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.
Based on today’s experience, being womanly means drinking lots of herbal tea, whereas normally it means drinking lots of green tea. Now I’m confused. How is a woman supposed to know if she’s womanly in an OK way or in a bad, use it to criticise MRAs way?
(Apparently cold meds make me extra snarky)
my womanly day has consisted of taking my kids to child care, and then being at work, trying to support 4 different people to resolve their housing and financial worries. i have drunk 2 cups of tea and had a very indifferent lunch sitting on the back verandah at work.
i am now staring, in a womanly fashion, at the river i can see from my work window, waiting to go home in 10minutes, via collecting the kids.
I then plan to organise dinners, lunch boxes, baths, bedtime stories and goodnight kisses. i will then sit my womanly ass down on my sofa and drink hot chocolate (trying to be good during the week, no wine) and watch My Kitchen Rules.
In my manly wisdom, I would like to inform you that y’all are doing the hivemind wrong.
Women! *shakes his manly head*
This is crazy. My manly day was not all that different from womanly days described here. WHAT IS GOING ON?!?
Most people who ID as transsexual are binary IDed, so discussing them as “in between” is misgendering. A binary IDed transsexual man, for example, is not “in between” man and woman any more than a cis man is, he’s on the man IDed end. I also think conceiving of non-binary IDs as “in between” is very limiting and still naturalizes the binary system.
On the issue of “womanly”, I think it’s a vague term. Insofar as it’s just defined as a woman being herself, then it’s fine (insofar as the acts would also be fine if viewed as nongendered), but the term can also refer to social expectations and social roles. And the latter opens a whole can of worms around forcible gender norms.
“I also think conceiving of non-binary IDs as “in between” is very limiting and still naturalizes the binary system.”
That should be “all non-binary IDs” some non-binary IDs are defined that way, and it’s fine for them, but it’s limiting and erasing to assume that’s what non-binary means in general.
There’s some value in having a term for “acting in accordance with social norms for women,” so you can say, for instance, “Anyone should be able to AIAWSNFW if he or she wants to,” or “Women should have other options beyond AIAWSNFW.” But “womanly” is probably not the best choice.
Men’s reaction against feminism is growing rapidly. It must be happened as it is. Feminist cannot change the nature.
I can’t stop laughing
It must be happened as it is, you guys. Words of wisdom.
Aww, hey EN! How’s it going? Why don’t you hang around a while and reminisce? Haha, oh wait, this is you we’re talking about.
I forgot to say what my womanly day was. It involved watching Labyrinth and sending dirty text messages and starting to tidy my living room, mostly.
My mistake. It contradicts my own principles on gender. Instead of viewing gender as black and white (which includes gray in between) there should be a rainbow of genders. (Laci Green made an amazing video dealing with sex-gender, and this is where the rainbow idea comes from. I love Laci.) It’s like seeing 3 dimensions when there were previously only two.
ZJ is not between Man and Woman, he is beyond Man and Woman! 🙂
You may want to do a bit of research my overeager little friend. What you think is nature is really a set of your own ideologies, and a very limiting and dogmatic set at that.
Gender is black, white, gray, and rainbow. But some people really are black or white and that’s real too.
Also ZJ describes himself as a guy, so I’d check with him before exuberantly declaring him “beyond Man and Woman.”
But whenever s/he speaks of himself in the third person s/he refers to himself as “she”. (At least as far as I’ve checked.)
Hm. I looked at ZJ’s blog and zie describes zirself as a guy, but that was an old post? Anyway. The point is that zir gender is something zie knows, not something you get to declare is extra-special-magical because zie’s trans or androgynous.
I’m not declaring anything. I’m not defining zir gender for zir, I’m just being a little enthusiastic.
I didn’t mean anything…
Being womanly sounds so complicated. How does one even choose from all the ways? It seems there are as many as there are women. Luckily I’m a man, I just be myself to be manly.
I know. There are so many different ways to be manly and womanly, but unfortunately our society approves of only a very few.
I am surprised that FactFinderReview did not seize upon this post as evidence that manboobzers calls all its “dissenters” terrorists. What better proof of a general claim than the first instance in, like, months? But I must say I love /r/mensrights, too, it’s hard to find such high concentrations of the Force (the Force in this continuity being cluelessness).
Do your manly business here!
http://myobatlas-production-apac.s3-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/6f350848b6612b5249daaa73cec0189b/gallery/1304041297-Manly+Business+Centre+Print+on+Frost+Logo+and+Sign.jpg-jumbo.jpg
😉
Apparently the MRA’s are less powerless than they might think:
http://jezebel.com/5892657/lawmaker-says-pregnant-ladies-are-a-lot-like-livestock
Apparently it’s now ok to propose that women should be forced to carry around stillborn fetuses until they almost die of sepsis or “naturally” expel the stillborn.
Also, 99% of superfluous male-based drugs (viagra, etc) are covered almost 100% by most if not all insurances, while women are still fighting to have BASIC HORMONAL BIRTH CONTROL covered even partially on the same plans.
These people won’t learn until each of these MRAs is given his own dictatorship over his home, with his wife as livestock to use as he wishes and his children as fodder to control and beat and intimidate as he pleases. Of course, this will blind him to the larger hierarchy, one of men and men alone that will be put in place to keep them from ever rising from the utter bottom of the pit, but that will be just fine with these MRAs. After all, if he can lord over a woman, make her like a slave, use her like an object, bend her to his will, then he can feel superior knowing that he is better than THOSE WOMEN and forget how deeply fucked he actually is in the scheme of things.
It’s like a cancer on human decency and progress. How can these people NOT SEE that they are willfully supporting a system where they will be shackled in a male-only patriarchal order, and that they are actually suggesting that SLAVERY to higher up males is preferable to having to see women as fellow human beings?!
@Nanasha
There may be a time when MRAs will no longer just be clowns and will pose a real threat to society.
When do we draw that line? Now?
“Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter.” – Nietzsche
I could use more laughter instead of vitriolic attacks. Satire and humor will do far more damage to MRAs than my rage.
I think we should all adopt this principle more vigorously.
@BoggiDWurms- The problem isn’t necessarily the MRA’s as much as the fact that their psychological make up is ripe for being used in the Neo-Con patriarchal pyramid plan. When you have a huge population of men who willingly cage themselves in old fashioned masculine gender roles, and who easily accept direction and hierarchy from “higher status” males, you have a very optimal situation for the shitheads at the top (the sociopathic bastards at the top of the pyramid) to enact legislation and social programs to turn women into scapegoats, then slaves, then lower than animals. Using women as the designated objectified scapegoat, each man is forced into a situation where his entire life is relegated to stereotypical 2 dimensional gender roles that focus on violence and obedience to higher authority. He can take out any and all frustrations he may have at his situation NOT on the men above him who have the power to do things (who will tell him that they deserve to be up there after all, they “worked hard” for it), and instead be encouraged to hit, torture, rape, and otherwise abuse his female scapegoat object because after all, it’s all HER fault that she’s not making HIM happy.
As I’ve said before, this is not all men. There are many men who will reject this. These men will be branded “terrorists” or “traitors” and then made examples of. Women will be relegated to breeding/abuse objects, trying to keep their usefulness to these terrifying monsters as long as possible so they don’t get thrown away or killed because they’ve gotten “old” or “used up.”
I mean, seriously, just read a book like “The Handmaid’s Tale” and other books that show extremism when paired with patriarchy and pseudo-religious justification. When a group of people believe that they are gods, they will do their damnedest to make the world one in which they are treated as gods.
I love human beings. I think that we have a capacity for amazing progress and beauty in our advancement as a species. But every time I see groups of people ACTIVELY WORKING TO TURN OUR FUTURE INTO A DYSTOPIAN WASTELAND where sociopaths rule, it makes me want to put on my pith helmet and pick up some heavy artillery. No one is going to turn my daughter, my mother, my grandmother, my best friends, my sister, my aunt, my cousin, myself and all other women, and little girls into a fuck animal/abuse puppets without a fight. And I know that there are plenty of rational, decent and intelligent men who will agree that if it comes down to it, we will fight against those who would plunge our world into a hell of patriarchal, strict-male-gender-roled sociopathic bullshit.