Well a year later this article seems to have attracted some attention. Lovely. Anyway, as I wrote this article a year ago my views have changed a bit. I may write a followup at some point, but not today. There are a few things I'd like to mention, though. First of all, a few people have pointed out that I'm responding to "a comedy article", as if the fact that Pargin thinks he's being funny makes his assertions any less nonsensical. This isn't the Onion taken seriously, this is one of Cracked's unfunny writers trashing men with tumblr-feminist drivel. That said, I'm not really a fan of this article. I don't like the way I wrote it and I think it gives far too much attention to something that doesn't really need it. Of course, at the time that article was being passed around with the suggestion that it was something men could really learn from, which put it in a bit of a different context. Now it's just some shitty cracked article that isn't funny. Oh well. Also, some of you seem to have construed this article as anti-feminist. It's not, and I'm not. There's nothing feminist about sexist generalizations.
I recently read an article on Cracked by one Jason Pargin, Senior Editor, under the pen name David Wong entitled "5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women". Frankly, I was appauled. I don't know whether this is a reflection of Pargin's own life or something he's cobbled together from the worst the internet has to offer, but what it is not is an accurate reflection of men. I'm sure there are some people out there who will fit the bill, but that's not what he's saying. This guy's making blanket statements about this stuff, and that's complete nonsense. I'm going to address this one part at a time.
First, the introduction. Pargin points out misogyny on both FreeRepublic, a conservative site, and Reddit, a fairly liberal site. These are actual posts that exist on the internet, but what are they really reflective of? I can go find as many posts as you want about any extremely offensive subject that you like, advocating horrors and espousing utter filth. It demonstrates that there are some pretty fucked up people out there, but we already knew that. It doesn't demonstrate that they're anywhere near the norm, and we have no reason to believe they are.
#5. We Were Told that Society Owed Us a Hot Girl
Here the author states that men feel entitled to a woman because the media has trained them to think that way. He seems to derive that idea of entitlement from the emotional reaction that may sometimes accompany rejection. Of course, there's no reason to assume the presence of anything extra to explain someone being emotional after being rejected. They got their hopes up and stuck their neck out and it didn't work out. Men try to protect their conception of themselves, just as women do. We don't want to think of ourselves as devalued because someone we put value in didn't put value in us. Some men respond to this by feeling worse about themselves, some men respond to it by rejecting the woman (you can't fire me, I quit), and others respond rationally by telling themselves they just weren't compatible, but even that last guy is probably still kinda bummed, especially if it wasn't a spur of the moment thing.
One of the things that irritated me so much about this article is that some of the points he's trying to get at actually have some room to give advice to people who need it and instead of that he's painting with very broad strokes and not offering any suggestions. It really is helpful to be able to step back and look at your situation so you don't blow your top. Lack of control has no preference for gender, there are women who deal just as badly with rejection as any men do.
After a few assertions phrased like questions at the top he, moves on to detail some "examples" of this in media. His argument is that in movies, tv, books, and games the good guy wins the girl. There are a few problems with this. First, he ignores every story in which the lead has no romantic interest. Whoops. Second, he's breaking the fifth wall in regard to character decision making. To say that the romantic interest has no choice but to fall in love with the hero (which she doesn't always do), is the same as saying that the hero has no choice but to defeat the villain. You can't just erase character motivation because you think you know the archetypal elements of the story you're looking at. Are there instances where the hero gets the girl and her opinion isn't addressed? Sure, in older or more simplistic stories (the archery contest in Robin Hood, Donkey Kong), but there are also instances where the girl has no interest in the hero despite his success, or where the hero doesn't succeed at all. There are many stories in which the hero's love is unrequited and stays that way, and not every hero is a hero. Many heroes are losers. Again, blanket statements and cherry-picking.
Now he comes back to entitlement, and again asserts that men's problem is with women exercising choice, rather than with men being just as emotional as anyone else. That he finds a causal connection with media here is laughable. Clearly he's forgetting the mating practices of the rest of the animal world.
#4. We're Trained from Birth to See You as Decoration
Here Pargin talks about how men only think about sex, ever. He says that the fundamental difference between male and female sexuality is that sometimes women aren't thinking about sex. So now we know that Pargin thinks about sex every minute of every day. This explains why he has such a warped perspective. If I was constantly distracted by sex I'd probably half-ass my social commentary too. He moves on to cherry-pick that awful FreeRepublic site some more. Again, yes, there are extreme examples of all kinds of crazy offensive shit if you go looking for them, but that doesn't say anything about everybody else. A little more cherry-picking and we're on our way.
#3 We Think You're Conspiring With Our Boners to Ruin Us
Here he starts out talking about public masturbation. He details stories about men who get their dicks caught in things and have to be freed, using this to suggest that women don't masturbate in public, just men. I'm sure the fact that it would be impossible for a woman to get stuck in something she was fucking has no impact on the number of women who get stuck in the things they're fucking. None at all. Also, apparently all these men were interviewed by "Wong" after wedging their wangs while wanking, and personally asserted that they were not, in fact, fetishists, but terribly impatient. Fascinating.
Next he starts making a bunch of claims about the brain that he doesn't really seem to fully grasp. He claims to have a "theory" but offers no scientific papers or peer review related to it. He cites a study that mentions an increase of activity in the amygdala and hypothalamus in men, but not women, while viewing arousing pictures, but this study makes no claims related to his own. He then goes on to accuse men of being so helplessly enthralled by their sexuality that even at their grandmother's funeral they'll be busy looking at tits. I lost my grandmother last year and I can assure you, I was not looking for tits. A stiff drink, maybe, but not tits. I don't really have anything else to say about that claim other than it's insulting and demeaning.
Now he gets into the idea that men are angry with women for wearing provocative clothing because it turns them on. I'm sure this is true of some men, but again, he's painting with broad strokes and has no evidence for his claims. He talks about how his female friends balk when he explains to them that their bodies have given them mind-control powers over him. I'd balk too. Moving on.
#2 We Feel Like Manhood Was Stolen from Us at Some Point
He's almost touching on something real here. Almost. He talks about learning that you're not supposed to show people your dick, piss wherever you want, attack people, jump off of high objects, or light things on fire. These things, he says, are "core male urges" that we now supress. Let's examine that.
First, the penis. One thing we did learn at a young age is that society wants nothing to do with our penises. Not only should we not take them out, we should hide them so that people can pretend they don't exist. Failing to do so isn't just impolite, either, you can go to jail for it. Of course, women can be arrested for indecent exposure as well. Consider, though, the reaction to finding a man lying naked in his yard on a hot day and a woman lying naked in hers. Which, in America, at any rate, do you think is more likely to have the cops called on them? There are certainly places in the world where women's bodies are vilified and hidden, but that's not the society being addressed here. In Western society women's bodies are beautiful and men's bodies are tolerable at best but closer to disgusting. Now it may well be that the reason for this is that men are more receptive to visual arousal, which sets the tone for what is and isn't visually attractive in an unbalanced way, but that by no means reduces the impact on men, and it's something that women contribute to as well.
So yeah, male nudity has intrinsic maleness, he hit the nail on the head with that one. The rest of the things he listed, however, are not intrinsically male. They're socially identified with maleness, but girls learn not to do these things too. They're no more core male urges than passivity, cooking, and home-making are core female urges. I don't burn things down, attack people and jump off of buildings because I don't want to, not because women as a whole "took it away from me". I also don't enact retribution on an entire gender as a response to some imagined slight. Are there guys out there who do view the world through Pargin's warped perspective? Sure, but there's no reason to believe they're anything but a minority. Of course, you'll find a ton of them if you go looking for them, but that's true of anything. It says nothing about everybody else.
#1 We Feel Powerless
Here Pargin says that when men interact with women, it's like when a person is hungry in a cartoon and sees their friend as actually being made out of food, or being a floating ham or what have you. Again he's coming back to the whole "men only think about sex" thing in the form of "everything men do is related to impressing women". This has no basis in reality. He does a little more cherry-picking and we're out the door.
So what we have here is a man who is obsessed with sex, only ever thinks about women, and hates women for being attractive. Having begun to realize this he projects it onto his entire gender rather than coming to terms with his own personal flaws. It can't possibly be him, so it must be all of us. Suddenly instead of a pathetic jerk admitting to himself that he's a pathetic jerk and needs to get his shit together, he becomes a crusader. He points out his flaws in everyone else whether they have them or not, and seeks out places where those flaws are common so he can become irritated and further affirm his distance from his own problems. If this article can, as people keep saying, "help men grow", it's by their own ability to realize that Jason Pargin is a spineless weasle who hides from his problems out in the open and drags others into his venomous bullshit like so many other guilt-ridden cowards, and that they should neither emulate him nor buy into the bile spewed by him and his ilk.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not that guy who thinks all feminists have it out for men, or that no male privilege exists. Women have to think about things and deal with things that men never encounter, but it goes both ways. There is an experiential gap between the genders, and rather than arguing over who has it worse or building dogmatic and confrontational camps, we ought to try to understand one another. It has to go both ways, though, and we can't make judgemental leaps of logic to conform to our preconceptions or project our problems onto everyone else so we don't have to deal with them.
