I’ve been following the Men’s Rights Movement for some time, and I’ve never been quite sure exactly what the major injustices faced by men are. I haven’t really noticed much to speak of in my own life, but evidently there are some and they are really, really bad.
Luckily, in recent days A Voice for Men has begun to clarify the issue for me. For example, AVfM Radio’s new theme song points out two of the worst injustices of all:
- Men having to hold doors open for ladies.
- Ladies wanting to marry us.
But these are not the only important men’s issues out there. In a recent post titled “A hard rains gonna fall: how hard is up to you” (clearly a reference to the famous song by Carly Simon), AVfM head dude Paul Elam spells out the most important issues of all in a set of bullet points. To save the beleaguered men of the world some important man-time I will summarize them for you here. Bullet-time!
- Thomas Ball’s suicide isn’t mentioned on Wikipedia because feminism.
- The Obama administration urged colleges to use the same standard of proof used in most non-criminal cases in their non-criminal disciplinary proceedings dealing with rape cases. Because feminism.
- Australia. Something about Australia. Ok, here’s the deal: Australia is very, very far away from me, like literally on the other side of the planet, and my eyes sometimes glaze over when reading about it. I’m sure whatever Elam is mad about is really bad. It might involve Koalas. Feminist Koalas. But that’s just speculation on my part.
- In India, where women are routinely harassed in public and groped on train cars, there are a tiny number of women-only train cars set up to cut down on the groping.
- In Sweden, a small group of feminists did a theatrical production based on/dealing with the writings of Valarie Solanas. It was performed in some schools.
- “Men constitute the lion’s share of combat deaths[11], workplace deaths[12], suicide deaths[13], and are afflicted with almost every known human malady and disease more frequently and more severely than women.” Obviously, the feminists are to blame, for their staunch opposition to women serving in the armed forces, and for their secret program of giving men girl germs.
- There are agencies dealing with women’s health issues. Clearly, men need to have just as many of their own agencies to deal with such male health issues as not being pregnant.
I hope my summary of these issues has been fair. As Elam has pointed out on a number of occasions, I am fat, so really nothing I do or say has any value. Plus, of course, I am a mangina. Just, you know, FYI.
In any case, these injustices have Elam plenty mad:
I am truly curious as to what festering, morally atrophied deviation of humanity could look at anything approaching this level of discrimination and suffering without becoming angry.
So mad that his metaphors all get up in each other’s business:
Whether it becomes a wave of social change, or a violent tempest of indignation and fury, the pendulum will continue to swing.
So there you have it. Naturally, Elam’s readers are grateful for his efforts to bring justice to the world by yelling about it online and trying to get people really, really mad at certain specific ladies without explicitly advocating violence against them. That’s pretty much how Martin Luther King did it, only with fewer references to “bitches” and “cunts” and not so many threaty remarks.
As Alfred E puts it:
Well said Mr Elam. May the harpies finally get a clue about their complete lack of compassion for men and boys all the while living in a gold box carted around by the prince.
Justice and compassion for all, except you harpies in your gold boxes! And also the rest of the bitches, cunts and manginas.
NOTE: That bit about Carly Simon above was a joke. Obviously the song in question was written by The Bangles.
Well, okay, Laura, I’m not saying the wimmz don’t have their own issues with representation. Just, so do men.
Okay, I get that the people you relate to this situation are the Faceless Mooks. What you’re not getting is the intended message is not “These are guyz are useless, like you!” It’s “Look how awesome the Hero is! Nothing can stop him! Don’t you wish you were like that?” It’s a male power fantasy.
Or you can assume that Hollywood movies don’t portray real life or dictate your personal life choices, and go work on becoming who *you* want to be. 😉
When has anyone here said that men don’t?
It may not be the intended message, but it’s still the message. I don’t think the cackling menz pull out chairs in an attempt to humiliate and degrade females (even if I agreed with the underlying assumption there, which I don’t).
Patriarchy does tend to rank men by useless criteria like muscular strength and then harshly penalize the “lesser” ones, doesn’t it? The solution: less patriarchy, less authoritarianism.
MRAL, no one read you the Paper Bag Princess as a kid, did they? Pity, that.
I was an adult when I first read it, but oh, how it spoke to my desire to be active, and not wait around for some boring old prince to have all the adventures on his way to “rescue” me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paper_Bag_Princess
Spoilers!
“Princess Elizabeth plans on marrying Prince Ronald, who is practically perfect. However, a dragon arrives who destroys her kingdom, kidnaps Ronald, and burns all her clothes so that she has no choice but to wear a paper bag. Elizabeth follows the dragon and Ronald, and seeking to rescue her fiancé, challenges the dragon to burn forests with fire and to fly around the world. The dragon completes the tasks but after flying around the world a second time becomes tired and falls asleep. Elizabeth rescues Ronald, who is ungrateful and tells her to return when she looks more like a princess. Elizabeth realizes that she is better off without Ronald and sets off into the sunset to live her own life.”
I’d like to be the center of my own story, thank you very much. Not the girl knocked off in the opening credits.
I already am not chivalrous, and will never be. Females can take care of their own goddamned shit. I’m not going to chew their food and change their diaper. I’m grateful I live in 2011, where that’s considered borderline acceptable (though still frowned upon). In earlier times I’d probably be beaten up.
Felix, I LOVE The Paper Bag Princess! That was my favorite story ever growing up.
So you get to read your own meaning into the products of popular culture…
but we do not. You’re contradicting yourself.
Hey, we feminists are a year ahead of you! Cool.
Congratulations. You have embraced one of the tenets of feminism.
In other news, the Pope is Catholic and bears shit in the woods. Hold the front page.
Not wanting to pick on minor details. But, MRAL, why do you keep using the word ‘females’ yet you don’t seem to have an issue saying ‘men’ (or at least ‘menz’).
Just a bit jarring.
I hate quote fails.
Here’s the thing that gets me, Felix. What makes you think you’d be the princess in this scenario? If the genders really were reversed, you’d almost certainly be one of the she-mooks the princess kills. Or the dragon.
If you are basing how much you matter on a character in a movie, you have some problems that need to be addressed in your personal life before you go off trying to effect national policy on the relationship between men and women.
And when it comes to holding doors, I do not discriminate. If someone is approaching a door that I have already come through, I hold it open. Regardless of who (or what) they are.
There are no other characters in the story beyond the dragon, Elizabeth, and the prince. In fact, the only thing the dragon is ever mentioned as killing were horses.
I’m sorry, what? That’s the nice thing about books, you get to pick which character to identify with. Me, I’m going with the kick-ass princess.
Because the point of myths is that they’re models for the life stories of the hearer. They not only model what a culture values, but also provide images of how to cope with adversity and react to changing circumstances. That’s their function. They’re not the news, they’re life lessons.
Holding doors is something polite people do, for all genders, when they get to the door first. That is how I grew up, that is what I am teaching my kids (two girls). Everywhere I have lived for any length of time, Massachusetts, Minnesota, California, Arizona and Texas, this rule has been true.
What I think you’re trying get across here is the cultural narrative has negative side effects that many people don’t consider. That’s great, you have a tendency to do the whole “La la la I can’t hear you!” thing when people who aren’t you tell you A) how it effects them, and B) what the narrative is actually supposed to be. You missing the bigger and the smaller picture here, for no other apparent reason than it not effecting you personally.
Cloudiah: “Sorry, we men are human beings. We are no longer afraid of your feminist threats to use the oppressive power of proof to intimidate those who fight for our civil and human rights.”
The “oppressive power of proof”??
When you see facts and reality as opposition to your movement, you may want to reconsider your movement.
It’s also really nice to get a choice of characters that bear a resemblance to the reader, of course. If all the heroes are able-bodied white boys, then after the first 100 books of that, a female protagonist is a breath of fresh air. We teach children what they can be in life with what we read to them. And if the picture never lines up to their experience or identity, then that tends to narrow a child’s understanding of what is possible.
*That’s great [but]…*