People keep coming up with more and more intricate ways to dump on the women’s liberation movement:
Ultimately the question is, does “mankind” really need men? With human cloning technology just around the corner and enough frozen sperm in the world to already populate many generations, perhaps we should perform a cost-benefit analysis. It’s true that men have traditionally been the breadwinners. But women have been a majority of college graduates since the 1980s, and their numbers are growing. It’s also true that men have, on average, a bit more muscle mass than women. But in the age of ubiquitous weapons, the one with the better firepower (and knowledge of the law) triumphs.
Meanwhile women live longer, are healthier and are far less likely to commit a violent offense. If men were cars, who would buy the model that doesn’t last as long, is given to lethal incidents and ends up impounded more often?
This is the kind of crap the New York Times publishes, folks. Before you fall into the trap the author of the quoted piece has prepared for you and start defending the “need” for men to exist, let’s look at what the article is really trying to accomplish. This is nothing but a blatant attempt to make people angry with an obviously offensive question. After they do get angry, it will be easy to smuggle any ideological manipulation past them.
The main idea of the article is the age-old myth that whenever women gain rights, men lose out. This battle-between-the-sexes mentality is one of the favorite weapons of the patriarchy. Any reasonable person who is not deeply invested into the preservation of the strict gender binary, however, realizes that this is not how things work. The destruction of strict gender divisions benefits both men and women because different kinds of masculinity, femininity and intersexuality become legitimate. For instance, if women can work and make their own money, this not only benefits women but also men who don’t have to carry the burden of “providing” for a group of dependents on their own. And I cannot believe I have to explain something this basic in year 2012.
The article’s author ends his piece with the following inanity:
When I explained this to a female colleague and asked her if she thought that there was yet anything irreplaceable about men, she answered, “They’re entertaining.”
Gentlemen, let’s hope that’s enough.
This is a favorite trick of all anti-feminists. A spurious anecdote about some ridiculous and offensive pronouncement from a man-eating, ball-busting “feminazi” is offered and then followed immediately with a rallying call to the poor, persecuted men. “Beware, fellow men,” the author is saying. “Or the vile female-lib creatures will get rid of you altogether.” As a result, many feminists will become bogged down in explanations of how we are not opposed to the existence of men. In the meanwhile, the very real assault on reproductive rights can continue unchecked. Come on, who cares about rape victims, unintended pregnancies and healthcare provided by Planned Parenthood when we live in a world where women have gotten so much power that they are seriously thinking of getting rid of men. It has to be true because the New York Times said so.
Clarissa's Blog 
Good grief, and to think the journalist got paid for that piece of crap. The NYTimes should really deconstruct the bollocks not support the spread of provocative shite.
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This bugs me, too! So many brilliant journalists barely manage to get themselves published when some official fool rakes in a good sum of money for publishing this kind of garbage.
It’s no wonder the print media are dying!
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Why does anyone think it’s a good idea to ask “why do we need [group of people]?” anyway? And why do men have to be able to do things women can’t in order to justify their existence? Isn’t it enough that they’re people, and have value as people?
That article is not just inane, it’s positively poisonous.
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Agreed. Articles like these also set up false damaging dichotomies. Men must be the sole providers/breadwinners or they’re useless. Individual women must show that they really really need a man in their lives or they’re man-hating ‘feminazis’ who regard men at best as ‘entertaining.’ The people who buy into these articles are so simple-minded and/or vindictive that they act as if reality truly is carved out into these extreme, rigid positions.
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I know! Any discussion of why “we need” men, women, Jews, autistics, blacks, etc is deeply fascist in nature.
Ridiculous.
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Agreed. I used to enjoy this sort of thing when it’s aimed at men, but then I realized a) it just reinforces a strict gender dichotomy and b) it opens the door for similar comments aimed at women.
I also don’t think our cloning science it really that advanced. Not to mention that sexual reproduction allows for greater genetic diversity which is a huge evolutionary advantage.
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Are you sure the article is meant to be facetious? I thought that he was more so writing about how genuinely from a biological standpoint that the species could continue with just women (with current technology). He throws in other things about how men are “behind” and that confuses his point, and the article is clearly terrible, but I did not think the article was meant to “dump on the women’s liberation movement”.
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The turkey baster (or its equivalent) that he mentions in the article as the only think women need to impregnate themselves with a small amount of sperm is not a huge technological advance. I’d say one could have found something of the kind at any point in human history. 🙂 So what changed? What is generating all this anxiety that men have become redundant? Surely, it isn’t the spread of turkey basters. 🙂 The answer is given right there in the article: women make money and go to college. That is a real change and the true cause of this existential angst. The author feels redundant because he knows he can’t offer anything but money to women in his life.
If tomorrow an artificial womb is invented, I will celebrate. it will not even begin to occur to me that the universe doesn’t need me any longer. 🙂
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I have something for you:
http://feministcurrent.com/5800/dude-throws-tantrum-on-account-of-sexism-feminists-laugh-their-faces-off/
And I agree with this Virgin’s policy.
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It’s sad when people confuse their crappy personal lives with an ideological position. The idea that women are “a minority” anywhere outside of China and India is also quite bizarre.
The following sentence is truly a gem: “And that doesn’t make ME sexist because the truth is that, as of today, not one woman has sexually harassed or ogled me whereas dozens of men have.” Given that approximately 90% of population are heterosexual, I’m not extremely surprised. Besides, the argument of “this hasn’t happened to me, ergo this doesn’t happen anywhere in the universe” is bizarre. If racism hasn’t happened to me because I’m white, should I conclude there is no racism?
As for children, statistically, they are the most likely to be sexually molested and raped at home. The numbers of children raped on airplanes cannot even begin to be compared. So? What policy do we introduce in response?
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Thanks for the great critique of the article. It was directly on target. So many conservative women love nothing better than to imply that men and women have totally different essential natures and to gripe about their nearest and dearest. It’s something the enjoy as a compensation prize for being dominated. I remember one woman in a non-academic course I took. She offered her husband’s cell phone to her female friends and invited them to talk for as long as they wanted as the bill was on him. If she didn’t like him, she should really have just left.
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A compensation prize, that’s exactly what it is!
Just imagine an article titled “Do we need whites?” arguing that the black people have gotten so “uppity” that they are getting ready to dispense with the whites. Or an article titled “Do the Jews Need Us, the Gentiles?” Everybody would see them for what they are: racist and anti-semitic.
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Excellent points. People are absolutely blind to sexism and will do anything to avoid seeing it. I think that is because most people are already invested in the sexist social structures to some degree, so to critique them is a lot like critiquing themselves, which hardly anyone wants to do. They can’t see what is right in front of their eyes. My memoir critiques sexism as originating in men projecting the parts of their character structure they don’t like (such as fear, guilt and emotionalism) onto women. This critique is quite clear, but nobody will acknowledge it. One learns, from this, that even self-proclaimed feminists are to some degree highly invested in the patriarchal notion that men and women are just “different”.
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“One learns, from this, that even self-proclaimed feminists are to some degree highly invested in the patriarchal notion that men and women are just “different”.”
– The “innate differences” between men and women have been the official position of North American academic feminism for 2 decades. This is why my colleagues at feminist conferences have conniptions whenever I give a talk. 🙂 When I ask them how they can accept inherent differences and not accept the separation of spheres of activity for men and women, they get very anxious and unhappy. 🙂
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Oh, I see. That must be the problem then. In Australia, even though we accept some aspects of American culture and academic philosophy and some aspects of those from Britain, we don’t generally essentialize about gender to the extent they seem to do in America. In America, gender essentialism has the same feeling as common sense. I see in American catalogues that men’s and women’s products are often in different colors with gender demarcations. LL Bean, for example, does not offer women clothing in primary or rustic colors. Women wear pastels. In Australia, we don’t see it that way. Only in very conservative industries, like banking, are women expected to represent absolute difference from men. With regard to attire, we are far more open-minded. That doesn’t mean the society isn’t rife with sexism. It is. But there is also a certain current of liberation.
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” In America, gender essentialism has the same feeling as common sense.”
– Oh yes. In the absence of any real common sense, people adopt these idiotic demarcations of gender.
“LL Bean, for example, does not offer women clothing in primary or rustic colors. Women wear pastels. In Australia, we don’t see it that way.”
– I always knew I should have just moved to Australia! 🙂
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Remember, media will always focus on the most insane, rude and extreme members of a group because of their entertainment value. This is why they show FEMEN (even though there is only a handful of them), Pussy Riot, streakers running through the stadium and many, many others.
It is true for many other things as well : you can have a brilliant computer game and the only thing the media will focus on is a 5-second cinematic in which women kiss or something.
And, of course, most people that aren’t that into a particular topic will then think :
feminists = feminazis with tits on display cutting down crosses and fucking chickens
MRAs = crazy dads killing their families and commiting suicide
Poles = collaborators with Nazis that hate all Jews
Ukrainians = golddigers that live in a shithole, work as prostitutes or farmers and actually are Russians.
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I love Wirbelwind’s comment. It is very funny and insightful.
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What can I say ? Media in my country concentrate on maybe 20 idiots in my Parliment (out of 460 deputies and 100 senators) that have absolutely nothing smart or insightful to say… they just keep airing them because they raise adrenaline level in everybody.
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I have known women who have said this. I suspect men should take it seriously. It is a bit frightening.
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I’ve had an encounter with one such person online. A deeply traumatized individual. Which, of course, doesn’t excuse the fascist beliefs.
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Thanks for writing this! That article annoyed me so much in a way I couldn’t even condense into a coherent blog post, so I’m glad you did it for me. I don’t understand why the NYT wastes money paying people to write about stupid “hypothetical” situations like this when there are plenty of real ones to write about.
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