The other day I came about a comment on a photo essay that willingly opened the floodgates to misogynistic comments.
“I'm sorry the internet has given so many of you idiots a voice. Yes, I'm talking about all of you about to leave comments stating this portrays a dangerous and unrealistic standard of beauty for young women,” one commenter wrote.
ABOUT to leave comments. He was just asking for it.
The same commenter’s best defense to a woman in the online battle he started was “Shouldn't you be working on your third hamburger of the morning right now?”
This is why I think YouTube should just delete their comment section all together. I’m looking up a poorly made Windows Movie Maker lyric video to a Drake song - I don’t need to be surrounded by an online war of the words with middle-school level maturity.
However, the Internet can be an unrestricted thought channel, and part of that is great. It’s why feminism in the 21st century has taken off and gained so much attention. Unfortunately, see above. People have to voice their misogynistic opinions, which is where Vice comes back into play. To be fair, the Vice I’m going to talk about in this blog post is an antiquated one. It’s the Vice associated with ex-founder Gavin McInnes, who was fired from Vice over “creative differences.” In his 2008 resignation e-mail, McInnes promised a “ton of other projects in the works, including books, a movie, comics, TV s**t, etc and I'll announce them on the site as they blossom into fruition like a hundred humid vaginas in the presence of God's boner.”
OK … Well, McInnes has been making headlines lately, and not for his website Streetcarnage.com. McInnes was asked to speak on a HuffPost Live panel discussion on modern masculinity in a post-feminism world.
McInnes praised violence and its attachment to views of masculinity while figuratively beating his chest and showing off his bananas. He called the only female panelist on the discussion, Mary Anne Franks, a professor of law at the University of Miami School of Law, a “f**king idiot.” Then he went on to be the expert voice on what women really want.
Said McInnes: “ Women are forced to pretend to be men. They're feigning this toughness. They're miserable. Study after study has shown that feminism has made women less happy. They're not happy in the work force, for the most part. I would guess 7 percent [of women] like not having kids, they want to be CEOs, they like staying at the office all night working on a proposal, and all power to them. But by enforcing that as the norm, you're pulling these women away from what they naturally want to do, and you're making them miserable.”
McInnes, a man, saying that women are being made miserable through feminism is truly one of the most outlandish things I’ve heard, but knowing his journalistic history, it doesn’t surprise me coming from him. His self-righteous, macho attitude discredits him from any real understanding, despite that what he is saying is utterly impossible to understand. Women started feminism because they wanted to be put in equal positions of influence and responsibility. Without feminism women wouldn’t have the basic right to vote. Now McInnes is saying that all women really want is to stay home and make babies. If that were what we wanted, birth control wouldn’t have been invented; there wouldn’t be so many broken families based off this idea that “I’m the man, and you’re the woman. Now that you have a kid, it’s your problem. Stay home and fulfill your innate duties as a homemaker.”
I realize getting upset over such dumb comments really does nothing for me and my female friends and colleagues. We’re exposed to this kind of stuff on a daily basis, whether it’s on a harmless date or thrown at you in your face via an online cyber storm.
Women do want all of these things. The only reason I can think of women being “miserable” in achieving these things is because male-dominated institutions still try to keep women in inferior positions. Women work the same jobs as men and are still underpaid. In 2012, the U.S. Census Bureau reported the median yearly income for full-time working men was $49,398, compared to women’s $37,791 median salary. In the University of Florida alone, where athletics are an integral part of college life, in 2012 the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act reported that the average institutional salary per head coach on a men’s team was $1,014,995, whereas women’s team head coaches (most of which are women themselves) calculated in at $210,512.
McInnes only further embarrassed himself on Streetcarnage.com by retaliating with a staff-written defense piece titled “Women aren’t happy? Well, I’m a man and I’m happy so there!”
So there, feminists - arguments are won nowadays with a simple “So there.” Now, who wants to fight about how important My Chemical Romance was to emo music? I’ll be over on a 2006 Warped Tour chat room eagerly awaiting your fiery replies.
