Some links for Friday night:
Jezebel’s Anna North takes up the question “What Should You Do When Someone You Love Becomes a Men’s Rights Activist?”
North quotes me and Hugo Schwyzer on the topic. Here’s the extended remix of my remarks:
Unfortunately, in most cases, I don’t think it’s possible to talk someone out of a Men’s Rights obsession. For most of them, it seems to be driven not by facts — they’re happy to simply make up facts to fit their worldview — but by feelings, most obviously by rage at women. If they were driven by actual interest in issues, they probably would have accomplished something by now; in reality, only the overlapping but more politically focused Father’s Rights movement has actually had much of an effect on the real world, for better or worse. For most MRAs, the closest they come to activism is leaving angry comments everywhere online — or harassing individual women online in a manner similar to the ways abusers stalk the objects of their obsessions.
The one argument I think you can make to MRAs who are not too far gone is this: it’s not healthy for you to spend so much time stewing in your anger online. Instead of trying to help men work through their personal issues with women, the MRM encourages men to cultivate their rages and hatreds, to remain stuck. That’s not healthy for them, or for society at large.
North’s post was inspired by a recent Dear Prudence question on Slate from a girl whose dad had recently gone all MRA on her. (It’s here, scroll down a bit to the question that starts “Dad-Related Dilemma.:)
The guys at The Spearhead also had a whack at the Dear Prudence question here. Needless to say their perspective is a little different than mine or Hugo’s.
And while I’m doing links, here’s another misogyny-related post on Jezebel: Founder of Possible Sex Tourist Website Creates Elaborate Ad Campaign Telling Men to Beware of Marriage
It’s a lot of the same old shit we’ve seen before from marriage-hating MGTOWers and Western-women-haters. But entertaining nonetheless.
And last but not least: checking my traffic today I discovered that Man Boobz is big in Brazil! By which I mean, a professor at the Federal University of Ceará is a fan, and has started making fun of obnoxious Brazilian misogynists on her blog. Olá Lola!
As far as I can tell from the badly Google-translated version of her blog, the Brazilian versions of Man Boobz (Homens Idiotas?) are pretty much identical to our Man Boobz, right on down to their obsessions with alphas and betas and all that crap.
Lola, it’s great to hear from you. I’m going to have to go back and read some more from your blog — alas, I don’t know Portuguese, and Google’s translation is pretty rough, but hopefully I’ll be able to get the basic gist of it.
That video you posted about was really very sweet. It’s funny how angrily the MRAs reacted to it — presumably because it challenges their little orthodoxies about alphas and betas and all that. MRAs and pickup artists here would have reacted exactly the same way to it.
I had never heard of that attack in Rio. It sounds very similar to the Lepine shooting in Montreal. What was the name of the shooter?
Sorry to hear you’ve been getting threats. That’s pretty typical behavior for these guys, unfortunately.
Let’s definitely keep in touch!
@ Buttman
It only states she left him for another man. It doesn’t state her reasons for doing so. As Prudie points out in her response, maybe the husband was always that way and eventually the wife got tired of it and left. It could be the fault of the husband or the wife, or both might be partially to blame. We’re simply not given enough information to make judgements on the motivations of either party. But to MRAssholes, the man in any given divorce situation is always as pure as the driven snow, whether the information given supports that view or not.
Regardless, I was not bashing the man whose wife left him. I was pointing out that the MRAssholes have automatically jumped to the conclusion that the wife was solely at fault. Just take a gander at the comments on the Spearhead post. Some are are also blaming the son or daughter who was the author of the letter for daring to be offended by their father’s misogynistic statements.
I think that most MRAs have a short shelf-life. They’re laden down and embittered and all of a sudden their rejections and low self-esteem become political – it’s not their fault, it’s feminists/womens/big-daddy Govt that’s the cause of all of their problems.
I truly believe that 90% of MRAs active at the moment will forget all about their sad little “movement” within a year or two. They are, basically, 4-Chan with a pseudo-political agenda; they move the negative attention and the meaning that the MRM gives them.
But it’s a flash in the pan.
There are obviously exceptions, Price at Spearhead, Elam and his band of misfits and others.
But let’s not lose sight of something quite important. MRAs enjoy being MRAs. The perverse camaraderie, the attention and the perceived power of being amongst peers. They revel in it.
What makes me find the MRM a source of amusement rather than fear is that they are so incredibly stupid. If they were slightly more sophisticated there might be a danger of them gaining some influence amongst extreme right-wing nutjobs. As it is, they are amongst the wackiest lunatic fringe groups on the net, where they will stay. About the only people that have heard from them are a tiny minority of feminists and each other.
Contingent can mean “dependent on,” as in, “My flight time is contingent on good weather,” or it can mean a group of people gathered for a common goal.
Like I said in a previous thread, probably to you, tell that to the Catholic church in my hometown who runs a homeless shelter exclusively to men, and tell that to the OTHER homeless shelter for men just down the street from them. You’re a liar.
If she cheated on him, then she wronged him. That’s true. He’s taken that experience and turned it into a personal vendetta against an entire gender. That still makes him an asshole, even if he was wronged. And furthermore, to have such an extreme reaction to being wronged implies that it’s part of his character and already present during the marriage. No need to imagine anything. Someone who reacts to the actions of one person by hating the entire group of people she belongs to is an asshole, and most likely was always an asshole.
For instance, my alcoholic sister in law decided she didn’t feel like doing the whole family and kids thing, and left their two children with my brother. He doesn’t hate all women. In fact, he’s dating someone right now. And he’s a great father who devotes all of his time to his kids. See, that’s what a well-adjusted person does when they are wronged. An asshole, on the other hand, will sit and stew for the rest of his life.
I have to thank Buttman for posting the Peter Marin link. I looked through the pdf and it was much more nuanced and interesting than I expected. Like, more so than Buttman’s posts. It read like something that wouldn’t be out of place at NSWATM.
Buttman, us trollops shot you down in the forum because your premise that only women were getting food was patently false. Men were stealing the food, so they set up lines for women. You know this, you disingenuous creep.
…Masculinist?
Not only are they misogynistic asshats, but they can’t spell. MASCULIST, people. It is spelled MASCULIST.
Feminist doesn’t derive from “feminine”; it derives from “femina,” the Latin word for woman. If it came from feminine, it would be femininist. Similarly, masculist does not derive from “masculine”; it derives from “masculus,” the Latin word for man.
@CassandraSays
Sadly, I still haven’t made it over to Scotland, so that just flew over my head. One day the plans will actually be carried out though!
Hi, David. The massacre at a school that we had in Rio last April really shocked us. If I recall correctly, it was only the second time ever that Brazil had a shooter killing people at a public place (the other time was more than 12 years ago: a guy at a movie theater where Fight Club was playing). This time it was called the Realengo massacre (that’s the district where the public school is), and the shooter’s name was (he was wounded by a policeman in the leg and then shot himself) Wellington Menezes de Oliveira. I wrote about this: http://escrevalolaescreva.blogspot.com/2011/04/assassinos-de-mulheres-e-seus-crimes-de.html Another shocking factor is that the media never treated this case as a hate crime against women. They still insist that the shooter killed randomly, even if several reports from survivors confirm that he aimed at girls (and specifically at beautiful girls). And, since the media discarded misogyny, it had to find other explanations for Wellington having killed 10 girls and 2 boys. These explanations were absurd: girls don’t run as fast as boys, girls prefer to sit in front of the class, whatever… The Brazilian masculinists tried to justify the shooter’s actions: if only those 13-14 y.o. girls would have sex with those “nice” guys, this would never have happened! http://escrevalolaescreva.blogspot.com/2011/04/masculinistas-tem-solucao-para-que.html
At the time, police investigated Wellington’s connections with a few masculinist blogs in Brazil, which caused some of them to flee in fear. Some hate blogs were deleted, but months later they reappeared. You can imagine how much they hate having a woman president…
About the video I posted, isn’t it lovely? It’s amazing how it makes mascus furious.
@blitzgal
In other worlds, it’s always the man’s fault. If he is cheated on then it has to do with some defect that he has. You actually believe that someones life experience doesn’t determine whether they’re an “asshole”? You sound like a genetic determinist.
I bet your brother would have a different outlook on life if his wife had decided she wanted to be an alcoholic AND have the kids. The courts would have sided with her and he would have been in the same boat as the father of the letter writer. You think his opinions on things would be the same after he got screwed over by the gynocracy?
The letter writer needs to confront her mother more than her father. The reason she is so butthurt is because she knows her mother is a slut. That’s what makes her uncomfortable.
@CassandraSays – actually, Scottish education in the Islands and Highlands is usually pretty high standard. I speak as someone who used to work for a Scottish Government education quango. Usually when a Scottish school was being held up as a shining example for other schools in the country to aspire to, nine times out of ten it was Highland or Island-based.
I don’t think Ullere is ill-educated, just what we Scots would call a blowhard. He really is quite, quite dull…
@Ponkz – The reason I think he’s ill educted isn’t so much his ideas as his appalling grammar and sentence structure. If his rants were better written I might at least bother to read them, but as is it’s like listening to someone drag their nails down a chalkboard.
Yeah, there is the nails down the chalkboard factor to consider as well, I suppose…. Personally, my eyelids just start drooping whenever I see his name!
He’s just so aggressively boring, which is odd since he’s saying some offensive things sometimes. And yet still he’s too boring to pay attention to.
Me too, Ponkz. i have to say he’s my least favorite current troll (since Brandon is off trying to write a comment that doesn’t include “I”).
There are no shelters for men. There are no resources for abused or homeless men.
Butt-lad, that’s so far from the truth that it’s not even funny. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear your were just making shit up. Please bring your A-game next time, and stop disgracing the name of Butt Men everywhere.
A lot of homeless shelters don’t allow women. Call up some and see. Homeless shelters typically only accept males. Most don’t let male and female mix. Don’t know why but that’s how it is.
DV shelters for men will be crickets. My friend worked in dv. Hardly ever was a call coming in from a man needing to hide away from a woman. Women are physically weaker and don’t usually go around with the typical Domestic Violence Abuser mentality: To conquer and control through the use of force. To dominate and control through the use of force. That’s a male problem mainly. Check out the stats in hospitals. DV victims coming in all black and blue are mainly women. A woman can punch me in the face and most I’d get is red. If I punch a woman dead smack in her face most likely I’d bust her jaw right on open.
Buttman I just read your comment and the problem is for woman who don’t have access to homeless shelters as much as men do. There are more homeless shelters for men than women in mainly every state.
Explore nature: men ruined the world with violence, war, and everything else. Anti-feminism folks don’t want to share the power and privileges with women. All men care about is pussy and fast cars and strip bars. We can’t even go to a sport’s game without brutalizing other males from opposite teams.
Big different between feminists and mra.
Feminists don’t bully and threaten and murder men.
MRA bully, threaten and murder women. No one will take them seriously.
And I found a comment on a website from a anti-fem dude who kept trying to find ways to take down feminists. He boasted how, get ready now…. they got to keep the outrageous statements they make about women going and going. They admit the more outrageous the better. Did you folks read? These mra antifemmy dudes say this ridiculous shit on purpose and knowingly. They are a waste of a human life. They could use some therapy.
Like I said before I bet all those dudes walk through life carrying that anti-social attitude everywhere they roam. Poor lads.
bobbyjo, I know you mean well but your “Women are physically weaker” really like a “in average”
“All men care about is pussy and fast cars and strip bars. ” Not all, certainly?
🙂
@BobbyJo
Although they aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, there’s a big difference between a brawler and an abuser
Also
C’mon dude, I worry my pretty little head about other shit… like whether or not Community will be back on the air!!
@Ponkz and Ozy
I would have said that Ullere was the most boring current troll, and my least favorite (can’t they at least try to be entertaining?), but Toy Soldier is back.