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.
SaveIndianFamilyNGO is quite, uh, ‘interesting’:
Given that you think “Most women and all feminists can not (sic) use “Logic” and see facts and then lie”, I think people don’t like you because you’re an ass, not because ‘misandry’.
Wait, I thought that all women secretly hated each other because biotruths? Ugh, is consistency among misogynistic twats really too much to ask for?
Haha, yeah, those Artsies are fucking idiots! DAE enjoy movies, TV shows, books, music, drawings/paintings, literally anything with a storyline?
BRO DO U EVEN STEM? I DO INTEGRALS EVERY DAY BRO
wat
PFFFFFFFFTTT WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS
Martin Clausen dreams of a world where men are not second-class citizens:
I know what you mean, man. I mean, with how men get paid more than women for doing the same work, how they aren’t constantly judged based on their looks, how they weren’t viewed as property of their spouse for hundreds of years…the oppression is too much! =’(*sniffsniff*
Someday in the future, there might even be a male president. Alas, it won’t be now, or soon. But someday….
Please don’t use the word “twat” while trying to denounce misogyny, thanks.
Warrior for Justice is really straining against that character limit.
Also, all the Indian MRAs, is this a new thing or just a consequence of how you clicked through to find the funnies or what? It seems a strange time, given recent events, for the Men’s Rights Movement to get loud over there.
Hey, look who else is on that hashtag, and that’s real.
If anyone’s interested, I found this on Wikipedia: “The Save Indian Family Foundation (SIFF), founded in 2005, is a men’s rights organisation in India … An advocacy group against misuse of India’s laws related to dowry harassment and domestic violence,[2] it provides moral and legal support for men and their families who have suffered intimate partner violence, or have been accused of domestic violence themselves. SIFF is an umbrella organisation of a number of men’s and family rights organisations across Indian cities and provinces … SIFF has opposed efforts to criminalize marital rape in India, arguing that “no relationship will work if these rules are enforced.””
Seems to be that Tweeter, though their website is down.
@hellkell Sorry about that. I’ll remember not to do that.
Well, I guess if you’re awful enough to believe that relationships can’t work without rape, it’s good to at least be open and honest about it, so that people have a chance to preemptively avoid you.
Thanks, sabresguy5.
nerdypants, I have seen American MRAs talk sometimes about there being a big MR movement in India, but somehow I suspect they’re exaggerating. It’s just that when I was looking through the hashtag at like 4 AM here there were a bunch of Indian MRAs posting.
The guy who created the entire thing admitted that it was an experiment to see how quickly he could cause a dispute on Twitter. If you ask me he did pretty well
https://twitter.com/INeedMasculism
Men go 4 bear? Nah, I just don’t shave my legs in the winter. And that’s real.
The video which explains the Pervocracy’s tweet is hilarious, and that’s real.
And now I am going to spend my evening watching the whole “True Facts About” series.
@Creative Writing Student
It has to be the syndrome that places your bum where it will be exposed to the hardest place on a chair. Thus, society “encashes” (or gets cash from) selling men chair after chair as they attempt to find one that fits their bum correctly. They never will though because men themselves are the root cause of the abuse of men and that’s real.
Is it really a “dispute” if one group of people is taking it seriously and the other group is making fun of them? I mean it’s not like feminists were upset. We were snortling and having fun. See anglerfish video just above.
The 4chan buy may have been trolling, but the MRAs were pretty damn serious about it.
er, 4chan guy.
You don’t get much MORE serious than 5 guys going 4 bear, and that’s real.
Karalora – I actually agree! When I first heard about the Men’s Rights Movement, I remember thinking “oh yeah, that seems like a really good idea”, because (as many people here have noted before), there are actual serious issues facing men in our society – the way the criminal justice system treats men of color comes to mind (not to say racism in that system doesn’t affect women of color also, but there’s a particularly noxious brand of criminalization and fearmongering about, say, black men), as do some actual issues with family courts, or the way men are discouraged from getting help for mental health issues or dismissed and ridiculed when they are victims of abuse… at the time I first heard the term MRM, I actually had two male friends who were dealing with some pretty awfully biased stuff regarding parental custody*.
Alas, my first reaction of “sounds like a good idea” evaporated pretty quickly as soon as encountered the actual MRM as it exists right now, with all its delightful frothing misogyny and obsession with their boners and resentment of female emancipation in lieu of actual relevant issues.
Many other have also pointed out that many of the men’s issues I outlined above are actually best addressed by feminism, because they are outgrowths of toxic concepts about men derived from traditional gender roles. I would still not have a problem with a movement specifically dedicated to focusing on issues that affect men (whether you call it masculism or whatever), and it fact can see a good argument for there being a need for that. But any such movement that sees itself as somehow an antithesis to feminism (instead of a logical complement), or considers feminism its nemesis (instead of its ally)? Yikes.
*Note, neither of those friends took that as some jumping-off point for descending into misogyny. It’s possible to deal with discrimination from the courts and not somehow turn that into “and that’s why all women are terrible and feminism is evil!”
Also: DL Colvin, Ruby, did you see how sabresguy5 just handled themselves up there? You might wanna take some notes.
The hidden danger of laughing one’s ass off 🙁
And that’s real.
David: I’ve been Googling the name of the NGO and it does seem to be recent, though fairly big, over there. Save Indian Family Foundation have got hotlines in a few major city centres, a few thousand messages per month on their chat group. Some wins they cite include successfully lobbying their parliament to amend an anti-dowry law, delaying an anti-workplace harassment law to include penalties for false claims and protections from male-on-male and female-on-male harassment, and lobbying to exclude India from an International Violence Against Women act, which would have seen the US funding feminist orgs in India (see summary). It’s a bit depressing to see that their ideology looks pretty similar to Western MRAs. At a time when Indian women are trying to make progress on women’s rights, this is the last thing they need.
Ah, the “social experiment” defense
David PS: Also, that Firepower guy you featured recently still believes (despite my best efforts) that you have been commenting on his blog under the ‘nym of “David Fucktrelle – Male Feminist Extraordinairre”. Apparently there was a coincidence in timing between Fucktrelle’s arrival on his blog and your post, which has Firepower convinced beyond all reason that you and “Fucktrelle” are the same person. Do you want to go correct him? Or alternatively, you could just leave it as an amusing footnote to the whole thing 🙂 I personally find it interesting how tenaciously MRA types will cling to an untenable position, esp. when a woman points out their error…
I’d give him some slack. India probably uses the british system of “marks, where the US would say “credit”.