If you look upthread, even before I read the article I agreed with him.
On the other hand, I think the framing of Tag as a boy's game, derided only by silly young feminists out to destroy the male population, is just slightly offensive. I don't care if he's right or not. In this case, it's about the way it was said and the easy derision with which he treated this counselor for things like her age, gender, and educational history.
The thing that pissed me off most about the post? The guy in the alleged story (the parent, obviously built up to be the sympathetic guy with the correct opinion, as in most chain-email-stories) starts talking about "implied consent" and "if you join the game, you expect to get touched". Think about what those excuses are normally used for. Now think about the implications of that for a second. It's as if he's using dog-whistle language (via a story about kids playing tag) to promote rape culture. Seriously, I think that's what might be going on here; a lot of those kinds of stories work that way, and are meant as basically ideological allegories/analogies. Why else would the story involve "implied consent" and how someone should "expect" to be touched, and the issue of feminism in particular being brought up? Not even in vague terms, but in the
exact same terms used when people discuss things like date rape and casual sexual assault?
Stories like this often sugarcoat extremely dangerous or regressive mindsets by dressing them up in a scenario which is ostensibly legitimate in a way that's obvious to the reader. I mean, obviously saying that tag leads to rape/violence is patently ridiculous, even to the point of being farcical. However, the way it's presented makes it seem like tag isn't exactly the issue the writer is
really talking about. This might sound a little paranoid of me, but this happens rather often: People who believe in some particular cause, or point, or belief, will promote it by forwarding around little stories or morality plays that somehow "prove" it one way or the other. Snopes has
a lot of similar stories on their website, although normally with a more inspirational bent.
To be honest, I don't even see the point of Woman's Studies. What is the point of it? Anyone I hear of who took it seems to hate everything men make or do.
I will say that stereotypes of feminists
do exist in real life. This is an unfortunate reality. I have, for instance, a friend who once was taking a women's studies class which, due to the professor she had, got her believing some pretty strange things, for instance that all oral sex (performed by a woman on a man) is necessarily degrading, and I forget what else. Because the students often lack the research and rhetorical skills to retort, ideas like that can become pretty seductive. For instance, there are also ideas floating around that women can't rape men, or that a man having sex with an inebriated woman is rape (which is obviously a good point), but that a woman having sex with an inebriated man is not, or that if they're both drunk, the man specifically is still at fault (which is degrading to
both genders involved).
That being said, the fact that stereotypes exist doesn't mean that they compose the majority of that group, or that the subject itself is illegitimate. The fact of the matter is that Western society (and hell, most other society!) has been male-dominated for
millennia, and women have only very recently emerged as politically and socially powerful in the same way that men are in modern times, and still have a long way to go. Gender relations is a very important topic, and deserves to be studied, as does the phenomenon of simply being a woman during this process. The reason why we don't need "Men's Studies" is because, Christ, if you're a man society has basically been built for-you-by-you for millennia anyway, so it's not as if you need any help coping with it.
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Topic: Chill and Relaxed Progressive Irritation and Annoyance Thread (Read 870587 times)