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.
The First Joe- Not everyone prefers their modes of analysis to be quite so reductionist. There is room for the MRM to be both ineffectual as a political movement and to be harmful to individuals. And they manage this by de-legitimizing actual men’s issues by discussing them in a discourse so full of transparent vitriol for women no one with a sense of integrity would associate themselves with it. And their disturbing attempts to expose young women to attacks from angry, vitriolic men for disagreeing with them is harmful on an individual level without effecting any real ideological change. See, we can have it both ways. Yay.
@The First Joe
Дедер одјеби.
(@Everyone else
Sorry, but I’m sick and tired of this special snowflake and his Eastern European sh*t.)
@Ice: What’s “дедер”?
Also, what’s одјеби? 😀
@clairedammit: It sounds like some permutation of “fuck”, so if this is supposed to be some Eastern European language, I assume that’s what it is. Also, “од” is likely the equivalent of the Russian prefix “ot”, which means “away” or “off”. So, my guess is, “fuck off”.
No idea what “дедер” is, though.
“Judging by the suicide stats for men in the West as feminism took power over the last 40 years: Either this claim is a lie, or “feminist-help” is harming men – so, if it’s the latter, please stop whatever this “feminist-helping” is you claim. Thanks so much.”
Did someone call for a math lesson? Actually, this one is so simple we don’t even need math! Take a look — the rates by gender have been stable since the 50’s (I didn’t bother looking for earlier data, you did say 40 years after all). The rates by age have more elderly men killing themselves than young men, or elderly women, but there’s no indication if that’s a trend over time, or a stable rate — perhaps the rates by gender just peak at different ages.
And before you accuse me of protesting to much, you hit on a math question, and you should remember that I’m the one that just can’t resist those — I love math too much to let mathematical stupidity slide.
Might be Serbian? C’mon fuck off, per Google translate.
@Argenti, aren’t crime rates in general going down? Can we “blame” that on feminism too? 🙂
cloudiah — yes and no? Yes they’re going down, but only since 1990~ — after peaking from 1960~
See here for violent crime rates and here for property crime.
That’s US stats, I’ll dig up others if you like?
Here’s Canada with all types of crime lumped together. Same general trend though.
Well, if the drop in crime rates started going down in the 90s, then clearly that was caused by grunge music.
(I’m just making fun of the correlation/causation confusion our trolls have so often. They’re wrong on the facts, they’re wrong on the connections they draw from them — so much wrong.)
I wonder what’s responsible for that robbery uptick in the mid-90s.
Sorry, mid-2000s.
Idk, seems more like the 80s had a general drop, peaked again in 90~ and has been dropping since. I’d have to guess though — the article did have a few theories on the trend in general.
And nawh, it wasn’t grunge music, it was the reaction to River Phoenix OD’ing — people stopped partying too hard 🙂
*crosses fingers on the html*
I think that “mid-2000s” corresponds to the beginning of the economic crisis — just a guess though.
And at least my html broke gracefully — that should be a numbered list, but apparently <ol> is not a viable tag, oh well, no big deal.
Cloudiah, crime rates fell in the 90s as everyone joined together in the MC Hammer Slide.
That would do it.
Question — am I recalling correctly that The First Joe was the one who tried claiming that genderqueer isn’t a thing and calling people cis is supporting communism? Or some similar shit? He is the one who got all pissy about ze/zir, right?
Joe can’t math and is yet again pulling stuff from his ass? I’m so shocked.
Like this.
hellkell — that one seems to be a common MRM mistake, I’m not really sure where it comes from, but I’ve certainly heard it a few times.
Puddle of Mudd.
Uncle Joe: @Morkawhatever – so if the MRM is a small movement, it can’t have the all pervasive effect Harding claims, can it now.
Opus Dei can’t have any influence. Nor could the folks at PNAC. Being small doesn’t preclude being possessed of ideas those in power find useful to exploit (divide and conquer, as it were: keep the larger groups separated into factions at odds, when they ought to be in cahoots against the greater problem).
But that’s your entire shtick; point out how x group is so much worse than y group, and none of them is as smart as you.
Only you aren’t all that clever, much less smart.
We can add statistically challenged.
“We can add statistically challenged.”
FTR, I consider that a standard feature of MRAs — they suck at math. Being accused of protesting too was amusing though!