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.
Personally I’d rather do away with the army of goons mechanism altogether in favour of a smaller group of slightly better developed baddies. Which assuming they’re more competent than than the average Stormtrooper should provide the same level of threat.
Yup, MRAL. Women matter so much, female goons in movies PRACTICALLY DON’T EXIST.
I, for one, would be really bloody happy to see as many “disposable” female stock characters as male, instead of just one female character. This is why it’s so much easier for me to watch, say, British TV: even characters who aren’t the main character are sometimes fat, female, or black. You don’t realize what you’ve been missing until you see it!
@MRAL: You see, feminists don’t expect you to do anything of the sort (diapers? chewing food? infantilizing women much?)
But this lack of expectation, which is what I think gets to you, also extends to women not having to have sex with men who ask them, or date men who ask them out, or have a man to survive.
Shorter version: fucking quite blaming women AND/oR feminists for YOUR problems in the world.
@Crumbelieveable
I think Cloudiah was mocking AntZ. She said “Ack! Channeling Antz briefly there. A shattering experience, shattering.”
MRAL, please don’t hold doors for women if it just feeds your resentment. In general, don’t do “favors” that you resent, and that are really excuses to have things to hold over people’s heads. That’s not a good way to live. Also, no one gives a shit about the damn doors.
And who in this century follows the men-walk-on-the-right-side-of-the-street rule? That’s like a thing people would do in Dickens novels if they weren’t busy dying of consumption and spontaneous human combusting.
Does MRAL *only* watch action movies?
Personally I’d rather do away with the army of goons mechanism altogether in favour of a smaller group of slightly better developed baddies. Which assuming they’re more competent than than the average Stormtrooper should provide the same level of threat.
I think we should go back to the rules of 1980s action movies, and have characters fight ethnically-diverse street gangs that include at least one (1) black guy with a mohawk.
Now I am trying desperately to think of *any* movie with female goons and, except for MRAL’s Kill Bill example, I can’t.
Dammit, MRAL. Now I won’t be able to watch action movies again without seeing if any of the goons are female! It’s like the action movie version of the Bechdel Test!
My father actually does follow the street rule. Granted, he was raised by an abusive father who probably beat etiquette into him, and he’s a horrible person himself, so not the best example.
It seems like MRAL’s big complaint is that the one token female character in a “mainstream” movie (i.e. not targeted at women) gets a line or two. What a massive fucking injustice.
(It is, of course, but not in the way he means.)
Re: the street rule: I once read a girl’s blog entry about how her date did that and it made her feel protected and romantic. My first thought was, “Won’t he get splashed by cars as they go by?”
MRAL, until you can recognize that it is not women, and most especially not feminists, who are making these rules, then frankly, there’s no hope for you.
The thing about the Mary Kellett case is that it’s win-win for people like Elam. If she ends up being disciplined, then it will be a Glorious Victory Over Feminism. Of no action is taken, then it will be proof positive of the Evil Feminist Domination of the legal system. Either way, Elam and his minions will never stop taking about it.
“And who in this century follows the men-walk-on-the-right-side-of-the-street rule? That’s like a thing people would do in Dickens novels if they weren’t busy dying of consumption and spontaneous human combusting.”
My grandfather got me to walk that way with him on the street, in the last century. There’s an entire procedure for crossing the street and switching sides. But then, he’s also the person who thought my degree in Women’s Studies involved the domestic sciences, and was *horrified* when I explained what classes I was taking. He was also a British civil servant, literally an enforcer of colonial powers and the patriarchy.
Why does Paul Elam write with such an “angsty teen poetry” style? Is it because he is desperately trying to add weight to weak arguments through grandiose speeches? Or is he actually an angsty teen who just happens to look like a 50(?) year old man?
Right, Molly, and this thing with no female goons, it’s misandry, like the male version of the Bechdel Test.
The ‘walking on one side of the street’ thing probably goes back to when swords were carried. You’d want to have your dominant hand free to draw if you had to. Gods only know what lefties did – probably learn to fight right handed to avoid being accused of witchcraft.
MRAL, you think that having no female goons = hating men? How is not allowing the entire female gender not to be something against *men*? It’s based on the assumption that women *can’t* be warriors, even incompetent ones.
And t’s not like men don’t get to play all the *other* parts in movies *as well* as be the goons…
No, it’s based on the assumption that men are expendable and no one cares if they die.
Usually I think I’ve seen the Door Thing expressed as the reverse of this — not “Men have to open doors for women, tears flow” but rather “I WILL open the door for you. The door. I will open it. Even if you give me a dirty look! And a woman did give me a dirty look once, because feminists give men dirty looks when they open doors. But, defiantly, I will open the door anyway. Because that is what men are supposed to do for women, and I am a man, and you are a woman. So, even if you give me a REALLY dirty look, THE DOOR WILL BE OPENED FOR YOU. BY ME. WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT. Also, if you care about that, it indicates how silly you are because it’s really a trivial matter.”
MRAL, in the trope you’re talking about, female goons don’t even EXIST.We’re weighing “two seconds of screentime” vs. “no screentime AT ALL”, plus the fact that (I’m taking the latest Batman movie as an example) the hero is a dude, his sidekick is a dude, and his two nemesis are dudes. Even the helpful detective is a dude!
Not only the goons, but the hero, the villains, and the sidekicks all have dicks and you feel LEFT OUT? This isn’t about gender anymore, hon. This is about YOU. You do realize you’re extrapolating the expendability of men from ONE trope in ONE genre of fiction?
MRAL, if you hurry you can make the Game of Thrones panel in the Alcott Room.
MRAL, that’s not true. The public cares a lot if the male hero dies, same thing for the side kick. In movies, men are heroes, big bads, goons,… they’re everywhere, and everything. That your poor self image makes you identify with the characters that doesn’t matter doesn’t mean there the only ones or even that the viewer is supposed to care for them.
Or you could go to Phil and Kaja Foglio’s reading in Burroughs, which would be my personal pick.
I mentioned this thread to an online friend just now and they told me that Gaddafi had female bodyguards:
“The Amazonian Guard, as Gaddafi’s elite, all-female task force came to be known, comprised of women who were reportedly hand-selected by the Libyan leader and sworn virgins. Donning lipstick, heels, and jewelry in a country where many women wear veils in public, the contingency certainly turned heads. The women reportedly underwent “extensive martial arts and firearms training at a special academy” before they were officially inducted in the Guard, and their skills included flying fighter jets and hand-to-hand combat.”
Jets aside, the article goes on to say that Gaddafi was an abusive boss, but it’s still a much more interesting factoid than reading MRAL’s “I FEEL LEFT OUT OF ALL OF FICTION EVEN THO THEY’RE CALLED “ACTION *HEROES*” FOR A REASON” whining.
Poor MRAL, doomed to go through life identifying with the red-shirted ensign. If there were only more roles showing the kick-ass adventures of a 5’8″ hero (height averaged from day and night values). Cause being white, young and male isn’t quite enough.
Jason Stratham is losing his hair. Bruce Willis is short. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT, MRAL?
Now if he was arguing that FAT guys always get the short end of the stick in cinema, I’d be agreeing with him. But how the hell do you get “I’m expendable, because I’m male” when both the goon AND the hero are men? *side eye*
Hey, Scotty was totally a red shirt! You can identify with Simon Pegg, MRAL!
Question: does this man matter as a human? Does the public cares if he suffers or dies?
He’s not exactly a model, any average person can identify to him.
When I say human, you know what I mean…
MRAL
I think the problem is less one of male expendability (although I’ll concede that may be a factor or byproduct) and more of the idea of the male being the implicit default. I would speculate the idea behind a faceless goon left to die (for example, an Imperial Storm Trooper*) being male is because this is the default parameter on a “blank slate” character. Being female is a significant “character trait” or something along those lines in the minds of the people behind the show/movie/game/etc., something significant and different. I don’t think it’s because of the idea that people don’t care when men die (when Obi-wan died, Luke was pretty visibly bummed out, to use the same Star Wars example).
I think that’s in part why so few movies pass the Bedchel test. IMO, the reason the idea of the faceless goon being exclusively male is a lot like that (as Molly Ren pointed out) is that it plays into the same mentality. When people don’t care what gender someone is in a work of media, they are male by default. It then becomes a conscious decision to make a character female. Of course, this is all just speculation on my part.
*Now that I think about it, do we really know the Storm Troopers were men? Even the ones who talked might have just had voices that sounded what people commonly associate as male (assuming their communicators represented their voice accurately).
Lex Luthor’s bodyguard on Superman: The Animated Series was a woman named Mercy Graves.
I always wondered if the Storm Troopers were dudes! I always kinda assumed they were genderless, like the Borg.
@ MRAL no it’s means that clumsy stormtrooper types are expendable and nobody cares about them. Nobody identifies with them and nobody but you and your buddies take offense to them because they don’t represent men as a gender only low ranking villians.
This fails because in other, non-action genres like romantic comedies or whatever, background extras are generally realistically split- as of course they need to be. The filmmakers make a conscious choice to make all the mooks male- if they just sent out an open casting call, they’d get half and half, but they don’t. Because they think the audience won’t accept it. Misandry and male disposability.
Also, I’m not in Boston at the moment. I’m hoping to make it to Arisia tomorrow!
The Star Wars prequels have an even worse male-female ratio. IIRC the only female characters are Padme and her body doubles.
But trust MRAL to turn the troubling (and really weird when you think about it) absence of women in most films into an example of misandry. You were doing so well, kid!
@Spearhafoc She was harley quinned into the comics, too. Which terminology I’m sure upset her, because we know how she feels about her. XD
In the comics, she also worked alongside another female bodyguard named HOPE.
For fun historical women guards, it’s hard to beat…
THE DAHOMEY “AMAZONS!”
http://quirkyblackgirls.blogspot.com/2011/02/fyeahblackhistorythe-dahomey-amazonsthe.html
http://epa-prema.net/abomeyGB/resources/amazons.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahomey_Amazons
MRAL: wasn’t that “Bridesmaids” comedy a huge deal simply because *all* the main characters were female? People didn’t make a big deal out of the fact that “Inception” had an all-but-one male cast.
In a romantic comedy, i’s a realistic world so they can’t put mean only.
Do you even read what we write? What about the males that do matter, do you think they’re just a few exceptions, how do you rationalize that?
Starship Troopers did an amazing job of women in prime AND mook roles.
Now if it had had all male mooks and all female officers/main characters, I think you’d have a very good example for your cause. As it was, the movies with male mooks tend to have a male military in general, or a few token high up ladies.
If the military is portrayed as a man club, then male mooks go along with it. If you can find movies and games where women are presumed to have a large and equal role in the military, yet the men are still the mooks, I think you’d have a good point.
*men. All right, I’m going to sleep.
Really, it’s more of an example of *adult* disposability. I mean, when’s the last time you saw a big honkin’ superhero mowing down a mob of toddlers with squirt guns? I rest my case. Mis-elder-ry!
I think Bridesmaids was a big deal because it was fucking hilarious.
Also with with the door opening thing do MRAs realise these days there are many doors that open themselves (perhaps to avoid this drama).
What would happen if there were female mooks? Would the men in the audience go, “OMG, you can’t hit women because they are SACRED!” or would it all be about how unrealistic it was because no woman is strong enough to lift that much armor AND a gun?
zhinxy: The appellate court overturned the decision, but said there was no misconduct.
The evidence was sufficient to justify a prosecution.
Antz (the “lets split the world in half and keep all the men on one side, all the women on the other and jerk off to internet porn; so everyone will be happy” dude), is pretending that a, purported, lack of DV cases in which Kellet is prosecuting att’y is because she’s afraid of another jihad by the AVFM crowd.
I think comics have been recently decent (compared to earlier) about women being higher up in the organizations. Granted there aren’t enough women at the very top, but as far as lieutenants go I can think of Storm, Jean Grey, Emma Frost, Black Widow, Mystique. I also think Fable does an amazing job of creating strong but universally relatable women.
@molly
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Stormtrooper
the more you know…
Look, I’m tired of this shit. Read the TV Tropes page, they make a good case for it.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MenAreTheExpendableGender
I think it’ll probably be a 55-45 or 60-40 split in favor of “OMG so unrealistic”
Aw. :( *fantasy of all the Storm Troopers being genderqueer fades away*
In all seriousness, scrolling past Antz and his repetitive boilerplate and MRALs usual nonsense – are there any MRAs actually working on the issue of prison rape? Because that’s a huge injustice that mostly affects men right there, and one that’s theoretically fixable if there was just enough public will brought to bear on it, and pressure put on the appropriate authorities. Unlike many of the vague issues that they ramble on about, this is one that they can actually do something about, right now!
So, are they? Because I’ve yet to see any sign of it.
Molly, I really don’t think it would be a big deal, but Hollywood doesn’t THINK the mainstream audience would like it. This is institutional misandry. In fact, I really don’t think individuals are this misandric… as is often the case, people are more evolved that institutions.
From the TV Tropes page MRAL linked:
Thinking women aren’t strong/fierce enough to be mercs, even incompetent ones = hatred of men. Got it.
It gets in the way of hating women and feminists CassandraSays.
If they had to choose between magically able to stop prison rape by say, putting together a giant jigsaw puzzle or spending the time that it would take to put together the giant jigsaw puzzle ranting about how there is a woman on the jigsaw puzzle…they would pick the latter.
Messing with MRAL’s mind:
hey, did you know that most of the Riding Rohirrim in LOTR were played by women in their forties, fifties, and sixties, because when they put out a call for extras that had their own horses, that’s who turned up? Because a lot of women ride?
Hey, did you know that most of the MORIA orcs were played by women stuntplayers because they wanted them smaller than the other orcs?
Hey, did you know the honking big men in the Inn at Bree whose faces we never saw were stuntwomen on stilts!
Hey did you know a bunch of the elves who marched to defend Rohan were played by stuntwomen because they had problems getting tall slender Elven looking extras?
WOMEN.
Once or twice I’ve told that to guy fans, and they’ve told me I ROONED the movie for them
I laughed my evil feminist Medusa laugh and went off to write slash.
I don’t understand why you’re so fucking convinced that nameless men dying is an example of “women not being able to be incompetent”. Occam’s razor.
Men are disposable. That’s why you can’t make a movie without a million of them. Or something.
Because you are myopic. I am hoping you grow out of it and do not become Brandon.
Ithiliana, I don’t give a shit, except to note that they insisted on keeping the women’s faces hidden. More misandry- they can’t have women as mooks or extras.
Molly, why did you quote the TV Tropes article? They’re siding with me.
They (presumably the people in charge of creating the film) cannot have women as mooks or extras and that means it is anti male?
Uh no. What it means is that women are not allowed into all roles. Including the Red Shirts.
And all the male orcs were totally BARE FACE NO MAKEUP.
MANY of the extras in that film did not have their faces show (hobbits had probably the least make up or prosthetics).
Amazingly enough I have thought that refusing to give women equal access to roles equalled mksogyny. I agree with the others: only you are special enough to see a pattern of gender discrimination as being AGAINST MEN.
I assume yo’ll be rushing to see RED TAILS to see teh fantastic WWII movie about the black fighter pilots (which George Lucas took 23 years to make, and had to fund himself, because TPTB wouldn’t fund a film in which ALL THE MAJOR CHARACTERS are black men).
Right?
Because keep in mind that most of those diposable mooks are white men.
But that just shows how racist Hollywood is against white men?
Good lord, you’re pathetic.
If the Redundant Array of Incompetents isn’t sellable as a threat (albeit a hypothetical one) then the trope in question goes from “Look how badass our heroes are, they are defeating many enemies in combat!” to “Look at what a bunch of cowardly losers our, uhm, heroes are, they are slaughtering a bunch of innocents who could never harm anyone!” Hence the lack of toddlers. That there’s also generally a lack of women ain’t exactly a compliment.
In more exciting news, I’m contemplating the prospect of changing my own oil for the first time this weekend. This might or might not have something to do with the fact that the oil being targeted hasn’t been changed for at least a year and I’m mildly embarrassed.
Hey, I’m all for female mooks, and I bet most feminists and MRAs alike are. I suppose the rest is semantics.
You’d think MRAL would be able to read “More misandry- they can’t have women as mooks or extras” and go “Waaaaait a minute–this means no one realized women were extras! The women might as well not have existed!”
This is especially funny because it’s LOTR, which has… what, 3 explicitly female characters in a cast of thousands.
Oh, and MRAL: I see you Expandable Men TV Trope and top you with Girls in refrigerators
Nope, firebee, because even in film with a female action protagonist, the mooks are still all men (sometimes there’s a female boss). Why? Misandry.