Photo via Facebook from, I think, the Vancouver Sun.

Hugo Schwyzer says in support of the recent "slut walk" protest in Toronto. The emphasis is his but I heartily endorse it.

There are so many things that trouble me about the obsession with regulating women’s bodies. But as a man, I am particularly exasperated at the assumption that lies beneath the insistence on modesty: the myth that men cannot control themselves. As feminists often point out, the real “man-haters” are those who promote modest dress for women out of the belief that men lack self-control. There is nothing more contemptuous than the suggestion that those of us with penises and Y chromosomes are prisoners of our biology, liable to rape or commit infidelity at the first sign of cleavage. The myth of male weakness sells us woefully, heartbreakingly short.

...

SlutWalkers believe in men’s capacity to do two things at once: be aroused by what we see while honoring the humanity of the woman whose body attracts our eye. The most pernicious of all lies about men is that because of our make-up, lust and empathy can’t coexist within us. If you want kind and compassionate men who will respect women’s boundaries, the myth suggests, those women will have to conceal the parts of themselves that will turn men bestial and irresponsible.

We present women with a brutal binary: hide your sexuality and be respected; show your sexuality and be slut-shamed, harassed, or worse. But if ever there were a false dichotomy, rooted in ignorance about male identity, male biology, and male potential, this is it. While none of us want to live in a culture where women are compelled to display those parts of themselves they’d like to keep private, none of us should settle for living in a society where women are compelled to conceal those parts of themselves they’d occasionally like to display.

Source: Hugo Schwyzer

And I'd just add that the man-hating, slut-shaming meme isn't even about protecting women from all men (as a few feminists and most anti-feminists believe.)  Because research from the anecdotal to the latitudinal suggests that only a very small number of men commit the vast majority of sexual assaults.  So the message in the photo, to tell men not to rape, isn't a hopeless pie-in-the-sky recommendation: it's actually quite specific. And, I might add, a very much more-solid policy recommendation that telling all women to remain cloistered in the vestments of nuns, lest all men assault them.

Image suggestion via reader DA

ECS of Feminist Mormon Housewives takes note of some implicit male bashing from Elaine Dalton, president of the conservative organization LDS Young Women, by way of exhorting women to stay perched as high up on the pedestal as possible. (Emphasis mine.)

But then President Dalton tells us that if a young woman (i.e. a Guardian of Virtue) sends a sexually explicit text message to a young man, that this text message may “cause them (the young men) to lose the Spirit, their Priesthood Power and their virtue.”

By holding up women as “guardians of virtue” and telling young women that they “cause” young men to lose the Spirit, their priesthood, and their virtue, is similar to telling young women (the guardians of virtue) that young men cannot control themselves upon reading sexually explicit text messages.

Source: Feminist Mormon Housewives

Obviously some Mormons are feminist but LDS Young Women is decidedly not a feminist organization. You know how you can tell? Feminists don't believe it's their role in life to shepherd men.

There being far more non-feminist and (like LDS Young Women) actively anti-feminist women in the world it's not surprising that a lot of men pick up the idea that really is women's role. Or, another message implicit in Dalton's speech*, that shepherding men's sexuality is such a crucial role that women should withhold sexuality from themselves by not flirting, sexting, or otherwise having anything to do with sex.

Except, of course, when they come down off their pedestals to reward one man for being "worthy" enough to "deserve" it.  And, of course, once they're done not having sex even when they're ready to and want to, they have to turn around and start having sex even when they don't want to, or aren't even ready to.

The cool thing about mainstream feminists is that they recognize that men are perfectly capable of "guarding" their virtue, sexual or otherwise.  And therefore that women aren't obliged to be "guardians" of their own.

Anti-feminists?  Not so much.

What's funny is the way anti-feminists keep insisting it's feminists who hate men!  When you boil it all down feminists are mainly exasperated with men's learned helplessness.

It's worth noting that rather than being young herself the leader of "Young Women" is the mother of five sons and one daughter, and has ten grandchildren. One can only imagine what she thinks of her husband or how she raised her sons or how much pressure she put on her daughter!

Despite being really, really not fond of MRAs Amanda Marcotte is actually pretty ardent about her support for men. Case in point: while she things divorced and separated men still support their children she also thinks it's evil to force indigent and imprisoned men to pay it.

There's a twist to the story, below, that I think makes the point that traditional, conservative anti-feminists are far more brutal to men than even the dead, white "radfems" of the decidedly radical 1970s. Emphasis mine.

But throwing men in jail for not paying child support is just stupid. Charging men who are in prison and literally cannot make the money to pay child support for child support is just stupid. These are policies that not only hurt men that might very well intend to pay child support but can’t, but it doesn’t actually do anything to get the child support paid.  Men who can’t make money can’t pay child support, and being behind bars pretty much means you can’t hold a job.

I realize [expletive deleted] blame feminists for this, but it’s worth pointing out these backwards, punitive laws tend to be in place in anti-feminist, conservative states.  The reason behind them isn’t “feminazis out to get paid”.  It’s actually because conservatives believe that mothers are on public assistance not because they’re poor, but because they’re not married.  They still subscribe to this ridiculous notion that Mom + Dad + Baby = No Problems Ever Again, and figure that if people are struggling financially, it’s because they’re sexual deviants.  And so their child support laws are geared not towards making sure men pay for their children so much as punishing people for not being married, and punishing people for being poor.  It’s no good for the mothers, either, because they’re often expected to go to great lengths to try to get the money from the fathers before they’re permitted to get public assistance to feed their children. This is all rooted in a highly punitive view of gender roles and responsibilities, and no one benefits from it.

Source: Pandagon

I think that's about right. It is evil to hold non-custodial parents (it's not just men) responsible for child support if they're simply and legitimately unable to pay. It's particularly evil to use child support as just another way for legislators and prosecutors to pile on punishment than either law, justice, or (more to the point) penal theory would otherwise allow. And finally, as Amanda makes clear, it's also evil for social service agencies to refuse to provide assistance for children and their custodial parents (usually but not always women) when the primary-earning parent (usually but not always men) are also indigent. Or in jail.

But do check remember that not only do such laws tend to be more draconian in jurisdictions where feminism has less influence, many or most of those laws predate feminism by decades!

So once again, who really hates men? And if you were genuinely interested in men's rights, against whom would you rationally expend most of your efforts to resist their influence? In fact, who might you most logically want to form alliances to combat such oppression?

Oh, and last point?  At least in progressive jurisdictions legislators and courts, legislators, and society in general are all at least sympathetic to two crucial-to-men's-rights issues.

1) That divorce law and child support aren't strictly gendered, such that it's not enshrined that mothers stay home with children and fathers are responsible for all financial support, with the result that if a mother abandons her children or if a mother has more financial resources than the father then child support can go the other way, and

2) That opportunities exist for women such that they are economically, socially, politically, and legally capable of earning a living wage and supporting themselves and their children... or even their children and their ex-husbands if the husbands instead provided most of the primary care.

Items #1 and 2 aren't fully distributed yet, even in progressive, feminist-friendly jurisdictions, but they're a lot further along than in conservative, feminist-antagonistic ones.  Thing is, though, that traditional anti-feminists don't want women to have equal rights (these days they don't seem to want women to have rights at all!)  Such jurisdictions actively don't want men providing anything but financial support for their children (ok, maybe laudably beating them with their belts "when your father gets home.")  But sure as shittin' you're not going to find many feminists who want that for themselves or men.

Via Geek Feminism and Restructure!, it turns out there might be something else going on besides "girls suck at math" that keeps more women out of, well, math.

Skeptics might wonder if some of the [gender] differences [in engagement] among students relate to how well the students know the material. The researchers checked for that and found that, across sections, women outperformed men on grades. So the data point to women losing confidence with male instructors — even if female students know the material as well as or better than their male counterparts.

Link: Inoculation Against Stereotype (Inside Higher Ed)

Source: Geek Feminism Blog

Yes, the plural of lots of anecdotes still isn't data, but my observation in engineering, tech, math, and hard sciences -- in academia and even more so in industry -- has been that the biggest obstacle for women trying to get and do their work hasn't been their ability to do the actual work.

Incidentally, Penelope Trunk, who hasn't gotten the memo, still thinks it's all about brain differences.

One fundamental difference between the male and female brain is gray matter. And University of California at Irvine released solid data to explain why men are good at math.

“Evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior,” said Richard Haier, professor of psychology who led the study.

“In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of—or connections between—these processing centers.”

Source: Brazen Careerist

Not to sound all "don't have enough white matter to do interprocessing" or anything but gray matter is what we do math with, and if there are such vast differences between men's and women's white and gray matter then how is it possible that the average woman is capable of math as the average man?

Since that doesn't make any sense it must mean either that most men totally waste 5.5x of their 6.5x advantage over women in math-a-licious gray matter or... maybe something else is going on.

Based on the graceless quality and tone of the "congratulations" a friend of mine just got from her department head after receiving the highest NSF score anyone in her hard-sciences department has gotten in years I think it might be "something else."

The something else, incidentally, might be the worthiness trap conviction men have (doesn't matter if it's socialized or "genetic") that if they don't do better than women (let alone other men) then they'll never get sex.

You can't discount the effectiveness of that conviction, incidentally, or the grown-man-panic drive it can generate when a man's afraid he's going to be shown up by a woman.  Thank Rule #2 of the bogus  Two Rules of Desire for this -- if we're convinced women can't find us handsome and we're afraid they won't find us handy we imagine we're screwed... or more precisely not screwed!

Meanwhile women's worries about never getting sex run along pretty different lines (again whether it's socialized or genetic is kind of irrelevant.)

No one's asked me so far, but if someone did I'd say the difference in "...or I'll never get sex" accounts for far more of the differences in outcomes Trunk and others see in science, in sales, and in startups than gray matter ratios or "girls suck at math."