by Daniel Yim
There aren’t many females in Dilbert, but males are still the norm in engineering and IT, so fair enough. But we might still wonder about Scott Adams’s views on gender and women. We needn’t wonder too much, however, as Adams is a prolific blogger who has made a number of interesting pronouncements on these topics.
The Waves of Feminism
The wave metaphor is employed in describing historical trends in feminism on the assumption that interest in women’s rights and specific issues reaches a peak and then falls off. The first wave of feminism was predominantly about political rights and voting rights for women. Remember that women, as half the population in our country, didn’t “gain” the right to vote in the US until 1920.
A few decades later, the second wave of feminism gathered momentum when feminists like Simone de Beauvoir in her seminal work The Second Sex made explicit the historical and contemporary oppression of women, demonstrating that the right to vote hadn’t come close to changing the balance of power between men and women. The third wave of feminism focused on the lack of attention paid to issues of race and economics, arguing that oppression looks very different based on race, ethnicity, and economics, while arguing that the intersectionality of different versions of oppression had been ignored by previous feminisms, as had the voices of women of color. The fourth wave of feminism is characterized by activism surrounding issues of sexual harassment and violence against women and is tied to the use of social media to disseminate information and create a space for new and perhaps marginalized voices to be heard.
Cartoon by Julietta Rivera
But what is the so-called men’s rights movement and why has it, and Scott Adams, pissed off so many people in its defense?
But What about Men?
The men’s rights movement—which, like most movements is multifaceted and encompasses several different subgroups— developed in the 1960s and 1970s as both a parallel movement of and a response to second- and third-wave feminism. By the 1990s, the men’s rights movement and men’s rights activists has distilled their platform into a fairly distinct slate of issues including specific concerns about issues of due process and unequal legal treatment under the law to more nebulous and malicious complaints about feminisms and the destruction of the patriarchy. The party line of men’s rights activists is typified by a disproportionate sense of discrimination, entitlement, victimization, and in many cases, outright misogyny.
Scott Adams stepped into the morass that is the men’s rights movement in March 2011 on his personal blog (http://blog.dilbert.com), with a reader-requested post titled simply, “Men’s Rights.” He insisted the post was intended to skewer the men’s rights movement and men’s rights activists, which he did. Nonetheless, his treatment of women was far more negative because, as he opined, traditional masculinity is both the problem and the solution.
In addressing men’s rights activists, Adams says to such men in his March 2011 post:
Get over it, you bunch of pussies.
The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year-old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.
Leaving aside the incredibly problematic insult to the men’s rights activists by calling them “pussies” (why is a pussy a weak thing, by the way?), which we assume was done to be particularly insulting to the manly men typifying the men’s rights movement, this blog post has been reposted and attacked and defended a myriad of times. Adams himself attempts to shame the hysterical feminists who take this piece out of context, like we have here, and makes it clear that they (the hysterical and angry feminists) are not his target audience as they lack the depth to understand his humor (March 25th 2011 post).
This piece was designed for regular readers of The Scott Adams blog. That group has an unusually high reading comprehension level.
In this case, the content of the piece inspires so much emotion in some readers that they literally can’t understand it. The same would be true if the topic were about gun ownership or a dozen other topics. As emotion increases, reading comprehension decreases. This would be true of anyone, but regular readers of the Dilbert blog are pretty far along the bell curve toward rational thought, and relatively immune to emotional distortion.
Adding insult to injury, Adam’s post was no one-off. Following up on this initial 2011 controversy, he has gone on to author a number of other men’s-right’s-movement-supporting blog posts. These posts suggest an affinity with men’s rights activists rather deeper than he claims or perhaps even recognizes, particularly in his examinations of key feminist issues across various waves of feminism.
Women as Children
A significant recurring theme on many men’s rights activist websites is that of the unreliable female narrator—women simply don’t know or understand their own lives, and dissemble (intentionally or unintentionally) about everything from the salary gap to rape. This rhetoric is an eerie echo of the rhetoric of a number of early anti-suffragists, including Mrs. William Force Scott and Senator J.B. Sanford, both of whom argued variously that women were too flighty, too delicate, and—especially in the case of poorer, less educated women—too ignorant to vote.
From the perspective of the modern men’s rights movement, similar rhetoric describes women as “flaky,” spoiled, unreasonable, or wheedling, and justifies not only the value but also the need for men’s elevated position relative to women and other social (as opposed to racial) minorities. Some authors have termed this position “familial” patriarchy in which manliness is the strongly preferred state, while women are positioned alongside their toddlers as individuals who can’t be trusted to act in their own best interests, much less run the world.
Scott Adams neatly encapsulates the sentiment by lumping women, children, and the mentally handicapped together; espousing alignment with this particular area of the men’s rights movement when he noted that “women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone . . .”
Although Adams attempted later to qualify this comment, he in fact doubled down, noting that the ways men must deal with these three groups is “disturbingly similar” and the best (and perhaps only) coping strategy for men is to remember not to care when those who are less-competent start to whine. Surely the anti-suffragettes themselves would have approved.
The Voting Matriarchy
In recent years, the men’s rights movement has focused with growing zeal on the perceived toxic consequences of feminism as a force that frees women from male control at societal and personal levels and thus threatens the status quo—the patriarchy. Men’s rights activists believe a transfer of rights and power from the boys to the girls has occurred, and so we’re now living in a matriarchy. However, most modern anthropologists consider “matriarchy” a myth; there is no known (not myth-based) society, past or present, in which women truly ruled. Nonetheless, many men’s rights activists consider any societal system not wholly grounded in traditional masculine interests to be a de facto matriarchy, though of course no serious scholars share this view.
But for Scott Adams, the notation of a female-dominated matriarchal United States is quite real. In his “Global Gender War” post from 2015, Adams gives us his definition: matriarchies are female-dominated countries, and female-dominated countries are those in which women can vote.
I wonder if the discussion of so-called radical Islam is disguising the fact that male-dominated societies are at war with female-dominated countries. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Islam doesn’t look so dangerous in countries where women ca
n vote. Consider the United States . . . compare our matriarchy (that we pretend is a patriarchy) with the situation in DAESH-held territory. That’s what a male-dominated society looks like.
Adams expands this line of reasoning to a global context, noting that worldwide, male-dominated societies are at war with female-dominated countries as a way of explaining the tensions between the West and Middle East. Troublingly, Adams writes without any sense of knowledge or awareness that women are grievously oppressed in the Middle Eastern countries he’s referencing, despite having gained their voting rights much earlier than American women. Clearly, gaining the right to vote is just a small step to actual political power.
Somehow, despite their matriarchal power, women still have certain (mostly sexual) obligations to men. According to Adams, the result is that our female-dominated society has evolved to keep men constantly unfulfilled and unhappy. He has dedicated quite a bit of blog space to the issue of matriarchy, noting that typically feminine behavior is valued, while masculine behaviors outside of a few exceptions in sports and war are stifled. Like most members of the men’s rights movement, he blames women for this state of affairs—they have men by the balls for sure, forcing them to wear V-neck sweaters (blog post from June 23rd 2016). He encourages women to put down their feminist sledgehammers—surely, since you can vote, it’s time to relax ladies! But since feminist relaxation is unlikely to happen, how does Scott Adams propose to deal with the new matriarchal order inside the US? Why, just give up and submit to chemical castration (blog post from June 15th 2011).
Men’s Entitlement to Women’s Bodies
Women’s control over their own bodies, especially in the area of reproductive control, was a central issue of second-wave feminism, and one to which the men’s rights movement continues to respond vociferously. More recently, bodily integrity has become a central concern in fourth-wave feminism with the emergence of #metoo and similar anti-sexual harassment and assault movements.
All of these concepts trouble the men’s rights movement greatly, since in varying ways, they all challenge men’s sexual entitlement to women’s bodies and men’s power to control the narrative about that entitlement. Only a cursory review of the most popular men’s rights movement websites is needed to demonstrate the growing pushback among men’s rights activists about anti-rape efforts and sexual consent standards. Many groups cast the concept of rape culture as a feminist moral panic, although they are usually careful to couch the conversation in terms of political correctness run amok. For some men’s rights activists, these concerns have evolved into a clear preoccupation with false claims of sexual violence.
As Scott Adams and men’s rights activists see it, the matriarchy not only exists, it exists as a prison for men’s desires, forcing them to their knees in their relationships and interfering with their entitlement to women’s attention, love, and bodies. Almost all men’s rights movement websites demonstrate this sense of entitlement, although in different and differently upsetting ways. Many men’s rights activists see themselves as natural pursuers/horn dogs and access to sex as a biological right, a stance that Scott Adams certainly seems to support. He has noted (post from March 27th 2011) that men have natural instincts for sex and aggression, and only suppress them as a strategy to have an even better sexual outcome later.
How many times do we men suppress our natural instincts for sex and aggression just to get something better in the long run? It’s called a strategy. Sometimes you sacrifice a pawn to nail the queen.
Likewise, women grant or withhold access to sex as a means to some end—usually financial or relational, another common theme of men’s rights activists—to either men’s delight or frustration. A number of men’s rights movement groups endorse the notion that sexual frustration leads to rape. If women were just less stingy with blowjobs, they argue, surely rape rates would go down. As objectionable as that view seems, Scott Adams has actually gone further, suggesting that sexual frustration is linked not only to rape but also to murder in the form of ISIS/Daesh suicide bombings, when he suggests that in the absence of ‘hugging’ it’s logical and perhaps even biological to turn to killing instead (blog post from November 17th 2015).
Women as Shrews
While first-wave feminism focused on participation of women in the political sphere, the second wave focused more on broader equality in society, especially in the world of work. But in both eras, the opposition rolled out similar gender stereotypes grounded in domesticity, employing images and narratives of women behaving in un-ladylike, un-motherly ways to shame them into compliance with social norms.
This form of opposition continues today, and while almost all men’s rights movement groups engage in various forms of gender stereotyping, the current stereotype of women as unfeminine shrews is particularly insidious. Men’s rights activists often contend that feminism overall, and our matriarchal system specifically, educates and encourages women to henpeck and manipulate men. Casting women as verbose, emotional, and irrational beings gives men permission to ignore them.
Taking that train of thought a bit further, it’s not unusual for men’s rights activists to see traditionalist women as gold diggers intent on trapping men into marriage and the care of children. These harpies are intent on male humiliation and emasculation. On the other hand, they see feminist women as gold diggers of a different sort, intent on snagging men’s jobs through double-talk, manipulation, sex, or promises of sex. These harpies are intent on humiliating and emasculating men. Researchers have labeled this peculiarly men’s rights movement phenomenon the “Goldilocks Dilemma” because for many of them the modern woman, just like the storybook porridge, is either too hot or too cold, but never just right.
In either case, the overarching message is that if women would just shut up, they would be tolerable again and then men would be liberated. But as Adams points out to his readers, that’s an unlikely situation because women are too busy trying to shut men up to shut up themselves—and, there’s little men can do about either situation (blog post from April 7th 2015). Adams reminds his readers that women have made much ado recently about male interruption of female speech. He even admits to being a (rather gleeful) culprit but ultimately accepts no blame, saying it’s women’s fault for saying useless or uninteresting things to begin with. But regardless of how much Scott Adams may or may not gain from being a serial interrupter, he admits that none of it really matters, because women have “won,” their waves of feminism having washed away any competing male interests.
Adams goes on to argue that male humiliation is now so deeply institutionalized that men’s persistent humiliation for simply being male is the default societal state (blog post from June 23rd 2016). Thus, the only realistic response any man can make is, in men’s rights movement lingo, to “take the red pill”, a reference from the movie The Matrix to a drug that makes its consumers see things as they really are.
Now, it may seem at this point that we’re a bit far afield from gender stereotyping of women as shrews, but to paraphrase one feminist’s assessment, Scott Adams is effectively saying that he thinks men just need to “man up” and accept their subjugation, because women won’t understand their arguments and won’t stop complaining even if they did.
Men Have It at Least as Bad
The Men’s Rights Movement and men’s rights activists attempt to borrow legitimacy from the very social movements many of them abhor by couching their views in terms like fairness, equivalence, nondiscrimination, equality, and justice. Both a central theme and primary complaint, men’s rights movement groups like to gaslight the rest of us by claiming the state of affairs for typical men is a least as bad if not worse than that of women. On this point, Scott Adams heartily agrees: “STOP TELLING ME IN YOUR MIND THAT WOMEN HAVE IT WORSE IN THIS COUNTRY THAN MEN!” (blog post from June 23rd 2016).
But in fact Adams approaches this issue from a fairly different angle than men’s rights activists. To begin with, he soft-pedals some of the more co
mmon men’s rights movement rhetoric regarding significant inequalities between groups, saying that dealing with occasional maltreatment is a worthy cost of maintaining some semblance of a world in which, should the need arise, he can count on having a manly man pull him from a burning car (blog post from March 27th 2011). Thus, rather than focusing on issues like circumcision, conscription, false rape, or parental rights, Adams contends instead that men’s psychological state of real or imagined humiliation and suffering is sufficient alone to define their experiences as worse than women’s. For example, imminent death constantly hangs over their heads since, in Adams own words, “any solution to a problem that involves killing millions of adult men is automatically on the table” (blog post from November 17th 2015).
In a blissfully un-woke display of traditional American masculinity, Scott Adams has developed his own variation of the “Goldilocks Dilemma” in which he argues for the validity of men’s rights movement issues and a recognition of men’s significant suffering while simultaneously castigating men who talk about these issues and feel as though they are psychologically suffering, urging them to stop whining: “Now I would like to speak directly to my male readers who feel unjustly treated by the widespread suppression of men’s rights: Get over it, you bunch of pussies.” Naturally, a variety of female attitudes and actions have contributed to this massive pussification.
So What’s the Point, You Angry and Hysterical Feminists?
At this point, we have probably angered more than a few Dilbert fans who are wondering if we read the comic and wondering why they should care about the waves of feminism. To these readers we respond that feminism is not a dirty word and that you are deluded and ignoring a virtual consensus in academia if you think we live in a matriarchy.
We see Scott Adams, in his blog posts, as an interesting combination of Dilbert, Dogbert, and Catbert and we, the authors of this chapter, are best represented as Alice and Tina. And probably the best way to deal with us is the same way you would deal with children and the mentally handicapped. Just saying.