea of their right-wing, religion-friendly views and how misplaced they are.

In summary

Anti-feminism: “because fighting your enemies for scraps is more important than asking for more food”

Say we had Charity A and Charity B in the same environment. Both want to increase their fundraising and get their campaigns noticed through publicity. Those charities don't enter a smear campaign, knocking each others values and intentions and threatening each other. They simply raise their games, competing for people's donations by making better arguments and promoting their own agendas more intensely.

Why can't Charity A and Charity B be feminism and male rights activism? I have yet to hear a good reason why they can't.

It really does escape me why fighting feminism is a better approach than simply campaigning positively for men's rights. Just keep at it! Feminism and positive men's rights need not be in opposition, they would mesh with the right co-operation. I may even suggest this if I thought they wouldn't kill me for it...

Yes I've already been branded “beyond contempt” by the anti-feminists. It's almost as if they are more interested in hurting women than lessening the pain of men. It seems deplorable to me.

In my view, Men's rights and Ant-Feminism has much dirty laundry and needs to clean up its own backyard. Condemn and distance yourselves from the cretinous loonies with twitter handle names like “rapey” and “boozy” (I shit you not). It's disgusting. As if drunken, abusive men who thought they were god's gift to women were any type of role models. And condemn harassment, instead of polluting the idiom “what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger” to mean “women need to be put through hell in order to be strong”. This inane notion has been used to justify rape-apology, harassment and abuse. There are many ways in which we can challenge ourselves and build character, in work, hobbies and sport etc. If you talk to most recovered rape survivors, they don't say “Oh I'm glad it happened now, it made me stronger”. Something is seriously wrong with current anti-feminist thinking.