I love the smell of ignorance in the morning!

Good news, everyone! According a prolific commenter from r/MensRights, there is “literally no evidence supporting the idea that women had it any worse than the common man.”

My favorite part of this statement, besides it’s hostility towards women, is that it is factually untrue. I feel that Fatalistic may have missed a few history lessons, so I’ll clear a few things up. All of this info is found with just a few minutes of Googling, and some of it’s direct quotes from Wikipedia.

Women didn’t receive the right to vote in the United States until the Nineteenth Amendment passed in 1920. For those of you who are bad at math, that was 91 years ago. There are still plenty of people living who were born before then.

It’s still illegal for women in Saudi Arabia to drive.

“Bride abduction” by kidnapping and rape is still being practiced in Kyrgyzstan, Rwanda, Ethopia, Kenya, Kazakhstan Uzbekistan and is on the rise in Georgia, Azerbaijan and in the Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia regions.

Sexual slavery under the guise of “ritual servitude” is still practiced in Ghana, Benin, and Togo. There, young girls are sent to work as slaves for priests as payment for a family member’s misdeeds.

In ancient Greece, women weren’t even considered to be people.

During the middle ages all property which a wife held at the time of a marriage became a possession of her husband.

An estimated 500,000 women were raped during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. Of course, men and women were killed during the Rwandan Genocide, but this refers to the number of women raped specifically by enemy forces as a weapon of war.

Sati wasn’t banned in India until 1829.

Deaths from childbirth fever could kill around 27% of women giving birth – this does not include the number of women who died from childbirth, but from puerperal fever.

Over 90 million women and girls are estimated to be “missing” from the expected population in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, India, Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan alone due to sex-selective abortion and female infanticide.

It wasn’t until the 1870s that courts in the United States stopped recognizing the common-law principle that a husband had the right to “physically chastise an errant wife”. In the UK the traditional right of a husband to inflict moderate corporal punishment on his wife in order to keep her “within the bounds of duty” was removed in 1891.

Foot-binding was practiced in China for nearly a thousand years.

Acid attacks are on the rise, and 80% of victims are women.

The number of women and girls that are the victims of honor killings is hard to estimate, but The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) estimates that perhaps as many as 5,000 women and girls a year are killed by members of their own families. Many women’s groups in the Middle East and Southwest Asia suspect the victims are at least four times more.

Amnesty International estimates that 135 million women worldwide have experienced some form of Female genital mutilation. In some countries, nearly 100% of girls undergo female genital mutilation.

Women in India today develop kidney and liver problems because they do not have access to toilets.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 women develop obstetric fistulas each year and over two million women currently live with obstetric fistula.

In 2002, the US Department of State repeated an earlier CIA estimate that each year, about 50,000 women and children are brought against their will to the United States for sexual exploitation. For the last decade it has been estimated that 6,000 – 7,000 girls are trafficked out of Nepal each year. But these numbers have recently risen substantially. Current numbers for girls trafficked out of the country are now 10,000 to 15,000 yearly.

Around 200,000 women from Korea, Japan, China and the Philippines were forced into sexual slavery during World War II, the so-called “comfort-women.”

During the Victorian Era, women’s legal rights were comparable to the rights of children. They could not hold a job unless it was that of a teacher, nor were they allowed to have their own checking accounts or savings accounts. Women could not refuse sex with their husbands, and could be beaten if they tried.

Is that enough? I only stopped here because I actually got tired of making this list. Please add your additions to the list in the comments section.

I can already hear the flawed arguments coming my way, and I’ll just cut off a few at the pass –

“But, but but WAR! Men did most of the fighting.” Yes, and that’s disgusting. Women were often the “spoils of war” and just to make sure you weren’t missing anything, women. were. not. considered. people. until fairly recently in many places. In some, they still aren’t.

“But what about the menz?” Yes, my dear friend and concerned commenter, men are raped too, and men are mistreated too, saying something happens to women differently, or even more, doesn’t dismiss the experience of the men it also happens to.

“Well, even if women weren’t human beings, and they weren’t allowed to work outside the home, someone had to be taking care of them, amirite?! They were probably just sitting on their fat asses eating bonbons throughout history.” Yeah, no. Two words: domestic sphere. While women usually weren’t working outside the home, they were doing plenty of work at home.

Coming up soon – my least favorite new vocabulary word: “mangina.”

UPDATE: See Fatalistic’s response here!

