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The Misandry thread

I don't care about that 'relative' line of argument.
I do care, however, about equality. It's something that cuts both ways.
That's why I think that replacing one form of bigotry with another is never a good idea.
It's pretty clear that Bahar Mustafa doesn't have the right attitude to do the job of Diversity Officer.
 
I do care, however, about equality. It's something that cuts both ways.

Yes, but if equality is the only thing in the equation then we begin to approach Anatole France and his line about the majesty of the law forbidding both rich and poor alike to sleep beneath bridges. Some people have more options available to them than others do.
 
Oh, and as for her comments:

Men – be honest. Have you ever found yourself walking home at night, and been stopped in the street by a woman masturbating at you?

No. But then, I don't go out that much at all. And if I do, I drive.

Or has a woman ever followed you down the street, while shouting that she wants to “shag” you?

Yes - once. It was weird. I think she was on drugs.

Likewise, white people: has someone ever followed you around a shop suspiciously?

Yes. I was in John Lewis in Peterborough, looking at shirts. The security guy followed me about, then talked loudly on his radio about a 'large individual'. In the end, he went away.

Have the police ever stopped and searched you for no reason?

Yes. Early one morning, I was sitting outside Bracknell library when 2 police officers approached me and asked why I was sitting there. I explained that it was the only seat in the town centre where I could sit out of the rain.
On another occasion years later, police just stopped me in my car and asked to search the boot. I complied, then went on my way.

Has someone shouted a racial slur at you, or treated you as somehow inferior to them because of your race?

Yes. 'What you doing here, whitey?' was the hostile response when I went in a blues club in Sheffield.
'What're you doing hanging around with this white kafir, man?' - question asked of my Asian friend by one of his brothers.
On another occasion, while out walking across Peterborough to the cinema, I encountered 2 young Asian muslims (probably Pakistani, although I didn't stick around to check). One swore at me in a non-English language and spat on the ground at my feet. The other one held him back and told him off. I didn't stick around.
On another occasion, I walked past what looked like a mosque or Asian temple in Peterborough. I looked at it as I walked past, admiring the architecture. A young Asian man lurking nearby shouted at me and told me to go away, as this was their part of town. Really? I didn't see the signs saying 'This is Asian territory - stay out'.
 
Yes, but if equality is the only thing in the equation then we begin to approach Anatole France and his line about the majesty of the law forbidding both rich and poor alike to sleep beneath bridges. Some people have more options available to them than others do.
Not sure I understand fully.
 
Not sure I understand fully.
Yes, sorry, that was pretty gnomic of me. I suppose I'm groping blindly towards the idea that treating everyone equally, without fear or favour, is a laudable aim, but if the treatment is to be truly equal then it must happen on a level playing field, and I'm not sure we've achieved the latter quite yet. There are plenty of people still playing uphill into the wind.
 
If all people treat other people equally, then eventually we will achieve a level playing field.
We have to believe it to make it so.
 
Eventually, perhaps. But clearly some people are fed up waiting, and are no longer content with asking nicely. How much genuine change has been brought about through a simple polite request? I'll wager not much.

Now we're clearly in a better place today than say Montgomery in the 1950s, and you could argue that being a student in London is actually a pretty cushy position. But, while I don't want to speak for the individual concerned, I wouldn't be surprised if she was consciously adopting that posture.
 
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If you're saying that to get your point across, you have to go up to someone and (metaphorically) jab them in the eye...well, that doesn't work if they simply close their eyes.
There are many people who won't see logic and agree with a reasonable viewpoint. You can't force them to agree, if they aren't following your line of logic.
 
Yes. 'What you doing here, whitey?' was the hostile response when I went in a blues club in Sheffield.
'What're you doing hanging around with this white kafir, man?' - question asked of my Asian friend by one of his brothers.
On another occasion, while out walking across Peterborough to the cinema, I encountered 2 young Asian muslims (probably Pakistani, although I didn't stick around to check). One swore at me in a non-English language and spat on the ground at my feet. The other one held him back and told him off. I didn't stick around.
On another occasion, I walked past what looked like a mosque or Asian temple in Peterborough. I looked at it as I walked past, admiring the architecture. A young Asian man lurking nearby shouted at me and told me to go away, as this was their part of town. Really? I didn't see the signs saying 'This is Asian territory - stay out'.

I expect that's got more to do with those individuals being arseholes than them being Asian (Not suggesting your racist or anything) .... I've found it's mostly Asian youth who are arseholes myself although obviously not all of them, just in what we called 'front line' areas, areas that are already deprived, urban slang.

One of my ex- girlfriend's brother was held against a wall in Birmingham and whipped with a rubber hose pipe on his back by some kids. The family later moved to Tamworth to avoid these kid gangs. A few days after 9/11, I was walking down a street in a rougher part of Burton on Trent when a group of Asian kids that looked about 6 or 7 ran up to me asking me what I thought about "King Obama" .. I'd already spotted the car full of the big brothers parked up the street so I said "I don't know, I've never met him" which stumped the kids. Then the car pulled up, I was looked at with suspicion and the kids were asked if I was bothering them. They all said something along the lines of no everything's OK and I got a few smiles .... and no kicking ..
 
I expect that's got more to do with those individuals being arseholes than them being Asian (Not suggesting your racist or anything) .... I've found it's mostly Asian youth who are arseholes myself although obviously not all of them, just in what we called 'front line' areas, areas that are already deprived, urban slang.
Yeah, they all had one thing in common - they were young guys. I did nothing to deserve it, other than being there.
 
If you're saying that to get your point across, you have to go up to someone and (metaphorically) jab them in the eye...well, that doesn't work if they simply close their eyes.
Hmm, a hard enough poke in the eye will be felt whether or not the eyelid is closed. Having said that, you might get someone's attention by doing so, but you're unlikely to get them onside. Of course, if you've got to the stage of having to poke them in the eye in the first place, you probably feel you don't have much to lose.
There are many people who won't see logic and agree with a reasonable viewpoint. You can't force them to agree, if they aren't following your line of logic.
So what do you do?
 
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

Accept that humans will never be perfected and do your best to encourage the best of which each individual is capable. Rules and regulations breed reluctant compliance at best; sneering and accusations engender resentment which will bubble to the surface again; it's better to cajole and covert in a conciliatory manner than yell and point. Only the most egregious sinners are so wretched that it's best to condemn and ostracise.
 
On the subject of the silly Max Benwell article, of course most men realise the hashtag was an ironic 'in-joke' and I think most wouldn't have a problem per se with an event barring white men (I wouldn't-why on earth would we want to go to an event like this anyway?).

It is a matter of approach. The hashtag is insensitive, wrong-headed, and when looked at literally, is racist and sexist. Bahar's attitude is hateful and antagonistic (see the photo posted earlier; a picture really does paint a thousand words). Her rebuttal to the media contained no soothing apologies or explanations, just bald defiance. And I'll wager she'll keep her job, because the nutbags who employ her will be cut from the same cloth as she is. There is a growing realization that the 'diversity industry' running rampant in HE is a cover for something a lot more malevolent, and this incident offers a quick peek behind the door.

Universities are the most cloistered, left-wing places a young woman can be. I sincerely doubt most suffer the sexist indignities Bahar claims they do on a regular basis. In comparison with some (for example a downtrodden wife on a sink estate), they live in a very, very different world. So why so much of the anger and hatred?
 
Universities are the most cloistered, left-wing places a young woman can be. I sincerely doubt most suffer the sexist indignities Bahar claims they do on a regular basis. In comparison with some (for example a downtrodden wife on a sink estate), they live in a very, very different world. So why so much of the anger and hatred?

Because oppression has become a competitive sport, and in leftie lala land no one is allowed to have an opinion on anything unless they have personally been oppressed in some way. This leads to patent nonsense being accepted as fact - eg so-called statistics on campus sexual assaults which would appear to show that women are more likely to be raped in American universities than in the Congo.
 
And the fact that you can be 'raped', when neither the victim nor the alleged rapist consider a crime to have happened.
 
I've had a young lady flash her tits at me in the street. I was in my school uniform at the time. And a black gentleman in a high viz jacket once made a peculiar jibbering noise at me. It was kind of like "Mhhhwo waaa waaa woooooooh!". Not sure if it was racially motivated or if he was just feeling very happy.
 
I expect that's got more to do with those individuals being arseholes than them being Asian (Not suggesting your racist or anything) .... I've found it's mostly Asian youth who are arseholes myself although obviously not all of them, just in what we called 'front line' areas, areas that are already deprived, urban slang.

One of my ex- girlfriend's brother was held against a wall in Birmingham and whipped with a rubber hose pipe on his back by some kids. The family later moved to Tamworth to avoid these kid gangs. A few days after 9/11, I was walking down a street in a rougher part of Burton on Trent when a group of Asian kids that looked about 6 or 7 ran up to me asking me what I thought about "King Obama" .. I'd already spotted the car full of the big brothers parked up the street so I said "I don't know, I've never met him" which stumped the kids. Then the car pulled up, I was looked at with suspicion and the kids were asked if I was bothering them. They all said something along the lines of no everything's OK and I got a few smiles .... and no kicking ..

Of course the majority of people who are a-holes are that way not because of their race, religion, or sexual orientation - often they are just plain a-holes.

Equality in law and equal opportunity are something that society has striven for, and rightly, but 'equality' in the sense that some people use it becomes an absurdity.What are you going to do - force women to become coal miners because they are almost all men? There simply are some jobs that most women wouldn't want to do, and a few that most men wouldn't want to do either, so assuming that all jobs must be split fifty-fifty between the sexes is basically silly. And victimising women (and the occasional man) who wants to stop home and bring up their kids properly strikes me as one of the more absurd consequences of over-doing the idea of 'equality'. But on the other hand I have (successfully) fought to keep on women who do want to carry on working while pregnant and looking after infants.

(This was in CT, which at the time was an 'at will' state regarding employment, so you could simply sack a woman who became pregnant. Being from the UK, I was astonished that such a state of affairs could exist, but also I didn't want to lose one of my best programmers and one of my best technical document writers, so there was some self-interest involved too)
 
And a black gentleman in a high viz jacket once made a peculiar jibbering noise at me. It was kind of like "Mhhhwo waaa waaa woooooooh!". Not sure if it was racially motivated or if he was just feeling very happy.
Sounds like you've met Biz Markie. :cool:
 
Why I Created The #UnfollowAMan Movement
I’ve been man-free on Twitter for six months and you can be too. I mean, it can’t make Twitter any worse at this point, right?

posted on Jul. 29, 2014, at 7:42 p.m.

Katie Notopoulos

BuzzFeed News Reporter
#UnfollowAMan is the hottest new movement on Twitter. Everyone loves it and is really happy about it. The idea is to empower you to find a man on your Twitter feed who has been kind of driving you nuts with his bad opinions, and unfollow his ass.

Many people have found that unfollowing men is like Pringles — you can’t unfollow just one!

Oldie but goodie

It is of course okay to have a different opinion if you're a woman. Oh what am I saying of course it isn't.
 
There's a bratty, look-at-me, consciously provocative quality about this kind of stuff that leads me to suspect that it's all just a modern-dress form of the usual billing and cooing that goes on between the sexes. `Don't think you're worthy of me, you cads and bounders!`

It works for them too.

I knew some purported man-hater types back in the early nineties: they went on to get married to rich Alpha Male men, whereas the kind of `nice guy` boys who took their pose literally, and tried to accommodate it, were left behind.

It reminds me a bit of the Spice Girls too: all that brash `Girl Power` stuff, and then they went on to marry... footballers!
 
I got into a brief internet argument when a friend posted something about being supporting "equality for all women".

Being egalitarian, I couldn't resist saying that I'm only for equality for all people. This started a tremendous pissing match between myself and several other of his friends who told me all about how "equality for women" somehow supports equality for everybody.

The meat of the argument was that, as near as I could tell, I was a bad person for suggesting "equality for everyone" because that somehow took something away from women. I'd be a bad person for suggesting "equality for men", because that would make me a hypocrite at the very least. But, somehow, magically, adding "...for women" suddenly meant "equality for everyone" and I should shut up and be happy about it.

Originally, I was just being a smartass, but they've got me thinking that their chosen phrase is quite Orwellian....
 
On the subject of the silly Max Benwell article, of course most men realise the hashtag was an ironic 'in-joke' and I think most wouldn't have a problem per se with an event barring white men (I wouldn't-why on earth would we want to go to an event like this anyway?).

It is a matter of approach. The hashtag is insensitive, wrong-headed, and when looked at literally, is racist and sexist. Bahar's attitude is hateful and antagonistic (see the photo posted earlier; a picture really does paint a thousand words). Her rebuttal to the media contained no soothing apologies or explanations, just bald defiance. And I'll wager she'll keep her job, because the nutbags who employ her will be cut from the same cloth as she is. There is a growing realization that the 'diversity industry' running rampant in HE is a cover for something a lot more malevolent, and this incident offers a quick peek behind the door.

There's such a disconnect here, though. To take another high-profile figure, Jeremy Clarkson makes a nudge-nudge wink-wink joke about a "slope" on a bridge which you have to look at in quite a convoluted way not to see as racist, and yet it's laughed off. Did he apologise for that incident? I suppose there was a mealy-mouthed attempt when he used the N word a little later on. It's not as though his public persona exactly conveys kindness and reconciliation. More like curly haired defiance (as opposed to bald). But people were signing petitions for him to keep his job when he crossed the line one time too often. So why can he say and do stuff like that and retain the apparent love of the nation while Ms. Mustafa is seemingly public enemy number one all of a sudden? At any rate, people are signing petitions for her to lose her job. As DrBastard asks, why so much of the anger and hatred?
 
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I should think because of the two, only one of them is supposed to be an example to others and take the moral high ground.
 
I should think because of the two, only one of them is supposed to be an example to others and take the moral high ground.

So engaging in overt racism and hitting folk is acceptable behaviour then, provided you're not a diversity officer? (And that's not taking into account the reach someone might have if they present a prime-time TV show and write a newspaper column.) I still maintain there are double standards at work here.
 
No but Clarkson was running a TV program about cars, not an anti-hitting-people campaign.
 
So engaging in overt racism and hitting folk is acceptable behaviour then, provided you're not a diversity officer? (And that's not taking into account the reach someone might have if they present a prime-time TV show and write a newspaper column.) I still maintain there are double standards at work here.
Of the two cases - which one seems to be most 'in yer face' and confrontational?
 
No but Clarkson was running a TV program about cars, not an anti-hitting-people campaign.

That doesn't absolve him from adhering to normal standards of behaviour in the workplace. Most people would have been out on their ear on the first offence.
 
Of the two cases - which one seems to be most 'in yer face' and confrontational?

Actually, broadcasting a racist remark to around 5 million people (I've only googled the ratings in a cursory manner) seems pretty confrontational to me.
 
Yes, Clarkson messed up but in a way unrelated to his job. This Mustafa-woman specifically fails in her duties.
 
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