Image from Flickr user London Looks.

Responding to a complaint that those anti-assault Make Your Move posters are patronizing to women because they don't blame the victim enough enable "eschewing personal responsibility and projecting [their] own mistakes onto the people around [them]" the author over at STFUFauxFeminists was simultaneously blunt, cool, and awesomely inclusive.

Actually, everyone needs protection from their “silly choices” sometimes. People of all genders get too drunk to consent sometimes. And people of all genders take advantage of those situations sometimes. And people of all genders can take actions to check in on these people to make sure that everything is ok. It’s not about projecting mistakes. It’s about encouraging people to take care of each other. If you have a problem with that, you can go fuck yourself.

I like that so much I'm going to divide the core parts of it into a bulleted list for easier reading:

• Everyone needs protection from their “silly choices” sometimes
• People of all genders get too drunk to consent sometimes.
• People of all genders take advantage of those situations sometimes.
• People of all genders can take actions to check in on these people to make sure that everything is ok.

And here's the clincher

• It’s not about projecting mistakes. It’s about encouraging people to take care of each other.

That's pretty cool, right?  Not least because (contrary to MRA and anti-feminist dogma) she's at least as concerned and supportive about male victims as she is about female ones, as aware of female predation as male predation.

Which, as I'll probably keep saying till I'm sure everybody's got it, the only chance we have of eradicating sexual violence is to prevent all of it, all forms of perpetration, and all forms of perpetrators.

Aside: STFU concludes her piece by jumping hard on the person who raised the objection: "You’re not going to turn an anti-sexual violence campaign that’s about encouraging people to care about whether or not everyone in their group is having fun and enjoying themselves into some kind of fedora-wearing misogynistic bullshit about “needing to protect women from themselves” because it’s readily obvious that’s not what the campaign is about if you have half a fucking brain cell."  Ouch!  But then he or she really is missing the point of the poster campaign.  And/or making the gross assumption that only women screw up....  And that protecting women screw-ups from predators is also preventing them from "learning their lessons." Screw that!

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Aside #1: No two ways about it, that "we shouldn't keep 'screw-up' women from learning their lessons" is a really nasty, thuggish attitude. Because think about it: which is worse, "coddling" someone who's isolated or intoxicated to the point of vulnerability?  Or coddling the predators by approving the "lessons" they mete out to their victims?

Aside #2: My only real complaint is that while the complainer sure sounds like a misogynist and an anti-feminist there's only a 50/50 chance he or she was a "fedora-wearer" (a.k.a. MRA) and not an anti-feminist woman like Laura Ingraham, Christina Hoff Sommers, Heather Mac Donald, Camille Paglia, etc., who really do "privilege" women by arguing they should 'get what they deserve' in a way different from what men should get.  When, as so many of us including STFU are trying hard to get across, is that passed out and/or otherwise vulnerable men are roughly as liable to experience sexual violence as women.  Aside from occasional lip service, what befalls men is completely inconsequential, incidentally, to anti-feminists and misogynists of pretty much all stripes.  And that, in turn, is yet another reason I strongly prefer feminist and feminist-leaning approaches to MRA or anti-feminist ones.

Did you see Miri's post over at BruteReason?  The upshot is misandry's thing, it's just not a feminist thing.

I've been saying for years that nobody hates men like anti-feminists do. (Seriously, the reason women have to be kept down is because men couldn't compete on a level playing field? Seriously? Wow, thanks, Phyllis, Newt, and Pat!)

Miri's found a preliminary study that backs up my intuition.  Go check it out.

Anyway, guys want to complain about misandry need to take it up with the actual misandrists.  Most of whom aren't even remotely feminist.

Echidne of the Snakes points out a much deeper problem with currently-in-hot-water "gonzo" economics professor Steven Landsburg.  In addition to his WTF was he thinking "thought experiement" about the victims of the Steubinville rapists, he's opined in the past that polygamy ought to be beneficial for hetero women but bad for hetero men.  Because it expands the market of potential husbands while making it harder for (most) men to find wives.

Echidne, a passionate feminist, summarizes what's wrong with this picture: "Thinking about that clarified to me that [Landsburg] deems a fraction of a husband every bit as good as a husband or a father than a whole husband."

Actually I suspect that really is the way a) Landsburg thinks about men, b) Landsburg thinks women think about men, and while we're at it, c) what most anti-feminist men and women think about men.

Realizing that was one of the things that made me want to hitch my wagon to feminism for men: feminists are often angry at men, and even more often exasperated with us, but feminists rarely hate men.

Certainly not the way anti-feminist women and men do.

This is also the thing that fed me up with what on paper ought to have been my natural cohort: men's movement guys. I mean, yeah, a lot of their analysis of man-hatred is right on: men are seen as "walking wallets," we're cannon fodder, we only contribute a teaspoon of semen to progeny here and there, if you can send one man to the moon why not all of them, blah, blah, blah, "when the 'big one' hits the 'average' out of shape middle-age guys will be completely surplus because the really fit guys will 'get' all the women," blah, blah, blah.

But where they never, ever go is where those attitudes come from. Answer: definitely not feminists, so you can't blame them; mostly not women in general so you can't really blame them either. Instead it's... pretty much mostly men who believe crap like that.

Landsburg's part of his own oppression and he's sitting there blinking like an owl wondering "what did I say?"

Anyway, of course he's going to think that for women having to "put up" with a fraction of a man is better than having to put up with a whole one. (Hey, "giving" access to sex is a "resource" so that means in polygamy any individual woman has to "give it up" way less.) And in his blighted little economics world view, if one man's income can support multiple wives at the same style to which they would expect from a monogamous man it makes zero difference to the economy.

It never occurs to him that women might, I don't know, love their partners. Or even find them arousing. (A common mistake: Landsburg, being straight, doesn't find men attractive so he can't imagine anyone else finding men attractive either.)

Ugg. I agree they should sanction Landsburg for being an egregious troll. His Steubinville cracks were almost certainly calculated to sound "gonzo" or "freakonomics-y." That was just stupid, insensitive, exploitative, and misogynist, and even he knows he was wrong. 

But I think he should be fired for his paradigm-deep conviction about -- and his consistent evangelism of! -- the limited-utility undesirablity of men as a gender, as well as for his projection of that onto women.  Not ony is that attitude dangerous and wrong, he likely doesn't even think he's wrong.

Image by Flickr user pikerslanefarm.

In just a few short lines from a song, and a few more from her heart GeekyVamp reveals the complete, bleak, and total lie that is "women have all the power."

kaigenlucinda:

I’m in the corner watching you kiss her, oh.
I’m right over here, why can’t you see me? Oh.
I’m giving it my all but I’m not the girl you’re taking home.
[I keep dancing on my own]

I hear this and I am suddenly a gawky girl again on the dance floor, dancing my little hormonal heart out, desperately trying to attract a boy’s attention, and trying to hold my head up high and swallow the boulder in my chest, as I see him leave with some gazelle-like creature.

Source: Interpretive Pants

I'm not sure who started the lie but it's mostly us men who completely, 100% don't realize the only "power" women have in standard hetero dating is the "power" to answer if asked! No ask, no power. None. Period. At all. In other words no matter how gawky a boy you were, or a man you are, 100% of the "power" you might complain women have over you is power you give in the first place.

This realization, which only sank in for me back in 2007 (I first started trying to date in 1973!) was the moment I realized all the attempted "men's rights" alternatives to women's rights movements I'd been trying to get my heart into (since 1974!) weren't ever going to work because they located power where it wasn't and then complained about it. Just a little later I decided to not only drop all the variations on men's rights, men's studies, men's advocacy, etc., and even drop all the variants on "feminist allies," supporters, sympathizers, etc., and it's later variants -- especially "good men" -- and just call myself a feminist. Because that was the point when I realized men and women are both indoctrinated to the same set of artificial constructs that nominally advantage men and certainly disproportionately disadvantage women, but really continue to persist in order to control all of us.

I happen to believe, as do many others, that feminism doesn't have all the answers. But there's a giant flipping difference between "not all the answers" and "wrong." Which is why I see the work for men like me -- and I'm obviously proposing for men like you too -- as extending feminism by analyzing and challenging the consequences and not just the nominal advantages of Patriarchy for men.

And it can start with something as simple as listening to little snippets of song lyrics.

I’m in the corner watching you kiss her, oh.
I’m right over here, why can’t you see me? Oh.
I’m giving it my all but I’m not the girl you’re taking home.
[I keep dancing on my own]

Oh!