This article showed up in my Facebook news feed today.
I was discussing the article with my boyfriend via email while in class, particularly some of the comments like this one (which was in response to this), and I thought his response was well-said:
"Patriarchy has always been about protecting women because we know how precious they are--the exact opposite of being deemed worthless. However, they are considered precious for certain reasons (being attractive, soft and inviting, nurturing, caring, sweet) and feminists get pissed because they want to change what men find attractive so they can feel better about themselves.
In the same way, women value men for certain reasons (being strong, willing to kill to defend them if necessary, being a good leader). Men who try to subvert that are seen as sexually undesirable. Also, when men act feminine they signal weakness (because women, being feminine, aren't great warriors on average--not that they are worthless) to those outside his tribe, pissing off the other men in his tribe.
This is from a feminist I like:
One of feminism’s irritating reflexes is its fashionable disdain for “patriarchal society,” to which nothing good is ever attributed. But it is patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman. It is capitalism that has given me the leisure to sit at this desk writing this book. Let us stop being small-minded about men and freely acknowledge what treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture.
If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts."
TempestTcup 11y ago
In today's society the extreme ends of the bell curve are celebrated and every fetish is good whereas monogamous heterosexual sex is considered boring and vanilla. If you aren't some sort of victim class then you are an evil oppressor or something. Good is bad and bad is good. This world is weird.
[deleted] 11y ago
It's funny how the feminist movement comprises a bunch of masculine women telling normal women to be masculine while the masculinist movement comprises a bunch of feminine men telling normal men to be more feminine.
_waltzy 11y ago
Humm, not quite; the masculinist movement (MRAs) tends to spend their time pushing back against radical feminism's pressure on lawmakers.
[deleted] 11y ago
Yeah, but there's also the mythopoetic men's movement. I think it's good in some ways, but it's exactly as I described in my previous comment.
_waltzy 11y ago
Some Googling later I discovered a movement i never knew existed!
[deleted] 11y ago
Yeah, Robert Bly's books are really great. Worth a read.
givemeallthepuppies 11y ago
That is certainly a strange dichotomy...I just wish more people would accept that there's nothing wrong with men being men and women being women!
[deleted] 11y ago
I think the problem comes from people trying to make the world a fair place. Life isn't fair, it never will be and if you force the world to be fair your going to fuck it all up.
givemeallthepuppies 11y ago
Agreed. Another problem is that many people refuse to accept that men and women are not unequal, just different, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that.
[deleted] 11y ago
Right, and I think it's criminal that we devalue women's ability to bear and raise children, like it's somehow less important than working and earning money.
It's probably the single most important thing any human can do. Men can build things, and invent things all they want but if they can't continue the species, then there won't be anyone around to appreciate what they've done.
givemeallthepuppies 11y ago
Well, I agree, but we need both parties to continue the species--all the more reason to try to live in harmony!
[deleted] 11y ago
Right, it breaks down to basic evolutionary theory - men provide survival value, women provide reproductive value. The human race has historically done very well when everyone plays their part as planned.
givemeallthepuppies 11y ago
I was just referring to the fact that you need both sperm and egg to make a baby, but what you said is true as well! :)
[deleted] 11y ago
ah, camille paglia, what would i have become if i hadnt appropriated your personality in the early 90s
[deleted] 11y ago
This just reminds me of why I'm getting my hair restyled today: to make myself more attractive to my SO. He doesn't like my hair as it is, so I'm changing it for him.
They need to stop with this idea that the patriarchy is putting women down when it really isn't. It honestly is trying to protect us in the ways it can.
chloewoohoo 11y ago
Men and women are from a fundamental level biologically, neuroendocrinologically and evolutionarily different. Where the feminists fall short, in my opinion, is their inability to appreciate how wonderful this is. You can't equate the two.
FleetingWish 11y ago
It's the same way that if you called a woman "butch" or "masculine looking". It's an insult because that is (likely) not the look she was trying to achieve. It's not that looking masculine is bad, if you're a man it's a good thing, but if you're a women presumably it wasn't your goal to look like a man. Women are unattractive when they look like men, so such a comment comes off as insulting. Similarly if you're a man trying to behave masculine, being told you're behaving like a woman is an insult. Again, behaving like a woman is great if you're a woman, but it is bad if you're a man doing so, because men behaving like women are unattractive.
Tldr: One way to insult someone is telling them they are unattractive to the opposite sex.
drugdoctor87 11y ago
Somewhere along the lines... We forget that the majority of people judge other people based on their character - not their gender.
So yeah if you walk around shtting on everyone and acting like an entitled btch, people are going to hate you. The problem is that some people (bluepillers) will continue to let you walk all over them and you will never learn the consequences of your actions and never be given a reason to change your ways...
/end rant. Sorry, had a bad experience with one of those types of people at work the other day.
kekerae 11y ago
I had a Facebook "friend" post this article. The photo on her Newsfeed right below the article is a "boudoir" pic where she is pretty much lying seductively wearing panties and not much else...that oughta attract the long term mates.