Deconstructing Misogyny

I recently ended an online dialogue with a forty four year old man from South Dakota. The man saw my profile on a website for which I write and decided that I was the ideal candidate for some intellectual correspondence. Always willing to meet new people, and trying to keep an open mind, I agreed, and we began exchanging emails. We shared a little info, keeping it vague, and it looked like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.


And then I got a shot of reality.


‘Jess’ sends me an email stating, in response to my mention that I had studied martial arts, that no matter what training I got, I didn’t stand a chance against a man in a violent situation because ‘I’m just a woman’. I realize this little rant may seem redundant after my discussion of Egalitarianism, but it avoided the bigger problem by hiding under the banner of philosophical discourse. His statement revealed the bigger problem, which is that despite societal advances in the status of women, women are being discriminated against every day.


When I first saw his response, I got mad.


It was the exact same bullshit told to me by my friend Gabriel, and my own grandfather, all of whom consider themselves to be gentlemen.


It is the argument that no matter how much training a woman has, she still needs a ‘gentleman’, a man who will protect her, because she is not built for combat. It is the argument that in the face of an event where fighters are needed, women are useless because they don’t stand a chance in the face of and I quote the dickwad from South Dakota here, “genetic superiority”. It is the argument that defense training for women is useless, because no matter the training, it doesn’t level the playing field because we’re still weak.


When I finally stopped twitching and put away my Lorena Bobbitt Butcher knife, I got to thinking.


What do men possibly hope to accomplish by constantly reminding women that we’re physically weaker than men? Do they think we don’t know? Of course we do. The second the sports teams and athletic competitions got divided by gender in school, we women figured it out. It’s not rocket science, and with the exception of Paris Hilton, we’re not stupid. So why the fuck do men feel the need to remind us that they have bigger muscles?


I went to an objective source, and he made one point shockingly clear.


Condescension, the practice by which one assumes the role of a parent, teacher or other dominant figure in order to try and make the individual one is dealing with appear lower than themselves, is the last retreat of someone painfully aware of, and insecure about, their own incompetence. Furthermore, musculature is a pretty pathetic base from which to argue male superiority.


There are thousands of factors that balance the scales in the opposite direction.

Harvard-affiliated gynecologist Ruth Fretts, and Thomas Perls, a geriatrician with Harvard Medical School studied a hundred people age 100 and over and found that eighty five of them were women. A lot of men making the ‘But You’re Still Weak’ argument will claim that the reason women live longer is because they work less, have less dangerous jobs, and thus avoid employment related health risks. The “But You’re Still Weak” people (I’d normally say males but given that there are self hating women who actually believe this shit, I’m covering all the bases) argue that with the increased numbers of women entering the work force and joining the ranks of dangerous professions, this gap in life span is closing.


According to Fretts and Perls, this is not the case. Women live longer thanks to one irreversible and infinitely inevitable factor: genetics.


Menopause, according to their research cited in “Why Women Live Longer” in the Harvard Gazette, prolongs women’s lives by freeing them from the health risks associated with childbirth, allowing them to live long enough to take care of their children and grandchildren.

Testosterone, the very hormone that men laud as the secret to their masculinity and the bigger muscles that allegedly make them superior is the very thing that is cutting their lives so short. According to Fretts and Perls, Testosterone causes reckless and violent behavior in men and boosts the levels of harmful cholesterol, thus increasing their chances of heart disease and stroke. Furthermore, due to the Testosterone storm men experience during puberty, males aged 15-24 are four times more likely than women to die in car accidents, homicide, suicide, cancer, and drowning.


Human males, as it turns out, are biologically programmed to live only as long as required to spread a few seeds around, passing on their genetic material to their daughters. Human females, however, are programmed to live longer because it is their responsibility to ensure that their offspring survive. If you want to oversimplify, men are only as good as the sperm they supply, and are virtually useless thereafter.


It was recently pointed out to me by a guest lecturer at McGill’s Faculty of Medicine that the ratios of men to women in med school have shifted. The once ever sacred field of medical practice has now opened and become more egalitarian. According to said lecturer, sixty percent of med students are now women. He said that this was because people are more comfortable being cared for and treated by a woman, the eternal symbol of nurturing care.


It’s not just in the field of Medicine that women are starting to dominate. According to US News, nearly half of all Law Students are now women.


These ever sacred professions in which women were excluded due their alleged weakness are now opening up. Society is coming to its senses and realizing that this notion of male genetic superiority is bullshit. As a result, sexist pigs everywhere are shitting their pants in fear. They are beginning to realize that unless they are stupendously wealthy, nothing is going to be handed to them on a silver platter anymore just because they are male. They clean the shit out of their pants with one hand and with the other they grasp at something, ANYTHING to put women down. The fact that the best they can do is point to our smaller muscles is pretty pathetic.

But if these idiots insist on a direct refutation of their ridiculous claims, I’ll give a few. A lot of martial arts, such as Jujitsu and Aikido, were designed for the express purpose of allowing someone with a smaller build and weaker musculature to attack and win. I have heard big strong men tell me that in a tense situation, they’d rather have a woman with training on their side than a man without. Furthermore, the advances in weapon technology often make physical differences in combat irrelevant. In battle, anyone with half a brain would have more confidence being on the side of an army of women with guns, tanks, and rocket launchers than two armies of unarmed men, despite the female battalion’s muscular differences. The female army would simply cut them down. Why? Because the male leaders naively believed that a division of females wouldn’t last thirty seconds because they are simply not built for combat.


The reason people resort to the “But You’re Still Weak” argument, is because they are scared, deep down scared that all this training, all this weaponry will level the playing field because, guess what?

They choose the “But You’re Still Weak” argument because it’s the one irrefutable difference between the genders that once upon a time, actually made a difference in societal evaluations of self worth.

Let’s play devil’s advocate for a second and assume that men’s muscle size actually determines their place in life. If this is true, men are being wasted in non physical jobs because their superior musculature is not being used to its fullest extent. If we take the essentialist argument and assume that one’s physical make up should determine one’s role in society, men, due to their superior musculature, should be restricted to construction jobs, orderlies in hospitals, firefighting, farming, housecleaning, nursing and any number of manual labor positions that require heavy lifting. Women, given their physical weakness should be restricted to non physical jobs…like medicine, the law, corporate and business management, government, computer programming and any other white collar profession they can engage in without having to worry that their muscular inferiority will interfere with their ability to do the job.


If we take for granted that women do not belong in certain types of jobs or classes given their build, men have absolutely no place in intellectual jobs because their superior muscles would be wasted. If the “But You’re Still Weak” people are right, men have no place in government, the corporate world, and any other position valuing brains over brawn, because ‘they’re just not built for it’, they’re ‘built for combat’. Under such circumstances, there is no point in educating men for the only schooling they need is the knowledge of how to use those muscles to their fullest extent.


At this point in a debate a member of the “But You’re Still Weak” school will most likely become violent or starting hurling insults, all of which reflect a level of maturity worse than that of a temperamental two year old. All things considered, I would not be surprised. If there’s one thing the “But You’re Still Weak People” fear more than losing the weak pedestal of male muscle upon which they stand, it’s losing the power that their argument, however pitiful, once had in keeping men in the upper echelons of academic, political, and corporate authority. Ironic, given that the very argument they rely on is the one that will defeat them in the end.

Think of that, my fellow women, when being forced to deal with one of these pathetic hate mongers. They will use the “But You’re Still Weak” argument to try and insult, aggravate, and belittle you, hoping that they can convince you with those four little words not to learn to fight or trust your better judgment. DON’T YOU DARE LET THEM DETER YOU!

Do not bother arguing with these people for they are the type to respond irrationally to a perfectly rational argument, and, let’s face it, it’s just not worth it.


These are men living in fear.


Pity them.

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