You all need to go read Kate Harding’s bracing (and given all the recent doxxing bullshit, spectacularly well-timed) Jezebel piece titled “Fuck You, Men’s Rights Activists.” Here’s a sample:
Fuck you, first of all, for making it nearly impossible for decent men struggling with abusive partners or unfair custody arrangements to get the help they need and deserve. You have forever tainted those issues with your rage-filled, obsessively anti-woman horseshit, to the point where it’s become difficult for any rational, compassionate person to trust a man who claims he’s been screwed over in family court or abused by a female partner, even if he has. …
Fuck you for showing up every time women speak, especially about rape and abuse, and trying to make it all about you. Fuck you for derailing threads about the victims of Marc Lépine, a man who screamed about his hatred for feminists as he murdered fourteen women and injured many others, because you also hate feminists and want a fucking cookie for not killing anyone. Fuck you for making rape and death threats against young women who dared to protest a speaking engagement by a man who thinks little girls would enjoy being raped by their fathers if it weren’t for society telling them it’s dirty. Fuck you for whining about how unfair it is that women might wonder if you’re a rapist when you approach them out of nowhere, while completely ignoring how unfair it is that women feel the need to be on guard all the time in public. Or that if we relax and behave normally—drinking, dancing, dressing however we want—you will be the first motherfuckers in line to blame us for getting ourselves raped.
And it keeps going from there.
Thank you Kate, for putting it so well.
@cloudiah
This is so awesome it has made me laugh every time I’ve scrolled down the thread. Well done!
I actually wouldn’t be surprised if it did explain what they were thinking. Their logic is so pretzelly that they might see “fuck you” as an insulting prelude to intercourse.
It’s the Ideology Police!
I love it how one or two comments where all like “But gueiz, gueiz, srsly they’re not bad people, I’ve read their comments n stuff and they’re leik not that baaad.”
Yet nobody considers nearly *all* MRA hubs are ran by crazy-ass rape apologists or have them prominently featured on their webpage; whereas all the feminist websites I visit and the majority of tumblr aren’t horribly scary “RadFem” types who for all intents and purposes *are* straw feminists.
Seriously, one “Go mow my fucking lawn.” joke aimed at an MRA who wishes to derail a thread is not the equivalent to a rape threat.
@kittehhelp
That would explain why leftist dudes are so disproportionately beardy…
@kittenhelp- My guffaw scared my cat. You see, this is what misandry does.
Careful there, TTF. You go scaring our feline overlords* and you could be in real trouble.
*we ‘fessed up yesterday that feminism is really just a cover for the great feline takeover. As Argenti said, we have thumbs and cans don’t open by themselves.
Ok I have to ask, why are so many of the leading MRAs so pig-ignorant while claiming to be brainiacs on the topic of human history and its meaning for our modern times? I mean, it’s one thing to skip college, lots of fine people don’t go there, but to be as staggeringly ignorant as so many of them prove to be, all the while bragging about their self-styled insights into reality, is amazing considering that we have teh Internets and libraries, and Amazon.com, and all that.
You may recall the astounding statements over on the Shithead.com about Tibetan Buddhism, where they contradicted both recorded history and the current Dalai Lama. Here’s another gem from the comments on Kate’s speech: “I didn’t read that article, but women like her I believe have a deep-seated inferiority complex about being a woman. It could begin to develop, for example, when they’re sitting in elementary school studying history and they notice how all the significant events involved men, or almost all the inventions were by men. They being to feel a gnawing discomfort and question their self-worth as a woman.”
These dumbasses apparently don’t know any history farther back then their own butts. They have no clue about the education, culture, and (yes) LAWS that constrained men, women, and social classes back in the day. They have no idea that it was not only legal, but expected, to refuse women admission to colleges and apprenticeships, and the exceptions were rare (and often involved connections). They have never heard about laws regulating the ownership and control of assets by women. They really do think that a woman had the same opportunities gain education, invent things, and make their mark on the world as men over the course of human history. Meanwhile, we have another man in authority, a US judge this time, who apparently flunked Biology 101 (http://www.9news.com/news/article/304886/188/US-judge-says-victims-bodies-can-prevent-rape).
They don’t even know much about the societies where there were exceptions. They probably never heard about women in Sparta, or the matrilineal groups of India, America and elsewhere. When they hear about an achieving woman, they are dismissive because she could not possibly have been smart, strong, or brave, or whatever, because their minds have become too calcinated to perceive these qualities in a woman.
Combine their pathetic ignorance with the toxic emotions they cultivate in themselves and their smelly online confraternities, and what results is someone I not only never want as a doctor or a clergyman, I don’t even want to find myself in an elevator or a workplace with one. My sons are not like this and my daughter didn’t marry one, thank God.
Think of it, willfully dumb + angry = a walking sack of radioactive dogshit. Thank you David, for helping to expose a real danger to civil society. For as another fuckwad bragged over there, they are not remaining contained, they are branching out and commenting on respectable sites. I’ve seen Uncle Elmer on Forbes, and others elsewhere including our local news. Apostles of a nastier world to come if their fantasies are ever realized.
Not only that, but they are utterly oblivious to the fact that history was written by men, for men, and that women were excluded from the written record. All their contributions were downplayed, or overlooked entirely, or simply not seen as being of any significance, or when a woman actually made it into the historical record, she was treated as an exception (be that good or bad).
This gets covered in an excellent post here. The discussion is specifically about why fantasy fiction shouldn’t be reproducing the sexism of history. That isn’t saying fantasy worlds can’t be sexist, but that there’s no excuse for the writers now to reproduce the sexism of the men who wrote women out of history.
Good quotation from it:
“History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.
“History is actually a long series of centuries of men writing down what they thought was important and interesting, and FORGETTING TO WRITE ABOUT WOMEN. It’s also a long series of centuries of women’s work and women’s writing being actively denigrated by men. Writings were destroyed, contributions were downplayed, and women were actively oppressed against, absolutely.”
These MRM morons’ heads would explode if they had to grasp that fact.
Yeah, so much they don’t know. Nikola Tesla’s mother invented and built household tools, and in spite of being illiterate, memorized many Serbian epic poems. She was otherwise a traditional housewife, and had to be with 5 children at that time and place. Tesla thought very highly of her intellect and skills – MRAs would probably shout him down as a mangina for that.
@ Kitteh: Have you heard of “Requires Only That You Hate”? and Limyaael of “Limyaael’s Rants” fame? Both are fantasy writing/reading resources with a distinct social justice twist, and have made note of this rather silly trope. Thought that might be useful for brain bleach.
Adding this followup to that awesome blog post on Historically Authentic Sexism by Tansy Rayner Roberts; PSA: Your Default Narrative Settings Are Not Apolitical by Foz Meadows. Talk about knowing your stuff.
“I am an Mens Right’s Movement…”
You should go to your basement and self-flagellate for your crimes against the English language. (not to mention ‘an MRM’) I mean, being an MRA is terrible and you should feel bad for it, but what you’ve done to the language… *shudder*
PS: Xanthë is totally right, that PSA is gold, and I’m linking it far and wide. (well, one place, so far…)
The ignorance of women in history certainly doesn’t explain the women who managed to simultaneously get over the barriers put in front of them (like people assuming they’re stupid) *and* do amazing things, enough to get noticed despite that – the mathematician Sophie Germain springs to mind. She’d be one of the notable mathematicians of the 18th/19th Century even if she hadn’t had to correspond under a false identity.
Makes you wonder what all the women who had it in them to do great things but couldn’t get over the hurdles might have achieved.
While calling himself a movement is strange, using ‘an’ is correct. an is used in front of vowel sounds. so “an em ah em” is correct. I mean, maybe that’s not how it’s done everywhere, but that’s how it’s done here.
Oh wow, Kitteh’shelp, I loved that article!! Thanks!!
Oh, and MRAs? Fuck you for this too. TW for judicial dismissal of rape. Because if a judge thinks a rape victim wasn’t injured enough and so reduces the rapists sentence from 16 years to 6 years in prison, MRAs think:
and
and
I’m going off to look at kitten videos for a while.
I would love to see them yell “mangina” at someone OPERATING A GODDAMN TESLA COIL.
I see I was ninjaed on the PSA. As to the judge… Perhaps not disbarrment, but he should lose his robe. That speech from the bench was a complete odds with Calif. law on rape.
There is a reason people refer to living in Orange County as, “being behind the Orange Curtain”.
Kate said it well, bravo!
Right in one there Sparky.
Oh the irony.
Ruby commending someone for striking out against people who normalise rape.
Toysoldiers wrote an excellent response to that article here: http://toysoldier.wordpress.com/2012/12/15/youre-not-helping-v10/
He just destroys her argument. I particularly like the second half, starting with,
‘While I am not a men’s rights activist, I will accept the “fuck yous”, Harding. Indeed, as a male survivor of sexual violence at the hands of a feminist I thank you for telling me that every time I speak publicly about my abuse or advocate for other male survivors it makes me an “unapologetically misogynistic bag of rot.” I thank you because that is exactly the kind of thing my abuser would say, and it is the same thing I hear from most feminist I encounter.’
He brilliantly turns her rhetorical tactic around on feminists by pointing out the way many of them marginalize male victims:
“Fuck you for every time a man or boy gets hung up on by a feminist-run rape center.
Fuck you for every cop, medical care provider, and victim’s advocate who believes the feminist myth that rape is something only men do to only women.
Fuck you for every feminist who calls male survivors potential rapists and pedophiles.”
etc. Just an absolutely terrific response.
First, it isn’t really fair to go talking about toysoldier where he isn’t allowed to comment, pretty sure he’s still banned (it isn’t called a perma-ban for no reason).
Second, did you read Harding’s article?! It starts with —
As in — when the MRM makes it sound like male rape is only because of feminism, they make it harder for male survivors to seek help. And their attitudes towards psychology in general (female run feminist BS so don’t ever even think of getting psychological help) — those attitudes certainly don’t help survivors.
Meanwhile, in reality land, there are plenty of feminists, on this very board, who do support male rape survivors (hell, you’re distracting me from texting with one right this very second)
Since we were discussing random shit, I’ll get back to texting in a moment…he did tell me to enjoy playing whack-a-troll…
“Fuck you for every cop, medical care provider, and victim’s advocate who believes the feminist myth that rape is something only men do to only women.”
That is just straight up bullshit — it’s feminists who’re trying to change police, medical, and sociological attitudes towards rape. It’s feminists who’ve said that there’s nothing “unmanly” about a man being raped.
I’m not particularly surprised with TS though, he manages to make everything any feminist says into a direct attack on his experiences as a survivor. And since he’s probably reading this, may I say that that’s a good sign that some of that “feminist run bullshit” psychology might help? (Because it really isn’t feminist run, until fairly recently most psychs were men, and most psych profs still are — meaning most psychs are taught by male profs)
@Egalitarian
If by “destroys her argument” you mean “blame feminism for everything wrong that ever happens to men, completely disregarding all the work that feminists have put in to fix gender issues, not to mention ignoring all the misogyny that comes from the Men’s Right’s Movement as well as all the ways that they reinforce the very same rigid gender roles that cause a lot of the problems that affect men, and dismissing it all as just being a result of men frustrated with feminism” then sure.
I can see why you went with the first option, it’s much shorter.