Sometimes I ask myself: what is it that I really hope to accomplish with this website, aside from entertaining myself and my readers, and exposing misogynist assholes for who they are. There’s a part of me that still hopes that someday, something I write will cause some misogynist and/or Men’s Rightser out there to develop a modicum of self-awareness, look at what they’ve been saying or doing, and say to themselves, “I’m really kind of a tool, aren’t I? Maybe I should stop.”
When the Southern Poverty Law Center report on the Men’s Rights movement came out, I hoped it might have a similar sort of effect. Or that, even if it didn’t persuade any MRAs out there that they were wrong, it might at least convince a few that they were going about things the wrong way. Nope. On the Men’s Rights subreddit, at least, it seems to have sent many of the regulars into an indignant tizzy, and they have doubled down on their peculiar brand of politics-by-whining-online.
Consider this post:
Yes, that’s right. Some Men’s Rights Redditors seem to think that the best way to convince the world that they’re not part of a hate group is to continue to celebrate a self-admitted child abuser who urged men to firebomb courthouses and police stations and kill people.
Then there’s this post, currently the top post on the subreddit:
Wow, if the Men’s Rights subreddit had anything to do with that, that would indeed be a victory. As one regular put it:
Thing is, I read r/mensrights pretty regularly, and I don’t remember any campaign there to protect the rights of fishermen in New Zealand.
Turns out that’s because the campaign, such as it was, consisted of one post some months back, which got all of 11 upvotes at the time. The current post in which r/mensrights congratulates itself for its “victory” has gotten, last I checked, 120 upvotes, more than ten times that. Simplecosine’s self-congratulatory comment in the new thread has gotten 36 upvotes. The comment in the original thread asking r/mensrightsers to send an email to the US Secretary of State’s office got … one upvote. In other words, only a handful of Men’s Rights Redditors even noticed the original post, much less sent along an email.
Reading one of the linked news articles makes clear the real reason the State Department opened an investigation: a six-month long, three-continent wide investigation by Bloomberg Businessweek revealing abuses in the industry.
The Men’s Rights subreddit: Taking Credit for Shit They Didn’t Do Since 2008.
And then there’s this post:
I’ve got nothing to say about this one — it’s basically self-refuting — except that I’m sort of bemused by the notion that the Southern Poverty Law Center is a “semi-women group.” Uh, what is that exactly? A group with some women in it? A group that doesn’t think women are all a bunch of evil bitches? The horror!
Oh, Men’s Rights movement. You’ll never change, will you?
EDITED TO ADD: And speaking of never changing, here’s how one Men’s Rights redditor responded to my comments there suggesting that maybe, just maybe, MRAs should actually denounce and distance themselves from someone calling for terrorism:
Let me just highlight that bit at the end again:
[T]he cost to the establishment to maintain the status quo in regards to divorce, custody, etc. must be made so high that it’s just no longer feasible. If that means instilling abject fear into the hearts of judges, cops and legislators by making them think their careers and/or lives could be forfeit unless they change their attitudes towards men, then so be it.
Trying to instill fear for one’s life in your opponents: that is the very definition of terrorism.
@Cassandra
That’s interesting to me actually. One of the things that I noticed about how sexism is upheld versus racism is that, sexism is generally upheld through a sense of superiority in men and fear in women, whereas racism is often upheld through a sense of superiority in one race, as well as a fear of “those savages” whomever the savages may be. So when you say that you didn’t find the comments threatening, I think that’s somewhat unique because, IME, a lot of white people DO find those comments threatening, especially when they’re expats in a non-Western country. And I think that’s something fostered by a supremacist system as part of othering those people, and justifying treating them as different.
Okay… okay. This has gotten ridiculous, and I’ve kind of lost track of the whole discussion. Let’s say I was mansplaining. I don’t see it, and it wasn’t my intent, but let’s say I was. I’m sorry. Is that enough? What do you want me to do?
@Cassandra, I’m not trying to pick a fight with you. Just saying, you seem to be laboring under the delusion that everything’s got to work out in your favor. That’s not how it works.
*one caveat though. This is filtered through the experiences of White expats in Africa, where things are more unstable for White people than in the Middle East (not sure about Asia)
@ Shadow
Hmm. In my experience some people I grew up with, other expats, did exist in a state on constantly feeling threatened. It always seemed ridiculous to me because there were just so many situations in which it was so obvious that white privilege was protecting us in a way that no one else was protected. Example – when I was about 9 or 10, in Saudi, I once decided to go wandering around the sports complex that was under construction near my house in the middle of the night. So there I was, exploring in my PJs, and the local cops spotted me, stopped, and asked me what I was doing. Initially they were quite hostile, but as soon as they figured out that I was a British foreigner (I was frequently mistaken for Persian at first glance in Saudi), their attitude totally changed and they just drove me home and told me very nicely to please not wander around alone at night. Even at that age, I knew that if I hadn’t been a white foreigner that experience would not have ended well. And stuff like that happened all the time.
I do think that people who grew up 3rd culture from very early childhood, like I did, tended to interpret their experiences very differently than people who became expats as adults, so yeah, my perspective may be a bit weird.
To clarify- there just seems to be a level of entitlement there, with the expectation to carry on an exclusive conversation in a group thread, and it seems like it might speak to some larger entitlement.
Well, my pretty, I can cause accidents, too.
Complexities of feminist theories; blame everything on the man. let’s go to an island so we can frolic in lesbian delight. oh, and men suck. if it wasn’t for them, my life would have been happy.
Nah, it just speaks to the fact that I don’t really want to talk to you because, as ithiliana said, you’re not coming across very well. That sure is some entitlement you have there, thinking that everyone has to want to engage with you.
As opposed to, say, Magdelyn, who is perfectly happy carrying on a conversation with herself.
I’m not saying everyone wants to or has to engage with me. I’m just speaking to the fact that you’re having a private conversation on a public channel. And that’s fine, but it’s kinda weird that you’re mad at me for butting in. Maybe everything usually goes your way, probably it does. But you have no right for that always to be so. And your sociological theory was cannonballed.
cassandrasays, your privilege is showing.
@AVT,
If you’ve read Dworkin and Twisty, you would know your statements were anything but uncontroversial within feminist theory. Your own short list is enough to demonstrate that if you had actually comprehended even those, you would know that your “theory” isn’t some indisputable statement. Even with your incredibly limited knowledge, you should have fucking known better.
I stand by what I said, but for the record, it’s not my intent to engage in denialism.
What you said WAS denialism. I’m not making a tone argument here, the contents of your statements were denialism. And you stand by them, so you are engaging in denialism.
This. This is exactly what I was calling bullshit on. Your interpretation is utter privilege denying crap. Your denials of male privilege are crap, your denials of intersectionality* are crap, your attempts to attack femme women are crap (femme women have privilege and are agents of the patriarchy? Hell to the fuck no.), your entire spiel is crap.
“It’s just my opinion” is absolutely not a fucking decent counterargument (with a few slim exceptions regarding pure aesthetics).
Also, you’re a total fucking tone troll, and a hypocrite.
*In the interst of continuing Ithiliana’s point about erasure of black women’s theory, I’ll point out that this term was coined and this theory developed in large part by Kimberle Crenshaw. http://www.socialdifference.org/files/active/0/Article__Mapping_the_Margins_by_Kimblere_Crenshaw.pdf
You really don’t think feminine women receive benefits for being feminine?
Twisty Faster I consider kind of a fringe idiot, although a good writer with a coherent philosophy, which is why I follow her. Likewise Dworkin. They do not have a major voice in mainstream feminism.
AVT, dude, you’re getting more ridiculous with each comment. Seriously, just stop digging. When you’re aggressively unpleasant on a forum where nobody knows you, it makes it extremely unlikely that people will respond to you in a positive way.
You also need to learn the difference between mockery and anger.
Tbh, I’m sick of you, DSC. You’re an asshole. If you can’t see why I might have a negative reaction to someone coming in and immediately saying things like “fuck you” and “you’re full of shit”, you’re an idiot. That’s not being a “tone troll”, it’s taking offense to someone who can’t even show me basic human respect. Fuck off.
Dworkin is actually a fairly important, though controversial, figure in terms of feminist history. She doesn’t have any current voice because she’s, you know, dead.
@AVT
Aside from any other issues Cassandra may have with what you’ve written, if you can’t see that opening the lines of communication with this piece of dickbaggery:
will net you the reception that you got, then there’s no helping you.
@Cassandra
yeah, I can see that difference between myself and my parents. I can also see it between my parents and some of my other aunts and uncles because they both studied in the USSR, where all the foreign students kind of banded together, so they had friends from many different of cultures, contrasted with those aunts and uncles who studied in India and Sri Lanka. This is only true of people who immerse themselves in the culture though. I had so many friends and acquaintances who were born and raised in Africa, but grew up in such insulated communities that they still came out racist as fuck. I’m sure you would have found the same thing going on out there too.
CassandraSays probably would think that, privileged prefect that she is.
You know, if you want to complain about being addressed insultingly by another poster, you probably shouldn’t treat everyone you engage with in the thread like total shit.
@ Shadow
Yep to the first part. If someone opens communication like that, things are never going to end well. It’s kind of hilarious how oblivious he is to why exactly interactions aren’t going well for him here, though.
Yeah on the second part too. There was a very clear pattern in every place I ever lived where some expats would wall themselves off in hermetically sealed little communities, and others would actually interact with their surroundings. I never did want much to do with the first group, and luckily neither did my parents.
Also, Shadow, probably OT for this thread, but I’d love to hear about the experiences of your various relatives studying in the USSR at some point. (Is a communist history geek.)
@Cassandra
Yep for sure. I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but my grandad (mom’s dad) was actually one of the founders of the Communist party in Sri Lanka. That’s actually why my parents (and a couple of my uncles and aunts as well) studied out there. It’s too bad I didn’t meet you a couple of years ago (we lost him in ’05), I would have hooked you guys up through e-mail. He would have adored having someone to talk communism with.
That’s so cool. Sorry to hear about your grandad’s passing away. I’m sure he would have been fascinating to talk to, and to have grown up with.
@iShadow: It’s funny, but all those myths and out of context quotes of Dworkin and Daly actually drove home the concept of privilege to me, rather than the intended effect of considering feminism a hate movement. My introduction to feminism was actually through stumbling across some rad fem comments,which led me to some pretty dismissive to almost outright man-hating blogs. The utter indifference that their comments provoked in me, compared to the sense of unease that I got when I read White supremacists’ comments made the idea of privilege much easier to understand once I encountered it.
This is absolutely fascinating–and something I’d never heard of before. The whole idea of learning about feminism through various types of quotations and commentary on the internet is something I’ve thought about often.