If ever I run out of creationist pseudoscience (it will never happen), I can always turn to another source, the Men’s Rights movement, especially their radical anti-woman wing. Here’s a prime example from RooshV: Research Suggests That A Woman’s Body Incorporates DNA From The Semen Of Her Casual Sex Partners. Would you be surprised if I told you that everything in that title is wrong? Would you be shocked to learn that everything Roosh concludes from misreading that research is also wrong?
The above study has two seismic implications. The first is that a woman can absorb enough DNA during her lifetime that it changes her phenotype (i.e. her appearance and overall health state). There could be some truth to the phrase “slut face” in which highly promiscuous women suffer a change to their appearance because of all the variable sperm from different males that have been deposited inside them.
The second implication stems from the fact that it’s scientifically conclusive that single mothers have DNA of their bastard children residing permanently within their bodies. Any man who reproduces with a single mom will have a child that contains DNA from the bastard spawn, which of course includes DNA from the absentee father. This means that men can be genetically cuckolded without being traditionally cuckolded, and that having a baby with a single mom is essentially giving the father of her first child a bonus prize in the game of evolution.
There’s literally nothing correct in any of that mess. Nothing. Roosh has imposed his faulty, biased interpretation on the work in a way that would certainly horrify the authors.
The original research studies microchimerism, the incorporation of a small number of cells of a different genetic background into an individual. This happens! It’s been repeatedly confirmed. There is no fusion of DNA into the host, however; what happens is that cells from a foreign individual get infused into the host, tumble about, and take up transient residence throughout the body. It’s been noted in blood transfusions into people with severe trauma — some of the donor blood cells infiltrate tissues through lesions. It also happens during pregnancy. Pregnancy involves very intimate, long-term association between the fetal placenta and the maternal endometrium — those tissues interdigitate and basically fuse together, nutrients and blood flow between them, and some cells also migrate between the two genetically different humans.
This exchange is relatively easily observed (“relatively”: it involves examining the tissues of women who died during pregnancy for fetal markers, which are very thinly scattered). One of the easiest markers to look for is the Y chromosome: the mother’s cells lack it, but any cells derived from a male fetus will carry it, so you just scan through lots and lots of cells, counting Y chromosomes.
The answer is that there are some, but they are very thin on the ground. One study found that less than 0.05% of the cells in the lungs were microchimeric, fetal cells…and the lungs, with their dense capillary beds, were the richest source. Most other tissues had significantly less than 0.01% fetal cells. Note that these measurements were made in pregnant women, when there is a continuous influx of fetal cells, and so is probably the highest frequency that would be observed. Male microchimeras have been found in much older, non-pregnant women, so some of these cells can persist for a lifetime, but I would expect the numbers to drop rapidly after pregnancy.
Also, semen is highly unlikely to be a source of microchimeras. Sperm are highly specialized cells that don’t live long — they’re entirely gone within days. The few other cell types (for instance, white blood cells) are going to be far lower in dose than what you get from pregnancy. It’s simply silly to suggest that there is significant incorporation of your sex partner’s cells.
Given the tiny numbers and the insignificant contribution of microchimeric cells, the idea that semen modifies women’s appearance to give them “slut face”, whatever that is, isn’t just stupid — it’s daft. It’s also rather insulting to males: essentially 100% of the cells in our faces have Y chromosomes. We must have really slutty faces.
So no, his first claim is absolutely false. Women do not absorb enough DNA during her lifetime that it changes her phenotype
— there is nothing in any of the papers to suggest such a thing. For one thing, they don’t absorb DNA
— they are colonized by a minuscule number of fetal cells during pregnancy. These cells represent a tiny fraction of the total, and no, they do not make a genetic contribution to change her phenotype.
The second claim is messier, but also false. There have been observations of second generation microchimeras in fetuses — that is, the mother contains a tiny fraction of microchimeric cells from a previous pregnancy, and a tiny fraction of those cross into the placenta of the fetus, and an even tinier fraction of those can get incorporated into fetal tissues. (I suppose it’s also likely that you could have third generation microchimeras, but there’s a tinier and tinier fraction of a fraction in each generation). So yes, if your partner had been pregnant by another male before, any subsequent pregnancies might incorporate a vanishingly small number of the previous male’s cells in the fetus.
However, this isn’t an example of any kind of genetic freeloading. If anything, it means that a few of those previous male’s cells might get enslaved to contribute to the somatic tissues of your child: the germ line, the cells that produce the gonads of the child and are going to produce your grandchildren, are set aside very early in development and are not going to incorporate the microchimeras, especially since the microchimeras consist of primarily previously differentiated cells that are not in the totipotent state of a germ cell. There is no genetic cuckolding going on. I just have to roll my eyes at this paranoia of MRAs.
It’s also not going to make any kind of evolutionary contribution.
So relax. Biology is messy. There are cells of all sorts slopping about, especially during sex and pregnancy — I think the exchange of cells from your microbiomes almost certainly has a bigger effect on your offspring than a few rare microchimeric cells. And no, the cells in semen don’t invade women and turn them into sluts, and no, your former partner’s cells aren’t suddenly going to rise up and impregnate you, months or years after a pregnancy.
Rijnink EC, Penning ME, Wolterbeek R, Wilhelmus S, Zandbergen M, van Duinen SG, Schutte J, Bruijn JA, Bajema IM. (2015) Tissue microchimerism is increased during pregnancy: a human autopsy study. Mol Hum Reprod.[Epub ahead of print]
Chan WF, Gurnot C, Montine TJ, Sonnen JA, Guthrie KA, Nelson JL. (2012) Male microchimerism in the human female brain. PLoS One. 7(9):e45592.
Oh, phew. I was trying to come up with a response in 140 characters or less, and failing quite badly.
I seem to remember hearing that [undefined ancient human group] used to believe that a woman would give birth to the children of the first man she had sex with, no matter whether she got pregnant by him or by some other man at a later date, supposedly hence the virginity fetish in so many societies. (Citation needed, of course, it’s entirely possible that the people I heard this from were just wrong, or that my memory has dropped an important detail that makes the whole thing mean something entirely different.)
While I have to admit being uncertain about the truthliness of that claim, I do find it particularly amusing to see MRAs, rationalisy and logicktastic as they are, adopting essentially the same position.
So how does DNA know whether the mother is married, and is having sex with her husband?
Gregory in Seattle @2
“Spiritual discernment,” how else?
fusilier
James 2:24
That is such a pile of wrong, I’m almost textless. Unfortunately, all the correct information will be dismissed by most MRA / PUA people, because the pile of wrong supports their views of women, and maintains the almighty power of the penis, with the addition of “ohfuckpenisjuicecooties” to the ongoing rhetoric.
Athywren: On the subject of vaguely recalled societies, I remember reading of one which believed (perhaps even believes?) that attributes of every man who has sex with the mother during pregnancy may be passed to the child and encourages therefore that the mother have sex with a number of different men with desirable attributes to be the fathers.
It’s an interesting belief since it almost certainly does show strong correlation for a lot of attributes even if the causation isn’t quite what they think.
I bet Roosh is really getting off on the idea that chucking his manly spunk around will change women’s bodies. Silly wanker.
Speaking of creationists, I recently ran into a believer who cited research just like that in order to claim that homosexuality is wrong. Because gay sex doesn’t do that. Therefore gay sex is…wrong (there wasn’t any logic I could follow, it was very bizarre). Also this was interpreted to be what the whole “become one flesh” stuff means.
Wow. Roosh really does not like single mothers. I sincerely hope that single mothers do not like him in return.
Hah! At the very least, we can be glad that he tips his hand so early and so obviously: he is simply searching for justification for his habit of deriding women as sluts.
What the fuck how can someone this fucking moronic even function??
Obligatory Dr. Strangelove reference:
“Women uh… women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I, uh… I do not avoid women, Mandrake. . . . But I… I do deny them my essence.” — General Jack D. Ripper
I guess the old saying is true. Roosh is stranger than fiction.
I guess I have to thank you PZ. I like to think that we are living in the 21st century and we are progressing toward an enlightened future. Then you bring me back to reality that there are way to many ignorant superstitious people wondering around so many in fact it looks like we could stumble back to the 11th century rather easily.
But you often use these as an opportunity to inform us of some little known, by the general public at large, aspect of what biology is and does. As here, wow!
uncle frogy
Could this have possibly come from the article over at Phenomena by Ed Young (http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/07/foetal-cells-hide-out-in-mums-body-but-what-do-they-do/ ) and also Carl Zimmer (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/science/dna-double-take.html ) It’s a stretch but the first is a recent article.
I find this statement telling in its utter predictability.
Women are commodities, and sex is a resource transaction as part of game (the opposing players being other men).
This is the MRA mindset in a nutshell, and with this in mind you can pretty much predict in advance their position on almost anything.
Even to a biological layman like yours truly, the MRA stoopid here burns. That just isn’t how reproductive biology works, and I think that this disingenuous MRA arsehat is quite aware of that, and is (as is their wont) lying about women to try to justify their own rancid misogynistic bigotry.
I can’t wait for the “rebuttal.”
I suspect his experience with women can be measured in zero digits.
Probably because hasn’t gotten over his early childhood fear of cooties.
tsig
If his words are to be believed he’s a serial rapist.
+++
Roosh would sue the guy who donated bone marrow to his sick kid for alimony…
So if you dilute your cells when they invade the woman and then they get diluted even more when they are crossed to the fetus, doesn’t that make them even more potent and thus all her children will be the offspring of this other guy?
Wait, what’s the crossover of MRAs to homeopaths?
tsig @ 16;
I don’t think this is an issue of ‘experience’ per se. There are any number of men who have never had, and some of whom will never have, any intimate encounters with women who do not bear this toxic combination of a wholly unjustified sense of sexual entitlement paired with obsessive hatred toward half the species, and conversely there are also many examples of men who have, for whatever reason, been involved in several relationships with women and yet subscribe entirely to the heinously misogynistic MRA play book.
Writing off MRAs as simply sexually frustrated men who’s failure to achieve intimacy with women has curdled into hatred not only dramatically underestimates how dangerous MRAs and their toxic mindset can be to women, but it also serves to throw wholly innocent men (including asexual men) under the bus by tainting them by unfair association with MRAs simply because they have not had ‘sufficient’ (or any) sexual relationships with women. That kind of ‘virgin-baiting’ really isn’t helpful.
OTOH, this would explain why my friends’ kids look so much alike: The youngest is the superbrother of the other two.
Wow, this sounds like an echo of the rubbish Aristotle wrote 300 BC about the sperm being the important stuff and the woman just being an incubator. Small minds think alike.
I normally very much like Ed Yong’s writing, but his article on microchimeras was mildly annoying. The central question was “what do these cells do?”, and the answer I’d give is probably nothing. They’re just hanging out opportunistically. One body is as good as another.
His sources even admit that there’s no evidence they do anything at all, but they argue that from an evolutionary perspective, they must…which is not true!
@ screechymonkey:
+1
So “slut face” can be easily avoided by using a condom?
Really?! Sperm alters a woman’s DNA and appearance? On a common sense level, that is obvious bullshit. What happens if an animal comes in contact with giz? Does this asshole think spunk is mutagen from the Ninja Turtles? Well, I guess that would explain what “The Secret of the Ooze” is.
@Ilyris, Apparently it is an STD that men pass on to women, so I guess so!
Actually, this doesn’t sound *entirely* unlike something we were told in high school, and I’m sure that my teachers would happily have cited this research (and considering most of them are still teaching at the same school, probably will) without knowing anything about it too — their angle though, was that when you had sex with someone you were actually having sex with all their former partners too, because .
At the time, it seemed to be trying to scare kids off heterosexual sex (because obviously all other sex was just hell fodder) by implying that *all* sex outside of two virgins bound in wedlock was actually homosexuality.
It seems even stupider now that I come to write it down.
@screechymonkey #10:
But at least Roosh doesn’t haven’t access to nuclear weapons or a bomber wing.
(Hilariously, a quick search of his forum does turn up some threads concerning anti-fluoridation fears, albeit not quite as bizarre as this semen fusing foofaraw).
@bonzaikitten #27
I got the same lesson in school but I interpreted it as a caution against STIs. You may be willing to take that risk with your partner but do you really trust every partner s/he has had? Do you even know them all?
The impression I got was that they were trying to say “all sex outside of married [hetero, nothing else was acknowledged to exist] sex is high risk sex.”
I didn’t know about microchimerism and neither that MRA’s scientific illiteracy could reach this deep.
I find both fascinating, but the latter a bit less than the former.
@Lynna #8
I don’t think any women like him. He preys on the needy and the naive, and he has to get them drunk to have sex with them (he doesn’t care about consent.)
@Holms #9
Same way the big name creationists do. He exploits even stupider people–his readers–by telling them what they want to hear.
#29. Yes, it’s about STDs, but I know of students who were brow-beaten by abstinence counselors who came away with the same understanding that #27 did. When I did rape crisis counseling training, we were told that gang rapists tended to be much younger than solitary rapists in general, and often had homoerotic bonds by having sex with each other through raping one woman. It sounded nutty, but one never really understands the male bonding ritual of gang rape, which is often of other men, too. Recently I’ve had a hell of a time talking about how most rapists who rape men are straight. I don’t get how people still see rape as a sex act of desire. I bring this up because some of our male survivors were convinced they’d been “infected” by another man’s semen and wondered if their future children might bear the “mark” of their rapists.
There are a lot of crazy myths about the overwhelming potency of semen and dicks in general. Many men think Lesbians remain virgins all their lives since they’ve never “really” had sex. *sigh* I have no idea why I was so astonished to learn about this latest MRA idiocy; they’ve been scientifically illiterate all along. But this one nearly tops all the rest.
@mysteriousqfever #32
A lot of MRAs think that lesbians are secretly straight women who are just frustrated because they haven’t met a masculine enough man who can “dominate” them the way all women secretly want.
mysteriousqfever @ 32:
Rape is an act of dominance and control, and often a vehicle for punishment a/o humiliation, whether the rape is committed by a man or a woman. It doesn’t have anything to do with orientation. You shouldn’t be having a hell of a time with this, there are clear, concise, professional ways to discuss such matters. Also, it can be problematic to confuse homosociality with homoeroticism.
@ David Eriksen (29)
Honestly, if I thought they gave a damn about anyone’s sexual health, I’d have more respect for them, but they didn’t. It was just about religion and control. If they actually cared about STIs they’d have talked about them, instead of how us gals would get pregnant if we kissed a lad on a couch, and that all sexual contact is evil until marriage. No difference between being raped or consensual pre-marital sex to them. And of course, it was the sole responsibility of females to make sure sexual contact didn’t happen, because we are the innately wicked temptresses and the poor males can’t help themselves.
It was just trying to use homophobia as another deterrent for sex in general.
LOL, and I just remembered how condoms were supposed to be evil ‘and don’t work anyway’. Ah, memories!
Roosh is missing the larger picture — if he thinks phenotype depends on a tiny number of foetal cells colonising a body, he must freak out about the huge numbers of bacteria we all carry. Some even colonise the reproductive tract. Poor MRAs, perpetually cuckolded by lactobacilli.
OT — that “devil sperm” picture looks more like an electric guitar than a spermatozoon to me. A pretty damn cool guitar at that.
Re: mysteriousqfever @32
I can’t even wrap my brain around that. A big part of my job is training people to think like respectable human beings and I’d thought I’d heard it all. I don’t know how I would have dealt with that sort of thing. Probably not well.
Re: bonzaikitten @35
It was absolutely about control through fear. Us boys didn’t have to worry about getting knocked up and there was no DNA testing at the time. However, even the biggest scumbag couldn’t walk away from syphilis. That lead to our classes containing slides of half rotten penises with the take-home message that any woman could do this to you if you don’t wait until you marry a virgin.
Did I mention that I grew up in rural NC and you had to get parental permission to receive even that much “education”?
Ignoring the seedy MRA aspect of this, I had no idea this happened and, if told it did, would not have thought even close to 0.01%.
Do men ever have microchimeric cells also or are the only source colonization by a fetus?
Always remember, Roosh is the person who resents having to wipe his butt.
All I see in this is paranoid fantasy, or delirium.
Still makes more sense than the “homosexuality is wrong because magnets!” guy. Hmm, I wonder, they might believe any kind of bullshit if you paint it in misogyny. That might be a fun way of trolling them. Maybe they can be turned into creationists if someone was to present evolution as teh evul feminazi agenda to them.
It’s really obvious sometimes how much insecure cis men can’t handle the fact that sperm at the end of the day isn’t all that impactful or important beyond its role in fertilization. From bizarre beliefs about super sperm hanging around infinitely long, to this revivalism of the homunculus myth, to the anti-choicers trying to pretend the moment of fertilization is the instant baby button, it seems there is a giant parade of cis dudes who just cannot handle there being one single aspect of society or biology that they don’t dominate and overrun. What? The carrying parent is the one whose body does more work to build a fetus and develop it. But that would suggest our penile fluids are not the most importantest thing in all of creation? And that makes all our boners sad.
They desperately need some conspiracy theory to justify viewing women and people they view as women as beneath consideration in their eyes, because their fetish for oppression is so fragile, it can’t stand even the slightest counter. Sadly, this doesn’t make these fanatics less dangerous.
Especially when it’s put into service like this to supporting other oppressive actions like this serial rapist justifying his intentional choice to target young, uncomfortable with sex women he believes he can manipulate easier to a non-consensual or abusive interaction or fellow white supremacists to Roosh selling their “sperm hangs around forever” mythology to justify violence against white women they see as “betraying the purity of the race” by sleeping with non-white individuals (yes, this is a thing and I’d bet actual money that’s where he’s getting his “sperm has infinite longevity” viewpoints from in the first place given that his site has been courting white supremacists big time for a while now).
Sigh. Roosh isn’t an MRA. For a blogpost about scientific accuracy you might as well have got that much right. He is a PUA and a moron who runs a site that explicitly derides MRAs as whining cry babies.
David Eriksen @39 –
I’m suddenly reminded of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight episode on Sex Education, specifically the part showing a molestation survivor talking about how her sex education made her feel broken and diseased because of what happened to her and John Oliver saying something to the effect of “being sick that day would have been literally better than receiving that level of ‘education'”.
And it’s frustrating, because kids so desperately need real, accurate education on sex, sexual health, consent, and how to get tested and treated regularly and instead they have a bunch of control freaks dumping their freakish marry as a virgin so we can trap and enslave one half of the human race issues on a whole new generation.
dani @45 –
True. He identifies not as an MRA, but as a PUA… who mostly advertises his work and site on MRA sites, frequently believes in and uses common MRA conspiracy theories and languages, directs MRA fans to harass those who speak out against him, and otherwise fully participates in the general anti-women crusades the other MRAs go on.
And that’s the thing with a lot of these professional misogynists. Whether they call themselves PUAs, MRAs, MGTOWs, or GGers, they all seem to have the same bizarre collection of beliefs about women, use most of the same language and terminologies, and have the same collective enemies and talking points. As such, it’s really easy to just treat that as one giant entity of seething resentment towards women.
And so shorthand appears, commonly, in the same way that a faith-critical secular humanist website will probably be called an atheist website, especially if its writer is a general participant in overall atheist culture.
Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck…
Cerberus @47
Accuracy never harms anyone. If you search for ‘Roosh’ on the MR reddit you’ll see that he’s not particularly popular among MRAs:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/search?q=roosh&restrict_sr=on
It just makes it very hard to get men’s issues taken seriously when you have people who campaign for court reform, the abolition of circumcision and the provision of domestic violence shelters glibly conflated with twonks who try to ‘game’ half the population. And it is totally unnecessary. There’s already such a stigma against campaigning for men’s issues and stuff like this doesn’t help.
dani
Nobody who truely works to help men and boys identifies as an MRA.
There’s no reason to take MRAs serious, except as a serious threat.
Gillell @50
Perhaps not publicly due to it being such a loaded term. But you’ll see a lot of people from ManKind in the UK talking at MRA events. Same with Fathers 4 Justice. It all falls under the banner of Men’s Rights Advocacy/Activism. I personally have volunteered with Mankind and consider myself a Men’s Rights Advocate.
http://www.mankind.org.uk/aboutus.html
dani
Ahhh, I see, a real, wildlife MRA. Happy to hang out with the pro rape crowd from A Voice of Men. How many domestic violence shelters for men have you actually opened?
Giliell 52
Just the one at the moment. There’ll hopefully be more opening in the next few years though. A lot of the charity’s money goes on the helpline and education.
Surely the important question is whether Roosh in a member of the Judean People’s Front, of the People’s Front of Judea?
54
Very droll. The Judean People’s Front and The People’s Front of Judea had roughly similar goals.
The right to bodily autonomy and equal treatment in front of the law and state are not synonymous with trying to get your end away and rape apology.
Exactly. MRAs and PUAs are both subsets of the male supremacist reactionary backlash to feminism. There are two sets of people for whom caring about the subtle distinctions between the two groups is resasonable: male supremacists, and academics who study them. For the rest of us, “MRA” is just a verbal shortcut for “he-man woman-hater.” Does that bug MRAs? Nobody cares. If anyone else has a compelling reason for giving a fuck about what ugly bigots call themselves, then let us know. Til then, toddle along.
56
The incomprehensible anger of people like you makes helping people in need feel so much sweeter! Thank you and maintain your hate!
Meanwhile, my male supremacist agenda of hopefully opening a second shelter one day continues unabated. It’s reactionary, harking back to a time when male victims of DV were taken seriously. Oh… wait…
@dani
When I need to use a transparent, cellulose-based, pressure-sensitive tape to wrap birthday/christmas/happy random Tuesday present, I don’t always use sellotape brand transparent, cellulose-based, pressure-sensitive tape. But you know what? I always call it sellotape. You know why? Because the distinction is irrelevant.
As far as the content of their arguments go, the denizens of the manosphere are essentially indistinguishable. I recognise that their are differences in the ways that their fear of girlcooties manifest, but they’re so inconsequential as to not be worth the consideration of giving them each their own little compartment inside my mind.
Besides, what the hell does their particular flavour of misogynist irrationality have to do with scientific accuracy? It makes as much sense to criticise him for that on the grounds of scientific accuracy as it would if he had miscategorised the Hunger Games novels. They’re not scientific classifications.
(And if your argument is that you legitimately give a shit about promoting the rights of vulnerable men and dislike the fact that your acronym has been adopted by misogynistic little shits, maybe take that up with the misogynistic little shits who adopted your acronym?)
58
You are so correct. It is girl cooties that are to fear. Not being trapped in a cycle of violence. Or having your foreskin severed at birth. It’s all just a flavour of unrepentant misogyny based upon the writings of our Lord and saviour, RooshV, There is no serious distinction between genuine men’s issues and Pick Up Artistry that any reasonable person could be bothered to make. Circumcision, Domestic Violence and rape apology: It’s all just sellotape. /s
You’re all so nuanced, thoughtful and sceptical here.
Nope, circumcision and domestic violence are genuine issues. It’s just that MRAs have shown precisely zero signs of giving a flying fuck about them, or any of the other issues men have to deal with.
And yes, I as a man, am very skeptical of people who claim to care, but spend their time complaining that feminists are aware of the raging misogynists who have appropriated the language of rights, rather than railing against those misogynists and reclaiming the term for an actual rights movement. If your only aim here is to whine about the fact that we have a problem with the misogynists who wear your acronym, then you don’t get to claim to care about my rights.
61 –
Lol, of course. Nothing to see here: http://whitehouseboysmen.org/
Or here: http://www.mankind.org.uk/
Just a load of MRAs doing nothing and giving zero fucks.
It’s not that you have a problem with people who wear my acronym (feel free to pull apart MRAs, HONEST debate is important), its that you apply the acronym to people who have nothing to do with men’s rights. Give one example of Roosh saying he is an MRA or discussing an actual male issue (aside from the ‘matriarchy’ cock blocking him. /s)
The relevant ideological differences between the likes of Roosh and the likes of Paul Elam are zero.
If you want me to take you at your word and support your use of people like me to prop up your own legitimacy, take your label back from the Elams of the world and stop fucking whining that people are aware of them. If you don’t, then feel free to continue whining.
After finishing this piece I find myself staring blankly out the window at the old cedar in my front yard, and a thought pops into my head : perhaps I should go out there and bang my head against it. That might help.
63
What do you mean by people like you? You’re not needed to prop up the legitimacy of anything. The call for better treatment of Male DV victims is already legitimate, your feelings towards it is irrelevant to that legitimacy. You could think that the Belgians are a super-race, but your thoughts are of no consequence to the legitimacy of that claim.
Paul Elam runs a website. He is low hanging fruit for We Hunted the Mammoth. That’s why your hyper-aware of him, and have no interest in the proposed White House Council on Boys and Men or charities like ManKind. I don’t mind that you are aware of him, just like I’m sure you don’t mind that I’m aware of Valerie Solonas. They’re both extremists who are held up as representatives of a larger group when ideologically expedient. Paul Elam divides opinion in the MRM to say the least.
It is unfair to say their are no ideological differences between Roosh and Elam, however, as Elam is a critic of Red Pill philosophy and Roosh is the posterboy.
I honestly don’t want you to feel used in any way.
Of course it’s incomprehensible to you. You make zero effort at, you know, comprehending things. Predictable result: you mistake ennui for anger. Predictable result: you fail to comprehend the causes of either ennui or anger.
*shrug* If you manage to be the first person operating under the MRA flag to do something positive for men, then bully for you. That doesn’t change the fact that the MRM is ideologically indistinguishable from PUAs, and both are subsets of a reactionary male supremacist backlash reaction against feminism. I’m skeptical that one person (you) has enough influence and charisma to bring about a significant course change for the movement.
Basically Dani, if you want to do nice things for white people, don’t do it under the banner of the KKK. If you do do it under the banner of the KKK, then you have no business complaining that people assume you’re a white supremacist. And yes, the MRM is to women as the KKK is to Black people.
Please elaborate. I’m all ears on these ideological differences between Roosh and Paul Elam.
66
[QUOTE] If you manage to be the first person operating under the MRA flag to do something positive for men, then bully for you.[/QUOTE]
Genuinely just going to ignore http://whitehouseboysmen.org/ and http://www.mankind.org.uk/ , aren’t you.
[QUOTE]both are subsets of a reactionary male supremacist backlash reaction against feminism[/QUOTE]
Citation pending, I guess. Although all I get from reading the White House Council on Boys and Men website is male supremacy and anti-feminism. /s
“Please elaborate. I’m all ears on these ideological differences between Roosh and Paul Elam.”
I’ve read no Roosh and very little Elam. But here is a quote from Elam in response to a quote accredited to him on this blog:
“That quotation is a bunch of pseodoscientific horseshit and anyone who knows me knows I’d call that what looks like some of the seedier and dumber PUA crap out there. Not that all PUA is BS but that’s what some of the worst fringe material in PUA-land looks like. Also by the way, Ayn Rand is OK but I’m not a huge fan so I’d never use that quote except ironically, since I don’t embrace male chauvinism. For fuck’s sake, humans are pairbonders, not all men fawn over all women, and I’ve said thousands of times over the years that I reject the entire Alpha/Beta male paradigm for humans to begin with. If you know anything about evolution you know damned well that if we were rape-type tournament maters like gorillas we would never have evolved human civilization.”
http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/pz-myers-forgery-and-libel-duck-morality-is-not-for-me/
And at semi-random from Roosh:
“This video is meant to be an amusing comparison of a typical bar alpha and bar beta in America. Soon we’ll have to qualify the terms by saying American alpha, Polish beta, Baltic epsilon, Danish uber extreme beta, and so on.
As for the clip, I got a kick out of the alpha saying my lines. It’s cool to think there are thousands of mini-Rooshs running around, gaming and banging. I’m so proud.”
http://www.rooshv.com/alpha-male-vs-beta-male
[delurk] I did have a read at the sites Dani has been pushing. I can’t say it helps the credibility of your causes if some of the categories on the whitehouse thing include words like “mancession” and “misandry”. In a way, it’s the same problem that plagues you now: you want to use words that have become tainted by unsavoury connotations. Maybe dump the whole MRA thing and stop insisting on terminology, and just keep working for those shelters under a different, better moniker? [goes back to lurking]
71 –
When you advocate for men’s DV shelters and intactivism, it is a label that gets pushed upon you. You can either listen to people’s half-baked opinions, or you can own it and keep on pushing to make a positive difference in people’s lives.
And I did loathe myself for a while for no reason. I didn’t tell my friends that I was volunteering at a men’s DV charity because of the backlash you get for being a perceived MRA. Then I thought, fuck it, might as well own it.
Paul Elam on Roosh:
http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/02/18/criticized-for-posting-a-puffball-interview-with-pua-dirtbag-roosh-v-paul-elam-reassures-readers-he-knows-how-to-get-his-dick-wet/
Oh, and dani? Dave Futrelle of We Hunted the Mammoth doesn’t go after AVFM because it’s “low hanging fruit.” He tracks it because it’s the biggest online MRA presence. And because it is a poison well of misogyny and misinformation.
73 –
Yep, that link does a pretty good job of explaining why MRAs have a problem with both Elam and Roosh. Good find.
And the MRAMis a highly diffuse and loosely connected collection of different groups. AVfM is a website that gets significantly less traffic than this one and is very rarely linked to on the MR reddit or discussed by anyone. It is a lot more interest to you and David Futrelle than it is to most MRAs.
People might be interested to note that the “White House Council on Boys” promoted by dani as some sort of “real MRA instead of those odious people who give MRA a bad name” is the brainchild of Warren Farrell, the once-feminist who is now the intellectual hero of the MRA movement, contributor to the hate-site “A Voice For Man” and buddy-buddy with it’s founder Paul Elam.
@dani
Yeah, based on your willingness to quote Elam and Roosh and thus consider them worthy of being quotable on anything, plus what zenlike had to say at #75, plus your being invested in defending the MRA/PUA distinction, I see now that you are commenting on the wrong website, to say the least.
Sniff, sniff? What’s that smell? Oh, a *No True MRA* argument. That explains it. Carry on.
If by “loosely connected collection of different groups” you mean it’s a blog network, then you’re comparing apples to oranges.
That’s nice. Wait, no it isn’t. “Very rarely linked to” does not mean “we disassociate ourselves from these bigoted and dishonest fools and everything they stand for.”
I’m a lot more interested in what they have to say about it than in the frequency of mention. Is any effort made to counter the lies and the misogyny? How about the fact that Elam is conning men out of their hard earned money? Surely that should be of some interest to you.
And don’t throw Solanis at me. Solanis was never a leader; she had no followers and no platform. She wrote one brief text that was understood as satire and published as such.
That’s too bad, because if MRAs aren’t interested in countering the misogyny and muddled thinking in their own movement–misogyny and muddled thinking that has made their acronym a laughing stock, and rightly so–fuck ’em.
I stopped reading. Your credibility went from zero to negative.
Well, the first link is utterly ignorable. Nothing actually happening there, and the crisis it wants the White House to respond to is fictional. There’s no generalized crisis among boys. There is something of a crisis among boys of color, and the White House has already set up an initiative on that–the Brother’s Keeper thing I think?–but the MRM, being dominated by narcissistic young white cishet bigoted men, evinces zero interest in helping Black boys and men deal with their issues. And the White House was remiss, in my view, to treat the problems Black boys experience as gendered, when the source of most of their problems is racism, and Black girls also are targeted by racism. So.
The second seems quite nice and I’m skeptical that any self-professed MRAs were involved in setting it up.
If you are trying to convince people that the MRM isn’t a hate movement, and MRAs aren’t generally anti-woman bigots, then you will fail. Because that is what the reality is. But your attempts are mildly amusing.
It actually isn’t. I’ve managed to go my whole life without being accused of being an MRA. I guess it helps that I haven’t come out in support of rape any time recently.
And, again, if you want to push to make a positive difference in people’s lives? That’s fucking brilliant. But why are you wasting time whining that people are arguing against raving misogynists? If they are not you, then they are not you. If they are you, then you can kindly fuck off. Either way, the whining is fucking pointless.
Prae #43:
Looks like I’m falling behind on the variety of stupidity out there. But I guess it’s kinda hard to keep up with so many pioneers out there.
But this got me thinking: What if sex was a fundamental force of nature, like electromagnetism? Physics would get a lot more kinky. “Hey, let’s find out what happens if we do it in the Large Hardon Collider!” “Well, that was fun.” “Let’s see if we can replicate these results!”
—
But on recent stupidity:
Seriously, I see feminists caring more about abused males than any of the MRA/PUA/Whatever crowd. If anything, I get the impression that MRAs see abused males as people to deride because no Real Man(TM) would ever be made into a sissy baby, so they deserve to be abused by MRAs as well for their beta-ness.
The only misandry I recall encountering in the real world came from misogynists. The man-hating “feminazi” is something I’ve only seen in cartoons, particularly in bad comedy.
Going back to the original subject of this post … Am I the only who thinks it’s inherently disturbing that this RooshV character seems to work from the assumption that a person (of any gender or sexuality) who enjoys sex would not automatically think of using a condom?
Support for men who are victims of domestic violence isn’t a “men’s rights” issue, because men’s rights aren’t being trampled on by female society. A women’s shelter, on the other hand, is a women’s rights thing.
So supporting male victims of abuse is not a men’s rights issue. It’s just a good and important thing to do. Similarly, providing support for white people in poverty is not a “white rights” issue (because that poverty isn’t due to oppression by another race, there’s no antagonist racial class behind it). Doing it for poor black people is a black rights issue (because a lot of that poverty is due to white oppression).
A men’s rights movement implies there is an oppressor class that is not men (i.e. women), just like black rights movement is a movement against white oppression and LGBT rights movement is against hetero/cis oppression.
The stupidity here is… astounding.
Alex the Pretty Good
I see you’re unfamiliar with RooshV, self-acclaimed repeated rapist.
dani
Yep, but it would drop if you left.
Saad
I looked at his websites. His “ManKind” (they probably think themselves clever for that) explicitely states that DV isn’t a gendered problem. Yeah, just like police brutality isn’t a racialised problem because sometimes white people get shot, too.
I think it’s a good thing to have shelters for male DV victims. For obvious reasons mixed shelters are a bad idea. And kudos to them if they opened one. What they do in general is demand that women open up their shelters which they built for men. Yet they aren’t leading discussions about why it is so hard for male victims of DV or rape to look for help, especially if the perpetrator is female, because then they would need to have discussions about toxic masculinity. It’s like when they complain about male suicide as a evidence of misandry without ever wanting to talk about guns, gun culture and toxic masculinity. In short, they don’t actually want men to fare better, they just want to claim victim status and probably roll back on women’s rights . It’s usually male feminists who are leading these conversations and we all know what MRAs think of them.
@Bronze Dog #82:
http://www.thisdaylive.com/articles/science-of-gay-marriage/158265/ here it is. He basically starts with a similar premise, but focusing on electromagnetism, of course, since it works a little bit different fo the other fundamental forces.
Regarding feminazis: I’ve seen a documentary on those! It was about neonazi women who didn’t want to stay at home and pop out as many aryan children as possible, instead they wanted to show that they look just as good with a shaved head and that they can beat up immigrants just as well as the men!
dani, you don’t seem to have noticed that
a) everybody here is in favour of initiatives like shelters for male victims of DV
and
b) the initials MRA are tainted beyond recovery thanks to people like Roosh and Elam and that there is no meaningful distinction in practice between people like Roosh and Elam.
You can either give up on the initials MRA or you can complain to the people who have tainted them; trying to paint a distinction between one brand of misogyny and and another is … well, frankly it’s pathetic and makes you look like you care more about some piddling distinction than about the fact that they are both full of nasty, dangerous shit.
Saad said it well at #84:
To expand on it, every single genuine issue men face qua men can be traced back directly to patriarchal hegemony. They are not evidence that men lack rights women have, but a direct result from the rights and advantages that they do have.
The easiest one is child custody. It used to be that children automatically went to the father* because they were seen as assets in a Victorian world where childcare was mostly done by other people (who didn’t really matter on the great scale of things). This shifted when middle class families became incresingly nuclear and childcare needed to be provided mainly by the parents. The men were freed from these duties as breadwinners and, in consequence, and by their own argument, seen as incapable of providing childcare. When some men started to care for and about their offspring beyond providing money they found themselves behind brickwalls men themselves built.
So yeah, we should work towards equal parenting and contributing financially. Something feminists do.
BUt when you you hear MRAs talk about this, and when you look at their histories, quite often their interest in their children start with the divorce, when they see their children as part of the property “their ex wants to fleece them off.” They see something where they’re not getting all of the cake and they want to fix that.
89 –
You’re slightly off on the chronology of the breadwinner model. Men weren’t being freed from the role as the 1839 Custody of Infants Act came in, that was when it was beginning. From Wally Seccombe’s ‘Patriarchy Stabilized’:
“There was another side to the transformation of wage relations in mid-19th-century Britain involving two closely related changes: first, a shift in the prevailing wage form, from a joint to an individual payment; and second, a shift in the predominant subsistence norm of a living wage, from a family group’s income to the ideal of an adult male-breadwinner wage. This is the notion that the wage earned by a husband ought to be sufficient to support his family without his wife and young children having to work for pay.”
(Social History Journal, Vol 2 No 1 1986, p.54)
This was when the middle class was only really just emerging, and was actually very closely tied to it as children could stay in school until a later age and use their education to progress professionally and socially. It was only the aristocracy and professional classes who could afford to support a family without the wife and children working pre-1840s/50s. For a vast, vast amount of people, all childcare was provided by the parents. It was only in the mid-19th-century that semi-skilled labour and emerging white-collar jobs (clerks, office staff, etc…) paid enough so that the breadwinner wage became an achievable aim for the common man.
It also wasn’t really the fathers’ argument that they were incapable of looking after children. It was a reform that had been on the cards for a while and was primarily the work of Caroline Norton. It was a change that had the support of a majority of both men and women, and wasn’t foisted upon them.
It is also a little bit of a myth that the 19th century breadwinner father didn’t care for his children beyond earning money. If you have JSTOR access and can find Julie Marie Strange’s “Fatherhood, Providing and Attachment in Late Victorian and Edwardian Working-Class Families” from The Historical Journal, that follows on from Seccombe and gives a good breakdown of how the breadwinner model manifested itself. A lot of fathers were limited to demonstrating affection through work, put that partly had to do with the fact that they were working 12-14 hour days.
From Strange:
“This division of labour in parenting tasks can also be classified as ‘caring about’ (breadwinning) and ‘caring for’ (nurturing) children.”
(The Historical Journal, Vol. 5, Issue 4, December 2012 p. 1007)
Breadwinning should not necessarily be seen as an absence of care for children, rather care demonstrated by different means. Strange demonstrates this by example of miners who would cause more accidents in the run up to Christmas as they took more risks to provide better presents and treats.
So yeah:
-childcare was definitely not done by other people in the vast majority of cases.
-middle class families emerged from the lower classes, they didn’t ‘become more nuclear’. (Simon Gunn and Rachel Bell’s book on the Middle Classes is good for an overview)
-Men weren’t freed from the breadwinner role by CofI1839, the breadwinner model emerged afterwards.
-Men did care beyond earning a wage, as shown in journals of the time, however most of their affection was demonstrated through labour. This was demonstrating their interest. There was no social security and they didn’t want their children to starve.
Seccombe and Strange would really be worth reading on all of this. John Tosh is good as well but I can’t think of anything wholly relevant off the top of my head.
dani
HOW TO BLOCKQUOTE
Doing this
<blockquote>paste copied text here</blockquote>
Results in this
Hold on a minute. What chronology?
Here’s what Giliell said (emphasis mine):
The only reference to time frames in what she said was “in a Victorian world” and things that happened some time after the things that happened “in a Victorian world.”
Dani again:
You say “men weren’t freed from the role,” which I take to mean the role of being the primary breadwinner whose monetary contributions supported his wife and children in the nuclear model with which we are all familiar now, THEN. You assert that this “role” was just beginning.
OK, but let’s look at what Giliell said. She said that children automatically went to the father “in a Victorian world.”
So you aren’t contradicting her. Victoria ascended to the throne in 1837, and the Custody of Infants Act, which you point to as a symptom of that shift towards the breadwinner model, was passed two years later.
Again, you aren’t actually contradicting what you appear to think you are contradicting. The mid-nineteenth century is the beginning of the Victorian era. The breadwinner model took hold prior to and during the Victorian era. Both you and Giliell are asserting this, but only you seem to be confused about whether or not you two are saying the same thing or not.
Excuse me, what? Which fathers? When? During which era? What is the point of such a vague assertion?
The work of the Custody of Infants Act certainly was Norton’s work. But “the argument that fathers were incapable of looking after children”? Well, Norton’s own husband apparently demonstrated himself to be so. And the support for the act came from the fact that cases like hers, where an abusive husband used his right to custody as a weapon against both mothers and children, and severely mistreated both, were not uncommon.
Obviously, the vast majority of men theoretically have the ability to care about their children, as well as the ability to feed, clothe, and nurture them, change their diapers, transport them from place to place, cook food for them, provide instruction about the world, etc. That has nothing to do with the fact that in Victorian England (and other times and places of course), social norms were that men didn’t do those things, and women did. The obvious corollary to investigate is whether changing such norms leads to an increase in men actually doing those things. Historical evidence from the 20th and 21st century suggests that this is the case.
Again, the vagueness. The Custody of Infants act “wasn’t foisted on” the majority of adult men in 1839? You have access to opinion polls of the time? In 1839, the entire field of statistics was in its infancy and public opinion polls didn’t really become common, widespread, and scientific until the beginning of the 20th century.
Again with the vagueness. We aren’t talking about the emotional experiences of these men but rather social structures and social norms and mores.
“Limited” by what?
Social norms and mores.
Why was their expression limited to demonstrating affection through work?
Social norms and mores.
Your thrust here is unclear, but my surmise is that you have transposed Giliell’s thesis from “men were discouraged from performing the unpaid labor of child-rearing” into “men had no emotional attachments to their children.”
Yup. My surmise appears to be correct.
People other than their own fathers? It most certainly was. Even in the cases of households that did not conform to the breadwinner model, where the entire family was an economic unit in which men, women, and children performed labor to produce goods for their own survival, men were not the ones changing diapers, rocking colicky babies to sleep, preparing food for them, and so on.
If you thought Giliell was being unclear when she said “families became more nuclear,” you should have just said so, instead of launching this whole misguided attempt at debunking your misunderstanding of her position.
As I said before, you are not contradicting what you think you are contradicting. Nobody asserted that men began to be “freed” from the breadwinner role at the beginning of the Victorian era.
Simple, boring old straw man argument: you are dishonestly conflating having emotional attachments to children with doing the actual work of raising them to be functional adults.
That may well be, but your ability to successfully interpret their theses and apply their scholarship to this conversation has not yet been established. So your word alone, sadly, won’t be enough. Not until you can demonstrate better reading comprehension and present your thesis without resorting to fallacies.
And, most importantly, let’s note that absolutely NONE of this rebuts Giliell’s most important point vis-a-vis your little campaign to redeem the good name of “Mens Rights Activist:
The precise timing of shifts in social attitudes a century or two ago is interesting, but has no bearing on whether present-day MRAs are, as we have been asserting and you have been failing to debunk, a bunch of whiny little hate-mongers who resent feminists for decreasing their ability to enjoy the unfair advantages that previous generations of men took for granted.
You know, it’s a funny thing, but child custody most often goes to the “primary caretaker”. This is for the good of the child. It has nothing to do with who loves the child, or who loves the child more, or who wants the child or who wants the child more. It’s solely about providing the emotional security of being cared for by the person they bonded with as the primary caretaker. If the “primary caretaker” of the child is the father, then the father gets that custody and the mother has to pay the support.
I’m sure it’s all a massive coincidence that most “primary caretakers” are actually the mothers, regardless of whether she also worked away from home or not.
Holy shit Sally, that is mangled!
[BLOCKQUOTE]It used to be that children automatically went to the father* because they were seen as assets in a Victorian world where childcare was mostly done by other people (who didn’t really matter on the great scale of things). This shifted when middle class families became incresingly nuclear and childcare needed to be provided mainly by the parents.[/BLOCKQUOTE]
The change came right at the start of the Victorian era. From the wording it sounds like that was the case throughout at least half. Not 2 years of a 64 year period. Due to the context provided by “mainly by the parents”, “other people” seems to mean staff.
[BLOCKQUOTE]You assert that this “role” was just beginning.
OK, but let’s look at what Giliell said. She said that children automatically went to the father “in a Victorian world.”[/BLOCKQUOTE]
Yeah, they also said:
[BLOCKQUOTE]The men were freed from these duties as breadwinners[/BLOCKQUOTE]
In relation to the change of custody laws. But chronologically, the breadwinner role came at about the same time or after the change in custody laws, so it doesn’t make sense that men were freed from the breadwinner role when it continued with gusto until the 1950s and still continues today.
[BLOCKQUOTE]Excuse me, what? Which fathers? When? During which era? What is the point of such a vague assertion?[/BLOCKQUOTE]
I’m glad you agree. This was a response to “The men were freed from these duties as breadwinners and, in consequence, and by their own argument, seen as incapable of providing childcare.” You’re right. There is no point in such a vague assertion.
[BLOCKQUOTE]It is also a little bit of a myth that the 19th century breadwinner father didn’t care for his children beyond earning money.
Again with the vagueness. We aren’t talking about the emotional experiences of these men but rather social structures and social norms and mores.[/BLOCKQUOTE]
It is an introductory sentence. It is followed by a reference, a quote and an expansion. Just read on.
[BLOCKQUOTE]“Limited” by what?[/BLOCKQUOTE]
READ THE REST OF THE SENTENCE!
[BLOCKQUOTE]A lot of fathers were limited to demonstrating affection through work, [but] that partly had to do with the fact that they were working 12-14 hour days.[/BLOCKQUOTE]
[BLOCKQUOTE]Why was their expression limited to demonstrating affection through work?[/BLOCKQUOTE]
There expression wasn’t solely limited to that, it just made up a majority due to the fact that they spent a majority of their time working. You can read journals from the time, like that of Dr Heaton, and observe the father/child relationship.
[BLOCKQUOTE]Your thrust here is unclear, but my surmise is that you have transposed Giliell’s thesis from “men were discouraged from performing the unpaid labor of child-rearing” into “men had no emotional attachments to their children.”[/BLOCKQUOTE]
What Giliell said: “When some men started to care for and about their offspring beyond providing money ”
This suggests an absence of emotional attachment.
[BLOCKQUOTE]That may well be, but your ability to successfully interpret their theses and apply their scholarship to this conversation has not yet been established.[/BLOCKQUOTE]
It has. I wrote extensively on the subject during my PG studies. I did well.
“Not until you can demonstrate better reading comprehension ” – The irony. I read whole sentences and paragraphs before going ‘that’s vague’
So sorry about the formatting!
I see somebody still doesn’t understand our position. Unless they acknowledge that women are their equals, but they still have the advantage of male privilege, they have nothing to say that is cogent. When it comes to child custody, the male privilege says they, the male, should get custody. However, the courts appear to do a factual search, and many males who think they do significant work, don’t really do that much, and lose custody. Same is true of housework, men overestimate the amount they do compared to women. And since the men don’t get their way, they throw temper tantrums.
As far as formatting goes, Chigau was spot on as to what was needed to format correctly. Why where you so unable to learn?
Dani –
1. This was already posted. Post #91, just before mine. All you had to do was copy-paste the bits around “blockquote” directly from that post. I have replaced the pointy brackets with the words “pointy bracket” (aka less-than and greater-than signs) in my quote of that post.
2. You appear to be emotionally overwrought. I hope you will be able to calm down. Perhaps after a good night’s sleep, you will be able to write your post with proper formatting and with all the testerical yelling at me.
*Excuse me, WITHOUT all the testerical yelling at me.
Lazy Sunday afternoon… Let’s see if we can clean this up.
Nah not really.
It’s clear to me from context that “other people” meant “people besides the father.” Again, if you think a statement is unclear, the best course is to ask for clarification BEFORE you embark on a long rambling attempt at a rebuttal.
So, rather than request clarification from Giliell… etc., etc.
I did.
1. Take a deep breath and calm down.
2. It was a rhetorical question. Which I answered. Take your own advice about reading on.
Like I said. Rhetorical question. Already answered.
Again. if you find a statement unclear, the best course is to request clarification rather than embark on a long rambling rebuttal to a position your interlocutor does not hold.
Giliell’s statement does SUGGEST that she might have been talking about emotional attachments. I rather doubt that was her main concern. However it’s also clear that she was not talking about emotional attachments by themselves. She was also talking about the actual physical work involved in transforming infants into productive, socially integrated adults, which renders your refusal to deal with the fact that women were doing (and still do) unpaid labor when they raise children dishonest.
And I received my degree from “I am Right On The Internet University,” so by the same standards as you apply to your reading comprehension skills, my rightness is well established.
OK. I responded to every paragraph you wrote. But because I recorded my responses in more or less chronological order, you are going to seize on this weak excuse to try to throw my criticism of you back at me. Better luck next time with your attempts at misdirection.
——
And STILL we do not have a response to both Giliell’s and my main point, which I will repeat here:
The precise timing of shifts in social attitudes a century or two ago is interesting, but has no bearing on whether present-day MRAs are, as we have been asserting and you have been failing to debunk, a bunch of whiny little hate-mongers who resent feminists for decreasing their ability to enjoy the unfair advantages that previous generations of men took for granted.
Until you can respond to THIS, your failure at reading comprehension remains a fact on this page.
Correction:
This is my statement responding to Dani. Slight borkquote mixup there.
dani
Well, good that I never said that.
Let’s look at the actual quote:
It is of course possible to interprete the above as “men were freed from the duty of being breadwinners” if you take that sentence alone. But “these duties” refers back to “childcare” as “these” usually requires a know antecedent in English.
So, to clear it up: Men were freed for the duties of childcare as they were the breadwinners.
This is, of course, only true for a small amount of families, as I already noted, therefore arguing about how things were done in the working class is a strawman.
Sally
Anglo-American exceptionalism