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.

Spot the Misogyny: Irn Bru will get you through

Heat wave, day 5.

Temperature: brutal. Air: none. Meaningful activity: impossible.

The only way to survive: minimize one’s own movement.

When the inevitable frustration and boredom set in:  distract self by making a few exploratory forays into the heap of decaying garbage called popular culture.

And here’s a new game:  Spot the Misogyny!

Twitter user @SaorEcosse tweeted this link. claiming it to be “brilliant”.

I viewed it, and found myself in a freshly steaming heap o’misogyny.

Observe:

Can you spot the misogyny?  Answers after the jump.

Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful

“Don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful,” smirks Kelly LeBrock in this shampoo commercial from the 1980s.

“I won’t, ’cause you’re not!” retorted my child self to the screen.

.

I thought she was weird looking, with strange slitty nostrils, so it made me question her apparently delusional assumption that all the other females on the planet are jealous of her.   I wasn’t the only one, either – “Don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful” has become  a classic bit of pop-culture sarcasm.

Since then I’ve learned more about what it means to be female in this world, and I’m here to share it with you.

Man, superman, and misogyny

A tweet on my timeline this morning:

“Beating @joliclown at Words With Friends makes me feel  like a man.  Beating her by 107 points makes me feel like SUPERMAN”.

If I point out every instance of misogyny on the internet I’ll be here typing away for at least the next thousand years, but this reminded me of something from my past and I just couldn’t let it go.

Further tweets revealed the culprit to be her own son, which excuses it not at all.  Note that he said beating his mother at something didn’t make him feel like an adult, which is gender neutral at least on the surface.  He said it made him feel like a MAN.  And the idea there is that one gets to earn adult male status by defeating women.

Holy misogyny, Superman.

We should all be doing non-competitive stuff like flower gazing

Sit a spell,  dear readers,  and I’ll tell you a story from my past: