So: many if not most of you have probably heard about the whole #INeedMasculismBecause thing. For those who aren’t: a bunch of Men’s Rights Redditors and other MRAs, inspired by a post on 4Chan, decided to swarm Twitter with #INeedMasculismBecause tweets in response to the #INeedFeminismBecause hashtag. Feminists responded by outswarming the MRAs, flooding their new hashtag with often quite hilarious parodies of MRAspeak, as well as some just plain ridiculousness.
Today, on r/mensrights, MRAs are surveying the damage in a host of different threads, with some plaintively wondering “why is everyone so hostile towards the idea of men having issues,” and others claiming that the hashtag really “started as a caricature of Men’s Rights, in order to lure out the real life caricatures of Radical Feminism.” Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Jezebel has already chronicled some of the funniest parody tweets. And I was thinking of doing the same. I mean, these are pretty good:
Ok, that last one was just a dumb joke about someone ordering a watermelon-flavored drink. I “favorite” a lot of things.
Anyway, catching up on the whole thing last night, I found myself thinking that the parody comments – as funny as some of them were – couldn’t really compete with the loopiness of the real MRA tweets.
So here are some #INeedMasculismBecause tweets by some of my new favorite Twitter MRAs. (I only started going through these really late last night, so a lot of my examples come from the Indian MRAs who were posting prolifically at the time.)
Let’s start with Average Man, who opened a new Twitter account just for the occasion:
Uh, maybe they gave you “less marks” because you don’t know the difference between “less” and “lower.”
Alexander shared these somewhat perplexing thoughts:
The prolific SaveIndianFamilyNGO had all sorts of interesting opinions:
I found myself often perplexed by wnnbl, but I don’t think his troubles with English were the main problem:
I assume these last two are jokes, but honestly, who knows?
I have no idea what Virag was going on about with these tweets:
But this one at least was pretty clear:
Atit seems to have a rather strange idea of what “equality for men” means:
Warrior for Justice also doesn’t seem to like women very much:
Martin Clausen ramped up his largely dormant Twitter account to post these gems:
I don’t quite know what to make of Jackson here, but he seems to be a real MRA.
This is just a theory, but maybe women look at you strangely when you pick up your kids because of that uncontrollable boner you mentioned earlier?
MRAs show once again that they’re beyond parody — or at least indistinguishable from it.
What’s with the asterisks around “sincerity”? I’ve been engaging with you sincerely ever since my first reply to you.
You see, it’s not that there is no such thing as a bad feminist. Cathy Brennan, for instance, is a radical feminist, but I assure you that not a single regular here is fond of her. The same can be said for Mary Daly, Janice Raymond, the denizens of RadFemHub, and so on. However, these feminists lack significant influence on feminism as whole.
The reason why “MRA” is a dirty term is that the entire movement, as it currently stands, has been stained by bigotry, insincerity, and unjustified aggression against others (case in point: death threats and rape threats). And that’s not because of the work of a few individuals no MRA cares about – it’s because of the influence of assholes like Paul Elam, Karen Straughan, Christina Hoff Sommers, Warren Farrell, Wendy McElroy, and so on. And most of those figures, we have found, are greatly respected by the vast majority of MRAs. r/MensRights, for instance, links to Warren Farrell’s work in its suggested reading section.
Note on Warren Farrell: he is often considered to be the father of the MRM, yet his most famous book, The Myth of Male Power, is chock-full of misogyny and even bigotry against men. Check out the posts on Warren Farrell here on Man Boobz if you want to learn more about his awful ideas.
As for what other terms can be used, I’m not entirely sure – the term “masculinism” has also gained a pretty bad reputation around here. All that can really be done at this point, I think, is for those labels to be taken back and used positively.
thebionicmommy while I appreciate the calm and thoughtful response, we’re right back to the blanket assumptions thing. We’ve already established (or at least, others in this community have been particular to point out) that feminism is concerned chiefly, primarily, and unabashedly with female issues and feminists are under no obligation to concern themselves with male issues since they are directed towards correctly the gender hierarchy. Okay that’s fine. Nice delineation, keeps things simple, makes sense. Awesome – feminists work on feminist things and then you can just self identify as both if you agree with both. Sounds awesome, but then there HAS to be another name for those concerned with men’s rights and men’s rights advocates is literally expressive of that idea.
Everyone I’ve ever talked to that has acknowledged the problems men face as a result of patriarchy or the existence of double standard in certain circumstances in favor of women, has NOT been anti woman or an advocate or rape or abuse. I don’t know if it’s just the internet toxicity that is muddling the sincere from the obscene, but I think claiming that a “majority” of men’s rights advocates are in favor of rape seems EXTREMELY ill informed.
Ok, what part of “misogyny, I mock it” is so fucking hard to understand?
The part where it doesn’t say “your tedious, long-winded verbal wanking – we welcome it”?
You haven’t noticed the rife amount of victim-blaming, rape apologia, and the tendency of MRAs to send rape threats to certain women? Either you don’t think there’s anything wrong with rape apologia or you’re the one who is extremely ill-informed.
Just an example: Paul Elam, the founder of the well-known MRA blog A Voice for Men, said that women who get drunk are begging to be raped.
I’m sorry to Godwin this, but just because many political parties are both nationalist and socialist, doesn’t mean that the name Nationalist Socialist Party is a great descriptive name.
EVERY popular writer who identifies as MRA also advocates for more rape and domestic abuse in society. Feminists aren’t the ones taking this name away from decent human beings. The absurd numbers of assholes in the movement took it away a long, long time ago.
Ally S I’m about to read your post, I just wanted to clarify that the asterisks around sincerity were for emphasis. It kept reading sarcastic and I wanted to make sure that I didn’t come off as condescending. It appears I failed at that -.-
CassandraSays I find you unpleasant.
cloudiah Three or four people have addressed me with snarky condescension, I mislabeled one person a sexist because I didn’t realize “MRA” was shorthand for something here (I’ve since apologized though it is still completely accurate to say that it was dismissive and a generalization), and I read all of the most recent comments on the topic to see who had and hadn’t responded to who, and with what, before posting. If I need to read pages of comments and dozens of articles to “get” why its okay for the community to be snarky, condescending, and dismissive, then maybe the community is just snarky, condescending, and dismissive. Many here have treated me well and respectfully and I very much appreciate it, but where I come from, we self regulate our communities and while I’ve apologized for being rude, others in this community have done nothing but justify why being rude is acceptable.
I am so hurt, truly I am.
Keegan, get over yourself, demonstrate that you’re not just here to troll (believe me, harping on and on about how rude everyone is, on a blog devoted to snark, isn’t helping), and you’ll find the regulars friendly. Keep whining and telling us all how wrong we are in both tone & content, then expect to be snarked. And snarked thoroughly.
Unfortunately for you, Keegan, the tagline also does not say “Misogyny — we educate you about it in a tone that makes you feel comfortable.” FWIW, I ( I can’t speak for others) appreciate that you pulled back on Kittehs. Your insistence on being educated, on only being spoken to in certain ways, and your demand that we make sure you feel properly isolated from criticisms of misogyny are still irksome.
Zinnia Jones wrote this post the other day: I don’t want to be “one of the good ones.” It’s about how frustrating it is to respond in measured tones to a bigot’s questions, and then to be used by that same bigot as a beat stick against “mean” members of your group for not having the same patience.
This is all I have to say about that.
“but last I checked the abbreviation “MRA” stood for “men’s rights advocate/activist” and making assumptions about the people who would advocate for men’s rights is lumping them together”
Well there’s your problem! They aren’t advocates for mens rights, just click the Fidelbogen post in the sidebar (also a big name MRA), they’re anti-feminism. Like, they can’t say that DV against men is bad and shelters should exist and advocate for that, they have to tack on how feminism has a woman’s entitlement lobby and should build men’s shelters (often with a side dish of claiming men are abused more often than women). Or say that the solution to men getting longer prison sentences (which is mostly racism in the first place) is that women should get longer sentences. One of them, Elam I think, specifically said that if women are allowed in the military on par with men, then they need to die at equal rates (iirc, body bags were explicitly mentioned). They justify rape and death threats, AVfM runs a side site dedicated to dox’ing women they’ve deemed to be bigots.
Does any of that sound like helping men?
I told you about NOMAS and prominent male feminists, too. They are already doing great work on toxic masculinity and similar topics. So both things are true, feminism is mainly concerned with helping women, but there are some feminists, especially ones like Micheal Flood and Michael Kimmel, who help men as well. Yes, there is room in feminism for helping men. However, it shouldn’t overshadow women’s issues.
I want to reiterate that it’s not our fault MRA’s like Paul Elam and JohntheOther are out there giving their “movement” such a terrible reputation. You should blame them.
I said “vast majority”, not just “majority” and I stand by my statement. If there are MRA’s who don’t bash women and act as rape apologists, where are they? I’m from Missouri, so you’ll have to show me.
I really have no patience with the “well X is being nice so I will praise her, Y and Z you should try to be more like X” variety of tone trolling. It’s such a disingenuous asshole red flag.
titanblue Its one thing to put it in the banner, and it’s another thing to take a shotgun approach to it and get some not-misogynists in the crossfire (ie, again, Alexander). As for the snark, like it or not you guys are one of the first links on google when you search “I need masculism because.” A friend told me about it (one of the people I was talking about earlier who was pro men and women’s rights and anti rape) and said the whole thing just made him sad. I looked it up, came here, and the first thing I saw in the comments appeared to be a systemic misrepresentation of beliefs that I and many of the people I associate with. Maybe you all are fine, informed people who make snarky comments to each other for entertainment and simply have convenient shorthand for referring to “those bad ones,” but if that’s the case then I don’t think I’ll be hanging around – it’s just not the sort of community I want to be a part of. It’s too easy to be misunderstood in both directions and in my experience, the snarkier someone is, the less inclined they are to legitimately consider anything you have to say and as someone who writes phenomenally and obtrusively large posts to avoid being misunderstood, it just doesn’t appear to be worth my time.
Ally S, maybe I am just really ill informed. Maybe I exist in this odd section of the US where that stuff doesn’t happen or I have just coincidentally never encountered it, but all the people I’ve met who HAVE been that disgustingly vile have been properly shunned, vilified, and mocked for misrepresenting people who legitimately want equality rather than a re-establishment of more severe patriarchy. I don’t stand with them and neither to any genuine advocate of men’s rights I’ve encountered. Voices on the internet are loud and frantic and voices in print can be selected for their volatility in order to sell copies. I hope that you and the rest of this community understand that even if the people you call “MRA”s actually *are* the majority, they aren’t the totality and many are working to try to change minds like theirs.
Also thanks for the abstract tip – I might use that!
Viscaria, I appreciate the change in tone. I really do. I wish that my requests that this community wouldn’t generalize sincere advocates with misogynists wasn’t viewed as irksome though. I wish that when someone new enters your community and is receptive to your point of view that it wasn’t viewed as burdensome to inform them of things they may not have known. I wish that it could be acknowledged that a few among those who have responded to me have been unnecessarily rude rather than the wall of people saying that either I should get used to the site or that I shouldn’t ask to be talked to respectfully. Mostly I wish that this wouldn’t be interpreted as snarky or condescending either, but I don’t think I’m going to get any of those, so I thank you for the consolation and the link to the interesting article.
Argenti Aertheri, no not at all. Of course it doesn’t. That’s absolutely despicable, but (and maybe it’s pure naivety) I can’t shake the feeling that it’s not an accurate representation of the movement. It seems like several very loud individuals have addressed a community to prey on those whose minds we are trying to change and as a result have perverted the idea. It seems like these fallacious individuals were given a podium, a mic, and a pen and became the defacto leaders of a movement that wants nothing to do with them. But then again, maybe I’m just being incredibly optimistic.
thebionicmommy – I’m not blaming this community for the negative portrayal of the “movement,” If those guys are out there saying what you say they are saying, then they are doing more than enough all on their own. I just wish this community wouldn’t assume that anyone who would like to advocate men’s rights shares ideological concerns with these “Men’s Rights Advocates.” And as for where to find them, not on the internet is a good place to look. Most of us have tried to have serious discussions about it before and it just hasn’t gone well at all so we gave up trying to express complex ideas with character counts to strangers. I’m in north western Florida and there’s a pretty decent set of human beings in this area for what it’s worth.
CassandraSays the problem is that I’m being genuine, I’m not trolling, Ally S, thebionicmommy, and Viscaria have been fantastically calm and respectful and allowed me to have a pointed discussion. You’ve been rude, unpleasant, and now you’re calling names. To put it simply, you are single-handedly the reason why I have no interest in actually joining this community. I want no part of a community where no one else acknowledges how unacceptably poor you make them look.
And with that, I’ll be leaving. I’ve said my peace, learned a little, and I appreciated the conversation (sans CS). I’d stay and chat, but it’s pretty clear this site isn’t for me and I’ve burned about three hours talking with you all so doing that on a regular basis just isn’t feasible. Take care and live well.
PS Can someone let CS know she is the reason I left? I’m sort of guessing it’ll make her day.
Keegan, do you know where you are?
Why can’t these necro troll sever read the header?
Oh thank god, it’s a different Keegan. For some reason, I had a random fear that the young communist I knew in high school had come back to haunt me on the Internet in revenge for that car accident we had at prom.
There isn’t really much else to say here. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before.
Keegan: Brevity is the soul of wit, you should try it sometime.
Also, omit needless words.
Wait, am I supposed to care whether you stay or go? LOL.
Aw, Keegan’s friend has a sad. That’s as far as I got.
Gettin reeeeeal tired of your tone policing, Keegan. I’m especially tired of you whining about how you were greeted with condescension and snark when your very first sentence here was calling a regular sexist. You fucking started it, dude.
Guy who isn’t Young Communist Keegan From High School:
This is not a debate site. That this is the first hit on Google doesn’t make us a debate site. Also, this thread was done SIX MONTHS ago.
Keegan, are you this rude offline?
Me:
Aaaaaannd… you, in your next comment:
Dude.