Saturday, May 17, 2014

Not "Not All Men:" The Sophistry Gains Popularity

Hahahaha

Wow. Those are some of the shittiest arguments I've ever seen...even on the internet...

Maybe I'll shred this nonsense later. But there's really no need to write more than the author has already written. It's a screed that basically constitutes its own refutation...thus saving more reasonable people the time and effort.

This isn't a controversial issue. This isn't a close call. This isn't a point about which intelligent people can disagree. False generalizations are false, and it's permissible to point this out. If someone--including...gasp...a woman!--is making a false generalization about men, it's permissible to point this out. In fact, it's probably more than permissible. There are good reasons to do so.

We don't need any reasons beyond those.

However...  Old-school feminism was right when it encouraged men (and women) to be wary of generalizations about the sexes. New-school, internet feminism has slipped off the edge into sexism an irrationality in part by abandoning that insight--well, with respect to men, anyway...  The contemporary version of feminism looks more and more like the parody of old-school feminism propagated by actual male sexists--irrationalist, man-hating, and out to gain special advantage for women.

When someone can write lines like "A man is someone who pays his female employees less" with a straight face, they've just lost the argument.

Were this sophistry reasonable, it would be permissible to say "women are more emotional than men," and it would be impermissible for women--in fact, for anyone--to respond that not all women are more emotional than all men. But it would be stupid for me to say something like that, and stupid to say that it would be impermissible to correct me about it.

The internet lefty-left is going full-on batshit crazy. When you find yourself writing long, fallacy-filled screeds about your alleged right to make false generalizations about people on the basis of their sex, it's long past time to pack it in.

3 Comments:

Blogger The Mystic said...

I think my favorite part is the very beginning where "man" is defined strictly biologically in an almost sarcastic "I can't believe you made me do this" tone...immediately followed by other apparently essential qualities of men: paying female employees less (crap, I don't even HAVE employees! What am I? Transgendered or something?), interrupting a woman when she is in the middle of saying something (like..every time?), and expecting my wife to do all the cooking and cleaning (well I guess it's either that or she'll have to become a lesbian...which means we'll need to remarry in a state supporting same-sex marriages...ugh, this is going to be a logistical nightmare).

Also, did you SEE the blog she links to when she writes: "The Awl's John Hermann traced mentions of "Not all men" back to 1863"!?!?

You know, you always point out that bad theories make people stupid, but one rarely bears witness to the kind of comedic stupidity that would logically follow from the theories in question. For some reason, that's usually left to the imagination. I further imagine this is because the people holding them are rarely sufficiently rational to even follow their own stupid theories. But I digress. This..THIS is some sort of artist's rendering of a hypothetical far-left po-mo feminist's construal of scholarship come to life!

9:25 PM  
Blogger The Mystic said...

"On a very basic level, "not all men" is an interruption, and interrupting is rude."

Well, but what if a woman says it? I assume she would be free of the interruption requirement faced by us men?

"It was found that men interrupted more than women only marginally, but they were much more likely to interrupt with an intention to usurp the conversation as a sign of dominance, or intrusive interrupting."

Crap, now we can't even rely on women to avoid saying "Not all men" without interrupting, and the study must have included non-male impostors of some sort who gave themselves away by listening politely.

"'Not all men.' Fine. But pointing out individual exceptions doesn't help us understand or combat behaviors that really are mainly committed by men, from small things like interruptions up to domestic violence and rape. Not all men beat their partners, but people who beat their partners are mostly men. Pointing out that you're not one of them doesn't help us figure out how to understand and deal with that problem."

Did you just say "fine?" Now, is that one of those girl "fine"s or like a guy wherein you accept the correction and will alter your behavior forthwith?

"Mansplaining is a term used to describe an explanation that is given in a condescending, patronizing tone. Though a woman could be guilty of mansplaining, the idea originated from men talking down to women in order to explain things, often things the women in question understand better than the mansplainer does."

Oh, just like how "hysterical" stems from the ancient Greek belief that extreme emotional distress on behalf of women could be a medical condition involving disturbances of the uterus. So like, a man can be hysterical, but it's really about a woman and her deranged uterus.

Right?

And finally, what can I do?

"You can not interrupt, because interrupting is rude, and use that time instead to think about whether or not injecting "not all men" is going to derail a productive conversation."

My god, I must give up my manhood for the cause.

I guess I'll just sit here with my bad androgynous self and think about something else.

9:28 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Yep. That's some high quality stupid on the other end of that link alright...

What's really funny is that feminism has come full circle...back to the parody of the view that anti-feminist dudes used to paint when I was a kid.

I always thought they were idiots...but it turns out that they may have been prescient... They were full of shit about the feminism of the time...but they were unknowingly predicting the outlines of the feminism of the future...

Shit that is like 1/100th this crazy that crops up on the right gets denounced by liberals in a heartbeat...but they seem to be tolerating this high-octane crazy just fine...

10:31 PM  

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