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| An Imaginary Feminist in action. |
There’s a great post up on The Pervocracy inspired by, well, some of the more lovable characters who frequent the comments section on this little blog – our resident antifeminists. As Holly notes, the feminists posting here devote much of their time (naturally enough) to arguing for feminism, while the MRA types, by contrast, tend to argue against an imaginary enemy that only bears a vague passing resemblance to actual feminism. Holly sets forth the tenets of this imaginary feminism, or IF, as she’s managed to glean them from the comments by MRA types here.
IF, she notes, is monolithic:
Anything said by anyone calling themselves a feminist can be assumed to be true of anyone else calling themselves a feminist. Some random thing Andrea Dworkin said in 1973 is tattooed on all IF’s chests backward so they can read it in the mirror. All IFs simultaneously subscribe to the beliefs of Valerie Solanas, Catharine McKinnon, Betty Dodson, Phyllis Schlafly, Twisty Faster, and that person who wrote those weird articles about Firefly.
Imaginary Feminists have no real grievances, are eager to take rights away from men, love shaming men, and are simultaneously sex-hating puritans and sex-obsessed sluts.
In other words, they are dastardly creatures indeed. If they really existed, I would oppose them too.
The post is hilarious and spot-on in its critiques. Well worth reading.
EDIT: Link fixed.
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>Interesting and somewhat true. But aren't people here doing the exact same thing when talking about MRAs? Stones in glass houses and all that.
>we don't completely mischaracterize MRAs and MGTOW's.
>"we don't completely mischaracterize MRAs and MGTOW's."Really? You take selected quotes from MRA boards and attack them. How is this any different from someone going after select feminist sources? Like Andrea Dworkin, Valerie Solanas, and that blogger who said that women should abort all male foetuses and refuse to nurse baby boys? If there is a difference, I haven't caught it so far.
>Not so much, Ion. If you read the posts and comments here you'll see many, many examples of precisely what Holly is talking about. And I have yet to meet an MRA/MGTOWer who has a realistic view of what feminism is and isn't. It's certainly possible that such a person exists, but I haven't met one yet.
>Ion, if you look at the sites I discuss and quote in my posts here, you'll see that the comments I quote are rather typical; you can find many more like them. I link to the sources of my quotes, so you can follow the links and see for yourself. (A couple of the MGTOW sites require registration, but that's a roadblock that is easily overcome if you really want to see if I'm taking quotes out of context.) When I quote from sites like The Spearhead and A Voice For Men that allow readers to upvote and downvote individual comments, I tend to only quote those comments that have many (usually dozens) of net upvotes; in other words, these are comments that MRAs themselves have singled out as reflecting their own views. Again, if you go to almost all of the sites I link to in my "boob roll" — which include most of the biggest and most popular MRA/MGTOW sites on the internet — you will find rampant misogyny there. And you will see almost no one ever criticizing such misogyny.There are a few sites that are less obviously misogynistic; on Reddit's Men's Rights subreddit, for example, some regulars do in fact criticize the misogyny that's often found there. But, as I've said before, the only way in which I "cherry pick" quotes is that I seek out those that are interesting and/or entertaining. Finding misogyny on MRA/MGTOW sites is as easy as falling off a log. Finding interesting misogyny takes a bit more time.
>Ion – Also, the MRAs here never seem to contradict these quotes! It would be one thing if they said "no, I don't hate women"; instead, they always seem to say "no, I hate women for a really good reason."Maybe that's why we haven't gotten to see the warm fuzzy side of MRA.
>Ion, I think David's gone over this several times already in the past. If you think he is just cherry-picking the worst articles or quotes from the MRM or MGTOW, then what sources do you think are legitimate? Do you know of any that aren't so steeped in woman-hating? That actually give a crap about Men's Rights instead of just blaming it all on the womenfolk?If so, where are they? Can you give us links?
>lon, David has repeatedly asked commenters here to link to examples of reasonable, non-misogynistic posts on MRM / MGTOW sites.If David is "cherry-picking" the worst, then can anyone direct us to some of the best?Correct me if I'm wrong, more frequent readers, but the response is always complete silence.
>Wow. I love Firefly and went to read these "weird articles." Uh, I have to be honest, that writer is batshit insane. My wife, who is a feminist and a fan of Firefly, was rather outraged at all this sexist bullshit she spouts while pretending to be a feminist (like derisively calling male feminists "unicorns"- kinda reminiscent of "mangina" insofar as insults go). Sadly, I know feminists can get to such a point of delusion that EVERYTHING looks like an attack against women.But to be fair, she's still not nearly as insane as most MRA quotes posted on this blog.
>When the MRAs do take David up on his challenge and cite what they consider "reasonable" MRA voices, it always ends up being someone like Warren Farrel or any number of the other prominent rape apologists in the MRA blogosphere.
>Triplanetary – Never mind authorities; they never seem to be able to man up themselves to say "I believe in men's rights and I believe we deserve better, but I accept women as equals and despise violence against them."It really doesn't seem like a contradiction to me. And I wouldn't even require a Big MRA Author to say it; I'd be impressed if even an MRA commenter went that far.
>Hey, your linky is broke.
>I found the article anyway, and it's great! But I thought you'd like to know. I particularly liked this paragraph:Any time an IF calls you a "sexist," "misogynist," "chauvinist," or anything along those lines, she is merely trying to shame you into silence, and you shouldn't fall for that old trick. In fact, the shaming language just got you out of listening to anything else in her argument! Anything an IF says is invalid in toto if she failed you to address you as "Gentle Scholar."I vow to henceforth address all my MRA interlocutors as nothing but "Gentle Scholar."
>Link fixed. Blogger sometimes inserts garbage into the URL when I post a link. It's annoying.
>francois, yeah, I think Holly's characterization of that Firefly stuff as "weird" was a case of deliberate understatement.
>Wait a second-someone just criticized a feminist! Wow. That means that um, we acknowledge faults in our own side!One of the biggest problems with MRAs and MGTOWs is they never do that. Not one of them who post on here said, even weakly, "Discount, bad form dude" when he was making seriously insane comments that they knew were out of line.
>@ Elizabeth – Yeah, you mean when he was threatening rape, and tossing "cunt" around like it was verbal confetti? Good point. As I recall, Ion was posting right at that time, and he didn't seem to have a problem with it.
>In one of Farrell's books he talked about the woman who shoot up a school. He said she poisoned her own son, accused a pre-pubescent boys of raping her, set fire to a Jewish Community Center, shot only boys, poisoned a fraternity….and God, all kind of stuff. He was talking about Laurie Dann, a paranoid schizophrenic who had obtained a gun and opened fire at a school, poisoned some food and drinks, took a family hostage, set fire to their house, and killed a small boy and herself (not at the same time.) The comments try and pose Dann as some kind of feminist hero who got away wiht something, and pointing out all the errors is regarded as a 'personal attack' on the author. But it's typical MRA crap. Laurie Dann didn't even have a son, and and what she did is what I've enumerated here. And then there's Farrell's repeated sleights of hand to try and make men look oppressed. He talks about how only man have to serve in wartime—but he neglects to mention that many men try mightily to get out of it and never serve, and how serving is a necessity for some forms of credibility in today's Armed Forces. He doesn't mention that women were kept out of combat—by men who then made combat a necessity for advancement. Nope, it's all about the poor menz. Women never get discriminated against. That's Warren Farrell. You can imagine what his followers are like, yet MRAs bristle at the idea that he might not be perfect and 100% right.
>I just pulled out my copy of Farrell's book and looked at his bizarre discussion of Laurie Dann. I remember the case pretty well, because it happened when I was living in Evanston, and Dann actually lived briefly at a house near where I lived. Dann was psychotic; she tried to kill all sorts of people, all sorts of ways — with poison, by burning down a house (she also tried to burn down a school and a daycare center, all filled with both men and women, boys and girls), by shooting them. She shot a number of boys, and killed one, but she also shot two girls and seriously wounded one of them. There was zero indication she was driven by any anti-male agenda. Lepine, in Montreal, deliberately targeted women and wrote an anti-feminist screed explaining his actions. To compare the two is ludicrous. Also, Dann was very clearly psychotic; Farrell blames a Winnetka paper for his factual errors, but even someone unclear on the details of Dann's rampage would have certianly picked up the very basic fact that she was not acting rationally or with some sort of anti-male agenda.
>Here's wikipedia, which mentions Farrell's distorted retelling of Dann's story:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_DannYou can see his "correction" at the bottom of this page on his web site:http://warrenfarrell.org/Resources/index.html
>Ion, thanks for pointing out the idiotic hypocrisy from feminists in this blog. But even that the evidence of hypocrisy is right in their face, they will be in knee jerk denials about it.Any such movement either for it to be feminism or men's rights will likely have the same amounts of sexism in it. But feminists seem to have this sexist perception that the male gender is more sexist than another gender.In a feminist world, even disagreeing or having criticism against feminists/women which is not veering anywhere near sexism will still be deemed as "sexism" by the whining group of bigots.
>Actually, yeah. I don't think you can criticize "women" as an entire group without being a sexist. That's almost the definition right there.
>Aaaaaaaaaaaand here comes Nick-ignoring the actual criticism just a few post above his of a feminist writer by another feminist.
>Perhaps what we need is a post that details "No, I really take popular examples" so that instead of answering the question eleventy-billion times, someone (or David) could just link it. That is pretty much the first question that gets asked. I mean, a bit is addressed in "Dumb Things to Assume About This Blog", but I think a clearer point is needed.Other than that, I loved that post. Really spot on.
>In a feminist world, even disagreeing or having criticism against feminists/women which is not veering anywhere near sexism will still be deemed as "sexism" by the whining group of bigots.Such a fool-proof strategy for remaining in denial about the existence of sexism!