As feminists, we love to praise strong, independent women. Whether they are fictional characters, or real celebrities, we love them. They are good role models for our children, and for us all.

There is good logic behind this. The gender binary tells us that women are weak, that they should depend upon men for their protection and income. These restrictions, whilst beneficial at an early stage in our evolution, now hurt modern women more than they help them. As feminists, it is this binary - the famous ‘patriarchy’ - that we fight. Strong, independent women break out of their gender roles, and so we want both to celebrate them and to encourage others to follow in their footsteps - if they so wish.

If they so wish.

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There’s an argument that I’ve frequently seen lampooned in SJ circles. It’s defending Disney-style movies, based on old fairy tales, when they are criticised for having an almost entirely white cast. 

“But there weren’t any people of colour in medieval Scotland!”

Immediately, SJers will jump in with “oh, so there were magic lamps and giants, were there?”. It’s a decent argument. You can’t argue for being realistic if the whole story is fantasy.

These same SJers, though, will commit the fallacy themselves where it suits them. The impractical poses and costumes of super-heroines are always branded “unrealistic”. “What, and magical powers are?” is the response that they conveniently forget.

The costumes aren’t even that impractical. Super-heroines are unlikely to match their male rivals when it comes to brute strength, due to sexual dimorphism, and so often they instead specialise in being flexible - in recent blockbusters Mystique, Catwoman and Black Widow all do this. Now, what outfit is practical for this? Clue: it’s not baggy clothes which completely cover the body. In fact, it’s more practical to have minimal coverage, and skintight clothing where it is necessary. The 2012 Olympics are going on as I type, and they allow me to test this theory. What do the best gymnasts in the world - who, we can be assured, have researched this into some depth to get an edge on their competitors - think is the most practical outfit?

Ah. But super-heroines also need to be fast. I’m sure that the fastest sprinters in the world realise that these outfits aren’t practic-

Ah. Well, there goes that argument. Tight clothing, and little of it, are actually practical. Go figure.

We’ve demonstrated two points already: that super-heroine costumes are actually often practical, and that whether they are realistically practical or not is irrelevant (by SJ’s own logic). Now to demonstrate some more.

Are women objectified in this sort of film? Yes. A lot. But not everything is related to that - as we’ve just shown, there are very sensible reasons for Black Widow or Catwoman to wear tight and revealing clothing. Their success relies on being fast and flexible, but also on being able to manipulate men who find them desirable. Such costumes help with both. It is not all male gaze.

Supporting this is the fact that male super-heroes who also need to be flexible also wear tight clothing. Spiderman’s suit, for instance, leaves very little to the imagination.

…and yes, a quick Google reveals plenty of sites obsessing over the ‘spider-bulge’. Either both are objectification, or both are practical. Either way, it’s not male gaze, because it’s almost entirely women drooling over Andrew Garfield. SJers can’t have it both ways. Personally, I think that both are both. 

In fact, when I went to see the film, there were a lot more women talking about how attractive Garfield was than men doing the same for Emma Stone. It was the same for Avengers: RDJ and Hiddlestone had the looks, Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth had the bodies. Even Scarlett Johansson, famous sex symbol, couldn’t compete. A large proportion of theatre-goers are female, and they objectify just as much as the men do. Film-makers know this.

Evans wore a skintight costume, Hemsworth and Jeremy Renner had their biceps on full display.  You can’t deny that this doesn’t happen to men, just as it happens to women. When it comes to unrealistic bodies, of course, I’ll just point you in the direction of the Hulk.

All of the actors were physically attractive, of course. We can’t even have a realistic nerd to play Peter Parker - instead we are given the handsome and charismatic Garfield. Why? If a man isn’t attractive, we won’t want to watch him. It’s objectification all of the way.

Costumes don’t have to be tight or revealing, anyway. As this excellent post on the subject puts it:

If you threw Batman into a belly shirt and short-shorts, that wouldn’t make his character more sexually appealing by virtue of the fact that you get a better look at the skin of his rippling abs and toned legs. 

Of course, Christian Bale also has plenty of chance to flash his muscles to us out of costume. The Dark Knight Rises, then, is another superhero film where the heroes are objectified. Bane’s costume is another obvious one, showing off Tom Hardy’s body as much as possible.

Anne Hathaway shows as much under tight clothing, and there’s no doubt that this is objectification, but as we showed earlier this is practical both for her physical and psychological fighting styles. It’s baffling that SJers would focus entirely on her, and ignore the clear objectification of other characters. Finally on the “super-heroines are objectified super-heroes aren’t” front, I’ll link a couple of pictures from the X-men films.

Go and count how many times Hugh Jackman gets naked or at least topless in those films.

Anyway, moving on. Comic books are usually concerned with physically perfect super-people anyway, and usually targeted towards sexually frustrated young men, so we can expect a lot of objectification there. What about in other popular films? Twilight and the Hunger Games are both about a sullen, angsty teenage girl who gets frustrated that two of the best looking guys around are in love with her (the difference being that THG actually has a very decent plot to go with it). If we look at the films, we see very little objectification of the female character, but men showing off their muscles left right and centre. That this is blatant objectification can be seen in the fact that women and girls watching these films will speak at some length about how attractive the male characters are, and completely ignore their worth as characters.

Television programmes which shouldn’t even be about romance, such as Doctor Who and Sherlock, nevertheless are swamped by female fans obsessing over the attractiveness of their male characters. I, along with all of the men I know, appreciate such programmes for their plots. We don’t even mention how good the female characters look, because we appreciate them first and foremost as characters. Many of the women I know, though, never stop going on about the men - especially here on Tumblr, where erotic fanfiction, and spamposting of people’s faces with “unffffggg” commentary attached, and even a blog devoted the sound of Benedict Cumberbatch’s voice, are the norm. Recently I’ve watched films starring Clooney, Craig, Fassbender and Gosling, and the women around me have spent the whole time talking about how good looking they are, and the men haven’t objectified the female stars at all. Films such as Magic Mike and it’s ilk don’t require any commentary: the objectification is there for all to see. People who say that it only happens the other way are asleep and dreaming.

Romantic comedies are possibly even worse when it comes to making these same women objectify and drool, even though Hugh Grant usually keeps his clothes on. To explain this, we need to go back to gender roles. The gender binary expects men to be powerful, to protect women and children from other men, and women to be attractive, to mate with the most powerful men, and thus have successful children and ensure the long-term survival of their genes. We don’t then, objectify men on looks the same was as we do women. We like our men to be strong, influential, wealthy or famous, whilst these aren’t generally things we look for in our women. That’s why we objectify the wealthy, well-dressed male lead in these films, even though he doesn’t throw his body around. It’s just a different type of objectification.

In it’s simplest form: women like powerful men, men like beautiful women. Obviously this is a massive generalisation, and you can fill in the disclaimers concerning sexual minorities, non-binaries, and people who just have different tastes. But, if we go back to the bare essentials - how nature intended it - the simplification would work fine. It’s how we evolved to be. I’m talking about what the patriarchy wants us to find attractive, and the patriarchy intended for there to be two rigid genders in rigid gender roles and for us all to be cis and hetero and so on - that’s the context I’m speaking in, and so that’s the language I’m using. That does not mean that other genders and other sexualities, aren’t equally valid, and I can’t stress that enough. The patriarchy, natural as it may have been, does not function well in modern society. If I speak in such black and white terms in this post, then, that is not be condoning that world view. I’m just speaking in the context of that world view, because it is this system of patriarchal gender roles that have shaped our world today, and so we need to explore the past if we are going to understand the present. That’s the only reason I am using those terms. Please don’t try to call me out on it, because you’ll be attacking a strawman, and will subsequently look more than a bit silly.

Moving on. An important point is that these impossibly sexy women aren’t just shown to those interested, and neither are these impossibly strong men. In fact, most superheroes are by men, for men. Young boys are encouraged to look up to athletes, whilst young girls are encouraged to look up to models. Boys are taught that they must be powerful, and should be ridiculously ambitious, should exercise lots, should aim to accumulate wealth above all else, and generally destroy themselves chasing these impossible standards. We don’t, or didn’t use to, teach our girls these things, instead telling them that they must be beautiful, and should be self-conscious and diet and generally destroy themselves chasing these impossible standards.

Super-heroes are terrible for this: could there be a more impossible standard? Sure, girls are taught that they should be able to display both their chest and their rump at the same time on the sexy standards, but boys are taught that they should be able to throw cars about and fly. Even if we ignore the fact that men are now objectified on the way they look in these films, and are also forced to wear revealing clothing, we have to accept that superpowers are themselves a form of objectification for men. Men are historically supposed to be society’s leaders, fighters, protectors, to bear almost the entirety of society’s burdens, to own property and buy food and work twice as hard to provide financially not just for ourselves but for women who aren’t expected to work at all, to fight twice as hard to protect just not ourselves but women who aren’t expected to have to defend themselves, and so on. We are disposable objects for this function, just as women are objects for the function of sex and childcare. A superhero saving the world, then, is objectification as much as any number of revealing costumes is. 

Complaining that superheroes are being unrealistically objectified, then, is futile. They were unrealistic objects from the start.

Complaining that super-heroines alone are being unrealistically objectified is, as we have shown here in several ways, wilfully ignorant.

Everyone is objectified. It’s less to do with misogyny from men, as the ‘male gaze’ commentary would like us to believe, and more to do with the gender binary forcing unrealistic standards on all of us - unrealistic standards for who we should be, and unrealistic standards for who we should be mating with. That this is so prominent is not a commentary on any gender in particular, but more an indicator of a general cultural shallowness. It is healthy and natural to enjoy looking at somebody attractive; SJers need to remember this before condemning all sexualisation. This shallowness, though, is something more. We only want to see films if the characters are attractive, and regard the overall film as somehow worse if they aren’t. Sometimes we rate this so highly that we’d rather have good-looking stars than a better plot. As gender roles are breaking down in our modern society, men are being objectified in the same way as women. In this case, however, the equality is not good. We have become equally bad.

How can it be discrimination against men if men made the laws? There is no systemic oppression of men in our society, since they effectively control it. If games are made by men, for men, why are men talking so much about how they are misandric?

It’s a common enough theme. Misandry can’t exist, because men control everything. 

Wrong.

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A glaring example of institutional misandry throughout history can be found when you look at casualties of war. They’re pretty much all men. Men were seen as strong, and so they were sent by their government to be massacred. They did not have a choice in the matter and, if they objected, they would be killed just as surely by their own state.

Women weren’t allowed to fight at all. A number of contemporary feminists see this as misogyny. This isn’t justified, because neither is the use of the word ‘allowed’. Sorry, but ‘allowed to be slaughtered’ doesn’t quite fit. Try ‘expected’. Women weren’t expected to fight at all. That’s what makes this very definitely misandry - men were killed solely because they were men, and that was what they were for. They were disposable weapons. This was historical gendercide, and millions of men have been killed because of the way they were born. If that’s not systematic sexism, nothing is.

If modern egalitarians try to use this example against those who persistently deny that misandry is ‘a thing’ (almost always women, who wouldn’t know), though, they face a couple of objections. The first is that this is all in the past - ancient history with no effect on the modern man. When the US-based equalists point out that the draft is still in place - whereby men are forced to sign up for service in the event of an emergency, and women are not - they face the second objection: that such an emergency isn’t happening. It might be misandry in the past, or potentially in the future, but it isn’t misandry now - and so misandry isn’t a thing.

Both these arguments are problematic. Feminists will happily cite historical misogyny, like unequal suffrage, as supporting the idea that misogyny is a big deal today and is inherent in our culture. Historical misandry like this can serve the exact same purpose. Potential misandry, too, is still problematic. If a law discriminates against one gender, even if nobody directly suffers tangibly, it’s still a sexist law. There’s no denying that.

The big problem, though, and one that these US-centric egalitarians scarcely point out, is that this misandry is far from over. 

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Feminist says something offensive.

Not all feminists are like that! She’s clearly not a real feminist, so she doesn’t count.

Masculist says something offensive.

All MRAs are misogynist douchebros!

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feministsaresexist:

pervyrasslincaps:

They are always beautiful and hilarious and sexy to me.

Always.

Because the thing is, they are always in context.

Prison is perhaps the only setting on Earth where a heterosexual white male actually feels uncomfortable, powerless, and maybe even threatened.

And that, my friends, is social justice.

Despite the fact that this is a ridiculously stupid post, that men do face significant discrimination and gender related issues simply for being male, and that this person honestly thinks making people suffer will ever bring about social justice, I find it hilarious that this fucking bimbo seems to think that there is a significant amount of white males in prison, when in fact the majority of those in prison are POC, and the majority of those that experience prison rape are in prison for victimless crimes like drug use, so they aren’t actually a danger to society or women, and you’re saying they deserve rape simply because they have a penis and so do some rapists.

Keep doing your cute little dance bitch. You’re a racist, sexist, uneducated piece of shit.

Prison is perhaps the only setting on Earth where a heterosexual white male actually feels uncomfortable, powerless, and maybe even threatened.

Outside of prison, men are the overwhelming victims of stranger violence, violent crime in general, pretty much all violence, and they’re more likely to be injured or killed as a result of that violence. Men have the most right to feel threatened walking down any street in the world, and they also have as much right to feel threatened by their partner. They are also powerless and threatened by law enforcement officers, in a process of discrimination and profiling which goes all the way to the top. They can feel threatened by the media and by the state. Finally, men have the right to feel threatened by bigots like you, happy to mock them for their suffering, trigger them, erase them, and enable their rapists. Bigots like you are everywhere, on every level. You contribute to and perpetuate a system of sexism, pain, and rape apologism. You call that justice. Because I was born a certain shape, and having never met me, you are wholly in support of my rape. You think that my father, who is the nicest guy I’ve ever met, deserves to me raped. You think my future sons will deserve to be raped, from the moment they open their little eyes. You are what we human beings call a monster.

mouthynaut:

Female privilege is being able to walk around without your shirt on in public without being arrested for indecent exposure… oh, wait.

Are you feeling okay? Because that didn’t make a lot of sense.

I don’t think that anybody is trying to say that male privileges don’t exist. The existence of male privilege doesn’t negate the existence of female privileges. In fact, they feed into each other. Because male privilege is evidence of a gender double standard, the existence of male privileges such as this actually confirm the existence of female privileges. If men are privileged in being allowed into the male role, and not being expected to be in the female role, then women are privileged in being allowed into the female role, and not being expected to be in the male role. Be careful with those two words. It was a privilege to be allowed to work, but also a privilege to not be expected to work. It was a privilege to be allowed to fight, but also a privilege to not be expected to fight. They come in pairs: it isn’t an either/or situation.

Female privilege does exist, as does male privilege, and it’s silly to deny either of them simply because you haven’t personally experienced them yourself! The picture is a lot bigger than your own experience, and that’s something you have to accept if you’re going to be in this business for long. It’s not all about what you have or haven’t seen with your own eyes, and so (if you haven’t already) you really need to start opening your mind and listening to other people’s experiences. That is, after all, how privilege gets checked in the first place :)

kingdomnada:

lol @ boys who disagree with feminism because it doesn’t acknowledge the issues men face

lol @ WoC who disagreed with feminism because it didn’t acknowledge the issues WoC face

lol @ trans* people who disagreed with feminism because it didn’t acknowledge the issues trans* people face

Erasing people isn’t something to laugh about, it’s something to feel deeply ashamed for. Grow up.

thatisnotfeminism:

- a woman being afraid for her safety when you are walking behind her alone at night

- anti rape campaigns that target men

- your whole gender being stereotyped as rapists, including being profiled by law enforcement and court officials. That’s not just misandry, that’s institutional misandry.

- women who don’t want to talk to/date/have sex with you

- well done.

- having to pay child custody

- having to unfairly pay large amounts of child support for a child you may not have wanted but legally had no choice in the matter, when you are disproportionately likely to be unable to see your child or have custody of them due to gender bias in courts. That’s misandry.

- women’s centers, safe spaces for battered women

- not being seen as a possible victim by law enforcement and court officials and therefore receiving justice at a disproportionate rate, as well as not being seen as a possible victim in society and the media, as well as not being seen as a possible victim by government organisations and so receiving almost no resources, no centres, no safe spaces, despite the fact that you are almost equally likely to be a victim of domestic violence. That’s misandry.

- the draft

- a negative law which targets and burdens men simply for being men, and excuses women? Misandry.

- being called out for being a sexist on the internet

- when it’s correct, well done. When you’re being called sexist simply because you’re male, that would be misandry.

- women’s studies/gender studies/feminism

- no, but individuals and groups who practice them often are.

- being ‘friendzoned’

- well done.

- rape accusations

- false rape accusations which lead to you being jailed (where you are likely to be raped yourself) due to gender bias in the courts? Obvious misandry.

- women who resent chivalry

- men paying for bills and drinks

- men being expected to suffer, to shoulder the financial burden for no other reason than the way they were born/identify, is social misandry.

- not getting hired/promoted/accepted and having a woman get in instead

- when you’re explicitly denied a job because you’re a man? Misandry.

- teenage girls who complain about how all guys are the same on facebook

- a boy saying all girls are bitches is misogynist, a girl saying all boys are dicks is misandrist. Stop using double standards.

- portrayal of men in the media - large muscles, clumsy, alcoholic, etc

- portrayal of women in the media, from objectification to negative stereotypes, is misogyny. The exact same thing happening to men is misandry. Double standards.

more suggestions for things that are/aren’t misandry are welcome!

Ooh, I’ve got one! Erasing men’s issues, for no other reason than to protect your ideology. That’s misandry. Stop it.

permutationofninjas:

kevinwayne:

http://hamptonroads.com/2012/06/study-dna-tests-show-scale-bad-convictions-va

By Dena Potter and Zinie Chen Sampson
The Associated Press
© June 18, 2012

RICHMOND

New DNA testing in hundreds of old Virginia homicide and sexual assault cases supports the exoneration of at least 38 suspects, according to a study released Monday by a national policy group that examined the test results.

The Urban Institute’s study is the first to say how many exonerations are likely from Virginia’s stash of archived, decades-old biological samples that so far have cleared at least five men who were convicted of sexual assaults. Officials with the state Department of Forensic Science, which is conducting the testing project, have said their job is not to suggest who should be exonerated, but to test the samples and deliver the results to law enforcement officials who determine whether they believe someone is innocent.

The institute’s researchers found that in 5 percent of homicide and sexual assault cases, DNA testing ruled out the convicted person. If the scope is narrowed to just the sexual assault convictions, DNA testing eliminated between 8 percent and 15 percent of convicted offenders. The wrongful conviction rate previously had been estimated at 3 percent or less.

Although all of these tests were done on Virginia cases, a lead researcher said the results likely could be applied elsewhere.

“I believe that there’s nothing about the Virginia situation that is much different from what was going on across much of the United States at that time,” said John Roman of the Urban Institute. “I think that states have a responsibility to take these findings seriously in other places and investigate other cases that they have where they have retained evidence, because chances are they’re going to find far more wrongfully convicted people than they would have anticipated before this study.”

Researchers analyzed the results of new testing of DNA samples archived from 635 murder, sexual assault and non-negligent manslaughter cases that led to convictions. The cases stemmed from 715 offenses in Virginia between 1973 and 1987.

Virginia was able to do the testing because a state serologist and those she had trained had retained cotton swabs and clothing swatches. The samples mainly contained semen and blood samples from the cases during an era when DNA analysis wasn’t widely used as an investigative tool. After two men were exonerated following the discovery of the old evidence, the state in 2005 ordered each of the samples tested.

The report acknowledged certain limitations. For instance, it said that in two-thirds of the cases the samples didn’t have enough DNA for testing. Roman said that may mean the number of false convictions is much higher.

Roman said there likely are “dozens, if not hundreds, of people who were convicted erroneously; dozens, if not hundreds, of people who were not convicted of a crime they committed who may have gone on to commit new crimes; and there were dozens, if not hundreds, of people who thought they had justice as a victim of a horrible crime who didn’t.”

State files that were shared with the Urban Institute didn’t always contain context about the physical evidence or non-DNA facts about the case that would help determine the value of the DNA testing results.

That’s why the Department of Forensic Science always sends its results to the law enforcement agency that originally investigated the case, to the commonwealth’s attorney and to the suspect when he or she can be located, said Gail Jaspen, chief deputy director of the department.

“The laboratory’s job is to completely and expertly perform the DNA analysis and provide those results to the law enforcement agencies and the commonwealth’s attorneys who know the facts in the case,” Jaspen said. “DFS recognizes its own case files at best only contain some of the facts in the case, so we would not to presume to do the kind of analysis that the Urban Institute performed for the purposes of their study.”

Until now, the test results have been shielded from the public, but the General Assembly mandated they be made available on July 1. The department will comply, Jaspen said.

The department has revealed that it has 78 cases in which the tests have excluded the person who was convicted. However, the department has stressed all along that being excluded by DNA evidence does not prove innocence. For instance, someone could commit a rape or another crime without leaving behind biological evidence.

The Urban Institute report details 18 cases in which exoneration is a possibility if additional evidence was gathered. In some cases, there was no victim DNA with which to compare the sample, and in others the sample matched only the victim.

Among the 38 cases that the Urban Institute deemed likely for exoneration, 33 involved a DNA profile that did not match the suspect but did match a known person who was neither the person convicted nor the victim. In the other five cases, the convicted person was eliminated because the profile was shown to be from a male, but not from the suspect. Scientists can distinguish between male and female contributors in a DNA sample.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice gave the Virginia Department of Forensic Science $4.5 million to finance testing in the project, which aimed to compare evidence profiles to those of DNA profiles of known criminals. As part of the grant obligation, the department had to surrender its files to the Urban Institute for the study, Jaspen said.

One of the important things we have to note when dealing with rape is that “false accusations” doesn’t just cover cases where women have actively/maliciously fabricated claims but also cases where, while a crime did occur, the wrong person was punished for it.  While the women in question most likely weren’t malicious (and indeed are twice victimized themselves, first by their rape and second by being denied justice), the men in question have still been unconscionably victimized in cases that all-too-often involve judicial misconduct by the very system that’s supposed to be protecting them.