Spot the Misogyny: My ex-friend Wim Soetaerts

“No one is born a bigot.  Hate is learned.”

This is a old childhood picture of someone who used to be my friend.  This cute little boy, smiling so brightly, surely deserved to be happy and loved.

But W. was viciously bullied.  He wasn’t athletic and the other kids constantly made fun of him.  Home wasn’t much of a comfort either, because his mother would punish him for trivial things by sending him to his room.  He spent much of his childhood immersed in comic books.

He grew up believing that people in general were just cruel to one another.  This cruelty affected him to his core: inwardly he aligned himself with the bullies and learned to take pleasure in other people’s suffering, and call it humor.  But you wouldn’t see it if you know him only casually, because on the surface he can be very kind, generous with gifts and time.  You might think he has a dark, twisted sense of humor, but you’d probably overlook it because he seems so good in other ways and is devoted to his friends.

He seems like a nice guy – as long as you don’t get too close.

What is a misogynist?

MISOGYNIST
___________________________________

A man who thinks women are intelligent (Unless they’re disagreeing with a man or thinking they deserve anything besides [his] contempt), rational (Unless they’re disagreeing with [him] on anything at all), accountable human beings (By which I mean they need to take responsibility for everything they do and, thus everything [misogynists] do to them…) and expects them to act that way (by agreeing with everything a man says and never doing anything to stand up for themselves and provoke a man into doing something to them because that’s just the consequences of making a man angry with you and you deserved it!).

 

Commenter Paradoxicalintention, from this thread at We Hunted the Mammoth

In my experience, a misogynist is a man who hates women but claims he doesn’t and is just a poor misunderstood nice guy.

The ultimate test of whether a man is a woman-hater or not is what he thinks of feminism.  If he hates feminism, any kind of feminism, even that radical hairy-legged lesbian kind, he’s a misogynist.  If he thinks the patriarchy is a “conspiracy”, he’s a misogynist.  If he thinks he’s such a special snowflake that he deserves cookies for not raping or murdering women, and he should be exempt from any responsibility whatsoever for women’s oppression,  he’s a misogynist.

On man-children

Young white men often number among the most useless and deficient individuals in society, precisely because they have such a delusional sense of their own importance and entitlements. They’ve been raised to believe that one day they’ll be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars (and superheroes), but they won’t, and they’re having a tantrum because of it.

 

Damien Walter, Forget Iron Man: Let’s fight the white maleness of geek culture

The only thing sadder than this is the aging man-child who refuses to grow up but has the same delusional sense of his own importance and entitlements.  These grown men still live in fantasy worlds full of adolescent power fantasies and lack real experiences that could temper their expectations into something more realistic.  Their attitude to the opposite sex is adversarial:  they think women exist to serve them, and that the main reason for a woman’s existence is to provide sex to men on demand, which is why most of these man-children are addicted to porn.

If a woman expresses a disinclination to do anything these man-children want, she’s a bitch.  Or a feminist.  And then their hate for women comes spewing out like pus from an infected zit.

Spot the Misogyny: How Could This Happen?

By Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Still relevant as ever.

Quote of the Day: Shared, Not Hoarded

“While I can see… that people can and do interpret recognizing the relative ease of one’s own difficulty setting and acting on that recognition as a hardship, or coming at personal cost, I am baffled by that view. I see it as coming at great personal gain. When I recognize my advantages, and work to offer them/ensure that I am not denying them to others, I am sharing in the success of a much wider universe. I can’t think of a single excellent thing that I have in my life that would be better for my being the only one to have it, and many excellent things that are made more excellent when I get to experience them with people from all sorts of different difficulty settings, whether I think those settings are easier or harder than mine. My world is better shared than hoarded.”  – Commenter “Sigh”

From:  Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is by John Scalzi

 

Human Being Is Human In Public, Gets Hated For It

I will teach my child to hate and fear people like you

Photographer Haley Morris-Cafiero is a woman whose body exceeds the acceptable social limits for a female body in a viciously woman-hating society like the one we live in. Her new photography project documents the disgusted looks and/or nasty laughter she gets from the assholes around her.

Quote of the Day: Got a clue?

Another Time by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham.  Source

The first person to get annoyed isn’t necessarily the one who’s wrong; sometimes it’s just the one who’s got a clue.

– Commenter Valerie, from this blog post full of epic comments.

Woman-hating slurs: not some kind of secret feminist code

Internment by Robin Hextrum, 18 x 18 inches, oil on canvas

Some women think they can use words like douche   “properly.”

Bear in mind it is literally a manifestation of men’s hatred and disgust and insistence on the female body as men imagine it to exist: unclean, impure, inferior, filthy hole that needs to be washed – don’t use it on just anything assholey. Respect it, and use it as that analogy.

Sounds all ironic and clever, doesn’t it?

Spot the Misogyny: Famous lady artists do dumb art shit for attention

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So apparently “national treasure” Tracey Emin and Cindy Sherman are part of some art project where they make pretentiously ironic Playboy centerfolds.   Read about it here, if you’ve got a strong stomach.

The thing about doing something ironically is that you’re still doing it.

Spot the Misogyny: Parliamentary Portraits Edition

I’ve been poking around the British Parliament website and found an archive with portraits of Members of Parliament.

Here’s Diane Abbott, the first black woman to be elected as an MP:

Portrait of Diane Abbott MP by Stuart Pearson Wright.  Source

It’s a good portrait.  She has a wonderful face, full of character. But why is she naked?  True, you don’t really see anything, but would a male MP be depicted this way?

Judging by the other portraits on Parliament’s website, no.