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.
MRAL, in the trope you’re talking about, female goons don’t even EXIST.We’re weighing “two seconds of screentime” vs. “no screentime AT ALL”, plus the fact that (I’m taking the latest Batman movie as an example) the hero is a dude, his sidekick is a dude, and his two nemesis are dudes. Even the helpful detective is a dude!
Not only the goons, but the hero, the villains, and the sidekicks all have dicks and you feel LEFT OUT? This isn’t about gender anymore, hon. This is about YOU. You do realize you’re extrapolating the expendability of men from ONE trope in ONE genre of fiction?
MRAL, if you hurry you can make the Game of Thrones panel in the Alcott Room.
MRAL, that’s not true. The public cares a lot if the male hero dies, same thing for the side kick. In movies, men are heroes, big bads, goons,… they’re everywhere, and everything. That your poor self image makes you identify with the characters that doesn’t matter doesn’t mean there the only ones or even that the viewer is supposed to care for them.
Or you could go to Phil and Kaja Foglio’s reading in Burroughs, which would be my personal pick.
I mentioned this thread to an online friend just now and they told me that Gaddafi had female bodyguards:
“The Amazonian Guard, as Gaddafi’s elite, all-female task force came to be known, comprised of women who were reportedly hand-selected by the Libyan leader and sworn virgins. Donning lipstick, heels, and jewelry in a country where many women wear veils in public, the contingency certainly turned heads. The women reportedly underwent “extensive martial arts and firearms training at a special academy” before they were officially inducted in the Guard, and their skills included flying fighter jets and hand-to-hand combat.”
Jets aside, the article goes on to say that Gaddafi was an abusive boss, but it’s still a much more interesting factoid than reading MRAL’s “I FEEL LEFT OUT OF ALL OF FICTION EVEN THO THEY’RE CALLED “ACTION *HEROES*” FOR A REASON” whining.
Poor MRAL, doomed to go through life identifying with the red-shirted ensign. If there were only more roles showing the kick-ass adventures of a 5’8″ hero (height averaged from day and night values). Cause being white, young and male isn’t quite enough.
Jason Stratham is losing his hair. Bruce Willis is short. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT, MRAL?
Now if he was arguing that FAT guys always get the short end of the stick in cinema, I’d be agreeing with him. But how the hell do you get “I’m expendable, because I’m male” when both the goon AND the hero are men? *side eye*
Hey, Scotty was totally a red shirt! You can identify with Simon Pegg, MRAL!
Question: does this man matter as a human? Does the public cares if he suffers or dies?
He’s not exactly a model, any average person can identify to him.
When I say human, you know what I mean…
MRAL
I think the problem is less one of male expendability (although I’ll concede that may be a factor or byproduct) and more of the idea of the male being the implicit default. I would speculate the idea behind a faceless goon left to die (for example, an Imperial Storm Trooper*) being male is because this is the default parameter on a “blank slate” character. Being female is a significant “character trait” or something along those lines in the minds of the people behind the show/movie/game/etc., something significant and different. I don’t think it’s because of the idea that people don’t care when men die (when Obi-wan died, Luke was pretty visibly bummed out, to use the same Star Wars example).
I think that’s in part why so few movies pass the Bedchel test. IMO, the reason the idea of the faceless goon being exclusively male is a lot like that (as Molly Ren pointed out) is that it plays into the same mentality. When people don’t care what gender someone is in a work of media, they are male by default. It then becomes a conscious decision to make a character female. Of course, this is all just speculation on my part.
*Now that I think about it, do we really know the Storm Troopers were men? Even the ones who talked might have just had voices that sounded what people commonly associate as male (assuming their communicators represented their voice accurately).
Lex Luthor’s bodyguard on Superman: The Animated Series was a woman named Mercy Graves.
I always wondered if the Storm Troopers were dudes! I always kinda assumed they were genderless, like the Borg.
@ MRAL no it’s means that clumsy stormtrooper types are expendable and nobody cares about them. Nobody identifies with them and nobody but you and your buddies take offense to them because they don’t represent men as a gender only low ranking villians.
This fails because in other, non-action genres like romantic comedies or whatever, background extras are generally realistically split- as of course they need to be. The filmmakers make a conscious choice to make all the mooks male- if they just sent out an open casting call, they’d get half and half, but they don’t. Because they think the audience won’t accept it. Misandry and male disposability.
Also, I’m not in Boston at the moment. I’m hoping to make it to Arisia tomorrow!
The Star Wars prequels have an even worse male-female ratio. IIRC the only female characters are Padme and her body doubles.
But trust MRAL to turn the troubling (and really weird when you think about it) absence of women in most films into an example of misandry. You were doing so well, kid!
@Spearhafoc She was harley quinned into the comics, too. Which terminology I’m sure upset her, because we know how she feels about her. XD
In the comics, she also worked alongside another female bodyguard named HOPE.
For fun historical women guards, it’s hard to beat…
THE DAHOMEY “AMAZONS!”
http://quirkyblackgirls.blogspot.com/2011/02/fyeahblackhistorythe-dahomey-amazonsthe.html
http://epa-prema.net/abomeyGB/resources/amazons.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahomey_Amazons
MRAL: wasn’t that “Bridesmaids” comedy a huge deal simply because *all* the main characters were female? People didn’t make a big deal out of the fact that “Inception” had an all-but-one male cast.
In a romantic comedy, i’s a realistic world so they can’t put mean only.
Do you even read what we write? What about the males that do matter, do you think they’re just a few exceptions, how do you rationalize that?
Starship Troopers did an amazing job of women in prime AND mook roles.
Now if it had had all male mooks and all female officers/main characters, I think you’d have a very good example for your cause. As it was, the movies with male mooks tend to have a male military in general, or a few token high up ladies.
If the military is portrayed as a man club, then male mooks go along with it. If you can find movies and games where women are presumed to have a large and equal role in the military, yet the men are still the mooks, I think you’d have a good point.
*men. All right, I’m going to sleep.
Really, it’s more of an example of *adult* disposability. I mean, when’s the last time you saw a big honkin’ superhero mowing down a mob of toddlers with squirt guns? I rest my case. Mis-elder-ry!
I think Bridesmaids was a big deal because it was fucking hilarious.
Also with with the door opening thing do MRAs realise these days there are many doors that open themselves (perhaps to avoid this drama).