#today in...

Teacher: tell me the time when when you helped someone the most

Kid: what’s that row for?

Me: the green team.

Kid: what’s that row for?

Me: the red team

Kid: and what’s that row for? Is it for confession?

Teacher [giving an example to do with the lesson]:when I was young, I had the original Xbox, the PlayStation 2, the GameCube...

Kid: what’s a GameCube?

Me:

This is a really well put together post about the links between (toxic) masculinity and mass killings in the US. I didn't know before reading it that most victims of mass killings are women. I did know that the gunmen often cite "problems with women" (read: they won't go to bed with them) as some sort of motivation for their actions. It's bizarre, then, that these reasons are often ignored and replaced with concerns around "mental health". Also, note the new construct (to me) of "beta male", that downtrodden, un-sexed man who thinks the world, and women in particular, owe him a favour.

You're right to be scared of that.

From the Huffington Post, by Soraya Chemaly.

[...] The term "beta male" succinctly captures certain attitudes about gender, hierarchy and sex. Whether role playing or not, as one redditor put it, some people are taking the idea that there are betas and alpha males seriously and concluding that, "Since sexual freedom is rising and women today can choose with whom they want to have sex, a small minority of "alpha males" gets all girls while most betas are left in the dust. See this picture. After the betas have realized this, they'll rise up and stop the feminist insanity that left them without pussy."

However, many media outlets and analysts continue to treat information like this like an aside, or, when addressing the issue, actually feed it. Consider, for example, this headline: "Chris Mintz Defies The Age Of The Beta Male." In the meantime, another young white man with a gun has wreaked havoc on a community and once again the media is fixated on a numbing conversation about guns and mental illness.  These are important dimensions of this crisis, but they are insufficient ones. Without addressing the gender and race dimensions of male entitlement in the United States -- and the role they play in the treatment of mental illness, gun culture and the targeting of victims -- we will never tackle this problem in a meaningful way.

"So, it doesn't require an explicit statement of misogyny to result in a explicitly disproportionate harm to women and children due to the violent expression of masculinity. There is, however, for the record, no shortage of explicit and public statements of hatred of women, in the U.S. and the rest of the world. Particularly in connection to women's education and status."

Consider schools, for example. Schools make up 10 percent of mass shooting sites in the US and are highly gendered targets of opportunity. They are places where educated women aggregate and compete with men as equals. According to one thorough analysis, women are twice as likely to die in school shootings.  This year alone we have already had 45 school-based mass shootings.

But schools are not the only places. gyms, shopping malls, places of worship are also frequent targets, and are similarly places where women and girls are predictably present in greater numbers. Similarly, movie theaters provide opportunities for gunmen to express particular rage. When John Hauser, a man who had publicly repeatedly expressed misogynistic views in public, methodically mowed down 11 people in July at a theatre, the film they were watching was Trainwreck, a "chick flick" in dismissive parlance, one frequently discussed in terms of feminism. Workplace shootings also have a marked result: being killed while at work is the second most likely way for women to die in the workplace, after car accidents.

Lastly, there is, perhaps, no greater gendered target of opportunity than homes which, in terms of intimate partner violence, become Alpha male arenas.  As Melissa Jeltsen wrote earlier this year, "The untold story of mass shootings in America is one of domestic violence."  Fully 70 percent of mass shooting incidents occur in homes, but we don't generally hear about them because these crimes are considered a matter of private, not public health.  In August, for example, a man tracked down his ex-girlfriend, and executed her, her husband and six children. He was apparently angry that she had changed the locks on her doors.  Headlines focused on the "incomprehensibility" of the crime and about "domestic disputes."

Overall, according to a recent Huffington Post analysis, 64 percent of the victims of mass murders are women and children.

© and source/ rest: Huffington Post (Soraya Chemaly)

I agree with not one word that they (women who are against feminism) say, and nor do I particularly feel that I/ we are obliged to defend their right to say it, but their history is interesting nonetheless. Beulah Maud Devaney on OpenDemocracy:

One of the ongoing problems feminists face is how to document our own history. The closure of the Women’s Library in 2012, the funding difficulties currently faced by The Feminist Library, the movement’s reliance on short-life publications and the lack of knowledge about digital archiving (how exactly are feminists going to access and study #YesAllWomen in 100 years’ time?) are just some of the difficulties facing contemporary feminist historians. The fact that women’s contribution is often excluded from traditional history books adds another layer of complexity and, as a result, many branches of feminism are overlooked or forgotten.

For fairly obvious reasons there has been little enthusiasm for that awkward side of feminist history: women’s opposition to feminism. The emergence of Women Against Feminism in 2014 demonstrated that many feminists struggle to respond to anti-feminists with anything other than exasperation or amusement. What these responses miss, however, is that there is actually a long tradition of anti-feminism, stretching back to the late-18th century. Anti-feminists do not hold an obvious place within feminist history. They are yet to achieve a coup or any significant power grab within the movement, tending to remain as external critics or outliers, but anti-feminism has remained a consistent feature of feminist life. By examining two organised groups of anti-feminists operating over 100 years apart, it becomes clear that we should be wary of under-estimating their legacy.

The first documented anti-feminist organisation in the UK was founded in 1908: the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League (WNASL). While there were murmurs of disapproval when the first petition for women’s suffrage was presented in 1832 it wasn’t until the suffragettes adopted military tactics that the anti-suffrage movement really gained traction. The WNASL manifesto laid out a blueprint for every anti-feminist protest that has ever been mounted, right through to the present day:

“The matter [of women’s suffrage] is urgent. Unless those that hold that the success of the women’s suffrage movement would bring disaster upon England are prepared to take immediate and effective action, judgment may go by default, and our country drift towards a momentous revolution, both social and political, before it has realised the dangers involved.”

By suggesting that giving women equal rights to men somehow creates an imbalance the WNASL tapped into people’s fear that feminists will never be satisfied. This fear has been repeated throughout the 20th and 21st centuries and can now be seen in posts on Women Against Feminism where anti-feminists hold up signs saying “I don’t need feminism because I believe in equality for everyone, not just women”. The scaremongering tone of the manifesto (England in flames, mentions of revolution and danger) was later adopted by anti-choice groups in the 1960s and 70s. These pressure groups, mainly staffed by women, claimed that access to abortion and contraception was damaging women’s health and could lead to destruction of the family unit.

The WNASL manifesto went on to site the campaign for women’s suffrage in North America and claimed, erroneously that: “After forty years it [the American campaign for suffrage] has been practically defeated. The English agitation must be defeated the same way by the steady work and argument of women themselves.” The suggestion that a woman’s real power lies in her ability to defeat other women proved to be very popular within the anti-feminist movement. Returning once again to Women Against Feminism we can see women holding up signs saying they don’t need feminism because they are strong women and feminism just wants to turn everyone into a victim.

At the time of its formation that WNASL was seen as move of a nuisance than a threat. Just as contemporary feminists tend to be amused by anti-feminists, campaigners for women’s suffrage were not especially intimidated by the WNASL. It was easy to make fun of overblown rhetoric from anti-feminists like popular novelist Marie Corelli when she asked: “Shall we make a holocaust of maidens, wives and mothers on the bronze altars of party?” Unfortunately while feminists then and now were amused by sentiments like this we never did work out an effective way to refute them. Or if early feminists did find a way to silence accusations of sacrificing mothers and maidens, it was not recorded.

[...] On closer examination there are two recurring themes with organised anti-feminism. The first is a deliberate misrepresentation of what feminism is. A year on from when Women Against Feminism made headlines a number of popular posts in the group make reference to the traditional definition of feminism: “the belief that women should have equal political, social and economic rights to men”. For many feminists this is enough of a response to accusations that feminism believes that women are better than men. But the women on Women Against Feminism are clearly familiar with this view of feminism and have rejected it, choosing to continue to deliberately misrepresent the movement.

In retrospect the scaremongering of the WNASL is understandable, they were a political pressure group and, at the time, that kind of language was deemed the most effective for scaring people away from feminism. The reason for the misrepresentation by Women Against Feminism is less cut and dried but it can be linked to the current aims of Western feminism. In 1908 campaigners for Women’s Suffrage were after a change in law, so the WNASL adapted their tactics to stand in opposition to all bills pertaining to women’s suffrage.

In the present day the majority of feminist campaigns are focusing on changing the way people respond to and think about women, including body policing and acceptance, issues around consent and issues of equal pay that aren’t obviously solvable by a change in the law. Feminists are less interested in changing the law and more interested in changing people’s behaviour, and Women Against Feminism’s emphasis on women’s personal choices (“feminists judge me for being a stay at home mum, but it’s my choice”) demonstrate that they are well aware of this shift in focus.

The second link between the tactics of the WNASL and Woman Against Feminism is that they represent the views of fairly privileged women. WNASL members were wealthy women who usually had platforms of their own, either through the right-wing press or high-profile husbands and fathers. On the surface anti-feminist sentiment appears to come from a position of unexamined privilege but, just like their forerunners in the WNASL, today’s anti-feminists have good reason to maintain the status quo.

As Laurie Penny points out: the women featured on Women Against Feminism hold a great deal of cultural currency in areas that feminists traditionally try to subvert. As intersectional feminism becomes more popular it is, sadly, to be expected that some white, straight, cis first world women will see the emphasis on their own privilege as an attack. In a similar way feminist calls for a more inclusive beauty standard and appreciation of multiple body types can be read as an attempt to undermine the received wisdom that ‘skinny white girl’ is the ideal aesthetic.

Source and rest: Beulah Maud Devaney, The overlooked history of women against feminism (opendemocracy)