Lil’ P has a post. It’s the kind of post that makes me want to spend all morning refuting it, except I wonder if that actually does any good.
And I’m a little jealous. I wonder what it would be like to just make blatently and patently false claims and be able to go through life convinced of their truth.
Let’s start with Music City Oracle, who links approvingly to an address about the exploitation of men, that says thus:
Seeing all this, the feminists thought, wow, men dominate everything, so society is set up to favor men. It must be great to be a man.
The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who’s homeless? Again, mostly men. Whom does society use for bad or dangerous jobs? US Department of Labor statistics report that 93% of the people killed on the job are men. Likewise, who gets killed in battle? Even in today’s American army, which has made much of integrating the sexes and putting women into combat, the risks aren’t equal. This year we passed the milestone of 3,000 deaths in Iraq, and of those, 2,938 were men, 62 were women.
Y’all, I am no feminist genius and we’ve talked regularly about how the system screws men. Second, saying that society “favors” men doesn’t mean and has never necessarily meant that men as a whole all have it great. It means that men have gotten opportunities women don’t have. Yes, it sucks to be stuck in prison, but we’ve not historically had the freedom to commit crimes at the same rate as men. Yes, it sucks to be killed battle, but we aren’t allowed in combat. How hard is that to understand?
As for Adrienne and her “I’ll just make up some shit about feminism and then mock it,” I was going to go through and refute her points with links to feminists who are actually working on the issues she claims feminists don’t care about and have some big long discussion about how feminists are deeply divided over the porn issue, but this is a woman who thinks that Cosmo is a main vehicle for the transmittal of feminist values, so, really, there’s no hope.
Y’all, she actually says, “Modern feminism has destroyed what it means to be a woman.”* Well, what can I say in response to that? By god, it’s true. I volunteer twice a week down at the “Lady MacBeth” clinic off Charlotte where we feminists pluck women off the streets and tie them down and force them to become unsexed.
We’ve been found out!
*I’ve found out that it’s bad form to actually say this in public down here, but nothing strikes me as funnier than Southern white women talking about being distraught over the destruction of “what it means to be a woman.” Oh, yes, let’s bring back the good ole days when women couldn’t go to school and when they were kept pregnant or nursing most of their adult life and when their husbands could legally beat them and when they’d have seventeen kids and only see four of them reach adulthood and when the white ones would move straight from their fathers’ houses into their husbands’ houses with nary a chance to see the world, where even the rich white ones didn’t have their own money, but had to depend on a father or husband to do right by them, and where the rich white ones had to live in a system where they oversaw and managed the welfare of enslaved people who hated them and were constantly looking for opportunities to escape or rise up, some of whom, the white women were well aware, were the mistresses of her own husband. What good fun that must have been to look out at your children and the children of your enslaved women and see the same facial features.
Let’s not count the dirt women were forced to eat literally and metaphorically from 1865 on up until, well, shoot, look east into the mountains, even now.
Only with some heavy cultural amnesia could you come from the region that brought you “Oh, I Wish I Was a Single Girl Again” and pretend like life down here was so great for women before feminism ruined it.
Tiny Cat Pants 