Well, my fellow feminists, we might as well pack it in. For the forces arrayed against us have a devastating, nay brutal, new slogan.
The Counter-Feminist Agent of Change (CFAC) who calls himself Fidelbogen explained in a recent post how this “wicked new slogan” came to him. Also, what the slogan is:
This occurred to me in a flash of inspiration today. I grabbed the first scrap of paper I could find and jotted it down:
Feminism spreads lies like a fly spreads germs.
You like it? I thought you would.
So . . . spread it around, and make it part of the “buzz”!
Get it? Buzz. Like, “buzz” means “what people are excitedly talking about.” But it is also the sound that a fly makes.
See, Fidelbogen is working with TWO DIFFERENT MEANINGS at once. It’s like juggling two things at once, only with your brain. No wonder some MRAs regard his as the finest mind in the Men’s Rights movement today.
Several days after The Bogen (that’s what I like to call him) came up with this masterful slogan, one artistically minded MRA took it to a whole nother level – by using the slogan in the graphic above.
As The Bogen explained in his second post about his new slogan:
Memes can take many forms, and what you see here is among the most elemental and effective of those forms.
I am posting this graphic image for anybody on the planet who wants to fly away with it and spread it around.
First with the “buzz” thing, and now “fly away with it.” LIKE FLIES DO! The man is a genius.
Hell man, you could even print it on T-shirts and coffee mugs. Certainly you can post it on your website. Best of all, you can print it on little squares of paper and leave these in all manner of places where all manner of people will happen upon them.
Oh shit. T-shirts? Mugs? Motherfucking SQUARES OF PAPER?! He’s going CROSS-PLATFORM!
This is the sort of thing that will land in people’s brains, and buzz around there, and never leave!
I explained the buzz thing already, didn’t I?
It will find its way into the general buzz of conversation, too!
Just in case you’ve forgotten. Buzz = what people are talking about. ALSO THE SOUND FLIES MAKE.
I still cannot get over how much of a genius move that whole “buzz” thing is. I don’t know how he does it.
I kindly thank St. Estephe, the blog keeper who created this. I am honored to see my words so skillfully combined with pictures, and made ten times more effective by that method.
It’s true. It takes a tremendous amount of skill to find a picture of a fly, and then to put words next to it.
How can we possibly compete with this?
I tried to come up with some slogans of my own. But the best I could do was this:
I hope you guys have some better ideas.
Try QuickMeme if you want to make a little graphic. I’ll post any especially good ones here!
EDITED TO ADD: Some more graphics that are Fidelbogenesque in their brilliance. One from Scar, one from me.
Really? what’s the difference between how they react to this story as opposed to when a woman kills her kid? they blow a gasket, but with this case its all “oh how sad…we don’t REALLY know what happened” where is the outrage? why do they wait for more info on this case but if it were a woman they would tear her apart. I thought they were all about the well being of kids? or is it that they only pretend to care when it’s a mother doing something evil.
I’m not going to offer even a shred of sympathy. In my eyes, many of them are demons. They are hateful, misogynistic assholes. Day in and day out I read the horrible shit they say about women and feminists. They’ve advocated violence. They advocate letting rapists go even with evidence without any thought to what they are doing to the victim. To them we are lower than demons. So pardon me if I don’t feel like seeing the humanity in them, especially in this instance.
Thing is, many MRAs, not just the ones who make it to being quoted on manboobz, post about killing people, raping people and torturing people.
I am not inclined to give those guys the benefit of any doubt.
Quacker and Bostonian, you both have valid points. Would I spend so much as five minutes alone with these guys? HELL NO!
I don’t doubt what they’d have to say about a woman who murdered her children, and I went to that thread and read a long list of rape and slavery jokes….only two people had anything to say about the children at all. I agree with you assessment about how much impact those deaths had, the superbowl was more important. The first time I went to the link, I thought I had been misdirected…it was all about the superbowl. So, my bad.
I guess I’m just leary of letting them get me really angry. I was in a relationship where my partner would manipulate my emotions. I’ll get angry with issues but I’m hesitant to get anything more than annoyed with people. These guys manipulate through fear, condescension and getting us pissed. It gives them a sense of control. The things they say are really despicable.
Oh I don’t know. I’m tired, which tends to make me more philosophical and I really don’t think you want pillow in hells Life Philosophy.
Why not respond with cold contempt? That’s always been my response to MRAs. They are indeed attempting to manipulate through fear and anger, but there are responses other than “rage, “sadness”, and “don’t care” available.
Indeed CassandraSays. They are not worthy of much else really.
Cold contempt, mockery, and laughter. A lot of their rhetoric (especially the MGTOW stuff) is predicated on the idea that we care what they think, and that someone out there thinks they’re not all talk and no action. They think their words are powerful. They are wrong.
That’s why this blog pisses so many MRAs off so much. Anger they can feed off, but mockery and contempt? That stings if what you desperately want is for people to take you seriously.
Well especially when you cannot even scrape up 5 guys for a protest 3 months in the future…
Why not contempt?
My family background..well let’s just say that my mother was the first woman in several generations to not be married to men who did act the way these guys write. Including torture, rape and preying on the children. My family has suffered enormously as a result. My mother fixed as much as she could, and my fathers story isn’t much better. He also fixed what he could. I was lucky to have two parents who are still madly in love and have never spoken so much as one unkind word to each other. Contempt, in my eyes is ice cold hatred. Why would I want to carry such a thing? I watched my family struggle to move on in life, something that couldn’t happen until that contempt was finally let go of. I don’t respect the MRA. The contempt they hold for women does enormous damage to everyone. I pity them. They are filled with fear and a sense of inadequacy, and it drives them mercilessly. Either that, or they have no soul and thus no way to really ever connect, or to stop their pain.
They do say that laughter is the best medicine.
Laughter is to the soul what soap is to the body.
Sorry, you guys, but it had to be done…
MRAs are the adult personification of the truculant school pupil who refuses to do something ot help himself to spite someone else. They are the angry kids with problems at home who think everyone is out to get them when nobody notices them.
They shout and shout and shout but no-ones and no-one cares.
Their most eloquent leader is a laughing stock, a crude, ineffective writer who commands an army of a dozen or so and thinks the gender war will be won when he gets into the top 100,000 most popular websites in the world.
He’s setting his sites how! He bragged (incorrectly) about how AVfM has got more “hits” than Feministing.
Still, as we all know, Daily Mail readers upvoted some comments, so the gender war is won.
Antz for President (North Mississipi Ward)…
Happy, I’m all for mocking the MRAs, but the part about the kids with problems at home seems a bit insensitive. Especially because troubled kids should receive help.
But then again, maybe I’m the one being oversensitive.
@ Kyrie
If helping MRAs results in them becoming decent human beings, I’m happy to do that.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I think the MRM, like substance misuse, is something that people gravitate to at various points in their lives when they are vulnerable/unhappy/easily led. Most seem to burn out relatively quickly and move on. Some thrive in the anger, bitterness and hostility – they’re beyond help and should be ignored. The rest… They enjoy the negative attention, solidarity and “purpose” that belonging to a tiny community of bloggers give them. That’s why they amuse me so much. But the amusement is tempered with equal parts empathy and wariness.
Most of them are sad, scared, weak and pathetic. The only time they can face women is angrily on an anonymous blog.
Whilst on this topic, has anyone ever noticed the hilarious “good MRA, bad MRA” act that Elam and his sycophantic sidekick … JtO engage in? It’s so funny, JtO is clearly after Elam’s title as Chief MRA and tries to out-anger him at any turn. I’ve started to enjoy JtO’s bloated, pseudo-scientific ramblings more than Elam’s. His latest distribe states that any man who spends any time alone with a woman tacitly consents to be falsely accused of rape. This truly incredible piece of MRA academic wizardry kinda flies in the face of another MRA finding – that any juror should acquit a rapist.
So on the one hand, if you spend time with a woman alone, any time, ever, you are consenting to be falsely accused. But by the same token, if you believe that a man raped another human being, you should do all you can to acquit them.
Um… OK?
Happy: but I didn’t say MRAs where children. And after the MRAL debacle…
@ Kyrie
I know you didn’t, I was just drawing parrallels 🙂
Like children they are egocentric, illogical and overly emotional.
MRAL is a textbook case. He lapses all the time, from young-man-with-issues into typical MRA. People, rightly, give him a hard time, and I’m not going to try and drum up sympathy – I’m just saying why the MRM doesn’t remotely concern me.
It is, in essence, just a large group of people like MRAL – insignificant, nervous loners who like to think of themselves as being part of something, rather than the disparate group of bloggers that they are.
Some of them will go on to be abusive personalities, but then some of them would anyway.
The MGTOWers are the most amusing, in my opinion. They “go their own way” but need to constantly tell everyone who they have and look for reaction. None is forthcoming…
Hey, I think children can be rather lovely. Stop insulting them by comparing them to mra slime.
Now now, Darksidecat, MRAs can be lovely too.
Remember when MRAL accepted and recognised that he was just a sad, damaged individual who sought attention? He personified the MRM and I thought it was touching.
Unforunate that he chose the MRA path, but hey ho, it could have been lovely.
Actually, when MRAL made his big confession, he said that he always knew the MRM were clowns. And even after, in all his anger (how dare you find this hollywood star not sexy! Evil wymin, bitch!”) and borderline abusive behavior he didn’t came back on that.
Worst meme ever…I forgot it by the end of the blog. All I could remember was the fly, not the slogan.
PS. Child-proofing the world is a cause of tyranny…but the bigger cause is idiot-proofing the world.
“Feminism spreads lies like flies spread germs”
Wow! Faced with such imagination and word power I can only abandon being an author, poet, and editor.
M
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Marie Marshall
author/poet/editor
Scotland