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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?
My future father-in-law has some pretty choice rants about “American women” and how awful they are. In fact, he went so far as to get a Russian mail order bride who didn’t speak English and then marry her. He spends a lot of time making subtle/snide comments about how stupid/crazy/shallow/ugly she is, but they mostly (thankfully) get lost in translation.
Through my work I have know a couple of women who were enamored of serial killers. They were also sociopaths. One of them bungled a copy cat crime in an attempt to get one of the hillside strangler duo off.
@Creative Writing Student – There are a number of people who refuse to support feminism but do support humanism (or “womanism”) because of feminism’s major problems with race and intersectionality as well as transphobia. I know you were referring to people who have warped understandings of feminism, not this, but I just wanted to clear that up for anyone reading.
One of my students was definitely an MRA ideologically even if he didn’t claim the label. He was also a Tea Party fan. I SO do not miss teaching and having to listen to that crap impassively.
thebewilderness – well, clearly, since those women were sociopaths, ALL women must be sociopaths!
Oh wait. Isn’t this one of those things I learned in that logic class I took? The bit about universal statements? (unrelated: I just found a Proof Wiki. The internet is the greatest thing in the world, y’all)
Niktike – sorry about your future f-i-l. I’ve heard a few husband and wives make comments like that about their partner, and I always want to say “well, you married them! So what does that say about you?”
Ellex – I love how I’m not the only one doing “I have to play with different gravatars!” here. 😉
I’m pretty active in my local secular communities, which range the gamut from hyper liberal social justice activist humanists to PUAs… I have one acquaintance who’s recently become enamoured of the “manosphere” since he lost joint custody of his kids for no apparent reason in a divorce (and this is legitimate bias against him because he is a great father). He’s since glommed onto PUAs and found it’s “restored his confidence” when picking up women and refused to acknowledge that feminism is interested in men getting the shaft when it comes to child care, even though we had an entire discussion before he got into this about how feminists think that childrearing is a job for parents, not just for moms.
I’ve never met somebody truly atrocious in the wild until last week. He was an older guy, and started saying how all this egalitarian nonsense ruined the economy. Literally, he wanted to “return to the 50s” when the woman stayed at home because that provided a stable economy. Somehow. By taking 50% of the population out of the work force. When I pointed out that Leave it to Beaver was fictional and that having one parent stay at home was not a financial option for the vast majority of individuals, and the idea that women’s sole job being childrearing was actually a product of the victorian elite, he then started harping about the cavemen and how women wouldn’t have surivived hunting mammoths.
Sooo yeah that was a bit of a bummer for me.
Well, I have such photogenic kitties! I’ll have to dig out some of the stellar photographs I keep glomming from the Astronomy Pic of the Day website, too.
@Flora – he’d better be happy with going back to an openly acknowledged class system if he’s so anti-egalitarianism. I wonder how he’d enjoy being one of the peasantry, or at best a tradesman or merchant? But then all these “egalitarianism is bad” types think they’re going to be the ones in power.
I keep thinking more people should watch “Downton Abbey” so they get at least a vague notion of the class system and how sharply it constrained people.
Ellex – I know, I know, lol! So many pics of photogenic kittehs, so little time. Even worse when there’s a photogenic feller to throw in the mix. Choices, choices!
(emilygoddess has the right solution – Greebo in human form!)
Dear David,
Thank you for your request. I appreciate your blog. I believe that the anonymity of the internet has made it possible for misogyny to reach a wider audience, making it hard to ascertain whether it is worse today than it used to be. I know the views expressed by MRAs are absolutely in line with the kinds of things I used to hear in my family, in school and in univserity in the years before the internet. I think these attitudes are making a big ‘comeback’, and those promoting them are aiming for mainstream acceptance, because of fears over economic uncertainty (‘she took my job’), aggravated by a corporate media-driven ‘feminism’ which is emphasizing a form of ‘gender equality’ that denies that women have anything to fear from men. I think that men are being deliberately provoked to feel inadequate and to attack women in ‘self-defense.’ I have been experiencing this phenomenon personally in my own family. I can say that I grew up with and am still affected by the following doctrines:
-women cause the evil in the world.
-women’s thinking is diabolical, a woman who thinks too much (an intellectual) knows she is evil
-women plan everything that happens to them, therefore when a woman is raped or sexually abused, it happened because she really wanted it
-women are parasites who want to seduce and enslave men
-women have to be shown who is the boss, or they will ‘cut it off’–
I must leave off now–good night.
Who is that creature of cuteness peeping over there? 😀
Yes, Victorian England was a right mess of class distinction, partly because there was increased mobility and the middle classes were realllly insecure. The whole business of keeping servants at arms’ length and treating them like aliens really got under way then. Things were much more casual and intimate in earlier times, though that’s partly due to very different ideas about privacy, too. The concept didn’t really get moving until the 1700s; Mr K was roundly criticised for wanting any time alone during his earthly days.
Okay, public transport time for me – later! 🙂
@Kitteh – the best part of it is that he’s solidly lower middle class – he’s a construction worker (although he owns the construction company). Still, he outright said that he would have never married a woman who wasn’t willing to stay home with the kids, but that his wife kindly volunteered to do so “out of her own choice.” Presumably he would have forced her to whether she wanted to or not…
He also said that division of labour didn’t work because if you give two people the same job nothing happens and referenced the bystander effect. Therefore if you have two people working, both of them just stop going to their jobs because they confused about whose jobs they are supposed to be going to that day and give up.
Kittehs’ – have a good time on the hopefully uncrowded public transportation. I too must take my leave – I hear the bottomless pit (aka Rory) knocking things over to tell me that he has not eaten in 5 whole minutes.
The peeping cat was accurately named Nosy Parker. Sadly, I lost him to a UTI about 9 years back. He really enjoyed having his picture taken, so I have a ridiculous number of photos of him.
OT but since there’s discussion of gravatars – how do you get your picture gravatar to go with your handle that has uppercase letters and/or spaces in it? It seemed like gravatar.com was specifying that I could only have lowercase letters and numbers when I tried it, but I see some here with uppercase letters?
@Zanana, you can go to your WordPress account page, choose “Pubic Profile” and choose a public display name with Capital letters if you want :).
So Gosh Manboob, Pledge drive time, huh? Got that big old “Donate” icon up there. “Girls, pay up. I’m busily protecting your right to be pedestalized entitlement princesses, and I am just busy busy busy manufacturing outrage. So click my button.”
Man, you do such important work. Whatever would society do without you?
I gotta apologize. I had you all figured wrong. I figured you were selling men down the river because of some misguided sense of justice. I used to wonder how you could do it, read all those complaints about women from men, and not be affected, not feel the pain of those men, not get influenced by their outrage.
Silly me, I figured it was some misguided white knight calling.
Gosh, It was for donations. Any one should respect anybody that has figured out a good internet scam to get paid. Who cares if men are being thrown under the bus? So long as you get paid, then it’s cool.
Apparently I think the Word Capital requires a Capital Letter.
“I figured you were selling men down the river because of some misguided sense of justice.”
manboobz sells men down the river? no, he sells hate-filled misogynistic bigots down the river. if you think the hate-filled misogynistic bigots manboobz exposes represent the typical man, well sir thats MISANDRY.
Thanks, Viscaria!
I know a wannabe PUA in real life (in my world, all PUAs are wannabes, anyway) and man, is it a dark and horrible thing to get a glimpse at the Universe as told by this guy.
One, he thinks he is horribly, terribly clever with all of his scripts and pseudo-psychological bullshit that preys on the “female mind”. I think he really believes he is just smarter than all women, and can thus manipulate them into sleeping with him/dating him (he seems to have a hard time separating these two things in spite of his intellectual prowess).
The thing is, he preys on young girls that he picks up in malls. They’re of legal age (at least the recent ones have been), but at nearly 30, it’s not much of a feat to be more worldly than the almost-18 year old you’re trying to bang (seriously, she primarily thinks you’re awesome because have your own apartment and can legally buy beer). His avoidance of confident, adult women is so obvious, it’s almost funnysad. Yet he boasts to all his bros–er, when he had bros–about how he totally crushed some high schooler’s heart and she’ll still sleep with him this weekend when he calls.
It’s just gross. I always wonder if he realizes that he is Dennis from It’s Always Sunny…
” I used to wonder how you could do it, read all those complaints about women from men, and not be affected, not feel the pain of those men, not get influenced by their outrage.”
Because non-self entitled human beings can recognize that their desires do not supersede other people’s rights. It’s hard to feel somebody’s pain when their main complaint seems to consist of the fact that hot women don’t have personal obligations to their boners.
BRB when I can stop laughing at the implication that saying unkind things about people on the internet is the same thing as putting them in chains and selling them into actual, not-just-a-metaphor slavery.
I encounter PUA types more often than MRA types in real life. From customers at work, mostly. There’s nothing weirder than some guy trying to ‘neg’ you when you’re making his coffee.
Though a friend of mine (an awesome non-jerk friend who isn’t super aware of social/feminist issues) started talking about how a friend of his was getting involved in the ‘men’s rights’ movement and I was biting my tongue so hard not to go on a huge rant that would probably sound slightly unhinged to someone who doesn’t know anything about Internet MRAs.
You can hardly expect us to sell men up the river. That would be harder.