Stop it. Just stop it. I’m usually quite happy to be male — it’s an incredibly lucky sex to be, and I’m chockful of hormones that joyfully confirm all of my biases — but then there are these other guys that are so stupid about it that I become uncomfortable. We should all be happy with who we are, and it’s not women who make me squirm, it’s the members of my own sex who do everything so badly. And there have been some terrible examples lately.
-
Men who think women owe them sex. Like this terrible story of a man who didn’t get the sex he wanted on a date. Don’t you know, he spent $30 on tolls?
It’s her decision, full stop. Don’t argue. And when you go on that kind of entitled rant, it just confirms how right her decision was.
-
Here’s another brand of obliviousness: a man wants his mother to be in the delivery room when his wife gives birth. His mother is apparently very critical and demanding, and his wife put her foot down and said no, so he went…running to Reddit to get advice on how to overrule her?
You know you’ve got problems when you think Reddit is a good source for relationship advice. You ought to know you’re really screwed up when even the Reddit community is nearly unanimous in declaring that you’re a clueless doofus and you need to respect your wife’s wishes.
-
MRAs. Enough said.
I’m not sure if I’m a man, but if I am, then these people make embarrassed to be one.
There’s regular whiny entitled sexism and then there’s ordering your wife and your mother to agree to an exceedingly personal intrusion on each other that neither of them want and asking the internet for advice on how to ignore their basic humanity.
At least reddit tells mother-complex-dude he’s in the wrong completely and he seems creepy and weird.
I mean, that is really not a high bar to clear for passing human awareness. It certainly is not something one would offer in defense of the site. but at least it isn’t something to offer to condemn the site either.
I would have had some… very strong words, had Husband insisted on his mother being present in the delivery room. I wouldn’t even have my mum in the delivery room. I mean, I can barely tolerate the medical staff, and that’s not because they’re incompetent, it’s because I have an irrational fear of doctors. This guy is just… wow. I’m not surprised he blames pregnancy and birth for breaking up his marriages. He’s really oblivious. That last little sentence about ‘the relationship between [his] mom, her and [himself]’ never recovering is about the most clueless thing ever.
It is totally reasonable to restrict delivery room access to husband only, She, however, was demanding MIL (Mother-In-Law) be excluded from the entire hospital. Given the MIL’s history of interference, totally reasonable extra specification of request. The MIL was overcontrolling and ubiquitously critical of wife, so it is reasonable to anticipate MIL abandoning the waiting area to invade the recovery room and maternity ward.
aside from that detail, for him to write it up as “hormones making wife irrational” is worse than “clueless”, heading into obnoxious.
More people in delivery room = more chances of something nasty getting where it oughtn’t. You want mom in here? Put her in a bag with some bleach for a while first then we can talk.
Would you believe it? This woman is clearly totally stuck up. And then demanding that she gets to say who gets to see her the day she gives birth!
I don’t think Mr. Oedipus thought people would take his wife’s side over his mother.
Well at least he’s still getting his tidy house and blowjobs, so obviously the totes real condition of pregnancy entitlement hasn’t completely overtaken his soon to be ex second wife. It’s really the very least she could do in addition to the constant sexing and the cleaning and the child minding and the nausea and the swollen feet and the back pain and the pushing of a child out her vagina as public spectacle to just stop having opinions and be not only polite but also happy about letting him and his mother have whatever they want, her personhood be damned.
The fuck did I read.
I have to wonder about guys who are so attached to their mothers that they put their feelings and interests ahead of their wives or girlfriends. It makes me think of incest!
Kinda disappointed to see your casual dismissal of MRA’S.
I agree that many of them do promote mysogynystic beliefs, etc. But to paint them all with the same broad brush is no different than people who attack all unions because of the behavior of one, or because the observers collective working conditions are good right now.
What’s wrong with men wanting to organise around the issues affecting us? Just as women and other groups do? Don’t we have the right to organise politically/socially?
If you want to take issue with something that someone or some group has said, great! Let’s discuss the ridiculousness. But if you want to position all MRA’S under that one groups statement, then you are doing a disservice both to the truth as well as to yourself as a man. Fact is there are gender disparity that can harm men, such as prison sentences.
After controlling for the arrest offense, criminal history, and other prior characteristics, “men receive 63% longer sentences on average than women do,” and “[w]omen are…twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted
https://www.law.umich.edu/newsandinfo/features/Pages/starr_gender_disparities.aspx
There’s nothing wrong with promoting equality for men and women — see Heteronormative Patriarchy for Men for good examples. MRAs, though, or at least most men willing to accept the label of “MRA”, are misogynistic assholes. See We Hunted the Mammoth for plenty of examples of that.
I should also add…I do not casually dismiss MRAs. I hurl them away from me with great force. Keep that in mind if you’re going to try to defend misogynistic assholes here.
@roadkoan
Do any people who label themselves as MRAs organize and support issues that hurt men? The vast majority of MRA leaders and followers are whiny man babies who spend their time tearing apart women and ignoring men who could use their help. If you quote prison stats or child support issues but then spend all your time telling feminist to shut up you don’t really care about men. I’m sure there are some men who take the label of MRA who focus on men;s issues, but don’t #notallMRAs us, the label has been poisoned.
If you want people to stop thinking you’re a misogynist asshole for being an MRA, either do a better job of dealing with the misogynist assholes in your community or quit whining when we point out how shitty your community is.
@roadkoan
Of all of the people and groups of whom I’m aware who promote solutions for the problems faced by mostly men in societies around the world, I know of precisely zero who call themselves MRAs. Yes, there are activists in the world who focus their efforts on rights issues that predominantly effect men, and that’s fine, but they’re not MRAs, not even by their own self identification.
I’ve given the benefit of the doubt to every MRA I’ve known personally, and, without exception, they have shown themselves to be, at best, ranting fools who shore up the systems that hurt men because they are too busy hating feminism and seeing feminists as the source of all their problems to realise that, assuming their complaints are legitimately held, they should see feminism as an ally.
—
I’m curious if delivery room guy is seriously complaining that the sex with his first wife dried up after the birth of his first child? I’m not a parent, and I’m not a woman, but I’m pretty sure I can understand why she might not have been eager for sex right afterwards. I mean, babies are tiny, sure, but they aren’t that tiny. Surely he’s not complaining about not getting any right after?! Surely….
There are a lot of things I’m curious about on that topic (kinda weird that he thinks her thinking about divorce is a “card” and not a sign that things are really falling apart for her) but, if I’m reading that right, the lack of empathy there is staggering.
I also get the impression from friends who have had children that any spare time while new baby is sleeping that isn’t being used catching up on essential things to be done is spent on getting some sleep. I’m pretty sure that sex becomes fairly low on the priority list for people with a new baby who are actively involved in caring for the child.
nothing.
but then, why call yourselves MRAs… when those issues have NOTHING to do with rights you already have?
..unless you want even more rights… special rights… to be assholes.
Mr. Oedipus’ wife needs to dump him. That relationship is doomed and the sooner she gets out, the less damage in the long run. Not because of his mother, but because of him.
It is not clear to me why Pr. Myers whould be embrrassed to be a man when another man does one of the things listed i n the post.
After all he himself didn’t do these things (that I know of). That’s putting an enormous burden of embarrassement on his own shoulders.
In fact Pr. Myers has been fighting the behaviours described for years. That embarrassement seems completely illegitimate to me. Also, that puts him at the mercy of the perpetrators of the acts he condemns.
He could also not stop there. I do not know through what mechanism Pr. Myers feels embarrassement, but I know some men do other reprehensible deeds : the same mechanism may make him feel embarrassed of being a man because of these deeds too. The burden would be even heavier.
He could be embarrassed of being a man because Bernard Madof is one.
And then some reprehensible deeds are done by people who are not men. I do not know by what logic Pr. Myers feels embarrassed of being a man, so I cannot say he should be embarrassed of being a human because of every bad deed done by a human, but I don’t wee why he wouldn’t.
Also, humans are not the only beings behaving badly at times.
That seems to me to be really a recipe to make oneself miserable.
That reminds me of that other relatively recent post in which Pr. Myers was sad because so many people are “arseholes”. Sure, if he is embarrassed because of the deeds of other people that not only has he nothing to do with, but indeed that he tries to prevent, the fact that other people are mean, even if it is a very few of them, is going to make him suffer a great deal.
Being embarrassed because of what one has done oneself is quite enough.
I know sometimes you cannot prevent being embarrassed because of something you have no responsibility in, but if you can fight that feeling, it may be reasonable to do so.
For starters, being so egotistical that you won’t listen to women in your life. Those men embarrass me too. They are just clueless egotistical assholes.
damien75 #19
Bless your heart.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls #20
But then it never ends…
chigau #21
Thank you, you too.
That reddit post is a disaster. This guy’s wife tried:
1. Discussion.
2. Asking him to assert boundaries.
3. Attempting to assert boundaries herself.
4. Couples counseling.
5. Ultimatum of last resort.
I have to wonder what kind of no-barrier involvement this guy’s mother has had throughout his whole life that he would think it reasonable now as a twice-married adult with one kid and another on the way that there is not an important, necessary and appropriate shift in the role your mother plays once you start a family of your own. It seems to me that he sees asserting boundaries around the privacy of his family for their own well-being and out of respect for his wife and her comfort to be akin to telling his mother he doesn’t love her anymore and cutting her off. He doesn’t seem to understand there is a world of difference between no involvement whatsoever, and total involvement in everything, all the time.
I’m AMAZED at the coping and communication skills of his wife, while pregnant no less — and “pregnancy entitlement” is Not A Thing — to deal with this situation. She has gone about this exactly the right way, and I am sad for her that she has had to reach a point where it’s “change or divorce” because he’s been so selfish and unwilling to not just compromise but to even understand why behavior changes should happen. This man strikes me as someone who always wants his needs to be put first. I bet he is extremely passive-aggressive and has been repeatedly promising mild changes to keep the peace that he never had any intention of making. When he said pregnancy and childbirth destroyed his first marriage, it struck me as naive and egocentric that he thought they would NOT change his marriage. Quite a few couples I’ve known have been in that position, where one partner is not stepping up to the new responsibilities of parenthood and is having trouble putting a baby’s needs and schedule above their own, and it causes huge problems if that partner isn’t emotionally capable of making that shift.
They always say the first step to recovery is acknowledging you have a problem, and this guy does not seem to acknowledge there is a problem here. When even a licensed therapist tells you you need to assert some boundaries around your mother and you shrug that off, there’s a huge problem. Not that he can change his mother, but I wonder what is going on (or NOT going on) in her life that she would glom on to her son like that. Does she do that to her other kids?
And I’m appalled he thinks he gets to override his wife’s wishes in the delivery room. Just like the choice of whether to carry a pregnancy to term lies solely with a woman, barring medical or logistical constraints the circumstances around labor and delivery are also solely the purview of the mother-to-be.
This woman seems lovely and I respect her for standing up for herself after trying so hard to build a healthy relationship with a husband who sees only his own needs as rational and worthy. I hope they do NOT get divorced and he gets the counseling he needs to realize how toxic this relationship with his mother is to both his wife AND him. Short of that happening, I can’t see any other path except divorce, because living like that, as essentially a second-wife to a man who’s already determined his mother is his first wife is just soul-crushingly awful.
Secondhand embarassment is a thing.
Ever looked at someone making a fool of themselves in public and thought “Yikes, come on, stop doing that”?
Or like, ever watched an “awkward comedy” like Best In Show or Napoleon Dynamite and had that moment of like “ah yeah that would be embarrassing if it happened to me”?
IMO secondhand embarrassment is a natural part of human sympathy and putting yourself in other people’s shoes.
Vivec #24
I know second-hand embarrassment is a thing.
I too sometimes see someone making a fool of themselves and feel like telling them not “Stop doing that.” but rather “Why are you doing that ? Are you sure it is a good idea ?”.
I am not sure that it is the kind of embarrassment the title of the post is about.
When that happens I do not feel embarrassed to belong to the same gender, nationality, industry, or whatever, as the person.
(I have not seen the comedies you mention, I do not know what they are about.)
If I see a person behaving badly to another, I feel sorry for the person being mistreated. I do not identify at all with the wrongdoer.
On the other hand many people are happy when their local team wins a game, and that doesn’t make any sense to me either, it seems to come from the same kind of identification. I guess I am missing a great joy.
PR.Meyers and Happy Nat:
Sounds to me like you doubled down on judging all MRA’S as a group. Sad to hear. I don’t think people should be judged as groups. I am an individual. I have said nothing mysogynystic (unless you could point something out) and yet you call me a mysogynystic asshole?
Should we judge other groups enmasse as well? What are all feminists like?
What are all civil rights activists like?
You ignored my evidence of disparities in prison sentences and apparently don’t think men have valid causes to fight for?
Do you expect one of these other groups you prefer to carry the flag on the sentencing disparities?
I kinda wish I could see people in black and white like you do.
Wait. No I don’t.
If you in any way defend MRAs, you are their equivalent. Let them defend themselves. And yes, they can and are judged as group who hates and demeans women.
If the husband in that story is this dismissive of his wife’s wishes about childbirth, imagine how he is day-to-day, under normal circumstances. Y’know, without all those hormones and “pregnancy entitlement.”
Jesus Christ.
You know what is curious? How these people who want to lecture PZ how he shouldn’t take collective blame for men rarely (or ever) appear in conversations that aren’t about feminism.
You could write 100 articles saying how you’re ashamed of sharing the same species like some religious dumbass who doesn’t believe in evolution, and there’s no trace of them. They all get the meaning of the phrase. Mention men and women and suddenly they all worry about your sense of shame.
If anyone has pregnancy entitlement, it’s him.
“You’re pregnant, you need to shower ME with affection so that I don’t feel neglected”
Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought #29
Since this seems to be about me :
– You will notice I am not lecturing Pr. Myers. I am expressing my perplexity.
– Are there really posts in which Pr. Myers expresses his shame for belonging to the same species as creationists ?
I have to say I haven’t been able to follow Pharyngula for a long while.
– I assure you I do not get why any human should be ashamed of belonging to the same species as a creationist either. I cannot prove it, so all I can do is assure you it is the truth. In some way I “get the meaning of the phrase” but in some way, you are right, I don’t.
– It is very easy to think of historical figures who are way worse than most creationists, I will not name any, pick your favourite, and yet I do not feel ashamed for belonging to the same species as theirs. I really don’t, I am not lying. It is a good thing. There are so many of them, I wouldn’t get through the day, I would die of shame before noon.
Toe-may-toe, tah-mah-toe. You are lecturing your disdain for his position. Which he has made clear. You are showing your own purposeful ignorance.
You are doing nothing but deflecting the criticism they so richly deserve. Show my wrong by severely criticizing their misogynistic opinions and actions. In which case, you agree with us.
damien75,
You… you do realize that PZ isn’t spending sleepless nights castigating himself for being the same gender as these folks? It’s a phrase meant to shame them.
@roadkoan
If this really is your first week on the internet and you really are interested in tackling the rights issues faced by men in this world of ours, I would like to give you a tiny piece of advice. You don’t need to associate with MRAs in order to get your message across, and you’re far more likely to see the fruit from your efforts if you work with groups who’re interested in addressing the actual causes of men’s issues – there are plenty of them out there who don’t mistake screaming about how feminism is the cancer that is destroying men’s lives for activism.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls #32 and Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought #33
I an writing an answer. I am sorry, but it is going very slowly. I’m not ignoring you, I’m just slow. All apologies.
Roadkoan, If you’re going to identify with a group largely made up with misogynist assholes, you’re giving people a pretty good reason to assume you’re a misogynist asshole too. If you don’t like that, good! Get your fellow MRA’s to stop being misogynist assholes, and the perception will change.
Who is PR.Meyers?
Chigau: I believe it is intended as Professor Myers. That’s what I meant anyway. Please forgive my linguistic inexactitude.
Other interneters: (Vivec, Athywren, Nerd of Redhead, etc)
How is your treatment of me any different from the way some have chosen to treat all Muslims as terrorists?
You choose to treat all MRA’S as if they are the same as the worst MRA’S, and thereby lose potential allies in the cause for gender equality.
I am no different that a feminist.
Just for men.
I try my best to represent and aid women’s causes and needs as I can but my life experiences offer limited assistance. Dig?
I am simply asking for civility in the discourse!
You are all so smug in your judgement of me yet none of you has said word one about sentencing disparities. This is why there needs to be MRA’S amongst the batallions of various SJW’S.
I actually do agree that we need people interested in Mens’ Rights. Society does do things that negatively impact men in a major way.
Especially men that belong to oppressed groups, who often face a particular, unique sort of issues (for example, trans men or men of color)
We absolutely do not need “MRAs” as in the specific movement though. A huge amount of that group are misogynist assholes that think women and other oppressed groups are just being whiny.
It’s possible to care about and advocate for Men’s Rights without being an MRA, just like how it’s possible to care about and advocate for gender equality without being a Feminist. Case in point? I don’t identify as a feminist, but I also spend a lot of time advocating for the oppression of women.
Advocating against, I meant.
None. Same for all paranoid bigots be they Islamphobic, racist, misogynist, etc. Any time your fears get ahead of your rationality, you lose.
Until you show empathy for the victims of your paranoia, you are dismissed.
You haven’t convinced me of anything. I require more than just your word….
I’m sorry that the MRA label carries so much baggage. Might I suggest a different label?
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls #32
Your comment contains many things.
– “Toe-may-toe, tah-mah-toe.” I do not know what to make of that. I do not know what one can answer to that, even assuming one is 100% right on the topic of the conversation.
– “You are lecturing your disdain for his position.” I am not lecturing my disdain.
What I wrote is not about his position. It is only a while after I started writing this reply that I understood that you meant “His position about the people mentioned in the post.” (I hope I got it right). When I started writing my reply, I thought you meant his position of being ashamed, which of course didn’t make so much sense because shame is not a position, but that’s what it seemed to me to mean at first.
Again : no, it is not at all about his position regarding the stories he mentions. I didn’t write anything about that. If I wanted to contradict him on his position, I would contradict him on his postition.
– “You are showing your own purposeful ignorance.” I am ignorant of a lot of things. It is not on purpose. I do not know what of you think I am showing my ignorance (except English).
– “You are doing nothing but deflecting the criticism they so richly deserve.” If you think so you can not solicit me. I hope it is not a game you’re palying because typing is costly.
I do not think I am deflecting anything. When I look at the thread, it does not seem that my comments have deflected much. I admit I did not ponder the effects of my comment on the criticism “they” deserve. I did not expect at all to have that much influence. I would be sorry if the thread lacked some interesting contribution because of my comment, but I doubt it is so.
By the way, the post was already two days old when I wrote my comment (that could have been my only comment). If I was a deflection attempter, I would focus on more recent threads in order to be efficient.
Now to the most difficult part :”Show my wrong by severely criticizing their misogynistic opinions and actions. In which case, you agree with us.”
So far, there was “they”n abnd “they” was not specified. Now, “us” comes into play. I do not know who “us” stands for (aside, of course, of you).
You write “Show my wrong (…) In which case you agree with us.” I’ll take that as a joke.
Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought #33
You are right, I did not think Pr. Myers was losing his sleep out of embarrassment for being, like the people he condemns, a man. Why would I think that ? He doesn’t say so.
Likewise, when I see sports supporters elated by the victory of their local team, I do not think they are happy to the point of insomnia. After all, they do not say they are.
But I think the sports fans are genuinely happy and I had no reason to doubt Pr. Myers was ashamed. He says (writes) he is. Moreover he sometimes sounds sad in his posts. I believe he is sincere when he expresses that kind of feelings. He obviously cares very much about issues of sexism and gender.
You may tell me that you have knowledge that I am wrong, but when I read a post title like “Guys who make me embarrassed to be a guy” I believe he really is embarrassed and I worry that over time that could wear him out. Especially since I still have in mind the nameless “people mostly suck” post of March the 18th.
Not that my life is particularly interesting, but when I was a child I had these feelings of being ashamed or embarrassed for somebody else very often. All the time. It was unbearable. I know it exists, I know it is true, it is not just a figure of speech. As I grew up, they faded and today they do not make any sense to me. I’d like to think that I defeated them through reason, that they disappeared since I realised they made no sense, but it might very well be the other way around. I had almost forgotten about them, and I do not want to remember. See ? I am willfully ignorant after all. Apparently, some people still have these feelings as grown ups. It seems that some famous artists do. They can make you miserable (the feelings). Just thinking about what it is like to have these feelings on a daily basis frightens me.
To get back to your question, I thought Pr. Myers was sincere. Likewise, when he writes “So-and-so is an ignorant quack”, I understand it is aimed at shaming that person.
re 38:
yes all SJW are totally justified in denigrating every single one of MRA advocates. Call me an anti-MRA bigot all you want, I’m quite proud of it To compare me to an Islamophobe is a false analogy. Even without being a vocal blowhard, a quiet MRA is totally misunderstanding what he refuses to accept and rails against.
They call their opposition SJW, as if fighting for social Justice was a bad thing. SJW also fails as a sarcasm.
Yep, you are in full deflection mode. Either criticize or shut the fuck up.
When you reach that “PUT UP OR SHUT UP” question, as I presented, your responses tells what you are. If you can’t put up (honesty and integrity) or shut up (honesty and integrity), you are left with the middle position, liar and bullshitter.
Now, either criticize the misogynists, or shut the fuck up. Your choice, and it is no joke. Your credibility is on the line.
There is no third option with honesty and integrity.
Vivec:
“Advocating against, I meant”
Of course.
So I have presented my cause; the gender disparities in prison sentences. Under what banner would you and Llamaherder have me pursue it?
Prison reform?
Then should women who pay higher health insurance rates pursue reform under the banner of health care reform rather than women’s rights?
Nerd of Redhead:
Apparently you got the metaphor backwards. The way I see it your prejudice against all MRA’S has allowed you to speak in a less than polite fashion towards me despite my efforts to be polite and courteous to you and all here.
How will I prove myself to you?
How will the Muslims prove themselves to the “paranoid bigiots”?
And should I have to?
Or must you paint me with your broad brush?
Whatever one you want?
All we’re saying is that if you choose to align yourself with a group that contains a huge amount of misogynists, you only have yourself to blame when people think you’re a misogynist too.
Severely criticize the misogynists in public. Like here. Or, I must conclude, based on the evidence you provide, they support their misogyny.
Simple.
#48, next to last sentence:
th
eyat [you] support their misogyny.And thus it begins, the thousandth showing of the tragicomedy, “But I swear, I’m a GOOD Men’s Rights Activist!”. Also known as “#NotAllMen the Musical”.
I don’t know what you should call your movement, but I’d suggest avoiding “MRA”. The acronym is tainted. I’m sorry your label sucks, because there are real problems faced by men.
Here’s the good news: Feminism includes support for solving a lot of those problems. Efforts against toxic masculinity, gender stereotypes, rape culture, and the glass ceiling all serve to address issues like sentencing disparities and custody preferences by attacking the myths and attitudes they rely on.
The MRA movement has defined itself by its open warfare with feminism. Any positive version of a “men’s rights” movement would work in conjunction with feminism, not against it. Any movement which did that would not be the MRA movement.
@roadkoan
Can you point to the MRA organizations that are currently trying to address the issue that you linked about?
You are running into a problem that involves a part of how human psychology works, groups getting associated with things. At a basic level this is a neutral part of our psychology, the problems creep in when it comes to how people associate groups with things. It’s possible to sever a name from bad characteristics, but very very difficult. Once the public has made a connection it’s difficult to get it to change so I would suggest organizing under a different title and watching for people more interested in fighting feminism than helping men. Either way it is totally natural to be able to equate a group with kinds of behavior and what is important is to be able to do it rationally and logically.
For many years now this community has been exposed to “Men’s Rights Advocates” as people that are mostly interested in fighting feminism and feminists. With a very small number of exceptions they have been people of awful character, the sort that I would want expelled from the village hundreds of years ago (shunned at the very least). If a large enough number of men actively took back the title by actually doing advocacy for men’s issues I would consider that a good thing, so who are the people working on your issue?
@Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls #45
I can hardly believe my eyes.
I see you are giving me orders. That is unbelievable to me.
It almost makes me want to give you some, to see if you gallantly comply the way you expect me to.
And thinking I envied you for your paradoxical Wilde-esque “Show my wrong (…) In which case, you agree with us.” !
I see now that it was not intentional.
Sorry : I don’t owe you any proof of anything.
“Either criticize or shut the fuck up.” : this is Hollywood movie-grade-craziness. I am not sure you would accept being talked to like that.
“Now, either criticize the misogynists, or shut the fuck up. Your choice, and it is no joke. Your credibility is on the line.” : pots and kettles come to my mind. How is that for a criticism ?
In the words of Pr. Myers : “Have a fucking sense of perspective.” (See “Commenting Rules”)
And in mine : just try to be humane.
Good bye.
@Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought
You wrote earlier (#26) “You know what is curious? How these people who want to lecture PZ how he shouldn’t take collective blame for men rarely (or ever) appear in conversations that aren’t about feminism.”
I took it to be about me, however, I looked up the threads in which I have commented, and most of them are not about feminism. By far.
@damien75
This might be a bit rude, but are you non-neurotypical? Please understand that I am asking this as a person who is not neurotypical (Tourette’s Syndrome). I don’t feel group related emotions the same way that other people do and I’m curious if you are similarly different in that area. It seems to me that most people would understand that we feel group connections as human beings, but at different points you seem unaware of the ramifications of feeling a group connection in the text of what PZ wrote and I want to be charitable.
Acknowledgement you are nothing but a Tone Trolling Liar and Bullshitter. Thank you…
@Brony, Social Justice Cenobite #54
To start with, I do not find the question rude. I take questions well.
Yes I am non-neurotypical. I hope you deal the best way possible with your Tourette’s syndrome. My great-great-grand-father had that apparently (from my grandmother’s memories).
I have to say a crucial portion of what you wrote is obscure : “at different points you seem unaware of the ramifications of feeling a group connection in the text of what PZ wrote” I do not understand it.
You also wrote “I want to be charitable.” So do I, I try to understand what people mean, I assume they are sincere and I try not to be harsh.
Never have I felt as strongly as today the truth of Simon Baron-Cohen’s statement “The person with Asperger”s syndrome is to the ordinary person as the ordinary person to the psychopath.” (Quote from memory.)
I should not have written that last sentence about the Baron-Cohen quote. That was mean. I am sorry.
@damien75
I see.
As a person associated with the autism spectrum you are someone that I believe stands as a kind of “mirror-image” to myself when it comes to how our psychology works, so it’s important to know that we are experiencing this situation different.
We share things like sensory hypersensitivity and rule-based language enhancements. But I don’t think that the “kind” of things we are sensitive to and enhanced with respect to are the same. I wish I could get more specific than that. but these are things that are still being studied so I would take any challenge that you have seriously. I’m going to put more effort into you than I might other posters that appear here.
I apologize for the forthrightness that my text had, there is a social conflict context here and I can only do so much. When you said,
This is what set a frame in my mind for the following conversation I actually feel group emotions rather strongly so I feel it more when someone in my group does something wrong (I’ve spent a lot of time objectifying that ability so i can control it). I can understand PZ feeling what he says he does, and I can understand it if others feel less when it comes to group connections.
Before we go on, maybe I should let you respond. Because most of the time in comments like these we don’t take the non-neurotypical aspect in mind and I still feel like what PZ said is reasonable, but I want to know what you think first.
For some reason the links I posted are not working. Here are the raw links.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3740136/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25342962
I’m not so skilled with embedding as I wish I was.
“‘Enough said”? Never! There’s always hope!
https://features.wearemel.com/i-was-a-men-s-rights-activist-55a0d2eb6052#.9fyvtu796
And remember, “you create the world in which you live”. As I get older, I realize even more, just how true that is.
@Brony, Social Justice Cenobite #58
Well, not on everything, apparently. You are obviously a caring person.
Indeed I do have that.
That expression is new to me, but I guess, yes, that sounds right.
That is most interesting, and by that I mean that sets my heart racing and makes my eyes open wider, literally. My mind is excited.
I appreciate that, sincerely, but I am not asking for it except to the extent that I ask to be treated like I am a human being.
Please, do not apologise. You are straightforward and explicit, that is great. As a philosopher once said “There is no third option with honesty and integrity.” (I only see one option, in fact, I wonder what is the other.)
I think I know what you mean, but, come on, people who happen to have the same type of geniatalia as I have are not “my group”. In fact, that may be horrible to say, you may find I am an unreliable person, but anyone who acts really badly ceases instantly to belong to “my group”, except if they do it towards me in which case that exclusion mechanism does not work, for some reason, and I am just hurt a thousand times more.
No friend of mine can count on me to hide the body of a person they murdered. Not my group, instantly.
However, although I do not have that embarrassment problem, I have something similar to that with compassion. I feel pain “for” other people. There is no notion of “my group”, though.
I think I know what you mean. It sounds a lot like some things I have done.
Yes, so can I, to some extent, especially now that I have given it a lot of thought, because I was like that once. And that makes me sorry Pr. Myers, who I would never dare call “PZ”, has to experience these feelings, because it is simply horrible. However, a comment by Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought suggests there may be a certain amount of hyperbole to what he wrote.
I have not read the articles entirely yet. Right now, I have things to do, but I will. Also I doubt anyone but us is interested in that conversation. We might continue it elsewhere.
If I gave you the impression that I thought it unreasonable to express feelings of distress, that is not what I meant. I sort of said it is unreasonable to feel them, but that is being shallow. I think it is not reasonable to consider it legitimate to be embarrassed by the actions of other people that you have no responsibility in, people you do not know the least in the world, because you happen to share some traits like a Y chromosome.
But maybe there is nothing Pr. Myers can do about these feelings, and no amount of objectifying it will do the trick with him. I have a phobia of a certain type of animals, and no amount of reasoning ever weakened it. If that is the way it is for him, well, that is sad.
Over and over Pr. Myers gave me the impression of being a genuinely intelligent person. That probably contributed in giving me the idea that he would be able to brush off that kind of feelings with the application of the right amount of thinking, but things may not be that simple.
@damien75
Since you have felt that way in the past is that hyperbole of your own? If so I guess the non-neurotypical issue is irrelevant. I thought that you were being literal when you said you could not understand, and while the expression of these things might be affected in either of us it does not appear to matter at this point. You don’t have to read the articles, I just pointed to them as a means to show that if the issue was relevant I understood some of it (I think it’s a matter of intereoception in TS and exteroception on the austim spectrum).
Feeling that one is a part of a group (men, male people, other ways of organizing ourselves…) is a matter of human instinct and psychology (with variable presentation in the population). It’s not just hyperbole on PZ’s part, it’s rhetoric as well. These are feelings that we can call to mind in one another and use when making appeals to the group.
That he did not do the things does not matter to how the instincts and emotion are being used, it’s about what people who call themselves “guys”, “male” or “men” should avoid doing. This is about attempts to regulate group behavior, something that we do as a matter of course. I feel similar emotional negativity and I would not want that feeling to disappear. That would not be part of controlling it because it is a tool that we use. The feeling it part of the tool, what we do in response to the feeling is where the control lies and PZ seems to be in control to me.
If you don’t want to feel this way and stopped for whatever reason that is something that I don’t find to be a problem and would not think of you as unreliable. People should have the freedom to choose group identification. But you want us to stop. Why should we stop using a group identification that is still useful to us? It’s even useful to non-male people because it’s about social emotions and communicating things. That might seem to be shallow, but the emotional component of speech is useful and using what is there seems to be intelligent to me. It gets more useful when one can switch to multiple ways of persuading individuals and groups.
I can’t so easily feel that terrible people are not in my group, it’s part of how I am motivated to improve society and you clearly motivate yourself in a different way and I think that is fine. This is what would be expected of a society with lots of kinds of people.
@damien75
If you wish to discuss the articles or anything involving how things like TS, aspergers and other things might relate to things feel free to do so in the comments on my blog. This article might be a place with relevant themes.
https://inchoatepsyche.wordpress.com/2015/07/06/cognitive-enhancements-and-mental-conditions-1-the-negative-medical-bias-problem/
Perfect. But since this thread follows a post dealing with embarrassment and sexism : one article relies on the “Ariana Effect”. I wonder why Ariana Jane Black (presumably a woman) is not elevated to the rank of a person and why the effect is not named after her last name.
What do you mean ?
I was.
I will explain briefly with two things : a chronology and an analogy.
– I was being literal when I said I did not understand, then of course I kept thinking about it and the fact that I was once like that, when I was a child, came back to me.
– When I was a child, I was embarrassed watching actors kiss on TV, it was to the point I wished I were in another room. Not anymore. It is so far from me now that I had to dig in my memories to find that example. I had almost forgotten the fact.
I don’t. I didn’t say I wanted people to stop identifying to a group. I didn’t imply it.
In some way, I have group identification. Let’s say I identify to the group of decent people. If my best friend in the world turns into Ted Bundy, he does not belong.
@damien75
What do you mean that they are not elevated to the rank of a person? The “Ariana Effect” follows a common convention similar to “Asperger’s Syndrome” or “Tourette’s Syndrome”. It’s of a kind with the tendency for things to be named after people from buildings to phenomena. Could you point out what you are seeing with respect to sexism and embarassment?
1) Since I noticed that you said that you did not understand and expressed what seemed like astonishment that people would feel group connections they way PZ and others here do I made the connection to a potential neurodiversity connection.
2) After you started talking about feeling similarly in the past that suggested that you were using “I don’t understand” in a more rhetorical fashion.
Now that you have mentioned your introspective process I think I see what is happening now. You do understand based on past experience, but what I was originally responding to is no longer relevant in the same way. How much it has to do with neurodiversity and how we are individually interacting with the issues here is hard to say, but it is probably relevant. I would also be affected by how I do group connections and any way that it effects you would also potentially affect me in same or opposite fashion. I see these things as science breaking down what “normal” really is and these issues will matter more and more.
Bias is always a factor and what matters is how we are individually aware of them and and how we deal with them. I know my psychology affects my biases and try to account for that.
I have similar memories, and I still feel the same sensations now like many other people. It’s a fundamental part of how our social memory/emotion processes work (among many parts) and I find the fact that there are people who work differently unsurprising. In my view it’s a feature of human society that there is diversity in how we are individually sensitive to the group and what it believes, thinks and does. Such diversity would tend to let the group settle on best solutions in the long run even if some individuals might be pulled in less relevant or useful directions.
That was a mistake. You seem to find they way we are sensitive to the group troubling, and that implies that the troubling thing is problematic hence my assumption about you wanting us to stop, in some ultimate sense if nothing else (we tend to want problematic things to no longer be problematic). I’m more focused on how and why the group identification occurs and it seems that how we are identifying with groups is problematic to you.
I think that we need to get more specific about the kinds of groups we are talking about. Human psychology is very diverse in how we conceptualize and identify with groups. Part of that involves some groups and ways of defining groups having more meaning to individuals. We can categorize by many features from physical characteristics(male, female, color…), to beliefs (religion, lack of religion, philosophy…), to ways of thinking (skeptics…), to ways of acting and communicating (sexists, racists, benefactors, protectors…).
But just because Ted Bundy does something terrible does not mean they are no longer in my group, and feeling like they are in my group in some sense is part of how I am motivated to work on social problems (a fellow human being of a kind that we need to understand for their sake and ours at the very least).
Better?
What I mean is that “Ariana” is not (i assume) Ariana Jane Black’s last name. Unless it is as is Kim for Kim Jong Un, but it seems unlikely. However, the authors use a nylon thread, and I understand now that when they write “Ariana effect” they are making a clever reference.
To me the Ted Bundy’s are still in my group in the sense that they are human beings and I am one too, however, is someone I considered close to me turns out to be a Ted Bundy, he moves to another group instantly. He does not become a source of embarrassment, he becomes yet another example of what I am against.
Yes.
You are too selective. You need to be embarrassed by bad behavior in others, so you don’t do it yourself. Your argument isn’t very good or persuasive.
@damien75
But what does that look like when one looks at the patterns in the convention as a whole, and did you look at that before suggesting that this is sexism?
Don’t get me wrong, this may actually be a form of sexism that I was previously unaware of depending on how the naming was done, who actually did the naming and how this compares with the convention as a whole. But if you don’t know how it fits in, why make the suggestion? (unless you do know, you did not indicate)
Also some people consider their first name more personal than their last name which is the family name. I can even see how a woman might prefer their personal name to their family name because that singles them out more as an individual, again this is subject to the reality.
But Ted Bundy is not a “what”, they are a “who”, the “what” involves characteristics below the level of whole person. Serial killers are made by society and their choices just as everyone else is. Despite the fact that they need to be dealt with because of the reality of what they did, they are still in our group. It’s ok to remove people from some of our group definitions, but which ones that we keep them in and which ones we remove them from determine what we believe and do when it comes to them.
What would you do with people like Ted Bundy, and men like the ones portrayed in the post? How do you use the way you group-identify to take actions that fix problem?
This is about how we feel we need to actively group other people in a social situation, or how we feel about how others actively group other people depending on the group in question. People are sensitive to active and passive group identification as separate things (that sort of processing is very relevant to trans related issues for example). So seeing the active group-inclusion of people engaging in bad behavior bothers you, even if that group inclusion is being used for the purposes of social communication to encourage people to look at the behavior (which is a “what”) as unacceptable within the group.
I would feel no need to actively exclude Ted Bundy from any groups, nor would I feel the need to actively rule them or men behaving badly from my group except when group is defined by the problematic behavior. Since I’m not in the serial killer group or the group of people the expect sex as a social obligation, I feel the inclusion of them in my group (men, male) as a good thing because I use that group identification to communicate about bad behavior. It’s how the negative emotions of the bad behavior are actively transformed and dealt with.
I accept that you feel negatively about seeing us feel negative about people we consider to be in our group (and that is a neutral thing in general), but what harm do you think it causes? I see good in it because being able to regulate one another behavior is important. What do you think the alternative should be?
Please understand I’m not trying to judge any differences between us in how our group-sensitivities work as far as how they are generally arranged (whether the specifics are relevant to neurodiversity or not). I see your own way of grouping as just as important on a general human level. I’m sure my own group categorization priorities and preferences have advantages, disadvantages and different needs to be implemented rationally and logically. There will be places where your preferences and priorities will be more reasonable and logical.
I did not look at the patterns in the convention except insofar as I have seen some “effects” named after people, I have memorised some of these effects’ names and I have memorised a pattern.
To give an analogy, when I make a sentence, I do not look up the grammar each time except insofar as I have memorised some grammar examples and rules.
I am not aware that naming effects after a person’s first name (the person being the discoverer of the effect, the person who formulated it or the person who proved the effect exists) is done. I do not find any example of that. If you say that it is done, I am interested in learning it.
Presumably Ariana is Ariana Jane Black’s first name and presumably that person is a woman. Before it dawned on me that naming the effect the Ariana effect was a reference to the classical myth , I had the impression that the authors of the article were dealing with her as she was not good enough to be referred to by her last name.
Turns out that, in all likelihood, I was wrong. As it happens, I am sensitive on issues of respect granting in the way people are called.
I don’t, but maybe it was her choice.
Among all the entities that I oppose, there are some people and some behaviours. The “what”, which may well be ungrammatical, referred to the whole set of entities I am against. Should I not, in that case, use “what” ?
Ted Bundy was a human being, he had to be treated accordingly. He belonged to the group of human beings, but not to the group of the decent ones.
I do not directly use the way I group identify to take actions that fix problems. However, not feeling embarrassed for all the Lynndie Englands of the world saves me some energy, which I can use to take action.
I stop there for now, but I will complete that answer later on.
I understand that. It can also be done differently, for instance, I can say “This is unacceptable behaviour. It is immoral, it fosters pain, people reading this, do not act like that.”
What is neutral ?
Well, it seems to me that causes harm to the person doing it. It seems to me to be pointless suffering. But also, maybe you have no leverage on that.
Still, you did notice that there was a difference from what we typically see in naming phenomena after people and that is fine by itself. The paper does not indicate who Ariana Jane Black is and some google and pubmed searching does not turn up anything.
Naming conventions in science is an interesting area, but it can get tricky to figure out because individual named fields of study, or even groups using the same model organism can have their own rules and some are more strict than others. For example naming fly mutants has been notoriously unrestricted and one group with mutants that prevented development of sex organs named them “Ken” and “Barbie”named them “Ken” and “Barbie”. It’s a valid question if anything in this is socially problematic.
As for the naming of an effect in psychology and people, I could not find any explicit rules but there is this. While there are many last names in effects, there are some first names and it’s hard to figure out what is going on with the information I could find.
The simplest explanation that I can think of is that this person is related to the author Kevin J. Black and that simply calling it “the Black effect” does not single out the person who really gave them the insight that led to the experimental approach.There is nothing wrong with that sensitivity in general, it’s benefitted our species and I personally would not be surprised to find social biases in naming conventions regardless of the nature of this one. I’m tempted to email the author of the paper now just to understand the reality better. In a later paper where they refined the protocol they did not call it the “Arianna effect”.
This one will be long, but I’m not sure how to avoid that because I need to explain a lot about how I see these things.
I’m fine with technical violations of language in general, our language evolves and often breaking a convention gets someone’s meaning across better and identifying “all the things” and “all the ways the things can be described/used” will probably involve breaking what we do now and creating new conventions.
Not all of this is going to apply to how I feel about you, but I need to get more general to adequately explain. The problem as I see it as a person who chooses to fight against irrational and illogical biases (as opposed to the reasonable and logical ones in sound decision making/impulsive reactions) is that people are very sloppy about how they think and feel about someone not in their group. I’m sure I have problems in my ways and means of mentally categorizing people because I keep finding them and so I keep updating how I categorize people because that is something we are going to do. The people I tend to react to the strongest are the ones that functionally render other human being objects in how they speak about them in a social context. Racists, sexists, misogynists, LGBTphobes and similar.
If this next part seems a little pedantic bear in mind that I see our language as intimately involved with what empathy is and creating/destroying it, I see a division between individual and social aspects to language, and both of those are intimately involved in what I think of as “social flocking”, the creation of impulsive reactions in social situations. Hitler was able to do what he did when it came to social persuasion for reasons and those reasons will be basic features of psychology that apply to all of us. Because I’m interested in opposing behaviors that cause bigoted behavior it’s as useful to think of how you are like terrible people as you are not like them because you have to be able to get used to the universal parts of our social software.
Parts of our language are meant to create personal bonds and while we are all technically a [what], we use the word [who] as a special kind of [what]. It proactively makes it a [what]+[ like me], a thing with real psychological significance. When a social conflict is occurring people tend to police language in areas related to the conflict. While I don’t know if you as a [who] are in the set of people displaying the [what]=[racism/sexiam/mysogyny/LGBTphobia…], it’s a warning sign because those people have a very strong tendency to treat other people as objects (analogical to sexual objectification). That is something that can reasonably be pursued in a conversation.
Now the fact that you want to put a serial killer in the [what] instead of [who] is not actually something that would make me personally wonder about you and [what]=bigotry, it’s merely a convenient way of getting at something more general. But it is an example of the same sort of mental categorizing that bigots use to make people [what]+[not like me]* in destructive ways. In your case I think that is not appropriate because the [not like me]=serial killing is categorically different from [what]=male person who thinks they are owed sex which is the context of the conversation. It implies the possibility that you might want to treat serial killers and people who think they are owed sex the same. I don’t personally think that is the case, but given the context it is a reasonable assumption that someone could make, especially in a community that is concerned about bigoted thought. Sloppy? Sure. But sloppy in a way that is hard to judge in social appeals given the language we have and how it works in a social conflict.
*This is tangential but it’s important to consider defaults in the case of +[not like me] and +[like me]. I present them as added information but I’m unsure if human beings have either them as a matter of being a “blank slate”.
But you do, unless I missed something. The fact that people here included themselves in a sex/gender based group that contained people engaging in bad behavior motivated you to criticize that behavior. You saw a problem that implicitly involved group identification and acted though communication.
Sure, it can be done differently, but what matters is can it be done differently and is that alternative specifically useful to this situation? One problem that this community faces is lots of suggestions that it find different ways of doing things (fighting rape or sexual harassment for example), but those suggestions mostly remain abstract and the person doing the suggestion rarely makes it concrete and useful. It actually becomes an oppressive social force when enough individuals who are paranoid about how we are acting do this and significant enough to be considered a social conflict strategy so it’s not likely that you will change any minds here without something as effective.
Given the fact that manipulation of group references is an effective means of adjusting the emotional impact of social messages, what alternative would you propose that is as emotionally effective?
Neutral in the sense of it being a phenomena that can be used for good or bad and is ultimately useful for our species.
I don’t think that it causes harm to [who]= people rhetorically including themselves in the group male/men/guys for the purposes of criticizing other [who]=male people/men/guys. The purpose is to arouse negative feelings about the behavior in other males/men/guys. But this would be very subjective and I can imagine that some male people/men/guys might feel so strongly about the behavior in other male people/men/guys that it could be classified as harm, but again what does that harm look like in specifics, and does it outweigh the harm that might be felt about creationists teaching ideas that lead to harmful actions (like bad decisions in school board meetings)?
I looked up the list. I checked the origin of the name of an effect only when the name was a plausible first name. I found
– the Matthew effect, after Matthew the disciple of Jesus, another reference to mythology ;
– the Pygmalion effect, after the myth of Pygmalion.
Did it still involve a thread ?
No, no, you’re getting me wrong. I only used “what” in my sentence about Bundy because I oppose certain people and a number of things, behaviours, beliefs, and so on. I assumed that to refer to the members of the set that contains the entities I oppose, I had to use “what”.
To give you an example :
Isis warriors are people who I fear. Cancer is a disease that I fear. Isis warriors and cancer axe examples of what I fear. Maybe it is ungrammatical.
They are not the same. They should be treated differently. I used Ted Bundy to give sharp example. Note that I didn’t write about the real (and late) Ted Bundy. Instead I imagined my best friend turning out to be some sort of new Ted Bundy. The idea was to use a character whom I have group identification with, my best friend, to explain how group identification is modified : still a human, but not close at all anymore.
One underlying idea is : if someone is going to be embarrassed by people who think sex is owed to them because of a date, how much more should that person be embarrassed by the Ted Bundys or Gengis Khans of the world.
Well, I do not to the point that I feel embarrassed. I don’t feel embarrassed for Lynndie England. An I think her behaviour should be prevented even if she was a robot on the loose.
Dos “this community” refer to the readers of Pharyngula, or do you mean a wider community ?
If saying “I feel embarrassed” is effective, by all means, go with it. If feeling embarrassed is effective, by all means, go with it. If you do not feel embarrassed to the point that it takes a significant amount of your energy away from you, so much the better.
My point was not to propose anything in terms of fighting rape or sexual harassment. I would not dare. I am sure these things have been given a lot of thought by others, there must be some sort of current state of the knowledge in that field that I do not have.
When I write
it is not a piece of advice. It is an example of what I can do.
I do not know more than you do. You seem to think that the “I feel embarrassed” strategy is effective. It is not obvious to me that it is. Before we had this conversation, I had no idea that writing “I feel embarrassed” was some sort of tool, a weapon, if I may say (he word is a bit strong), in order to fight the behaviours described below in the post.
I would like to thank you for this conversation, it is very interesting and enlightening.