Feminist koalas, and other grave injustices faced by men
MRAs: Just like Martin Luther King. Wait, not Martin Luther King. I'm thinking of someone else entirely. I'm not sure why I said Martin Luther King. I mean, that's ridiculous.
I’ve been following the Men’s Rights Movement for some time, and I’ve never been quite sure exactly what the major injustices faced by men are. I haven’t really noticed much to speak of in my own life, but evidently there are some and they are really, really bad.
Luckily, in recent days A Voice for Men has begun to clarify the issue for me. For example, AVfM Radio’s new theme song points out two of the worst injustices of all:
- Men having to hold doors open for ladies.
- Ladies wanting to marry us.
But these are not the only important men’s issues out there. In a recent post titled “A hard rains gonna fall: how hard is up to you” (clearly a reference to the famous song by Carly Simon), AVfM head dude Paul Elam spells out the most important issues of all in a set of bullet points. To save the beleaguered men of the world some important man-time I will summarize them for you here. Bullet-time!
- Thomas Ball’s suicide isn’t mentioned on Wikipedia because feminism.
- The Obama administration urged colleges to use the same standard of proof used in most non-criminal cases in their non-criminal disciplinary proceedings dealing with rape cases. Because feminism.
- Australia. Something about Australia. Ok, here’s the deal: Australia is very, very far away from me, like literally on the other side of the planet, and my eyes sometimes glaze over when reading about it. I’m sure whatever Elam is mad about is really bad. It might involve Koalas. Feminist Koalas. But that’s just speculation on my part.
- In India, where women are routinely harassed in public and groped on train cars, there are a tiny number of women-only train cars set up to cut down on the groping.
- In Sweden, a small group of feminists did a theatrical production based on/dealing with the writings of Valarie Solanas. It was performed in some schools.
- “Men constitute the lion’s share of combat deaths[11], workplace deaths[12], suicide deaths[13], and are afflicted with almost every known human malady and disease more frequently and more severely than women.” Obviously, the feminists are to blame, for their staunch opposition to women serving in the armed forces, and for their secret program of giving men girl germs.
- There are agencies dealing with women’s health issues. Clearly, men need to have just as many of their own agencies to deal with such male health issues as not being pregnant.
I hope my summary of these issues has been fair. As Elam has pointed out on a number of occasions, I am fat, so really nothing I do or say has any value. Plus, of course, I am a mangina. Just, you know, FYI.
In any case, these injustices have Elam plenty mad:
I am truly curious as to what festering, morally atrophied deviation of humanity could look at anything approaching this level of discrimination and suffering without becoming angry.
So mad that his metaphors all get up in each other’s business:
Whether it becomes a wave of social change, or a violent tempest of indignation and fury, the pendulum will continue to swing.
So there you have it. Naturally, Elam’s readers are grateful for his efforts to bring justice to the world by yelling about it online and trying to get people really, really mad at certain specific ladies without explicitly advocating violence against them. That’s pretty much how Martin Luther King did it, only with fewer references to “bitches” and “cunts” and not so many threaty remarks.
As Alfred E puts it:
Well said Mr Elam. May the harpies finally get a clue about their complete lack of compassion for men and boys all the while living in a gold box carted around by the prince.
Justice and compassion for all, except you harpies in your gold boxes! And also the rest of the bitches, cunts and manginas.
NOTE: That bit about Carly Simon above was a joke. Obviously the song in question was written by The Bangles.
Posted on January 13, 2012, in $MONEY$, a voice for men, antifeminism, evil women, grandiosity, I am making a joke, I'm totally being sarcastic, manginas, marriage strike, misandry, misogyny, MRA, oppressed men, paul elam, terrorism, threats. Bookmark the permalink. 601 Comments.
Nope. Here’s the point: Elam’s site has apparently been getting some more traffic lately because an Australian journalist did a blog post mentioning it.
So Elam takes the opportunity to set forth a bullet-pointed list that he thinks shows what horrible oppression men face.
Most of the items on the list are ridiculous. A couple refer to real issues, but these issues aren’t caused in any way or form by the evil feminists he goes on about.
This was also the case with the AVfM song. door holding, really??
Elam doesn’t seem much interested in actually helping men. He seems far more interested in coming up with random shit to get mad at women and feminists about.
I’ve written about numerous issues faced by men on this blog. Take prison rape. Because there are far more men than women in prison, this is an issue that mostly affects men. When MRAs talk about prison rape it’s all “men get raped more than women [false], argle bargle false accustions slutwalks.” It becomes another excuse to get mad at feminists. Has Elam ever actually talked about or linked to organizations that ACTUALLY TRY TO COMBAT PRISON RAPE, like Just Detention?
If you asked a feminist activist what the big issues facing women were, you’d likely get a list of specific real-world issues that feminist and other activist organizations actually attempt to deal with in a practical way.
With MRAs, as was the case with this post from Elam, it’s a flurry of weird little news items that make them mad.
Consider the vast number of “women behaving badly” posts about women abusers and other (alleged) criminals you see on r/mensrights all the time to the almost complete lack of similar “men behaving badly” posts on feminist blogs. Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of crime is committed by men and that it would be really really easy to come up with endless examples of really vile crimes.
But that’s not the point, because mainstream feminism isn’t all about “men are evil assholes argle bargle fuck their shit up!”
What they hell kind of activist slogan is “fuck their shit up” anyway? I’ve run across a few anarchists in my day who might have found that slogan appealing, but most of them were teenagers and got over it.
Conservatives want to go back to point A…,Feminists (and your liberal allies) want us to stay at point B, …
Well, Zarat, I’m a libertarian, and I abandoned MRA (To which I was initially very sympathetic) because it turned into a cesspool of misogyny, illogic, and violent rhetoric. Too bad, but having no allies doesn’t mean you’re automatically right. It means people with any shred of decency or sanity are running away from you and shaking the dust from your feet. Your movement is shrinking, and only getting “more attention” insofar as it is, because it’s becoming increasingly entertaining and alarming, not because it’s mattering.
Why are men who hate women referencing Carly Simon?
I am in so much favor of feminist koalas. Koalas are awesome. They look so soft and peaceful, but get in between them and their eucalyptus fix and they will cut you.
AntZ is going to need his own Big Book ‘o Leranin’
There are 600 feminist university departments with thousands of employees paid to find solutions to women’s problems but ZERO university departments working to find solutions to anything else.
There are 2000 publicly funded institutions, presidential commissions, etc, working to help women to implement these solutions but ZERO public institutions, commissions, etc. to help implement anything else.
There are 10,000 scholarships, programs, and educational initiatives to help women to find their own solutions to their problems, in cases where institutional solutions are inadequate but ZERO scholarships, programs, and initiatives to help anyone but women.
@ Dani Alexis, ouch. Does you hand hurt from that smack down?
@Ozy
Apparently donated all his capital letters and half his punctuation.
Mein GOTT!!! The reason there aren’t more homeless, suicidal men posting here is David is CENSORING THEM!!!!!
When does he find the time between his slanderous accusations and his malicious accusations!?
@ Shora
I though we agreed not to discuss Twilight? ;)
But Boy Howdie are those printers and envelop sealing machines frightening!
And don’t even get me started on Vacuum Cleaners!
@zhinxy
You’ve heard other definitions of humanity? I thought the “sugar and spice and everything nice” theory was debunked with the discovery of chemical X!
“Why are men who hate women referencing Carly Simon?”
Cause they’re so vain?
“What they hell kind of activist slogan is “fuck their shit up” anyway? I’ve run across a few anarchists in my day who might have found that slogan appealing, but most of them were teenagers and got over it.”
Hmm… As an overgrown anarchist, I could maybe kinda like “fuck their shit up” if it’s directed at the military-corporate-industrial complex, but it’s pretty lame if it’s directed at “the people with the cooties”
Also, it would be the difference between seeing a bold young anarchist yelling it and going, right on, young anti-stateling, and seeing a 40 something year old man say it as a serious political thing…
RE: The point about missing (white, middle class) women gaining more news coverage than missing men – it’s mainly to do with the theory of ‘ideal victims’.
Basically, the theory is thus: people REALLY hate shades of grey. They like to see one goodie, who has no negative characteristics, beat one baddie, who has no positive characteristics. So the media only tend to report cases where their readership can’t blame the victim for precipating hir attack.
The original list (Christie, 1986) was used to define ‘a person or category of individuals who, when hit by crime, most readily are given the complete and legitimate status of being a victim’. A person will typically be described as an ideal victim if:
They are vulnerable and weak
They were carrying out a respectable activity when the crime occurred
They were where they could not possibly be blamed for being
The offender was ‘big and bad’
The offender was unknown to the victim
So, we can see why young, white, middle class women fit this trope so well – they’re seen to be weak and respectable. Contrast with men, who are seen as ‘strong’ (or possibly blameworthy, given that men are most likely to be the victims of violence perpetrated by other men), or POC or poor people, who are inherently seen as less ‘respectable’ or more ‘streetwise’ (and so able to take care of themselves).
However, we can still look at cases to show that this is not simply a ‘woman good, man bad’ narrative – in January 2006, two men were killed on the same day in London – Thom Ap Rhys Price, a white lawyer, and Balbir Mataharu, an Asian taxi driver. In the fortnight after the murders, the media had generated 6,061 words about Rhys Price’s death, and 1,385 about Matharu’s.
So, if we made the media understand that *every person matters*, regardless of age/appearance/skin colour/size/gender/faith/ability etc., and people learned to accept that not everything is cut and dry when it comes to crimes, this would stop. It’s not a feminist conspiracy, it’s an ‘I want to sell newspapers and people don’t like thinking too much’ conspiracy.
Can’t breathe
(Sorry if that was boring/late/off topic, but I studied this phenomenon and potential responses to it at university and rarely get to rant about it)
TheNatFantastic – No, that was cool.
Why do you call her prosecuting (you know, her JOB as a prosecutor) one guy a “hate war against fathers?” I mean if she had dozens of prosecutions going on against men who were clearly innocent? Yeah I could see it. But she had one. A single case. A single case that even the appellate judges found to have enough merit to go to trial.
Also, she is still a prosecuting attorney as the Grievance Commission has not issued any suspensions. I checked.
You have no moral right to freedom to libel people and impersonate public officials.
Antz, you are so damn tedious. Go back to yelling about your virtual reality sex bots; at least that was entertaining.
Whoever thinks that women are never expendable characters has clearly never watched SVU, CSI, NCIS, Criminal Minds, and so on.
Antz, you idiot. Men make up half of the people emotionally abused; however, they make up less than half of the people physically abused, and about a third of those severely physically abused.
THAT IS NOT WHAT GENDER PARITY LOOKS LIKE FFS.
Honestly MRAL, I have to ask you, what is it about “Problematic ideas about gender effect men and women in different ways, and what seems like a positive to one person if often a negative to another.” that is so difficult to grasp for you?
If someone tells you that being portrayed in the media as a barely functional appendage to the important characters feels degrading to them, maybe try taking them at their word? Instead of agreeing to disagree, how about agreeing that it sucks for everyone, but not in the same exact way?
Stop insisting your perception is the Correct One. This is not an either/or situation.
*[is] often*
“Chivalry” is no more genuinely valuing someone than a mobster genuinely values people they victimize with protection rackets. It’s not affection, it’s brutal social control.
Chivalry is basically the David K. Meller System of “Benevolent” Ownership.
Well, Dracula, the thing is feminists have no problem telling ME what’s what in pop culture, how WOMEN ARE NOT REPRESENTED, MEN GET EVERYTHING, etc. I disagree with the basic assumptions, frankly. Especially since I’ve been alive. The hero is often called upon to risk his life again and again for women. He mows down goons, unheralded because they are all male. A single woman being in danger is a big deal. This is my perception, and it’s just as valid as yours.
DSC, I see chivalry more as a butler/employer relationship. Are the butlers more important than the employers? I think not.
Someone has not read Robert Aspirin’s Phule series!
Right, except you repeatedly dismiss the validity of other people perceptions all the fucking time.
Uh, no. People are people. Everyone has the same value. That’s basic sense.
Are the butlers believed to be competent enough to make unilateral decisions for the employers, or believed to be more trustworthy with the employer’s assets than the employer themself etc etc?
And people telling you that you might be wrong about the underlying intent of the message is not same thing as telling you that how you feel is wrong. It’s saying there are some things about this you don’t get.
Chivalry seems more like the way people baby-proof their homes. You’re operating under the assumption that the target of you’re coddling can’t manage without your support.
Interestingly I think I heard somewhere that cultures with less negative sexism ALSO have less chivalrous notions as well. Which seems to show that the existence of such chivalry is the byproduct of misogyny rather than putting women on a pedestal.
But ONLY THE HERO GETS TO DO ANYTHING. The woman is in danger and she CAN’T HELP HERSELF. Even the most valuable of women-in-danger is an object–either a treasure to be protected or a target of violence—but she’s not doing anything. This makes her LIKE A CHILD, and, like Dracula mentioned, it degrades me.
Like I said before, this hypothetical movie is only one of the repeated messages I’m getting throughout the day, throughout my life, that tell me I’m not as competent as my male equivalent: not as strong, not as smart, not as brave. I get that every day. I do not want to be a valuable object. I want to be people.
And I am willing to meet you halfway here, but I’m not sure whether you read my previous posts.
MRAL? The other face of chivalry is this:
http://genderacrossborders.tumblr.com/post/14262840202/boys-toys-vs-girls-toys
How would you like it if this was the message you got—about your own mind and your own capacity to learn and develop—every day of your life?
“Koalas are awesome. They look so soft and peaceful, but get in between them and their eucalyptus fix and they will cut you.”
Actually, they will pee on you. This is their only defense mechanism, besides living really high up in trees. And their pee has an incredibly strong menthol smell, as you might imagine.
Australian fauna are so weird.
Voip, there’s only one hero out of many, many men who don’t matter. Every woman matters, all the time. It’s more the general message that I dislike. It’s an example of male disposability.
YOU wouldn’t have to be “chivalrous” if society assumed WE could take care of shit like grownups.
Every woman in the movie matters, because there’s only one of them.
They matter the way that the ring in the Lord of the Rings matters. The plot may revolve around them, but the women still don’t DO anything. They are toted around for the entirety of the movie. At least the men get fight scenes.
Also, the heroes are usually pretty consistent in terms of appearance- with some exceptions, he’s tall, between like 28 and 50, ruggedly handsome, and usually white. I am only one of those things. Therefore, I have to assume I am a goon, and don’t matter.
They’re also stoned pretty much all the time, AND their brains are unusually small.
Yeah, since there’s such a diversity in the type of women cast in Hollywood blockbusters.
Voip, there’s basically usually only 1 or 2 men in the movies that matter.
What is also obvious from the MRM’s bizarrerie is their chronic mischaracterisation of the cause of social problems, and targeting feminism as the evil conspiracy underlying them. Despite my new Manboobz title (see previous comments thread for details), there really is no conspiracy of feminism to deprive men of their rights in some sort of zero sum game that insists women can only be liberated by the enslaving of men. In reality, society at large – enforced mostly by both men and women – is responsible for the ways society enforces gender roles that hurt both men and women. Blaming all of the MRM’s woes on feminism and making rabid anti-feminist assertions just shows how irrelevant and out-of-touch these male supremacists are.
I wonder if a koala would taste like menthol.
Well, okay, Laura, I’m not saying the wimmz don’t have their own issues with representation. Just, so do men.
Okay, I get that the people you relate to this situation are the Faceless Mooks. What you’re not getting is the intended message is not “These are guyz are useless, like you!” It’s “Look how awesome the Hero is! Nothing can stop him! Don’t you wish you were like that?” It’s a male power fantasy.
Or you can assume that Hollywood movies don’t portray real life or dictate your personal life choices, and go work on becoming who *you* want to be. ;)
When has anyone here said that men don’t?
It may not be the intended message, but it’s still the message. I don’t think the cackling menz pull out chairs in an attempt to humiliate and degrade females (even if I agreed with the underlying assumption there, which I don’t).
Patriarchy does tend to rank men by useless criteria like muscular strength and then harshly penalize the “lesser” ones, doesn’t it? The solution: less patriarchy, less authoritarianism.
MRAL, no one read you the Paper Bag Princess as a kid, did they? Pity, that.
I was an adult when I first read it, but oh, how it spoke to my desire to be active, and not wait around for some boring old prince to have all the adventures on his way to “rescue” me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paper_Bag_Princess
Spoilers!
“Princess Elizabeth plans on marrying Prince Ronald, who is practically perfect. However, a dragon arrives who destroys her kingdom, kidnaps Ronald, and burns all her clothes so that she has no choice but to wear a paper bag. Elizabeth follows the dragon and Ronald, and seeking to rescue her fiancé, challenges the dragon to burn forests with fire and to fly around the world. The dragon completes the tasks but after flying around the world a second time becomes tired and falls asleep. Elizabeth rescues Ronald, who is ungrateful and tells her to return when she looks more like a princess. Elizabeth realizes that she is better off without Ronald and sets off into the sunset to live her own life.”
I’d like to be the center of my own story, thank you very much. Not the girl knocked off in the opening credits.
I already am not chivalrous, and will never be. Females can take care of their own goddamned shit. I’m not going to chew their food and change their diaper. I’m grateful I live in 2011, where that’s considered borderline acceptable (though still frowned upon). In earlier times I’d probably be beaten up.
Felix, I LOVE The Paper Bag Princess! That was my favorite story ever growing up.
So you get to read your own meaning into the products of popular culture…
but we do not. You’re contradicting yourself.
Hey, we feminists are a year ahead of you! Cool.
Congratulations. You have embraced one of the tenets of feminism.
In other news, the Pope is Catholic and bears shit in the woods. Hold the front page.
Not wanting to pick on minor details. But, MRAL, why do you keep using the word ‘females’ yet you don’t seem to have an issue saying ‘men’ (or at least ‘menz’).
Just a bit jarring.
I hate quote fails.
Here’s the thing that gets me, Felix. What makes you think you’d be the princess in this scenario? If the genders really were reversed, you’d almost certainly be one of the she-mooks the princess kills. Or the dragon.
If you are basing how much you matter on a character in a movie, you have some problems that need to be addressed in your personal life before you go off trying to effect national policy on the relationship between men and women.
And when it comes to holding doors, I do not discriminate. If someone is approaching a door that I have already come through, I hold it open. Regardless of who (or what) they are.
There are no other characters in the story beyond the dragon, Elizabeth, and the prince. In fact, the only thing the dragon is ever mentioned as killing were horses.
I’m sorry, what? That’s the nice thing about books, you get to pick which character to identify with. Me, I’m going with the kick-ass princess.
Because the point of myths is that they’re models for the life stories of the hearer. They not only model what a culture values, but also provide images of how to cope with adversity and react to changing circumstances. That’s their function. They’re not the news, they’re life lessons.
Holding doors is something polite people do, for all genders, when they get to the door first. That is how I grew up, that is what I am teaching my kids (two girls). Everywhere I have lived for any length of time, Massachusetts, Minnesota, California, Arizona and Texas, this rule has been true.
What I think you’re trying get across here is the cultural narrative has negative side effects that many people don’t consider. That’s great, you have a tendency to do the whole “La la la I can’t hear you!” thing when people who aren’t you tell you A) how it effects them, and B) what the narrative is actually supposed to be. You missing the bigger and the smaller picture here, for no other apparent reason than it not effecting you personally.
Cloudiah: “Sorry, we men are human beings. We are no longer afraid of your feminist threats to use the oppressive power of proof to intimidate those who fight for our civil and human rights.”
The “oppressive power of proof”??
When you see facts and reality as opposition to your movement, you may want to reconsider your movement.
It’s also really nice to get a choice of characters that bear a resemblance to the reader, of course. If all the heroes are able-bodied white boys, then after the first 100 books of that, a female protagonist is a breath of fresh air. We teach children what they can be in life with what we read to them. And if the picture never lines up to their experience or identity, then that tends to narrow a child’s understanding of what is possible.
*That’s great [but]…*
Yaay! My quote got fixed!
I’ve got to go, but MRAL, it frustrates me how much you hate the things patriarchy does while continuing to blame women for it. We’re all oppressed and you’re envying our chains because they have Hello Kitty stickers on them? False consciousness, you haz it.
Yes, yes, MRAL, you’re a courageous hero for not changing the diapers of the imaginary women in your head.
Turn off the fucking computer. Go outside. Talk to real human women. Come on, you’re missing the “Viking Fighting Moves: Fiction vs. Fact” panel at Arisia.
Could be worse-you could be Tom Cruise.
Also, it is awesome that my name is so common that I get the same name as cool characters.
@MRAL: Bad analogy, AGAIN.
DSC, I see chivalry more as a butler/employer relationship. Are the butlers more important than the employers? I think not.
Butlers are paid by their employers.
Men are not paid by women.
Employers control much of what employees (butlers) can and cannot do.
Women do not control much what men can and cannot do (as classes, as social groups, despite the MRM lies).
ANALOGY FAIL.
And an employer can fire a butler. Women cannot, alas, fire men.
All right, MRAL. From now on, all faceless mooks in movies will be gender indeterminate ninjas. Of course, a lot of people will still code gender indeterminate as male, but there’s only so much you can do.