Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, a bunch of the locals are doing a little brainstorming, hoping to come up with a pithy slogan or two for posters that will allow them to better sell their alleged movement to the misandrist masses.
The results so far are, well, intriguing. The front-runner, so far, is this highly upvoted one from deluks917, though as you can see it has received some criticism:
Chernab0g’s contribution is short and to the point:
This one from unexpecteditem is a bit perplexing:
And this one from The_Real_Johnny_Utah is, if anything, even more unexpected than the one from unexpecteditem:
SuicideBanana seems to have a little trouble with his pith. Also, “huh?” Cthulufunk tries his best to play the race card, but unfortunately does not seem to be playing with a full deck:
Neofool’s slogan seems a bit defensive:
Oddly, none of them mentioned the “wicked new slogan” that Counter-Feminist Philosopher King Fidelbogen unveiled earlier this year: “Feminism spreads lies like a fly spreads germs.”
It’s frankly quite bizarre that MRAs haven’t SWARMED (get it? get it?) around this slogan yet. Not only is it clearly the greatest slogan since “The Best Part of Waking Up is Folgers in Your Cup,” but it also comes with a little graphic (see here on the right) that someone made for Mr. Bogen.
And no, despite its endearing amateurness it wasn’t put together as a joke by anyone here.
As wonderful as all these slogans are I think we can do a better job than the Reddit MRAs; after all, most of us know a lot more about the MRA than do most MRAs themselves. So have at it!
Oh, and speaking of posters, these have been going up recently in Vancouver. The r/MRer’s aren’t happy about it.
No he is serious. He has a very distorted world view, to say the least.
@Sir
Thats not the way I learned it, but I’ll look into it more. Nice snipe about the dead white guys again. We live in the Western world, so our knowledge reflects Western history. Thats nothing to be ashamed of.
@Cassandra
What? Seriously, what? How was what you said a response to anything I said?
If Owly’s not serious, he’s one hell of a dedicated troll.
You say that you support MRAs on the issue of father’s rights and custody. Many of those MRAs were denied custody of their children because they abused those children. Now, I suppose it’s possible that you simply didn’t bother to do any research before confidently mouthing off about the whole custody issue, but given how important it is that children be protected from abuse, that’s not really a good excuse.
Also, the whole oh no that person can’t possibly mean the horrible things they say thing you keep doing is getting really old. Find a new schtick, or we’re going to assume that you’re just trolling.
Well, Owly is a troll in the sense that he does not come here hoping to engage in any sort of constructive way, he just comes here to vent his anger and try to upset people. But trolling in the 4chan sense where people say things they don’t mean just for lulz? Nope, that’s not what he’s doing. He’s saying exactly what he believes, it’s just that he’s a deranged creeper with odd and disturbing beliefs about many things.
(And the occasional belief that’s deranged in an entertaining way, like the superdogs.)
We also live in the present.
Then why are you so ignorant of it?
Good point. Until you mentioned that, the mere fact that I know anything about Adam Smith filled me with a sense of shame and revulsion. You’ve now freed me from these emotional shackles.
It’s always funny when, on a medium known as the world wide web, people say things like “we live in the Western world” as if that was a perfectly logical and obvious assumption to be making.
And what are these extenuating circumstances? Abuse? Being a crap parent generally? Being a parent with no interest in the child/children? Being a parent doesn’t give someone property rights over the child. What’s the point of keeping an adult in the child’s life when that adult doesn’t give a damn?
“Parent” doesn’t automatically mean “loving” or “involved” or even “competent”. I’d sooner see to the child’s welfare, and biological ties are hardly a guarantee of that. Hearts of stone? Bollocks. You’re the one showing a serious lack of imagination and empathy when you talk as if a child should be forced to spend time with a parent who doesn’t care about it.
Haha yes, “democracy is infeasible for large states” Montesquieu truly was a liberal for the ages.
Except, you know, for the half of human race with vaginas. Or who have nonnormative sexual preference.
Since every last one of them is advocating rape, do you agree that they’re all idiots?
You’re aware that joint custody is already a thing right? It’s actually the most common type of custody settlement.
What MRAs want is joint custody even if the father is a child abuser, i.e. Thomas Ball.
And now, 240 odd years later, what they’re saying is reactionary. Progress is like that.
Also, it’s kind of hilarious to say something like “we live in the Western world.” I mean, I’m typing on a computer made from iron mined in Russia, mercury mined in Africa, assembled in China and sold to me by a company based in Japan that is largely owned by American and British investors. Later I’m going to take a bus that is only possible because of African and southeast Asian rubber, drink some tea grown in Sri Lanka, and read a book printed on German paper using technology originally invented in China.
We live in the world. Our lifestyle is only possible because of the labors of people in every country in the globe. Their history is our history.
Hatred is not stupidity. Their rape advocacy isn’t some gaffe that just slipped out and they had to regret later. It’s the primary feature of their movement and the reason why most MRAs choose to be MRAs.
The reason I’m skeptical about them advocating rape is that I haven’t looked into it myself
“I have problems wrapping my head around the level of derp it would take for someone to say this.”
Wev. I’m “classically educated”, because my university was into that sort of thing. I’m quite familiar with the canon. I’m well aware of the effect the canon has had on the intellectual development of the “West” and elsewhere and thus the importance of understanding it. (Yes, Gandhi and Nehru read the canon too.) What I’m saying is that it’s incomplete and insufficient for understanding the economics and politics of the present day. (I mean, shit, Smith was pretty blown away by the concept of interchangeable parts and the division of labor. Dunno if you’ve gotten there yet, but it’s one of my favorite parts of WoN. He’d probably wet himself if he could see a modern factory and the supply chains of an international corporation.)
In short, read some newer books. I’m not even suggesting structuralism, postmodernism, etc. You don’t have to dive into Foucault. Even late 19th century stuff would be an improvement.
P.S. You understand that calling it the dead white guy canon is not a mere snipe, but alluding to the reasons it’s insufficient, right? “Dead” as in not accounting for the present world, which has things that profoundly affect power relations, like, say, cheap publishing. “White” as in completely unrepresentative of the perspectives of colonized and racialized people, who, as might be expected, often have a slightly different view of governance and international relations than Smith did. “Men” as in completely and utterly deranged on the topic of slightly more than half of humanity, given the attitudes of society toward women at the time.
P.P.S. I’m not a dude. They let us learn how to read now! We’re even allowed in universities!
Or even read some older books from a different perspective. Olympe des Gouges saw pretty clearly what was wrong with mainstream classical liberalism, and was executed for it.
I love you guys, you know that? I went to sleep all “if no one else calls out the multiple levels of malicious ignorance in this person’s comments I will lose a little bit more faith in humanity”, and then I woke up and there you all were, eviscerating away.
Truthy, what percentage of women bought the book? And what percentage bought the book and didn’t like it?
And of course we will totally overlook the fact that sometimes men buy intoi certain fads…
Transformers 3: The Dark of the Moon is aimed at a male audience, is complete dreck, and it grossed over a billion dollars worldwide.
But please, tell me more about how 50 Shades of Grey proves women are dumb.
@Nepenthe
I’m 2/3 through WoN. Loving it so far.
Any books or authors you would recommend reading?
Its pretty obvious that Smith considered clear cutting forest to be land improvement, but I haven’t read any environmental concerns in his work. So yeah, those guys didn’t know how everything would end up, but they were the source material.
That was King James and his son was executed for it (well that and a few other things.)
What is next, making the absolutely hilarious claim people thought the world was flat?
@diogenes
For feminism/women’s issues, try Wollstonecraft, Mill (if you haven’t yet), and de Beauvoir. Non-western, my knowledge is pretty limited; I’d suggest Tarabai Shinde as a starting off place if India is of interest, if only because she’s early on the chronology. (And, of course, Gayatri Spivak, but that’s a bit “new”.) That’s non-fiction; there’s multitudes of fiction work that is also enlightening.
In general, if you’ve made it this far without Marx, rectify that, though it is dense stuff. (For a language so similar to English, German doesn’t, in my opinion, translate very well.) Nothing written after, like, 1900 makes any sense without him.
diogenese the cynic: So, if MRA’s are advocating rape (and I don’t know if they are or aren’t, but you say they are) then I disagree with them because that removes personal autonomy from the woman (or man) being raped. The reason I’m skeptical about them advocating rape is that I haven’t looked into it myself, haven’t seen concrete proof, and would initially think that no one would say something that stupid. Dumb positions like that are hard to believe.
So what you really are isn’t cynical, it’s apathetic. You can’t be arred to examine the MRA, and disagree with us; not because you agree with the MRA (which you’ve not investigate), but yuo can’t imagine they would be be as stupid as the quotations on this blog (even in this very post) prove them to be.
Why should anyone take you seriously? If your ideas about groups are based on what you think non-stupid people would do to pursue their ends, and from your ideas of what those ends are you then build your models I have no good recourse but to ignore you, because you aren’t actually taking part in the real world, just living a giant gedankenexperiment, esp. when faced with evidence you refuse to accept it.
Example: Well, thank you. Reading that was frightening as it was enlightening. He says that to troll though, right? Its not serious stuff I assume.
Why do you assume that? Because you want to. Your cynicism is pretty weak, in fact it’s naive.
Hi David, Yep, I’ve seen those flyers in Vancity. I love them.
This post actually made me think of a scene in the beginning of “Pollyanna”, where Aunt Polly forbids Pollyanna to open her window of her little attic room in the oppressively hot summer, makes her read an entire pamphlet of the dangers of letting flies in and all because Pollyanna opened the window once and about 4 flies got into the house.
So I suggest another slogan:
Men’s Rights Activists: A lot like Aunt Polly.