The Man Boobz Pledge Drive continues. See here for more details, or click below to donate.
And now back to our regularly scheduled post:
Reading through some of the stranger comments from MRAs and PUAs and other manospherean types I often find myself wondering to what degree this “new misogyny” reaches beyond the internet. I don’t mean old-fashioned misogyny and sexism, which are obviously fairly common offline. I mean the elaborate misogynistic ideologies we discuss here – the “feminism runs the world,” “all women are hypergamous bitches who will dump you in a second for an alpha,” “we hunted the mammoth to feed you” kind of stuff.
I run across much less of this offline than on, though the people I hang out with aren’t exactly a representative sampling of the general public.
So I’m asking you, dear readers, to tell me a bit about your own experiences. Do you run across MRAs/PUAs in the real world on a regular or even an irregular basis? Where (online or off) did you first encounter MRAs and/or PUAs? What aspects of what we might call the manosphere ideology are the most common offline? If it seems less common offline, is this because the beliefs are not that widespread, or is it that people are less willing to say the kind of horrific misogynistic shit they say online to other people face to face?
Thoughts?
I haven’t encountered anything MRAish in real life, or any PUA’s actually. I’m more of a pub person than a club and bar person which i don’t think PUA’s frequent as much.
Also, I’m 20, but look and act more mature than I am (plus short hair) so I don’t think i’d be the PUA’s target of choice. In a University town any PUA’s are probably after the other students.
Someone mentioned this earlier in the thread but from time to time I come across the “But why is it FEMinism, if it’s about equality? Isn’t that alienating to men?” thing from time to time.
This is how I tend to react? I ask them two questions:
1. Don’t you think the men centric nature of EVERYTHING ELSE in the world is alienating to women?
2. Are you sure that you’re just not so unused to seeing anything explicitly labelled as women-focused that it registers are “wrong”?
And then I stop caring, as I am 100% done with justifying Feminism to straight, white blokes. 300% done. A 10000000000% done.
Urgh, tumblr people.
On a more gratifying note, a few weeks ago, I mentioned the MRA to a group of my Kendo (martial arts) friends and they all stared at me blankly, then when i explained it they laughed.
Looking back to the days of my teens/twenties, I don’t know. I suspect this is because I 1: don’t know enough men in that age range now (or at least not well), and 2: the circles I’m in aren’t such that the men in them are going to be that sort of asshat.
I certainly don’t recall this level of social acceptance/encouragement of the trend. There was a “hookup” culture, but (at least in the circles I was in) it was a mutual thing. Casual sex was never as common as Penthouse might imply, but I knew any number of women who liked sex, and weren’t interested in “true love” before they went for it.
I also know they swapped stories, and being selfish in bed was a sure ticket to falling out of a more general favor. But the fear of AIDS changed some of that.
It certainly seems (to me) there is a lot less respect for women in general than there was in the ’80s.
“Incel” however was not a thing. Yeah, there were people (all genders) who weren’t getting any. Lots of us complained about, “dry spells” but it no one “blamed” EVERYONE for not being able to find a partner. If someone did, they got some serious side-eye (at the very least).
I do know that I’ve heard younger men (about 25) commenting about other people’s, “politics”, and when I asked what the meant, gotten, “he’s said some pretty misogynist things”, and left it at that; as if misogyny were obviously a bad enough thing that no further justification was needed.
“a nice tasty vag at the end of the night.”
I don’t understand this. If you’re just after a tasty vag, why go through all the effort and trickery? Get a fleshlight, add some flavored lube and go to town.
Stop trying to interact with women if you’re just gonna divorce them from their body parts. I can understand wanting to get laid, but for normal people, it’s about some kind of connection and experience with another HUMAN BEING. Not some hunt for Genitals. Ick.
I am 25 and know quite a few men my age who I’d describe with MRAish tendencies. One guy has just had a paternity test for a six year old and was found to be the father. He is now furious with the feminist government for denying him full custody of his child whom he has met only once. His goal is to somehow get full custody -now by filing complaints of child endangerment against the mother so CPS takes the child away and then he can file for custody. This is because lawyers have told him there is basically no way for him to get full custody now just because he wants it.
More than the hatred towards the mother he shows, the lack of concern for his actual child is pretty breathtaking to me. He can’t seem to understand how devastating it would be to uproot the kid from his entire life for no good reason. And he is unwilling to drive the 6 hours it would take to see him once a month so he isn’t interested in any kind of shared custody. Now all he talks about is how terrible child support is.
I also get lots of interesting attempts at pick up lines that I suppose are from PUA ideas. I am really bad at flirting and bantering though so my response is usually awkward staring. Which I used to feel bad about but now I think it is funny. Most negging at me involves my crooked teeth which seemingly keep me from being truly hot. The sads, I have them.
Most of all however, I was raised in a deeply patriarchal and hate filled church so my dad and younger brother and most other men at church would qualify on some respects. I notice that there is a gap between Christian patriarchs and MGTOW MRA types – the main difference is that Christian Patriarchy gives a script and role for women (small and shitty as it is) to follow to succeed whereas the hardcore MRAs absolutely hate women no matter what. But nonetheless, feminism was often painted as the worst thing to happen to America, immodesty is the cause of all rape and women shouldn’t vote because they are irrational.
My younger brother has a deep seated hatred of women, paired with untreated mental instability, and thankfully is somewhat internet illiterate because if he found his way to an MRA site he would be a most devoted follower.
I think I’ve encountered the most severe misogyny and rape apologism from comic nerd sites online, but very few of the comics people I know IRL(which are a lot) have been that way. As for PUAs, I mean it’s NYC, just walk around and someone will say something or try to meet you, they don’t all try this “mystery method” or “negging” or whatever it’s called, some of them are just “you look good I wanna get to know you.” “You got a man? He doesn’t have to know”, the standard stuff I guess.
Anyone need brain bleach? Here’s a bucket of sloths.
Also, This was pretty good.
cloudiah: So about 3 months ago I broke a glass in my kitchen, and my (bare) foot just found the only sliver of glass that I missed. It looks like I murdered someone in my kitchen. (I’m fine.)
Ouch. I had something similar happen in Feb,and had to go to the ER. The healing is still happening; nothing serious, but I can feel a lump where the scar tissue is getting settled.
Amnesia, congrats on the job! That’s great news. Hope all goes well with it. 🙂
I’ve found that people are much harsher when veiled by the anonymity of the Internet. When I was using the dating site OKC, I had a bullet point on my profile about being a proud feminist. When I would get nasty responses, I would politely invite the person out for a round of drinks, on me, to discuss it. Of the 60% who would, even the most vile of commenters became the most gentlemanly of men upon discovering that I’m traditionally (cissexual) very attractive. “Gender conditioning is a thing you feminists made up! … Ohhh you’re pretty, can I buy you something so you’ll sleep with me?” Yeah, this is why we still need feminism people.
@cloudiah
That is a great shirt.
I’ve been trying to remember if I’ve seen any of the MRA/PUA stuff irl and I don’t think I have. I’ve been hit on in creepy ways, but I don’t think any if them were PUA-specific.
I know that a friend of a friend pulled out a bunch of victim-blaming that was extreme enough to qualify, but he wasn’t being a rape apologist just playing Devil’s Advocate (by being a rape apologist, sigh). IIRC we tried to explain that he was still being a rape apologist, but I don’t think he understood. I know the friend he was/is friend of was really disappointed in him.
Thankfully I don’t encounter much of the MRA/PUA crap offline; I don’t go out a lot, and my friends and family are all quite progressive and feminist. Every now and then I tell them about something from this site just to blow their minds. They have a hard time believing it, except they know that I couldn’t make it up. 😀
I probably would be a target if I did the bar scene; I’m 25 but I look younger and I guess pretty approachable/innocent based on the few times I’ve gone out. Little do they know the raging feminazi within! ;p
I spend a lot of time online, but a lot of the milder “nice guy” tropes can be found on pretty mainstream tv shows. Also, if you’re a psych student, my experience is that you have to wade through various levels of evopsych BS, although I’m at a single-sex college, so it’s pretty minimal here (the two things might not be related, but I tend to think they are).
Idk, that’s all I can think of right now. I’m sick for the first time in like two years, so my brain is fuzzy right now.
Brain fuzz sucks. I hope you feel better soon, MKlein.
MRAs in meatspace? No. Garden variety sexism and male-entitlement? Yes. And “Nice Guy” bullshit everywhere. Pop culture mirrors a lot of this. Every other male character in a comedy is a “nice guy.”
I do think that some of this is driven by economic distress. The steady decline of wages was masked by the more accepted inclusion of women into the workforce. As the deterioration continued it became easier for some to blame the greater potential for women to advance for the effects of it.
So that the ways in which capitalism exploits people came to be blamed, not on capitalists, but on a subset of the victims of capitalism.
My father had a flirtation with the manosphere when his second wife and he divorced. She was going through a rough patch (breast cancer diagnosis, onset of bi-polar issues), and it was a messy divorce.
So someone started talking up, “alienation of affection” and shit like that. I worked on talking him down from it. He now admits that he wasn’t doing all he could have been to keep things from escalating (she was being unreasonable, and sometimes is still unreasonable, but he didn’t handle it well; though it all worked out in the end, and they still even speak, and do functions together, where my sisters are involved).
They prey on emotional vulnerability. Some of them (I’m looking at you Elam) with intent.
D/s: You clearly have no idea what Game is. Game doesn’t purport to work all of the time, because it won’t. All it does is provide a guided shot in the dark, so the man has a fighting chance of receiving a nice tasty vag at the end of the night.
Which is why you are only pursuing action with dudes. Game seems to be doing wonders for you.
Yep. Ties in with the other thread where we were talking about the SPLC and the Klan, and the ties between economics and hate. Scapegoating. A whole metric ton of stuff.
Sloths really creep me out.
/delurk for a moment
Luckily I haven’t come across any MRA types in non-internet world, but I have come across people who really remind me of them, even as a milder version. The first time I thought of this site in irl relation was when my brother was making some dumb-ass joke about divorce. And then when my dad’s fiance started trying to say, after someone pointed out something sexist she said, that she didn’t hate/not like all women, she just thought women should “be strong” or something. I don’t remember the phrasing :/ Though those are probably much closer to “mainstream” sexism than MRA stuff
Probably the biggest a-hole I had to interact with online (since I normally lurk) was someone who said I was “choosing to stay depressed”. Ugh.
Sorry for the huge rant :/ Sometimes I just end up rambling.
I guess I’ll join the small flood of readers-but-not-commenters emerging from the woodwork.
I accidentally wound up going on a few dates with a closet MRA a few years ago. He kept trying to bring up gender into conversations in a way that was kind of strange, but I let it go because I wasn’t familiar with the phenomenon at the time. Knowing what I know now, there were a few very prominent red flags that I did not recognize.
Anyway, the issue was made clear to me at some point when he was saying something about how biased divorce courts were, and how unfair alimony was. I pointed out that alimony is rarely granted anymore, and then made some quip about maybe if they fixed the wage gap it would be granted less.
He immediately got up on his soap box gave a (clearly rehearsed for whenever someone said “wage gap” or “glass ceiling”) response, saying that there was no wage gap, and pointing out that, “Women who have never been married or had kids actually make more than their male counterparts.”
I asked him if he really thought that women who’d never been married would collect alimony. He shut up and stopped talking about the topic for about a week. We didn’t date for much longer.
@Blitzgal, 🙁
You do know that your explanation doesn’t make “game” in practice less reprehensible, right?
There were quite a few garden variety misogynists where I grew up, a very rural, conservative area in a blue collar, typically more red/purpleish, midwestern state. They weren’t as easy to spot as the racists since the racists were generally a lot more brazen about their hatred of anyone not white, straight and Christian, but they were there (and often the sexists and racists were one in the same).
The ones I met in college (a small, private, religiously affiliated institution) were either of the “I’m a good Christian boy so I CAN’T be a misogynist, but yeah, of course women are best at women things and shouldn’t have a choice of what goes on inside their own bodies because SLUTS and GOD” or the “Nice Guy” variety or the “I’m SUUUUUUCH a radical thinker and SOOOO much smarter than everybody I come off as douchey, but that’s just because I’m a libertarian and you can’t recognize the TRUTH” variety or some combination of two or three of those. Honestly, sometimes I really do wonder how I not only survived college, but actually was attracted to some of those douchebags. It really wasn’t until my Senior year that I started to really see through the “I’m SUCH a good Christian boy so I can’t be misogynist, but I mean, duh women should be modest because my boner and SATAN” and could really put my finger on why that was so problematic. Possibly because I found myself in a lot of situations that year that pretty well disproved the uncontrollable werewolf boner claim (was provocatively dressed and drunk in the presence of men and did not get raped).
I don’t hang around many people now who espouse sexist ideas except for my dad who at least tries to not be horribly misogynist, though I think sometimes between his age, the people he’s surrounded himself with, and the way he and my mother’s marriage has soured, plus tons of sexist societal bullshit, it’s hard for him to even wrap his head around the fact that some of the stuff he repeats back IS in fact sexist and my sister who doesn’t really seem to understand what feminism is but is convinced it’s something she’s against, not, according to her, because she’s sexist (though she definitely embraces a LOT of internalized sexism) but because, according to her “this is the way the world is and besides she wishes we could be a little more old fashioned anyway”. I think she views herself as an “exceptional woman” who can “roll with the boys” as she says, which honestly makes me sad, because yes, she’s doing well in a heavily male-dominated work space, but from what she tells me it seems clear that one of her male subordinates is sexually harassing her and she refuses to go to her superiors because she doesn’t want to be one of “those women” who “can’t take a joke”. I can’t say I’d know what to do, were I in her position, or even that I’d go to my superiors (considering how well sexual harassment workcases usually DON’T go) but it honestly makes me really sad that she refuses to see that this sort of thing, the attitudes surrounding it, need to change. Then there’s my mom, who’s sort of an odd brand of what she considers feminist. She’s very much for bodily autonomy and against gendering careers, but also very favorable of not so empowering things, like the idea that my sister and I haven’t married anyone yet is some kind of moral failing, or the idea that women not being appropriately feminine is some kind of moral failing, etc, etc, etc. Then there’s my one libertarian co-worker who always seems naturally combative whenever gendered issues are brought up, but mostly I think because as a more conservative person in an academic environment, I think he sort of relishes in being differently minded (which is also irksome, because hey, stuff that’s just an intellectual exercise for him is stuff that’s my LIFE, but whevs).
Even most of the people I know who are fine or mostly fine with the misogyny ingrained in our culture or fine with some of it would probably STILL cringe at a lot of what the MRA sites say, particularly the bits about removing baby girls voice boxes and getting boners over fucking people’s shit up. Even my sister thinks MRAs are abhorrent and she is generally one of those people who automatically sides with the dude if there’s a publicized rape, DV or murder case in which the victim is female and the accused male because, as she says “I know a lot of girls who have screwed over guys too” (which makes me eyeroll for roughly 100 biebillion years). She actually knew about MRAs before I did, having seen what she figured was an MRA bumpersticker on a car and explaining to me that yeah, there were people out there even worse than garden variety misogynists. The bumper sticker read “EQUAL rights, not SPECIAL rights”. It’s possible the dude the car belonged to was only a raging racist instead of a raging sexist, but in my experience those tend to go hand in hand.
PUAs, I may have met some at bars and clubs, but nothing really rings a bell. Possibly because according to my friends, my face’s natural resting look is “I am not impressed” so I probably don’t look like someone who can be negged into sex. The only time I felt certain I was encountering a PUA, possibly an MRA type, was a guy on OKC who kept negging me with all kinds of sexual stuff, did not seem super my type (all kinds of douchey, conservative talking points filled his profile, in addition to all the sexual negging stuff) and would NOT leave me alone, even after I started replying “yeah, sorry, I’m not feeling this” in an attempt to get him to go away (I hadn’t mustered the gall to use the block button just yet, but did, thanks to him). Anyway, when I told him I didn’t generally date homophobic assholes, he was all “oh, I don’t really believe any of that stuff, I’m just conducting an experiment. I think more women will reply to a guy with that on his profile” when I told him I didn’t really care, I was into dating people, not experimenting on them he just kept on so I finally told him how much I weighed and then laughed when he didn’t respond. I then blocked him just to be safe. Another guy who I figured was possibly of an Incel/PUA variety seemed ok at first, nothing insulting, just a lot of goofy stuff, like “who would win in a fight, alligator or shark?” but when I couldn’t nail down my schedule for a meet-up RIGHT away he got super offended, started yelling at me, basically accusing me of not being into him but stringing him on for the hell of it, blah blah blah. It was super fun (sarcasm). Again, I was glad for that handy block button, but before using it I did say “pro tip, if you think someone isn’t into you, yelling at them is a surefire way to make sure they aren’t”. Because seriously, he was ok up to that point, but the yelling after a few conversations? For having a life that couldn’t accommodate a date right that second? MAJOR red flag. There was another guy who may have been PUA-ish, continually asking me what I’d “go for in guys” which I found irksome because it seemed to me like blatantly asking if he could pretend to be someone else in order to sleep with me, but he at least wasn’t super annoyingly persistent.