Yesterday, a young man barged into a Gender Studies class at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. After ascertaining that the class was indeed a Gender Studies class, he pulled a couple of knives out of his backpack, broke into what one witness called a “disgusting mischievous smile,” then stabbed the professor and two students before being arrested as he tried to slip away.
The trans panic has reached an alarming stage: transphobes, most notably Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, have escalated their rhetoric and become more obvious about their stochastic terrorism, with Tucker Carlson broadcasting the names and faces of board members of Vanderbilt Hospital, which offers gender affirming care to children. Bill O’Reilly gave the same sort of “publicity” to a prominent abortion doctor years ago; the doctor was murdered by an anti-abortion fanatic.
Alberta’s associate status of women minister apologized after a screed celebrating women as baby-makers “not exactly equal” to men won third prize in a government essay contest for young women.
It’s time once again to look at what’s going on in the imaginary world of “woke,” in which I highlight some improbable things right-wingers have declared “woke” in the past week.
Apparently, to a lot of the regulars in the Men’s Rights subreddit — like the hundreds who upvoted a post of this picture — the notion that men should raise their sons to respect women as equals is nothing more than foul propaganda and MISANDRY of the highest order.
And seriously, those guys in the poster look like total White Knight Beta Manginas.
Some of the Men’s Rightsers were especially offended by the white ribbon at the bottom of the poster, which they saw as a vaguely sinister reminder of a World War I campaign to shame British men into enlisting in the army. Because suggesting to your sons that boys and girls should be treated equally is the same as being guilt-tripped into becoming cannon fodder:
Others used the poster as an opportunity to rail against … marriage. The top comment in the thread, as I write this post, is this one.
Caspian_Drifter responded to the eeeevil poster with a rhetorical question that unintentionally helped to underscore the whole point of the campaign in the first place:
Seriously, ladies, why do gals like to go on and on about “equality” so much when your ladybrains weren’t even smart enough to come up with the idea in the first place? I mean, really, you ungrateful gals, you have a man/men to thank for that.
If I remember correctly, it was T. Reginald Equality who came up with the idea, with some help from his brother Ned (who suggested that he name it after himself).
Men’s Rights activists have discovered something that Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps and the rest of his gang at the Westboro Baptist Church learned a long time ago: outrageously offensive signs can mean media coverage.
This time the MRAs toned down the offensiveness in favor of simple outrageousness, combined with a healthy dose of incomprehensibility. The most incomprehensible of the current lot is probably this one, which comes straight from the A Voice for Men poster page:
But my favorite is this one:
I was originally going to write a sort of rebuttal to this, pointing out that by most measures Canada is, generally speaking, a rather unfrightening place for men (and women), what with its high standard of living, decent health care, relatively low crime rate, and so on.
I mean, if I were to pick a frightening country to live in, as a man (or a woman), I would probably pick someplace like, you know, Somalia, North Korea, Sudan or South Sudan, someplace like that. Syria’s probably not a great place to visit at the moment either.
But then I was thinking: Canada’s main problem, in terms of its international reputation, is that people tend to think of it as boring, not frightening.
Maybe Canada should embrace the whole “most frightening place to be a man” thing, and take advantage of this silly quote from Erin Pizzy to promote itself as scary, edgy, intense, EXTREEEEEMMME!
Maybe with some posters like the one at the top of this post?
I don’t know. I’m not that great at photoshop. Perhaps some of you would like to have a go at it? I know we’ve got some talented MRA poster-parodists here.