“Pregnancy is No Excuse For Misandry” and other pithy, baffling slogans from the Men’s Rights propaganda squad
A real Mens Rights poster from deviantART
Pity the poor Men’s Rights activists. The real civil rights movements that MRAs like to compare their, er, “struggle” to may have faced many obstacles that MRAs haven’t — from legal prohibitions on voting to fire bombings and assassinations — but at least they haven’t had a hard time explaining just what it was, and is, that they’re seeking redress for.
When Martin Luther King so famously dreamt of a world in which “my four little children will … not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” he was not only speaking eloquently; he was expressing an idea that was, well, pretty easy to understand.
And that’s where the trouble comes for the MRAs. It’s a bit harder to explain your alleged anti-oppression movement to the general public when the people on whose behalf you’re fighting aren’t actually, you know, oppressed. So is it any wonder that MRAs have such a hard time explaining themselves to the public?
I mean, all the Suffragettes had to put on their posters was “Votes for Women.” MRAs are stuck. Men already have votes. They already have civil rights. Heck, men already run most companies and hold most political offices and control most of the world’s wealth.
And so MRA propaganda tends to be muddled, a weird mixture of misogyny and special pleading and stuff that just doesn’t make any sort of sense no matter how you slice it. In earlier posts we’ve looked at baffling and/or offensive posters from A Voice for Men and associated sites, as well as at some of the awful graphics that sometimes make their appearance on Reddit.
Today, a quick stroll through the MRA underground on deviantART.
The graphic at the top of the post is from someone calling himself awesomeninja; for his propaganda work, he specializes in somewhat baffling text-based graphics in basic colors. Apparently he has convinced himself that “feminazis use child-bearing all the time to defend their sexist views,” and feels it is necessary to respond to this in giant letters in several colors with a black background.
He is also responsible for this similarly befuddling contribution to political art:
Wait, is this a trick question?
Dude, have you actually met any Men’s Rights Activists?
Oh, wait, you are one. Oops.
But wait, there’s more:
Of course, awesomeninja isn’t the only one spreading the MRA message of love on deviantART. Here are a few other graphics I found by searching for “men’s rights” and related tags on the site.
This lovely “stamp” from loqutor, who has convinced himself he is “debunking an ages-old feminist myth” with it.
A meme from Userbruiser, who apparently thinks that if a woman has alcohol in her system, it’s ok to rape her:
This bizarre castration fantasy from the same lovely fellow:
This rant posted by themodsquad, who also enjoys jokes about pedophilia and bestiality.
There’s some question about whether or not themodsquad came up with that all by himself, but this uglier and worse-written sequel seems pretty authentic to me:
Is he a “real” MRA or just a troll? I don’t know, but he does seem to be an authentic misogynistic asshole attention-seeker, and I’ve seen virtually every “argument” in the first graphic rehashed many times on assorted MRA sites; it’s pretty much standard-issue “we hunted the mammoth to feed you.”
Let’s close with several graphics from an aspiring Man Going His Own Way. millenia89 is proud of his own reproductive organs:
But he doesn’t seem to think too highly of most of his fellow male-identified penis-havers. Indeed, he believes most of his fellow men are like lemmings marching off a cliff — except for a tiny percentage of MGTOW like the two tiny fellows at the bottom right of the graphic below.
I know it seems confusing, but trust me, the MGTOW in this picture aren’t the ones going over the cliff, really. They’re the ones facing the other direction, underneath that little MGTOW sign. No, not under the big MGTOW sign, under the little one. Just trust me on this one.
millenia89 is especially unimpressed with men who step in to “save a hoe,” like this fellow, whom he sees as a handy “personification” of the sort of “manipulated tool” who, I guess, apparently likes women enough to help them out. I’m not quite sure I get it. Apparently this picture is inherently hilarious because it’s a picture of a black guy with an odd smile in a weirdly inaccurate superman costume. Heck, even the font is wacky.
Millenia89 may not think much of most of his fellow men, but at least he doesn’t want to render them obsolete. Women, well, that’s another issue entirely, as this utopian paean to the glories of artificial wombs suggests:
So awesomeninja thinks that “pregnancy is no excuse for misandry.” Millenia89 evidently hopes that in the future there will be no excuse for pregnancy itself.
This is how the Men’s Rights movement tries to explain itself to the world.
And MRAs wonder why their little movement has the reputation it does.
–
I was inspired to check out deviantART’s MRA community by some of the commenters here. Check out the comments in the “Feminist anti-obedience school” thread starting here to see some homegrown parodies of awesomeninja’s graphic works.
Posted on September 24, 2013, in a voice for men, all about the menz, antifeminism, are these guys 12 years old?, artistry, crackpottery, drama kings, entitled babies, evil women, grandiosity, gross incompetence, hypocrisy, imaginary oppression, mansplaining, men invented everything, men who should not ever be with women ever, MGTOW, misogyny, MRA, oppressed white men, pedophiles oh sorry ephebophiles, penises, playing the victim, racism, rape, rape culture, straw feminists, the c-word, we hunted the mammoth and tagged antifeminism, men's rights, mgtow, misogyny, MRA, racism, rape culture. Bookmark the permalink. 705 Comments.
“Also, the clear way that so many women have no inhibitions about aggressively confronting and striking men as well as how women are the bosses in most married or cohabitating households shows that women are in general not intimidated by men.”
First: citation?
Second: does not follow.
Where are my previous points?
It hasn’t been 3 million years. This is totally unrelated to evolution. No DNA, no biology, no natural selection, just social interactions. Since when have misery, shortsighted failure, and convenient excuses been part of evolution? Since when has evolution needed 3 million years to be considered evolution?
I simply didn’t cut anything out of the sentence. But a chain of happenstances over a large period and the effects on species development is evolution.
The beginnings of humankind go back around 3 million years when our ancestors first began walking upright. But if you want to just reference homo sapiens, 275,000 years of happenstance chain events is more than enough time to promote evolution.
off topic…
Athywren, how do I make them public?
Good, why the fuck would I want a man to show me how he can dominate other men? That’s a total douchebag.
Fibinachi didn’t say anything about species development.
Fallacies: Naturalistic. Is/Ought. Probably some others that I don’t have the patience to look for.
It’s an inaccurate point anyway – traditions aren’t coded for in the genome. It is no more an evolutionary fact that women are subservient to men than it is that we believe in Jesus Christ. Take all traces of Christianity out of the world and it will be dead, unless it turns out to be true, in which case god will come down and spank us. Likewise, take all traces of patriarchy out of the world and it will be dead. Something else may regrow in its place if it let it, but it will not be the same thing, any more than a new religion would be the same as Christianity. This is easily demonstrated by the large variety of traditional gender roles among different peoples around the world.
Any evidence of this?
Or this?
1) Or this?
2) As if that would be a bad thing!?
“I simply didn’t cut anything out of the sentence. But a chain of happenstances over a large period and the effects on species development is evolution.”
Oh dear, another twerp who thinks there is no such thing as nurture. How embarrassing for him.
Why don’t you just pull out that biological determinism card you’ve been hiding up your sleeve? You know, the argument that we have NEVER heard before.
First: citation?
Second: does not follow.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/glenn-sacks/researcher-says-womens-in_b_222746.html
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2008/09/25/women-call-the-shots-at-home-public-mixed-on-gender-roles-in-jobs/
I don’t exactly have a professional level understanding of biology and evolution… but a chain of happenstances over a large period and the effects on species development is history. The parts that count as evolution are the parts that have to do with the genetic code. Wearing funny hats over several thousand years, then making it illegal not to wear the hats is not evolution. Killing people who do not wear hats might contribute to evolution, but only if there’s a gene that determines whether someone will refuse to wear a hat.
You’re so predictable, Good.
Athywren,
“Take all traces of Christianity out of the world and it will be dead, unless it turns out to be true, in which case god will come down and spank us.”
Ok, I just scared the crap out of my kids laughing SO hard at this. Your delivery – wasn’t expecting it. Everything preceding spanking was so serious. Oh, I hope the rapture consists of spanking. Wait, that sounded dirty…
takshak, I’ll take it, thanks!
It looks like there are two ways – log in, click your name click settings, then click the “public” option in public or private, or create a public album and put the ones you want us to see in there. Or share the direct link for each one of them, but that’s probably a lot of copying and pasting.
Oh dear, another twerp who thinks there is no such thing as nurture. How embarrassing for him.
Stop being stupid stupid. Nurture is important. But you don’t think that nature is involved with something that is universal and has been for hundreds of thousands of years at the least?
Terrifying, horned demons, spanking us rhythmically to the tune of ““O Fortuna” and chanting, “I’m do-ing-this…. for-your-own-good…”
It doesn’t matter if it’s innate or not, Lessgood. That doesn’t make it correct.
@good
I’m going to need a citation on ‘hundreds of thousands of years at least’.
I really, really do.
“I simply didn’t cut anything out of the sentence.”
What?
“But a chain of happenstances over a large period and the effects on species development is evolution.”
First, it’s not happenstances. Natural selection selects the “best fit”. That’s not an accident. Nor is it a chain. Nor does it have to happen over a large period.
Could you address: This is totally unrelated to evolution. No DNA, no biology, no natural selection, just social interactions. Since when have misery, shortsighted failure, and convenient excuses been part of evolution?”
“The beginnings of humankind go back around 3 million years when our ancestors first began walking upright.”
… and? humans have only been around for around 200,000 years. Bipedal =/= human.
“But if you want to just reference homo sapiens, 275,000 years of happenstance chain events is more than enough time to promote evolution.”
… which has nothing to do with what any of us said.
Do you think that people who were slaves at one time in history are evolutionarily inferior to their masters, too, Good? Because that’s what follows from your statement.
True. If you’re talking genetics and biologically transferable things, instead of oral histories and sociological organisation or religion or traditions.
And even then, so… what? What? what
Are you suggesting misery is evolutionary selected for, or that fitness pressure would entail men to become more controlling and women to become more casually exploited? Or that evolutionary pressure has gradually shaped it so that humans come together in organisations wherein men are on top and women are not, because That’s Just The Way It Goes?
Are you mad? In what world? By what mechanism? For possible fitness increasing purpose? By what wayward mutation?
Set aside all of that, and consider for an instant that it’s a horrible *ineffecient* way to go about things. IT wastes truly massive amounts of ressource on subduing half the population and it limits the growth potential of your entire species. There is no way that system would endure for a split second the moment a better, more effectively producing generallized system came out OH WAIT that’s feminism, isn’t it? ANd the fact that in general, higher co-participation of everyone and more open, less strict terms of tradition frees up talent to go where its best.
Ouch, my brain.
And… O…. but…
OKay. Okay. New question. New question.
GOOD. assuming that’s true. Assuming that is actually the case. Assuming this is all evolution, and the way it works today is how it all evolved, and that men and women and the human species in general has been shaped by those forces to that which we are today, biological all, and it’s hard-coded into our dna…
You’d still want that to continue?. In this hypothetical example, we’ve all just figured that out, and people know, so you can just… make it not so by mutual decision, and set things up so everyone benefits better, reduce all the casual cruelty, domestic violence, rape, threats and pain because so far it’s just been blind evolution and we’re smart humans and we can fix that. It’s just a matter of changing a few laws and making a few snips and snaps at society to fix the “Blind errors of evolutionary chance”, and you seem to be saying we shouldn’t?
… I don’t often have the chance to converse with true evil, but I do relish the oppertunities I get.
Step on all the legos.
Forever.
Okay, easy run-by here: Good claims women are the bosses in ‘most’ homes. To justify this, he cites a study that shows that women are in charge of specific decisions… 43% of the time, with it being a mixed-bag or male-dominant household the other 57% of the time.
Ergo, Good is a moron who doesn’t know the meaning of the word “most”. Proceed accordingly.
“Stop being stupid stupid. Nurture is important. But you don’t think that nature is involved with something that is universal and has been for hundreds of thousands of years at the least?”
I think it’s funny to read YOU calling anyone stupid.
Funny how you like to strawman, too. I said, you’re ignoring nurture.
Unsure if Bad’s just trying to go for repetition as emphasis, or if Bad is, well, bad at grammar and attempting to make… dun dun duuuuun… A PERSONAL ATTACK! Gasp!
Somehow I suspect the latter, but let’s see: Bad, please elucidate!
Also this makes me feel ill: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/glenn-sacks/researcher-says-womens-in_b_222746.html
So women have the choice to not hit their partners, and advised not to(both true), but men don’t have the choice?
Also Erin Pizzey.
And “over-report”? DV is DV.
Is “Fathers and Families” MRA? just wondering
A good illustration of how neutral and even male-dominated situations are perceived as female-dominated (eg, how a group of half men and half women is perceived as being mostly women) because the base assumption is that there will be no women.
(I’m not saying it’s OK for women to hit their partners or whatever. My point is that they’re only holding one gender responsible for DV)
A vague reference to flawed DV research and a study that neither analyzes the nature of the respondents’ answers in the survey nor necessarily supports the conclusion that women are dominant in heterosexual couples? Ok.
Also fixed it: http://auggziliary.imgur.com/all/
Also, what’s deliciously ironic about those two links is that they are flawed for the same reason: they rely on the double-respondent model for responses, ignoring the effects of bias due to vague questions and biased perceptions of the respondents’ partners.
@Ally S
Well, I tried to find any research published by Capaldi in 2009, but unfortunately it looks like the article only mentioned a conference. She has published in 2012. I haven’t looked over the article pertaining to intimate partner violence.
Serrana:
“Do you think that people who were slaves at one time in history are evolutionarily inferior to their masters, too, Good? Because that’s what follows from your statement.”
YES, thank you!
Fibinachi:
Everything you just wrote, YES! So eloquent, so patient.
Good:
“Stop being stupid stupid.”
You stop being stupid, you big stupid head!
“stop being stupid stupid”
Commas make a difference.
Gives no source. Cites author, tells us where she presented the source, doesn’t tell us what the source is. Plus her articles are behind a pay wall anyway, so it’s not like we can even spend the night trawling through every one of her articles published before 2009 in the hopes of stumbling across it.
Basically boils down to decorating choices and what movies you go to. Hardly demonstrative of “being the boss.”
1) It’s not universal.
2) Maybe tens of thousands of years. The MRA/evo-psych idea of a hunter-gatherer society is one which is referred to by anthropologists as an “agrarian” society. (That’s an ever-so-special form of hunter-gatherer society which involves staying put and growing your own crops rather than hunting… or gathering.)
1. If a person stands up for rights, whether it be for men, women, gays, minorities, or leprechauns, that shouldn’t be considered a negative thing unless you are trying to deny those rights.
2. Injustices that may have been done in the past–or even those that continue to occur–should not be used as an excuse for more injustice.
3. It is irrational to make up a term, “MRA” and to use the term to dismiss a person without addressing his or her argument.
Count me in with the people who have no idea what the “Pregnancy is no excuse for misandry” shit is supposed to actually mean. A pregnant woman looked at an MRA the wrong way AAAAH MISANDRY EXCLAMATION POINT EXCLAMATION POINT ELEVEN EXCLAMATION POINT? Or is there a subtle nuance there that my tiny feminist brain isn’t picking up?
Ugh, tedious troll is tedious. Playing the devil’s advocate on the Internet is frequently a sign of extreme entitlement and boredom. “U mad?” is the catchphrase of jackasses with no personal investment in a serious matter they choose to throw their worthless two cents in. A sure sign of unchecked privilege, if you will. /rant
Here’s a little tip, Good: trying to justify the current, unfair social situation with vague biotruth theories based on nothing but one ad hoc hypothesis after another does not science make. To echo Fibinachi: even if it did, what the hell does that have to do with anything? “Welp, shitty things have been done in the past. Therefore, I’m completely justified in carrying on the proud tradition of doing shitty things myself. Checkmate, feminists!”
@auggziliary
My favorites are the one with the brown spotch over its eye and the one with the wide open mouth that looks like it’s raging XD
LOL at Good not understanding evolution.
And re: the carrying around someone against their will is showing you can “protect” them…
No. No no no. Even if you /wanted/ to carry out a horrible system like this, what you’d do is carry /other people/ around against their will and offer them to your sweetie.
Which is still awful, I’m just saying how does messing with someone show you can protect them?
Did Good get blocked or did he look up what a naturalistic fallacy is and realize he’s just simply wrong about everything?
Eh, who cares? I have pizza.
Who can destroy a thing, controls a thing. Who controls a thing can protect that thing! And don’t worry your little head about the whole destroying a thing thing, ok?
Anyone have a link to that study that found that when women speak even close to half of the time in mixed-gender groups they’re perceived as dominating the conversation? Because that’s what this reminds me of. Hmm, why do we think that a little less than half of households having women running the show would seem like too much to our resident sexist dumbass?
OT:
I made a DBZ faced kitty
crap. it didn’t link
You have pizza? Why don’t I have pizza? MISANDRY! MRA brothers! I have seen the beast and it is evil! Let me join with you!
Oh, wait… maybe I should just make something to eat myself?
I think it’s clear that carrying someone’s body against their will as a display of dominance does not in any way convey the message “I’m protecting you!” At best it conveys the message “I’m protecting you because you’re weak, ineffectual, and naive.”
I will sign up for this only on the condition that I get to be one of the demons, and dress up like Elizabeth Hurley in Bedazzled.
I’m really bad at imgur links…
Fibinachi… all awe is yours.
Hi. Archaeologist/anthropologist here. I teach this stuff, so I thought I’d jump in with some dates for you all. I can give you citations when I get into school tomorrow, so just let me know what you want. Most of these dates are in Wikipedia – I checked the article on human evolution just now.
Earliest ancestors show up around 4-6 mya Ardapithecus ramidus is the better documented.
2.5 mya we have Homo habilis and Australopithecis garrhi – both tool users, we believe.
1.8mya is when Homo erectus appears (I’m a joiner, not a splitter).
Archaic Homo sapiens appears around 400,000 ya, but he/she’s not quite us.
Anatomically modern man or Homo sapiens sapiens is dated back to only around 200,000 years ago.
All of these folks were food foragers, or hunters & gatherers, and were egalitarian so far as we know, based on observations of modern hunting/gathering groups, women supply about 70% of household resources in the form of plant, insect, and miscellaneous foods, and men supply about 30% in the form of animals hunted. This was the the case until about 10,000 years ago, when women invented horticulture, the cultivation of plants with hand tools. It is not until a few thousand years later that we get agriculture and women lose control of food production. This is where patriarchy first rears it’s ugly head.
I hope this helps clarify things. Now, I have to let my dogs out and get them some fresh water. I apologize for any typos-I’m doing this on my tablet and the keyboard is really teeny. I’ll check back tomorrow if there are any questions, comments or shrieks of outrage. (^_^)
@Cassandra says
this?
Normally David announces if someone has been blocked or moderated.
Also I’m tired of the “it’s OK to hit women if they hit you!” thing like in that article. No, it’s not OK for women to abuse their partners an any form. Yes, you can use self defense. But self defense is not “give same pain back and a little more”. Self defense is the victim using the needed amount of violence to get out of the situation. Not all cases where a man hits his wife after she hit him are self defense, so the man is still responsible. Just as a woman being hurt by her husband is no excuse for her to do the same.
@ Fade
It was the classroom study mentioned there I was thinking of. Also, re the earlier conversation about gender, this was one of the things related to social construction of gender roles that pissed me off most as a child, and it’s an example of one of the cases where people’s ideas about gender and how it works – women are really talkative! – clashes with societal models of appropriate behavior for women and girls – they shouldn’t talk so much, that means they’re nagging or dominating men and that’s not acceptable!
Basically, the article blames women for a man’s abuse, rather than each responsible for their own abuse.
Wait, you need a philosophy, a plan of attack to go shopping?
This guy sounds like soooooooooo much fun. I’m a guy and I would love to spend the weekend with him:
Me: “Hey-I’m about to check my local sci-fi bookstore to see if they have any new Doctor Who stuff. Want to come along?”
MRA: “What-right now? We need a philosophy first-need a set plan of the shop, exactly where the books you are looking for may be, a set path that would minimise any possible distractions, and have you focus on what you’d like, but most of all a philosophy. What are you going to look for?”
Me: “Oh, I don’t know. I was just going to see what’s new and-”
MRA: Not good enough. We will now go online, see what may be new and then add those points to the plan of the shop!”
Capaldi did publish an article in 2009; here’s the abstract:
The non-official data came from self-reported surveys and observation (while the couple engaged in problem-solving behavior).
Citation: Violence Vict. 2009; 24(4): 502–519.
In an update on that “do women talk more than men” issue,
Link: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/317/5834/82.short
Thanks, Bonelady!
Goddamn, why do MRAs suck so bad at science?
The one time that a woman hit me, I caught her arm as she went to hit me again, held it firmly and said, “I’m not hitting you. I’m not going to hit you. If you touch me like that again, you’ll never see me again.” Oddly enough, she didn’t hit me again… it’s almost as if communicating works or something. Go figure.
Not that communicating always works, and not that it would’ve necessarily worked if she was significantly stronger than me or if I had nowhere to go, but… at least in that situation with that power dynamic, it worked.
Cloudiah, are you following me on Tumblr? Just curious because I see that someone named “metacloudiah” is following me.
Also, here’s a link to that study whose abstract you quoted: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2779018/
Good, you’re speaking to someone who’s taking a biological science for a major.
Your misunderstanding of evolution and your misapplication in a place where the theory of evolution does not apply (i.e. culture) is so painful, it doesn’t burn with the fury of a septillion suns, but of a septillion supernovas. That’s how bad it is.
Even hard-core young earth creationists aren’t as bad as you.
Congratulations. You win a negative Internet.
No, not one. You win negative ten septillion Internets.
FYI: You are all amazing, have all the kitties!!! (except bad, they can go step on cat litter)
Athywren, Holding the partner’s arms is probably the most harmless way to use force against someone that’s attacking you. And communication is good(not that it always works obviously).
I don’t know much about self defense tbh, but I can understand that punching someone in the face is sometimes necessary, when it’s used to stun. I know when Dahmer was caught by his last almost-victim, the victim escaped him by punching and then pushing through him while he was stunned(the victim was in the bathroom and Dahmer appeared at the door). Of course, Dahmer was kind of not expecting that, since he had just walked in, so I don’t know if that would work in most DV situations.
Guys, y’all are overthinking Good’s fail. He started this with “Let me ask this. If men dominate the world, why is that the case when men and women are equal in numbers?”
And once the social constructs that put women and minorities in oppressed roles was oh so explained, he went “And when this happens over a 3 million year period, it’s called evolution.”
Well Good, looks like you got your answer, it’s evolution (you’re fractally wrong, an mild bogglingly thick, but even within your framework you’ve answered your question and can now kindly fuck off)
Oh, when I said “DV situations” in the last sentence, I don’t mean that Dahmer was being a domestic abuser. That was attempted premeditated murder/rape/torture.
Alice, I actually thought he was a creationist at first, trying to convince us that belief in evolution caused misogyny.
Argenti, his fail began long before that. He responded to MRAs making shitty posters with “most feminist arguments are baseless too”.
Goodfornothing:
Want to tell me why the number one cause of premature death for women in Victoria is male violence, then? “Men have never desired to kill women” is the dumbest piece of lying shit you’ve come out with yet. Tell the women slaughtered by male soldiers over millennia, the women murdered by their fathers, brothers, husbands around the world, the women and little girls being gang raped and murdered in India (hardly an isolated instance, but prominent in the news right now, with India noted as the worst place in the world to be a female-bodied person). It’s not for nothing that Gavin de Becker (you know, a DUDE) saw fit to quote this line in The Gift of Fear: “At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.”
You think you don’t use personal insults? You do. You insult everyone here. You insult us with your blind stupidity, your complete refusal to look outside your own privilege, your insistence that the real things women have suffered for millennia and still suffer now are not real; you insult us with your claiming of victim status for men; you insult us by ignoring our life experience and brushing it all aside. You’re a fucking insult to anyone with an ounce of human decency, because you’re a mealy-mouthed, pathetic little misogynist.
Go sit on a cactus, you carbon thief.
Oh I know, but he is full of fail and that was the closest he came to an actual question. One which he has now answered to his own satisfaction. Who cares if he’s right so long as he goes away?
Argenti is correct – we’ve had some dumb trolls before, but this one is special. He’s kind of stupidity squared.
Goodfornothing also doesn’t know the difference between “mad” and “contemptuous”.