Debunking more MRA “statistics”…

UPDATE: Due to this entry having been posted on Reddit/Mensrights, I am shutting down the comments section. Also, hi MRAs! Go fuck yourselves!
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I want to analyze this list of claims from MRAs, in order to debunk it and expose the further lies of the MRA bigots.

I have already examined some MRA “statistics” that were actually rubbish; see this entry for the points that appeared there. For the sake of space, I will not repeat the same objections here.

I added “secondary gains” as a response. Secondary gains, as defined by Patrick Colm Hogan in The Culture of Conformism (p50-51), are forms of gratification given to people who belongs to a subordinate group in order for them to accept their condition. Likewise, many things which MRAs claim are disadvantages to being a man are actually used by the Patriarchy as signals of male nature, and therefore of superiority (e.g. military service, not being charged with child care, and esthetic considerations such as short hair and long pants).

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1. Women are treated better in all aspects of the legal system. For instance, women receive lighter sentences and a higher chance of acquittal, simply for being women.

Secondary gain. Studies prove that women are given lighter sentences because judges ignore rules of gender equality and personally take it unto themselves to “protect” women. Women are “protected” because they are seen as inferior to men.

2. Men are significantly more likely to be the victims of violent crime (of which rape is included) than women.

Irrelevant. See my previous entry, point 5.

3. Despite domestic violence being equally committed by women, for the most part only male perpetrators are arrested.

False. Again, see previous entry, points 10 and 11.

4. The feminist definition of domestic violence has skewed arrest and prosecution philosophies, resulting in having mostly male batterers criminally pursued, and female batterers left alone.

Too vague. How would you even prove such a statement? The US Code does not define domestic violence in a “feminist” way, whatever that’s supposed to mean:

“The term ‘domestic violence’ includes felony or misdemeanor crimes of violence committed by a current or former spouse of the victim, by a person with whom the victim shares a child in common, by a person who is cohabitating with or has cohabitated with the victim as a spouse, by a person similarly situated to a spouse of the victim under the domestic or family violence laws of the jurisdiction receiving grant monies, or by any other person against an adult or youth victim who is protected from that person’s acts under the domestic or family violence laws of the jurisdiction.”

5. It is legal to circumcise male babies against their will. In some places, laws have been passed which forbid any attempts to make male circumcision illegal. Meanwhile, female circumcision is completely illegal, even though some types of female circumcision are equivalent in harm to male circumcision, and other types (a symbolic prick to draw blood) are non-harmful.

Technically true. It is fucked up. However, female circumcision has only been illegal since 1997, and the medical establishment is trying to slowly bring it back.

6. Men comprise 95% of workplace deaths.

Slightly exaggerated, and misleading. See previous entry, point 4.

7. Men commit suicide at over triple the rate that women do.

Correct, but misleading. Suicide attempts are three times more common in women than in men. Men succeed more often because they use more violent means.

8. The vast majority of prisoners are men.

Irrelevant. This is the same general point as point 2. Men are prisoners because they use violence on other men.

9. Men are doing worse in all aspects of the educational system, from kindergarten to university.

Irrelevant. How is this an example of male oppression?

10. Men who are falsely accused of rape can have their names published and their lives ruined even if they are not convicted or charged – their accuser is protected and is likely to face no punishment, or a light one.

Irrelevant. The unjust rules against sexual offenders apply to men and women alike. This is not oppression against men.

11. Reproductive rights. Men have none. Simply read this story.

Ridiculous. Men have all their reproductive rights, but they do not have the right to dictate to women what their rights should be or should not be. This is a source of endless frustration for these MRA faggots.

12. Parental rights. Men have virtually none. See below.

A woman can name any man she likes as the father, he gets a letter in the mail, if he does not prove he isn’t the father within 30 days—(suppose the letter gets lost by the USPS?)—he is now the father and must pay. He cannot contest it.

A boy who is the victim of statutory rape must pay child support to his rapist.

A man who is raped while unconscious must likewise pay child support.

A man who fathers a child and wishes to take custody may have his child adopted out against his will and essentially kidnapped

Some are irrelevant, others I have no idea. I have no idea if all this nonsense is true or not. I could not find independent sources for most of these claims, and no evidence for it is presented. But child support is supposed to be for the child’s welfare, not the woman’s.

13. The majority of homeless are men.

True, in the United States. This is highly culture-dependent. In Australia, for example, women are the majority.

14. Despite men’s need being arguably greater than women, government spending to help women is 10 to 100 times greater than that to help men. That figure is unrelated to medical spending.

Absurd. Does anyone seriously believe this shit? This is almost as bad as the “reproductive rights” point. Most government spending helps men more than it helps women.

15. In 2009/2010 it was $1,516,460 toward men and $57,562,373 toward women. In 2010/2011 it was $3,740,800 toward men and $48,331,443 toward women. In 2008/2009 the province dedicated $561,360 toward men’s resources and $98,983,236 toward women’s resources. (figures are for British Columbia, Canada, but representative of Western society).

Same point as above.

16. Female-owned businesses get free government money for literally no reason other than being a woman (i.e. all other factors are equal, same size of business, same income, etc. etc. but the owner’s gender is different = money or no money.

I couldn’t find any evidence to confirm or debunk this point. No evidence was presented.

17. On some airlines, men were banned from sitting next to kids on airplanes, simply because they were men. Why? Because men are pedophiles, obviously. This ban remains on some airlines, such as Air New Zealand.

Irrelevant. This is male entitlement at work and actually has nothing to do with gender.

18. Under a recent federal directive, men are convicted of rape in university campuses if the investigating board finds that the chances they committed the rape are at 50.00001% or greater.

Irrelevant. Since this is the same rule we use in other justice systems, how does this reflect any offense against men?

19. The DOE policy in practice: Caleb Warner was accused of rape and expelled from the University of North Dakota, then his accuser was charged with filing a false report. He remains expelled as of June 2011.

Same point as above.

20. Selective service. Enough said.

Secondary gain. Women were “protected” from warfare because they are “the weaker sex.”

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So here is the final count:

True: 2
Correct but misleading: 1
Secondary gains: 2
Misleading: 2
Irrelevant: 7
False: 1
Complete bullshit: 3
For a total of 18 ratings.

That makes a total of 17% of technically correct points, 61% of misleading points, and 22% of plainly false points. The previous entry had a truth record of 33%, and in both cases this is a terrible record. The list gives the appearance of a plethora of arguments for the oppression of men when there are actually very few such arguments here, let alone valid ones.

Again it is demonstrated that MRAs are all about lying their ass off to pursue their ideological agenda of woman-hating.

Bring in the Fake Dissenters.

A photo op for a fake demonstration, as reported on American Everyman.

I already discussed gatekeepers and how they operate (see the second half of this entry). In an ideological movement, a gatekeeper is a person who is in charge of some organization or group, or perhaps some well-known figure, who can delimitate the acceptable margins of discourse within the movement. Usually this is a spokesperson or a public figure, someone who has a wide reach and who can mold public opinion within the movement in question.

The kind of person I want to talk about in this entry is also a role within a movement, but a different kind of role. On his epic blog Once Upon a Time, Arthur Silber calls it “the Obedient Dissenter,” and, using the example of such a dissenter (journalist Matt Taibbi, “dissenting” against the upcoming war in Iran) identifies two main traits of Obedient Dissent:

1. “[A]ccept[ing] all the assumptions and premises of those [they say they are] criticizing.”
2. “[L]ack[ing] even the faintest understanding of the false set of beliefs to which [they cling] so desperately.”

To which I would add:
3. Because they fail to criticize the premises of those they claim to criticize, their dissent is wholly superficial and contradictory.

I call them Fake Dissenters because they make the claim of being dissenters when in fact they are merely reinforcing the premises enforced by their supposed enemies. In the case of Matt Taibbi, he claims to be a dissenter towards the American government, but he reinforces the prejudices that the American government uses to demonize its chosen enemies and he reinforces the myths used to prop up American imperialism. While Taibbi may be against the upcoming war in Iran, he fails to question American terrorism, American prejudices against Iran, or claims of American exceptionalism. That’s not dissent, that’s just a normal disagreement that lies well within the margins of discourse set by the American government and American journalism (although when the war in Iran drumbeat gets going for real, it will become unacceptable).

You can observe this fake dissent in all areas.

* No one is for abortion, but we should allow women to choose whether they want an abortion or not.
I already discussed that one in the entry on gatekeepers.

* People who have children are doing a wonderful service to us all. But the Duggars are just ridiculous, am I right?
The Duggars, and the Quiverfull movement in general, are easy targets because they represent excess and the objectification of women. But if we start from the premise that having children is a wonderful service to society, it’s not clear how having nineteen is more or less excessive.

* Radical feminism is totally crackpot, but we should give women the same opportunities we give men.
I’ve already written about how equality of opportunity is an elitist conceit which seeks to amplify existing oppressive institutions. Radfem provides the systemic investigation which is lacking from “equality of opportunity” rhetoric, so radfem must be demonized.

* We must respect religious freedom, no matter the religion, but group X is corrupting the true religion.
I refer you to my entry on religious freedom as to why this is a terrible idea. Saying that a certain group X corrupts “true religion” assumes that “true religion” actually exists and that it’s somehow different from the religion people actually practice. Furthermore, there’s no reason to believe that this “fake religion” is any less valid as a form of “religious freedom” than the “true religion.”

* After every new example of police abuse is unveiled: the police is here to protect us, this is just the work of some bad apples.
It is not the job of cops to protect us (for more on this, see The Enterprise of Law, by Bruce Benson), and we know they lie to obtain convictions. The rhetoric of “bad apples” is used to perpetuate institutions which systemically, through noxious incentive systems, makes people act in an evil way, like the police.

* We respect the military and the sacrifices they make for us, we just think this war is unjust…
The job of soldiers is not to protect us but, like cops, to enforce the interests of the power elite. Also, the way in which people argue that a war is unjust is almost always by supporting some part of the apparatus that makes war possible (such as some part of the government which is supposed to provide checks and balances).

Fake dissenters are utterly unable to make the simplest observations about social institutions (e.g. the basic nature of the work of cops and soldiers, the basic nature of religion, the existence of the patriarchy, the lack of justification for breeding, the fact that some people are pro-abortion and that compromised children provide an obvious basis for such a position). This is because doing so would force them to question the core premises of their beliefs about those institutions. The principle at work for these people, whatever movement they are a part of, is: ignorance is bliss.

There are gatekeepers in all movements, and there are fake dissenters in all movements. So yes, there are gatekeeper atheists and fake dissenter atheists (although these have been rather less visible than the very real dissenters such as the Four Horsemen), there are gatekeeper Anarchists and fake dissenter Anarchists (like “anarcho-capitalists,” or pseudo-Anarchist State-supporters), and so on.

This fits within the mainstream media’s control of the margins of discourse, because any movement will inevitably vie for the attention of the mainstream media. Therefore gatekeepers will endeavor to cut dissent’s legs to fit in the Procrustean bed of the media’s margins of discourse, and fake dissenters will slavishly follow these operations. As long as it’s acceptable to criticize a war, they will criticize it; as soon as it becomes unacceptable, they will stop. As long as it’s acceptable to criticize a government program, they will criticize it; as soon as it’s under attack, they will start supporting it.

Fake dissenters often use tactics similar to those of gatekeepers. You will sometimes hear both use sentences like “can’t we all agree that X?” or “no one really believes X” as a way of narrowing discourse and keeping core premises out of the discussion, while blowing the existing debate out of proportion. The difference is that when a gatekeeper does it, ey is also sending a message to eir followers to limit discourse in this manner, and that’s where the fake dissenters get their marching orders.

I know this sounds conspiratorial, but there’s no conspiracy involved. It’s just part of what people naturally do when they’re in a movement.

I may be accused of not distinguishing between fake dissenters and moderates. The difference is that a moderate may take various positions which are not considered a completely coherent set, but that doesn’t mean they act as fake dissenters on any single issue. A moderate can be a fake dissenter on any issue, but ey doesn’t have to be. Unlike moderates, fake dissenters buy into the premises of their movement wholesale and want to be good followers to further the aims of the movement.

The “scientific” attack against egalitarianism…

Attacks against egalitarianism have existed for as long as hierarchies have existed. There have always been privileged ideologues paid by the rulers to articulate reasons why the rulers are always right and deserve to use their power in any way found necessary. That’s the way hierarchies work.

In the past, they argued that rulers were appointed by divine fiat. Nowadays, we are too sophisticated to fall for such simplistic justifications. In modern times, there have been two main areas which these ideologues have used to argue against egalitarianism:

1. “Scientific” atomism: The pseudo-scientific analysis of human behavior through purely individual factors, which includes most economics, sociobiology, and evolutionary psychology (as well as philosophical ideologies derived from them). It is used to “prove” that some people are naturally superior to others and that this justifies inequality (up to genocide, depending on the “researcher”).

I have discussed these attacks in various entries, such as “Hierarchies are natural!”, “Greed is part of human nature!”, Against Psychological Egoism and The trouble with time preference (I may have written other entries that relate to this topic, but they are not coming to my mind at present). Economic support for STV can also be included in this category, as it reduces value to the desires of the individual, instead of connecting it to the larger world of labor.

2. “Scientific” racism: The pseudo-scientific analysis of race (itself a pseudo-scientific concept) through the lens of some desirable variable, such as brain size, intelligence, industriousness, or others. This “research” is then used in order to “prove” that some races are superior and some are inferior, and that this justifies racial inequality. The most recent example of this hate rhetoric disguised as science is the book The Bell Curve.

Both of these attacks are interrelated. One starts by attacking individuals, and the other starts by attacking races, but it’s easy to go from one to the other, because whatever standard we use to evaluate one can be applied to the other.

In this entry, the second kind interests me more, since I don’t believe I have ever written about it. As I said, the most prominent example of “scientific” racism in recent times is the book The Bell Curve, which mostly relies on “research” funded by neo-nazi organization The Pioneer Fund, which was first founded to support eugenics policies and now supports its modern equivalent, heredity research. In this we see the natural descent of “scientific” racism from the phrenological racism of the early 1800s, to the eugenics of the early 1900s, to the IQ/race connection of the late 1900s.

It’s hard not to make a comparison between this and the natural descent of creationism towards intelligent design and irreducible complexity. The more failures they face, the more pseudo-scientists have to narrow the field of their nonsense. “Scientific” racism, like creationism, has to increasingly hide under the skirts of science in order to keep its credibility; but both doctrines are more about the performance of scientific rigor and open-mindedness than about actually using scientific methods and being open-minded. Doing actual science would be counterproductive to creationist and racist aims, but giving the appearance of being scientific in order to deceive is very productive to them. Furthermore, both first found their roots in the Bible.

Creationism and “scientific” racism are also inherently elitist, although in entirely opposite ways: creationism in its rejection of evolution as demeaning, populist “liberal dogma,” and “scientific” racism in its pretend adoption of evolution as a rebuttal of “blank slate,” politically holistic “liberal dogma.”

They lump together behaviours seen as criminal in our society, and look for genetic explanations. They tap the spinal fluids of violent prisoners to test for levels of a chemical which they believe reduces violent behaviour. But their choice of violence is completely socially determined. They do not look at the spinal fluids of the policemen who beat up blacks in custody or those of the soldiers who fought in the Gulf War. Violence in these instances is seen as justified. The idea that you can lump together a whole series of behaviours and label them as crime or violence is clearly flawed.

The very concepts of IQ and race are highly questionable, and highly questioned. I don’t think I need to explain this to my readers. Again, the Socialist Review makes a good point in this respect:

Scientists have claimed that there is a gene for being gay. But the idea is ludicrous. The idea that there is a separate group of people who can be labelled homosexual has only existed for the last couple of hundred years. Same gender sexual relationships have existed in all societies, but the idea that gay people exist as a separate group is a relatively new one. It would be nonsense to suggest that the gene has only appeared in the last 200 years.
…
The idea of race has a political history, reflecting the needs of the capitalist system, particularly in justifying the slave trade. In previous societies the idea that the colour of someone’s skin was significant was completely unheard of. Why then should we believe it now?

Because the whole study is spurious, and the “research” is made up, it should be no surprise that the results of this “research” has always matched prejudice. In the past, Jews were considered to be intellectually inferior, but since World War 2, “research” has proven the opposite, that Jews are the most intellectual race. The current “research” gives us the following order: Jews, then asians, then whites, then, far below, blacks. How convenient that, again, this fits racial prejudices perfectly. What a marvelous coincidence (can you tell I am being sarcastic?).

Such “research” is not much different from the humongous amount of “research” done every year on the GDP (“the economy”). The GDP is used to reinforce both optimistic beliefs about social progress and nationalistic superiority compared to other countries having a lower GDP. It is ostensibly scientific but has very little to do with science or facts.

The only reply by “scientific” racists is that the data is ironclad, that they are being censored, and that we just have to deal with the facts and stop being “close-minded.” This is another similarity with creationism, as I have recently pointed out how attacks against methodological naturalism rely on accusations of the opposition being “close-minded” to the possibility of the supernatural. But the belief that egalitarianism is impossible is just as close-minded as the belief that naturalism cannot explain everything.

Because of its atomism, the doctrine of “scientific” racism deliberately omits anything having to do with social interactions and institutions, and therefore is silent about the violence of currently existing institutions. Here is an example:

To illustrate “consilience,” [biologist E. O.] Wilson interprets the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. He writes that it was partly an example of “ethnic rivalry run amuck,” reflecting our genetically based tribal instincts. It also had a “deeper cause, rooted in environment and demography.”
…
Consider what Wilson omits from his analysis. Hutus and Tutsis intermarried centuries ago, and there is no biological distinction between them. European colonialists arbitrarily created an ethnic distinction and used the Tutsi minority to impose indirect rule on the Hutu majority. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank imposed agricultural and financial reforms that shifted land use from subsistence food production to export crops such as coffee…

Nationalist leaders in Rwanda recruited, incited, and armed the “teenage soldiers.” Pres. Clinton prevented the US Government and the UN from intervening to halt the genocide. Wilson blames genocide on human nature and overpopulation to let imperialists and local nationalists off the hook. Under the banner of “consilience” Wilson excludes from his analysis knowledge provided by history, anthropology, economics, political science, sociology, demography, and environmental science.

We see now the hypocrisy of the party line that equality cannot possibly work because of inborn inferiority. The refusal to help others which comes from believing in inborn inferiority is what creates these dramatic collapses which then “prove” inborn inferiority further. Like all prejudice, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The final word, I think, should go to C. Loring Brace who, responding to the “scientific” racist concept that toddlers can be genetically evaluated to see if they deserve a good education or not:

There is no such thing as an undeserving five-year-old.

Narratives drive our perception of politics.

It is my view that the major conflicts of our time are over the real and only secondarily over versions of it and methods for apprehending it. The struggle over reality is conducted through contending versions and debates over verification but it is reality, not versions or verification, that is in contention. For instance, the discussion of pornography and prostitution can be seen as a debate in two stories. In story 1, a woman wakes up in the morning and decides, Today is my lucky day. I can choose whether to become a brain surgeon whether to go find a pimp and spread my legs for a camera. In story 2, a girl is sexually abused at home, runs to the street thinking nothing can be worse, is picked up by a pimp, is molested, raped, beaten, starved, drugged, threatened, and sold for sex. Story 1 is a story of choice, equality, liberation; story 2 is a story of force, inequality, slavery. As story, there is no way to distinguish between the two. The fact that most women in the industry were sexually abused as children, entered it as children, are desperately poor, report massive violence against them, and say they want to leave but cannot supports story 2, but all this is extrinsic to the narrative form as such. Story 1 is fantasy, entertainment, lie- it is propaganda- but its support for power widely makes the real story of story 2 into just another story. Storytelling as method requires only the story form for validation.
Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws, by Catharine A. MacKinnon (quoted by femonade)

Consider any political, social or religious issue and you will find the power of narratives underlining every position, especially those that are favorable to power. Narratives are so powerful precisely because they appeal to the imagination, which is more concrete to the individual than any argument or statistical fact. It is one thing to tell people that more than half of prostitutes were abused as children (Prostitution, Violence, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Farley and Barkan), but that fact takes no hold in the imagination unless it is incorporated into a narrative that is repeated and built upon.

The narrative of the rich, empowered escorts who joined of their own free will, on the other hand, is presented to us as if it was representative. Like all narratives, it becomes part of what people think about prostitution and is incorporated in more and more narratives, coagulating into a cohesive view. This view informs how people think about prostitutes, and therefore the political positions they take on the sex trade. The use of the term “sex work” instead of “prostitution” is in itself a highjacking of narrative: it portrays prostitution as being like any other kind of work, and prostitutes as having come into this “work” like any other “worker.”

This process occurs in all areas. If you need any proof of the supremely concrete nature of the imaginary, just look at Christianity. Christianity’s beliefs are completely not grounded in anything real, in anything material, although they try to rationalize it as such. Everything about Christianity resides solely in the imaginary, it is made of castles in the sky (metaphorically of course). And yet Christianity is very real for a billion people and gets them to do very real things to one another. It also pushes otherwise clever people to endlessly rationalize the unrationalizable (such as the genocidal stories of the Old Testament).

That’s the extreme power of narratives, when you lever them with a fixed idea. Most stories in the Bible are about God’s power and dominion over all life. Christian Creationism is just a narrative about God creating all life stretched into a belief system of its own. To refuse to believe Christian Creationism is to refuse to believe in God’s dominion over all life.

Narratives are more insidious than any other form of indoctrination, because they remain persuasive to the individual even after ey comes to know the facts. It’s that concreteness aspect again. For instance, after a person becomes an atheist, the narratives about Heaven/Hell, the morality tales, the stories about Jesus, and so on, stick with people for a long time, sometimes forever.

A narrative is not necessarily a story, with a beginning, middle and end, with a lesson to be learned or a theme, and so on. The examples about sex workers is a good illustration of that. Sometimes it can be a simple cause and effect: [according to theoretical capitalism,] people rise or fall on the basis of their contributions, therefore people are poor because they are lazy. You fill this in with the stereotype of the lazy welfare bum who (shock and horror!) has access to a television, a cell phone, and so on, and you’ve got your story 1 about poverty.

Story 2 is the one explained to us in innumerable documentaries and history books, the fact that workers are screwed by the ownership class, that minorities are screwed by institutionalized racism, that women are screwed (literally) by the patriarchy, and that all of this adds up to the sum total of poverty that exists in our society. It is the narrative of the hard-working average person who gets fired because of “downsizing” and “restructuring” that make the top echelon richer and everyone else poorer, or because workers tried to unionize, or for any number of reasons. This is your story 2 about poverty.

In all cases, does the story 1 ever apply? Sure it does. No doubt there are sex workers who joined of their own impetus, and no doubt there are poor people who are poor because they are lazy. But is it representative? No, it is not. Despite that fact, does it motivate people to attack the rights of sex workers and poor people? Yes, it definitely does.

Another insidious fact about narratives is that they change how we see ourselves, too; and even worse than that, they change what we do. It’s been proven by numerous studies that while people in minority groups may perform as well as “normal” people at a given simple task, when their status is explicitly stated to everyone or when the task is presented as a measure of their ability, the narrative of “you people are incompetent [and you will fail]” will be restimulated in them and they will perform way under par. The narrative becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is even true when the group and narrative are entirely made-up, such as “people with blue eyes perform better at this test than people with brown eyes.”

If the prevalent narrative is that “black people are stupid [and they will fail],” then black people will underperform on intelligence tests. If the prevalent narrative is that “alcoholism is a disease and you are powerless to prevent it, you will crash and burn and will come crawling back to [AA]” then you will be powerless to prevent it, you will crash and burn and come crawling back to AA. It is, in essence, a form of voodoo: the belief that something bad will happen to you is as strong as the law of gravity or magnetism, as long as you keep believing it.

Any issue is informed by battling narratives, and most of what we call political activism is in fact an attempt to directly or indirectly change the prevalent narrative. Think of abortion and the ways people think about women who have one, or “immigration” and the stories people tell each other about why people “immigrate” and what they do, drug use and why people take drugs as well as the kind of people who take drugs, “pirating” and why people “pirate” music and movies… the list is endless. I believe the kind of narrative you ascribe to will be the primary factor in what position you adopt.

To me the most interesting thing about these narratives is the way they are built. For the most part, this whole process is entirely opaque to the consumer: we see the narrative as a fait accompli and don’t think about what’s behind it.

I’ve already pointed out that free speech is a sham. It is a sham because we ground our positions on narratives which are dictated or guided mostly by corporate interests. Debating “free speech” is a convenient way of deflecting attention away from the people responsible for the narratives (either fictional or ostensibly “real”) which drive our beliefs.

Some of these people are part of the power elite, but most are just ordinary Joes, people working as scriptwriters, directors, in newspaper or television offices, making a living. For the most part, all these people do is regurgitate the prevalent narratives, believing that because they are prevalent they must be well-liked. This has the effect of keeping the margins of discourse very narrow, because acceptable political opinions have to follow the prevalent narratives.

These people do not re-examine their premises because they are just “doing their job” and don’t want to be fired or be considered irrelevant. We let them have this power over us because we do not recognize the existence of this power. Any sane society where people recognized the incredible power of narratives to mould our perceptions would never permit random individuals to wield it without accountability.

But we don’t live in a sane society, and we let this happen unconsciously. But by doing so, we remove any possibility of seriously claiming that our political positions are freely chosen. It also means that, in order to even be within the margins of discourse, we need to present alternate, fact-based narratives. We need to nourish people’s imaginary. We know the truth will always win in the end because it’s demonstrable to everyone, but first we need to introduce the truth. And that’s the real challenge.

My position on gun control.

It has occurred to me that I have never really stated my position on gun control. Recently, I got thinking about this issue and the various factors around it.

The one thing I’ve mentioned before is that “gun control,” whenever it is considered, is never, ever applied to the one category of people who own, use and abuse guns the most: law enforcement. This is bizarre, to say the least, that the kind of people who abuse guns the most, who use guns in a criminal manner the most, are also the ones who are never put into question by gun control rhetoric. Liberals wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole. And yet it is a necessary part of abolishing gun crime.

I don’t reject gun control out of hand. I would heartily agree to gun control if, and only if, there was a proportional commitment from law enforcement not to use guns as well: a mutual disarmament policy, just as was implemented for nuclear weapons. The less guns are allowed in the general population, the less they should be allowed to policemen as well.

One good example of this system would be the Greek system, where policemen are only allowed to wield guns when authorized by a warrant, although of course illegal gun use is reported. Theoretically, mutual disarmament would give incentive to law enforcement to find more effective way to reduce gun abuse, because their lives would be on the line. That’s really the only way you can get law enforcement to effectively prevent anything: otherwise they just take the route of least effort.

The underlying problem is the fact that policemen are a higher class of citizens with special rights, able to get away with criminal behaviour under the cloak of a uniform because no one can really stand up to them effectively. That is by far the biggest obstacle to the reduction of gun abuse. Nothing will ever really get done unless law enforcement is reintegrated as an integral part of society, instead of a class above it.

The mainstream discussions center around scares of weapons falling into the hands of maniacs who then proceed to shoot schools up. Some of these scares refer to reality, and I don’t deny that. But this is not the reality for most of the population. People are much, much more likely to be exposed to policemen abusing weapons than they are to be exposed to a private criminal abusing weapons.

Unfortunately, it is not only a problem of dueling narratives, because the media outright refuses to report on the crimes of law enforcement as crimes. They push the “bad apples” line over and over and over again instead of confronting the reality. So we have an extremely distorted view, and I don’t think anyone who has such a distorted view (including myself and anyone else who currently comments on gun abuse) can really have a rational opinion on the subject. All debate is absolutely, completely hopeless unless this distortion ends.

Gun control is only one parcel of a much greater issue, which is that of violence. But gun control receives a great deal more attention than that of violence as a whole. It is not really an issue of complexity: the issue of gun control is just as complicated as that of violence itself.

I think the reason for concentrating on gun control is obvious once we look at who puts opinions forward, for or against. By and large those people are capitalists, whether liberals or conservatives. They all believe in absolute property rights, with only mild disagreements as to how conflicts between two people’s property rights, including ownership of their own bodies, must be resolved. So they both agree that we have a right to own guns as a piece of property, merely on the extent to which that right should be respected or regulated.

As capitalists, therefore, they have all the interest to reduce the issue to gun control and other property issues, as it plays to their common assumptions about ownership. And when we let them do that, we’re implicitly conceding the validity of property-based discourse.

If we expand beyond gun control and look at it as an issue of violence, then it’s a lot more complicated than a property issue. Why do countries with almost as much gun ownership than the United States fare a lot better in homicide rates? (see table below) There is in fact no correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates, or between gun ownership and firearm homicide rates. So the assumption that gun ownership makes us more secure on the whole seems unjustified.

Countries that top the gun ownership list:
United States- 88.8 firearms/100, 5.0 homicides per 100,000
Serbia- 58.2 firearms/100, 1.73 homicides per 100,000
Yemen- 54.8 firearms/100, 4.0 homicides per 100,000
Switzerland- 45.7 firearms/100, 0.71 homicides per 100,000
Cyprus- 36.4 firearms/100, 2.4 homicides per 100,000
Saudi Arabia- 35.0 firearms/100, 1.04 homicides per 100,000
(these numbers, of course, do not include law enforcement/judicial/military homicides, which are not recognized as such)

What does seem to be the case is that, in countries where gun ownership is banned, homicides tend to be almost entirely non-firearm related, but in countries where gun ownership is permitted to various degrees, the proportion of firearm homicides rises. Firearms explain the nature of homicides, but not the rates of homicide in general.

So the question we have to ask is, why is the United States peculiarly violent, with homicide rates on par with countries torn with civil unrest like North Ireland or high risk countries like Argentina? Could it be that property-centered discourse and policies, with all the inequality and hatred that they generate, are one of the very root causes of violence, and is that why the capitalists desperately try to divert the issue?

I mean think about it… divide and conquer is how they operate. What better way to divert attention from their idiotic dogma than to divide people over a relatively irrelevant issue over which they will argue over and over because no one will ever convince the other side? The very same propertarian orientation which centers discourse around gun control also underlies market dogma, the capitalist planned economy with the property owner at the center, “sink or swim” rhetoric, and so on.

Indeed, it is the very connection between economic power and gun ownership which permits corporations like Standard Oil and Chiquita to raise their own private armies to kill protestors in Third World countries and increase the inequality within our own countries even more. It is bullshit to visualize the gun control debate as being about a guy shooting his wife, when the reality of it is primarily about cops shooting innocent people, private armies shooting protestors, and American guns being exported to war-torn countries.

In the end, the gun control debate is engineered to take your attention away from economic and political power, and to get you to accept that power as necessary to “maintain the peace.” And that’s exactly what people do! Christians say the best trick Satan pulled is to make people believe he doesn’t exist; the power elite one-upped that and makes us believe that we need them. And the gullible sheep fall for this trap every fucking time.

The Moving Train fallacy.

JR has written a number of comments on this topic, and I wanted to expand on them a bit in a full blog entry, because I think it’s an interesting topic which relates to my examination of various mechanisms of control and bad arguments.

JR has identified a rhetorical device which ey calls the Moving Train fallacy (named after Howard Zinn’s book You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train):

It’s a type of innuendo, where the innuendo is conveyed through a pragmatic implication. Like you are a riding in a car and you say, “I think we need a new driver, Harry is not a good driver.” And the other passenger says “well, I think you’re being very subjective and extreme, Harry is both a good driver and a bad driver.” So, they are on one hand saying that their opponent is holding an extreme view, but it’s pretty obvious that there is a pragmatic implication here that Harry will continue driving. In every case I can think of, it’s a superficial rationalization for the opposite view. But it’s difficult to prove they hold the opposite view, since the innuendo is pragmatic.

Basically the fallacy is based on the fact that often “neutral” (or non-extreme) positions do not entail changes to the status quo. In the case of the car, believing that Harry is a middling driver (neither really good or really bad) means in practice that Harry will continue driving, because no one’s gonna go through the trouble of changing drivers.

JR points out the application of this fallacy to antinatalism. Antinatalists make the claim that life is an overall negative and that we should not start new lives. Natalists may then try to take the “moderate” position and claim that life is both positive and negative, that the positives and the negatives need each other to exist, and so on. But there is no “moderate” consequence: you can’t bring half a life into existence. Obviously the “moderate” position is supposed to lead to the conclusion that it can be good to start new lives. In practice, therefore, the “nuanced” view leads to the “extremist” position of natalism.

The other point relevant here is that, while they may talk as if they hold a “moderate” position, natalists generally do not really hold such positions. Rather, they generally believe that the positives of life are primary, but give us a “moderate” position as a rhetorical device meant to portray themselves as reasonable people who are looking at both sides of the argument, and to portray the opponent as an extremist.

What we are really faced with, in practice, is a binary decision: to start a new life, or to not start a new life, both of which are “extremes.” So to advocate a “moderate” position is to advocate the continuation of the status quo, to advocate more new lives (even if fewer of them, but often not even that).

We can observe the Moving Train fallacy in other areas. For instance, religious people may argue with atheists by saying something like “but don’t you think there exists a force greater than us?” But what people really believe in is not “a force,” but a religion, a whole worldview. Saying that one can believe in an abstract force may appease some people but we all know it really means God. There isn’t really any other direction to go towards but either atheism or religion.

Another example is people who object to feminism by arguing that the physical differences between the sexes entail social differences as well. While this may be technically true, the level of social differences we’re talking about here is so small compared to what people infer (even many feminists) that we know they’re not serious about using physical differences as their basis for social differences. We also know that any acceptance of such differences is supposed to lead one to rejecting the equality of the sexes, accepting larger differences, and so on.

Yet another example is the belief that we, as a society, need some kind of common values or direction, and that they should be enforced in some way. This is a silly argument because where common values exist, there is no need to enforce them, and where common values do not exist, it would be cruel and unjust to enforce them. But that aside, we know that no one only believes in enforcing common values, and that it’s unworkable; any hierarchy which is strong enough to determine and enforce “common values” is also strong enough to do everything else that governments do. These people are just trying to get you to accept the validity of authority and hierarchies, to eventually get you to agree with statist principles.

In all cases the Moving Train fallacy only supports the status quo, because it always brings us back to the default position. A radical trying to use a similar kind of argument to drag a voluntaryist away from individualistic analysis will usually meet with failure; the voluntaryist can at any time decide to stop at any point on the way to the radical side (“sure I agree with you that capitalism is not great, but… we absolutely need public schools!”), ending the argument on failure.

The Moving Train fallacy circumvents our natural skepticism because it doesn’t openly admit irrationality, it only encourages you to exert seemingly healthy doubt. Uses of this fallacy, like some of the ones I’ve already described, can be based on facts, but the importance of the facts is distorted.

Take the antinatalist example again. Natalists will often argue that life contains pleasures as well, and that we should give both equal importance. The fact that life contains pleasures is true, but it’s given equal importance to suffering. Antinatalists contend that suffering is primary and that, whether you agree or not, suffering imposes ethical duties on us which pleasures do not. We have a duty to not inflict suffering, but we do not have a duty to provide pleasures. So the importance of pleasure is distorted; pleasure does not confer ethical duty on us, neither is it of equal causal relevance.

Likewise with the sexes. No matter how generously you interpret them, biological differences between men and women can’t possibly explain more than a tiny percentage of the social differences between men and women, such as modes of dress, most of the wage and power differentials, the widespread objectification of women, prostitution, rape and abuse statistics, and so on. There is simply no way to make biological differences that important (what I am saying, to be clear, is that in order to go from “the differences between men’s bodies and women’s bodies” to “men shouldn’t wear dresses and women shouldn’t wear suits” or “it is okay to abuse some women for money,” you need to add the construction of class, hierarchy and gender into the equation first). So again there is an attribution of vastly disproportionate importance to some fact.

JR also posits that there are three levels of strength to the fallacy:

In the strongest form of it, N, the neutral view, is just impossible to imagine. In the next strongest form, there is no neutral action (N1) imaginable– maybe the case with natalism. In the weak form, there are conceivable neutral actions, but they aren’t suggested.

An example of the weak form would be the “force greater than us” argument. One can be a pantheist or a deist, for example, but few people actually are, and there are no pantheists or deists out there making this argument; most people who make the argument are Christians trying to persuade others to adopt Christianity. The case of sexism also belongs to the weak form, insofar as it is possible to imagine a society where social differences are solely caused by biological differences but such a society is not what anyone actually advocates, while the case of minarchism I would say belongs to the next strongest form, insofar as the minarchist ideal is logically and pragmatically impossible to achieve (but that doesn’t stop people from dreaming about it).

We are predisposed to follow moderate arguments because we’re taught that the truth is always “somewhere in the middle.” Sometimes people confuse this with the process of competing hypotheses. But competing hypotheses is not a rush to the middle, and scientists are not busy mashing them together. Rather, they’re looking for the hypothesis that best fits to the observed facts. By definition any theory that results will be an “extreme.”

Moderation is also associated with compromise, which is considered to be laudable and reasonable. I think that this association of moderation with reasonableness is the main tool that proponents of the status quo have going for them, because who doesn’t want to be reasonable?

This is compounded by the fact that most people believe in political means, and the only way to succeed using political means is by being “reasonable” enough (i.e. moderate enough) that you appeal to a wide swath of the population. This means, at the very least, not questioning the core premises of the status quo; in practice we know it’s much, much worse than that, because any politician who exhibits slight deviations from the margins of discourse is pretty much automatically labeled crazy. So, for people who reject the status quo in some way but accept political means as the only valid path, there is a tremendous pressure to conform, and therefore to be “reasonable” and moderate.

“No one is for abortion!”

This is an entry in the Pro-Abortion series.

(image modified from a wrongcards)

You will sometimes hear a talking head from some organization or clinic saying something like “well, no one is for abortion,” and trying to portray the “reasonable” position that abortion is undesirable, terrible, but that it’s a “necessary evil.” Even if they won’t say the words “necessary evil,” it always seems to be in the back of their minds, or at least the belief that it’s a “necessary undesirable.”

Here’s the question though, why is abortion undesirable and terrible? It is a surgical operation, and like all surgical operations, it carries with it some risk. In fact, abortions are amongst the safest surgical operations that can be performed. It also generates some amount of traumatism for the patient, but so do all surgical operations.

As for any other surgical operation, we accept the risk and traumatism, however big or small it is, because the operation brings about some greater good desired by the patient. The greater the good, the more risk and traumatism we are ready to accept. It’s really that simple. And abortion, while not usually a matter of life or death, does bring about a tremendous good: not having to bring to term a new life which will occupy the next twenty years of one’s life, not starting a new human life which will be the victim of harm and suffering. That’s a great benefit.

One may reply that abortion is like any other operation, that we don’t think the operation itself is a benefit, and that we would rather have the benefit without the operation. Following this logic, it is better to not be pregnant at all than to have to have an abortion. But I think that is the wrong way of looking at the situation (especially since some pregnancies are inevitable, as long as people will have PIV). We should rather ask, all other things being equal, is it better for abortion to be made more available or less available? Is it better for more abortions to be performed, or less abortions? Clearly it is better for there to be more abortions. I would rather have an abortion clinic in every neighborhood than daycare centers.

We absolutely do need abortions to be widespread. Even the most effective contraception methods used in a perfect manner (I am excluding surgical operations like vasectomies here) still yield a 2-6% unintended pregnancy rate per year. This means that over a period of five years, you have an average from 10% to 27% probability of experiencing an unintended pregnancy, again if the contraceptive is used in a perfect manner. Typical (non-perfect) condom use see a 56% probability of unintended pregnancy over five years. This is a gigantic risk to take without abortions being widely available to all. Even vasectomies, done perfectly, yield a 0.5% accidental pregnancies rate over five years, which means that for every thousand men who get perfect vasectomies, five will end up starting a pregnancy. This should be a scary scenario for anyone.

Even though she is pro-childbirth, which is ridiculous, Jill of Feministe (a funfem blog, not a radical feminist blog) understands why abortion is good in itself:

Abortion itself, though, can be a savior for women, and a positive choice. Abortion is a medical procedure and, like most medical procedures, is preempted by some sort of negative event. And yet the discourse around abortion is focused on how “tragic” it is. Is open-heart surgery “tragic”? Is an appendectomy “tragic”? Obviously the circumstances leading up to open-heart surgery and appendectomy are bad. But the procedures themselves, I would argue, are good responses to bad situations. As is abortion.

My real topic in this entry is not abortion but gatekeepers. The pro-choice spokespeople just happen to be a good example of what gatekeepers do. Their objective is to become part and parcel of a system which makes childbirth the default and abortion an aberration. Like everyone who seeks to integrate emselves within the dominant paradigm, they have to not only conform to the expectations of the public but also to suppress anyone who is on their side but fails to conform to those expectations as well.

This is the role of the gatekeeper, to keep “undesirable” elements out of a movement or ideology and ensure that only ideas and soundbites that are compatible with the goal of public relations are allowed in public discourse. Like all attempts at integrating within political discourse, their decisions are made on the basis of pragmatism, not about truth. Saying that abortion is positive has no political benefit and plenty of political downsides, so it must be suppressed. Even though they know it is the truth, and they know they are lying, they must keep pretending that the position doesn’t exist and is a straw man; to admit the opposite would open them to further accusations and would be pragmatically counter-productive.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair
(to which I would add: same for women, too)

Gatekeepers can be all sorts of people or organizations. Some include unions, political parties, interest groups, academics, self-styled activist elites, and basically anyone who plots at organizing any field that has any possibility of activism. Anyone who sniffs power for themselves may take on traits of gatekeepers (such as older atheists who try to stop younger atheists from expressing how much they hate religion).

The avowed aim of gatekeepers is to gain support from the public and from the power elite (especially politicians). Any form of radical activism necessarily goes counter to that intent, because it goes against the interest of the power elite and of the segments of the population that support it. Therefore it is always in their interest to suppress or co-opt radical activism. They become the equivalent of slave overseers, people who are part of the same “group” but whose job it is to keep everyone else in the “group” subservient.

The end result is that gatekeepers are part of the emergence of a movement but paradoxically keep a movement from growing, because they channel people’s energies into fruitless political pursuits and suppress creativity in the name of that channeling.

The saddest part is that some gatekeepers (not all, by far, but some) are good-intentioned and really truly believe that they are doing what’s best for their community or ideological group. They believe that some “tough love” is necessary to align “rebels” in their group with the “proper behaviour” necessary to mimic in order to be successful in the “marketplace of ideas” (hi db0!).

It can be hard to argue against such blindingly naive honesty. The best course of action, I think, is to ignore these self-appointed leaders and speak your mind, even if that means ostracism. Likewise, if anyone ever tries to establish themselves as leaders of any pro-abortion movement in the future, I will blithely tell them to fuck off.

What is the “men’s rights” movement?

I suppose I should preface this entry by clarifying my own position: I am not a feminist, and I am not a “men’s rights” proponent. Anyone calling me a mangina or any other term intended as a slur will be swiftly censored. Also, if you do this, fuck you in advance, you woman-hating asshole.

The “men’s rights” movement (MRM) is an ideology based on the premise that women have more power than men in our society (??), mainly concentrating on things like alimony and custody disputes, false rape accusations, laws biased towards women, and so on. At least, that’s the theory (an incredibly sexist theory, but still a defensible theory if you are incredibly sexist).

In practice, when you read what these people write, when they defend their positions or discuss them with like-minded people, you find invariably one thing: they don’t do anything about “men’s rights” or care a whit about the hardships of men, but they despise, mock, infantilize, resent, and hate women. It’s not that they think women are favoured by our institutions or laws, although that’s always part of it; their main drive seems to be a seething, sometimes violent, hatred for women. To them, women marry men purely to abuse and use men. Women are vile creatures, and on the whole it’s better to have nothing to do with them if possible.

An interesting thing. Where have we heard that before?

But the further interesting thing is that not only do they hate women, but they also hate abortion, they hate homosexuals, they hate sexuality, they believe in gender segregation, objectify women. They also profusely use projection: they are “nice guy” who just happen to want to kill everyone who disagrees with them, they claim women only want to exploit men and then talk about their fantasies of exploiting women, they are paranoid that women berate men when they talk to each other while they come together as a bunch of men to berate women, they believe that women only want to exploit them in relationships while they constantly talk about exploiting women for sex, they talk about women being herd animals and emotional while violently opposing anyone who disagrees with them on any subject, and so on and so forth.

Again, where have we heard these traits before? That’s right.. the truth is, “men’s rights” activists (MRAs) are faggots!

MRAs say they support MRM because women have too much power in relationships and in society (except when they say it, there’s a lot of b-words and c-words). Others, more clinical, say that the MRM (“men’s rights” movement) comes from men feeling they are losing all their privileges. But the probably truth, at least the only hypothesis that fits the facts observed, is that they are all faggots.

Feeling someone is taking away your privileges, or that women have too much power, doesn’t fit at all with the other hatreds MRAs have. But the faggot hypothesis does, almost completely. The only part of faggotry which MRAs do not possess is the self-hatred and subsequent belief in salvation: they believe they are perfect “nice guys,” so they don’t hate themselves (although there is a bit of self-hatred in that they are still attracted to women, and resent that fact about themselves). This may be related to the fact that MRM is not a belief system, but purely a system to channel faggot energy and faggot hatred.

There is also the added fact that MRAs constantly harp on themselves being the victims of women’s needs, aggression and dominance. But at the same time, they describe their fantasies of raping women, beating women to a bloody pulp, or just outright killing them. This is very reminiscent, again, of the Christian faggots who scream their victimhood while they are in control of the government, said government furthermore ruthlessly murdering brown people for the crime of having a different religion.

There seems to be other movements or ideologies which emphasize some other hatred over the rest. People who emphasize hatred of homosexuals? Ex-gay ministries (and Fred Phelps). People who emphasize hatred of abortion? Pro-life movement. People who emphasize hatred of sexuality? I’m not sure about that one, although I suppose most religions and various cults fit the bill. MRM seems to inscribe itself within this framework as putting the emphasis on hatred of women.

At no other phase of history would such an absurd concept of “men’s rights” make any sense whatsoever. Generally speaking, men have always been in control of women and have never needed a reminder of that fact. The fact that feminism has risen to the ranks of respectable ideologies and is now within the margins of discourse, however, is new. Feminism is a threat to male domination, which is a hierarchy, and all hierarchies have their own self-serving defenders, even the most ignoble of all hierarchies. Plenty of smart people defended black slavery. Plenty of smart people defended Catholicism throughout the centuries. Plenty of smart people defended Jew-hatred throughout the centuries. And now, plenty of smart people defend male domination and women-hating, even though it’s on the way out, because they are scared shitless that they will no longer be able to dominate women and delegate suffering to them (such as the suffering of giving birth).

The fact is, any person who still holds on to these outdated beliefs at this point is a fanatic. They profusely use projection, stimulate violence against women (the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, for instance, was an MAM phenomenon), and violently react to anyone who is against them in any way whatsoever. Like all faggots, they are fanatics, they are aggressive, and they throw themselves fully into their favourite cause. Their propensity for violence is merely the outwards indication of a crumbling ideology.

The sad reality is that they are fucked up in the head, probably because they didn’t have a healthy mother figure to teach them to love and respect women. Their mother wasn’t there for them. So now they are rebelling against their own mother which they see reflected in all women, even when it’s obviously not true. Hating half of the population because of a childhood trauma is a sick way of living, if you can even call it that.

From an Anarchist perspective, MRAs are class traitors, pure and simple. Their constant attacks against working class women sap energy from the class struggle and further undermine class consciousness. Instead of talking about the real social problem of the exploitation of the working class and how we, of the working class, can regain the power that has been taken from us, we are stuck rehashing the age-old sexist nonsense of the “battle of the sexes.” Instead of trying to bring about egalitarianism, we have to look at endless dick-waving from retarded faggots who want to throw us back into the fifties.

These bozos are cheerleaders for the patriarchy. They persist in claiming that women are in control, even though 90% of the power elite is made of men (see Who Rules America? by G. William Domhoff), men’s wages are higher than women’s, women’s sexuality is not as respected as men’s sexuality and women are not as respected in the media as men, and far more women are raped and abused (three times more women are victim of conjugal violence) as men. They are batshit insane, and these dangerous imbeciles have to be stomped out of public discourse right away before they send us straight to their own Hell. They must be chemically castrated, or otherwise removed from the gene pool, so they may not create daughters to abuse.

The Male Privilege Checklist

1. My odds of being hired for a job, when competing against female applicants, are probably skewed in my favor. The more prestigious the job, the larger the odds are skewed.

2. I can be confident that my co-workers won’t think I got my job because of my sex – even though that might be true.

3. If I am never promoted, it’s not because of my sex.

4. If I fail in my job or career, I can feel sure this won’t be seen as a black mark against my entire sex’s capabilities.

5. I am far less likely to face sexual harassment at work than my female co-workers are.

6. If I do the same task as a woman, and if the measurement is at all subjective, chances are people will think I did a better job.

7. If I’m a teen or adult, and if I can stay out of prison, my odds of being raped are relatively low.

8. On average, I am taught to fear walking alone after dark in average public spaces much less than my female counterparts are.

9. If I choose not to have children, my masculinity will not be called into question.

10. If I have children but do not provide primary care for them, my masculinity will not be called into question.

11. If I have children and provide primary care for them, I’ll be praised for extraordinary parenting if I’m even marginally competent.

12. If I have children and a career, no one will think I’m selfish for not staying at home.

13. If I seek political office, my relationship with my children, or who I hire to take care of them, will probably not be scrutinized by the press.

14. My elected representatives are mostly people of my own sex. The more prestigious and powerful the elected position, the more this is true.

15. When I ask to see “the person in charge,” odds are I will face a person of my own sex. The higher-up in the organization the person is, the surer I can be.

16. As a child, chances are I was encouraged to be more active and outgoing than my sisters.

17. As a child, I could choose from an almost infinite variety of children’s media featuring positive, active, non-stereotyped heroes of my own sex. I never had to look for it; male protagonists were (and are) the default.

18. As a child, chances are I got more teacher attention than girls who raised their hands just as often.

19. If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether or not it has sexist overtones.

20. I can turn on the television or glance at the front page of the newspaper and see people of my own sex widely represented.

21. If I’m careless with my financial affairs it won’t be attributed to my sex.

22. If I’m careless with my driving it won’t be attributed to my sex.

23. I can speak in public to a large group without putting my sex on trial.

24. Even if I sleep with a lot of women, there is no chance that I will be seriously labeled a “slut,” nor is there any male counterpart to “slut-bashing.”

25. I do not have to worry about the message my wardrobe sends about my sexual availability.

26. My clothing is typically less expensive and better-constructed than women’s clothing for the same social status. While I have fewer options, my clothes will probably fit better than a woman’s without tailoring.

27. The grooming regimen expected of me is relatively cheap and consumes little time.

28. If I buy a new car, chances are I’ll be offered a better price than a woman buying the same car. (More).

29. If I’m not conventionally attractive, the disadvantages are relatively small and easy to ignore.

30. I can be loud with no fear of being called a shrew. I can be aggressive with no fear of being called a bitch.

31. I can ask for legal protection from violence that happens mostly to men without being seen as a selfish special interest, since that kind of violence is called “crime” and is a general social concern. (Violence that happens mostly to women is usually called “domestic violence” or “acquaintance rape,” and is seen as a special interest issue.)

32. I can be confident that the ordinary language of day-to-day existence will always include my sex. “All men are created equal,” mailman, chairman, freshman, he.

33. My ability to make important decisions and my capability in general will never be questioned depending on what time of the month it is.

34. I will never be expected to change my name upon marriage or questioned if I don’t change my name.

35. The decision to hire me will not be based on assumptions about whether or not I might choose to have a family sometime soon.

36. Every major religion in the world is led primarily by people of my own sex. Even God, in most major religions, is pictured as male.

37. Most major religions argue that I should be the head of my household, while my wife and children should be subservient to me.

38. If I have a wife or live-in girlfriend, chances are we’ll divide up household chores so that she does most of the labor, and in particular the most repetitive and unrewarding tasks.

39. If I have children with my girlfriend or wife, I can expect her to do most of the basic childcare such as changing diapers and feeding.

40. If I have children with my wife or girlfriend, and it turns out that one of us needs to make career sacrifices to raise the kids, chances are we’ll both assume the career sacrificed should be hers.

41. Assuming I am heterosexual, magazines, billboards, television, movies, pornography, and virtually all of media is filled with images of scantily-clad women intended to appeal to me sexually. Such images of men exist, but are rarer.

42. In general, I am under much less pressure to be thin than my female counterparts are. If I am fat, I probably suffer fewer social and economic consequences for being fat than fat women do.

43. If I am heterosexual, it’s incredibly unlikely that I’ll ever be beaten up by a spouse or lover.

44. Complete strangers generally do not walk up to me on the street and tell me to “smile.”

45. Sexual harassment on the street virtually never happens to me. I do not need to plot my movements through public space in order to avoid being sexually harassed, or to mitigate sexual harassment.

45. On average, I am not interrupted by women as often as women are interrupted by men.

46. I have the privilege of being unaware of my male privilege.