Blog Archives
Why aren’t more women world leaders? Some Reddit dude has a theory. (SPOILER ALERT: It’s really dopey.)
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Men’s Rights activists spend more time discussing women than most women’s studies majors. Heck, they might even qualify for honorary degrees in women’s studies, if we expand the term “study” to mean “make shit up.”
Here a couple of dudes on the Men’s Rights subreddit offer their new but not-exactly-improved version of “difference feminism.”
Seems legit.
What do women want? Ask a dude. Ask an awesome dude.
Oh, ladies, you poor, deluded ladies, so unaware of the basic facts about yourselves. If only you had an objective source for information on the mystery that is you! Happily, a Men’s Rights Redditor by the name of nigglereddit has decided to throw a giant clue your way:
You may want to step back and take a look at the entire thread here, especially nigglereddit’s original post about the different ways he and his wife have responded to being new parents, in which he mocks his wife for what sounds very much like undiagnosed postpartum depression, blaming her misery not on brain chemistry or sleep deprivation or any of a zillion other things that tend to stress out new mothers but on all those terrible women’s magazines and books and TV shows she reads and/or watches.
Also, he pats himself on the back for being a totally cool and awesome dude who handles both his job and his duties as a father in a super awesome way — way better than his wife handles her new motherhood — because he’s a man, damnit, and totally able to see the world in an objective way.
Needless to day, this meaty slab of misogynist shitthatneverthappened got dozens up upvotes from the r/mensrights regulars.
Thanks to r/againstmensrights for pointing me to this terrible post.
EDITED TO ADD:
Speaking of which, the good folks at r/againstmensrights have assembled these handy guides to the shittiest comments in the shitty r/mensrights thread. A-one and a-two.
“You can’t have social equality for women without sexual equality for men,” and other completely baffling Men’s Rights slogans.
Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, a bunch of the locals are doing a little brainstorming, hoping to come up with a pithy slogan or two for posters that will allow them to better sell their alleged movement to the misandrist masses.
The results so far are, well, intriguing. The front-runner, so far, is this highly upvoted one from deluks917, though as you can see it has received some criticism:
Reddit Ugly: MRAs and others argue that a man allegedly wronged in divorce court should turn to murder
So there was a bit of ugliness over on the Men’s Rights subreddit the other day. No, scratch that; there was a giant explosion of ugliness.
A couple of days ago, you see, a Redditor with a nine-day-old account posted a story to r/menrights detailing the alleged ill-treatment he’d gotten at the hands of a vengeful ex-wife and an unsympathetic family court system. The story was filled with literally unbelievable details – among other things, he claimed to have been rendered homeless by the demands of the court, forced to pay $1000 a month in spousal support to his ex though she had a $60,000 a year job. Some commenters challenged the veracity of the tale – while the OP gave a case number in his post, no one has been able to find evidence that a case with that number actually exists. (The OP has not responded to the skeptics.)
But most of the respondents assumed the story was true. And why not? It seemed to reinforce every paranoid MRA fantasy of evil women and courts out of control. Despite its fishiness, the post got more than 700 net upvotes.
And that’s where the ugliness began. Not content to merely offer the man sympathy and advice, many commenters started talking murder, and some of the most violent comments got dozens of upvotes.
How to Get Downvoted on the Men’s Rights Subreddit, Sandra Fluke edition
If you ever have the desire to get yourself downvoted on the Men’s Rights subreddit, here’s one sure-fire strategy: Write a sensible comment suggesting that birth control benefits people with penises as much as people with vaginas.
Here are the two top replies to this comment:
I was going to point out some of the ironies inherent in Men’s Rightsers getting mad about women getting “free” birth control, but I suspect you can figure those out on your own.
This is why the so-called Men’s Rights movement is not so much a rights movement as a take-away-other-people’s-rights movement.
Fake Spooge and Rape Jokes: A new frontier in Men’s Rights activism?
So over on the Men’s Rights subreddit – you know, the old one, not its newfangled would-be replacement – the fellas are complaining about how oppressive it is for a university to put up signs suggesting that consent is good and rape is bad.
Clearly, these signs are an insult to non-rapist men, in the same way that “don’t feed the animals” signs in zoos are an insult to those of us who aren’t planning to feed the animals.
Happily, the dude calling himself anti-everyone has come up with a way to fight back against this feminazi tyranny:
Is the Poster Revolution moving to its next stage?
Splitsville! Paul Elam starts a rival Men’s Rights subreddit, where he can ban people
It was, perhaps, inevitable, and now it has come to pass: obviously fed up with Men’s Rights Redditors questioning his wisdom (and his tactics, and his general narcissistic assholery) on a fairly regular basis, A Voice for Men Supreme Leader Paul Elam has started up his own Men’s Rights subreddit – r/mensrightsactivists –in which he can summarily ban all ”armchair activists” and “white knights” and “people who disagree with him.” Yep, that’s right: he’s made like a Trotskyist banana, and split.
Elam has long had a fairly strained relationship with Reddit MRAs. If you search through his comment history on Reddit, you can see evidence of numerous meltdowns on his part, which occur fairly regularly whenever anyone challenges him on pretty much anything, even when they are otherwise sympathetic to his views. On his own blog, he responds to such criticism by quickly banning the critics; on Reddit, he has tended to respond with schoolyard insults, digs at the masculinity of his critics, long recitations of his many fine accomplishments as a dedicated armchair activist, and the occasional rape joke.
Is Reddit’s Feminism subreddit run by MRAs?
Oh, Reddit, where the demographics are so skewed that virtually every discussion amongst and/or about women ultimately gets taken over by dudes doing the old “what about the dudes” routine. It’s no secret that the TwoXChromosomes subreddit has long been overrun with MRAs and FeMRAs. And now it’s become pretty clear that the Feminism subreddit has gone MRA as well.
If you want all the details of the drama, here’s a thread in the subreddit in which the feminists who’ve stuck with the subreddit take on the MRAs and MRA-symps amongst the mods.
Check out the Feminisms and SRSWomen subreddits if you want to discuss feministy stuff on Reddit without having to deal with endless derailing from MRAs and other shitlords.
EDITED TO ADD: More links:
SRS takes on the whole mess (lots of useful links).
SRS links to r/feminism mods defending MRAs
An r/feminism thread about the recent Captain Awkward posts about creeps that is, naturally, full of endless hang-wringing about the evils of “creep-shaming.”
(Thanks, Cliff, for the links.)
The Thinking Housewife: Olympic women athletes too athletic
Sure, America’s women athletes may have taken home a whopping 29 gold medals, but over on The Thinking Housewife, Laura Wood is pissed off at them – and the rest of the Olympic women — for being so, well, athletic.
In a recent post, Wood rushes to the defense of a Turkish newspaper columnist who complained about the “broad-shouldered, flat-chested women” who were destroying Womanhood with their mannish, muscular bodies. Alas, wrote Yuksel Aytug, even their “breasts – the symbol of womanhood, motherhood – [were] flattened into stubs as they were seen as mere hindrances to speed.” Curse you, sports bras!
Seriously, in future Olympics, female athletes should face mandatory deductions for every cup size less than C.
Wood adds her own two cents:
A man who dares to say what every normal person has been thinking when confronted with the muscle-bound female gladiators at the games and what soft, effeminate Western men would not dare articulate, Aytug has been attacked for his remarks throughout the Western world. He is tiresomely accused of misogyny. In fact, judging from these words, he is an admirer of women, a courageous defender of them.
Or at least of their tits.
The Olympic Games are anti-woman. They require female athletes to ape men in grotesque ways. They compromise female fertility and modesty. They promote the idea that aggression and competitiveness in women are normal and healthy. They debase not just women athletes but womanhood throughout the world.
Well, I suppose Wood can take solace in the fact that the “muscle-bound” bodies of these “female gladiators” didn’t stop the Pedophile – sorry, Ephebophile – Army of Reddit from perving on McKayla Maroney and the rest of the US Women’s Gymnastics team.
Hey, MRAs: If you don’t want people to associate you with hatred, don’t associate yourself with hate groups
MRAs: digging their own hole.
Here’s a bit of advice for Men’s Rights redditors and MRAs in general: if you don’t want people to associate the Men’s Rights movement with hatred, you should probably not associate yourselves with hate groups.
Yesterday, a fellow called heiligenschein posted a link in the Men’s Rights subreddit to a relatively new subreddit called simply SPLC, a subreddit set up by enemies of the Southern Poverty Law Center and devoted to, as heiligenschein put it, “compiling the numerous criticisms of the [SPLC].” As he explained in a comment:
