My Man Boobz staycation continues. Here as promised is an interesting video.
I’d also like to take the opportunity, while I’m off, to as you all, dear Man Boobz readers, some questions that I’m really interested in seeing your answers to.
The first one: Are MRAs right about anything?
My answer to that is “no,” but there are some issues they bring up that a real, non-misogynistic men’s movement could focus on. These are:
1) Prison rape. A troubling new survey suggests that it’s far more common than previously thought, and that the number of people raped inside prison (overwhelmingly male) is by some estimates nearly as great as the number of people raped outside of prison (overwhelmingly female). (Trying to break down the numbers to make clean comparisons between prison rape and rape outside of prison is difficult; Stephanie Zvan digs into the numbers here.) Of course, MRAs don’t seem to want to do anything about the problem except use the issue of male rape to attack feminists. And of course if they focused on prison rape they would have to acknowledge that female prisoners are also raped, and that LGBT folks are much, much more likely to be raped than straight cis men.
2) Disparities in prison sentences between men and women. Even after controlling for assorted relevant variables, men tend to get longer prison sentences than women for the same crimes. (I don’t have a citation handy, alas.) This is not driven by feminism; female judges tend to be harsher on women than male judges. And of course there are gigantic racial disparities in sentences as well. MRAs again have done nothing about this except use it as an excuse to circle-jerk about evil women getting a “pussy pass.”
3) Domestic violence against men should be taken more seriously. Needless to say, though, most of what MRAs say about this issue is repugnant nonsense, and they have done nothing to actually help men, instead trying to get resources taken away from women.
Thoughts, on these or on any other issues MRA might be kind of, sort of “right” about?
You have my sympathies. 🙁
I did once know someone who sent people who sent weird texts and emails to her pictures of naked David Hasslehoff posing seductively and covered in wrinkly puppies, but I don’t know if that will work or not.
@Falconer – I recently listened to an excellent audiobook of Bujold’s novel The Curse of Chalion. I had not read any of her books before, but she’s certainly on my “to read” list now. I also highly recommend the audiobook. Between the excellent story and the fantastic narrator, I listened to it twice in the space of 3 weeks!
@Argenti – I need to know what episode of Criminal Minds involved Reid getting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Seriously. I NEED to know that.
Gillian – 50 texts?! So not only is he an MRA, he’s also a pest?
Send him a picture of Slenderman.
Men’s Rights:
1) Equal protection under the law for all.
2) Equal protection of government for all.
There is nothing else. We are only anti-feminists because feminists are anti-equality.
@ellex24: Eh, I didn’t like her Chalion books as much as the Sharing Knife. Far and away I prefer Vorkosigan. There’s just been a new Vorkosigan book (Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance) and I strongly recommend you read Vorkosigan in order because Miles’ career evolves almost like he’s an actual person, and the events of each book have consequences in the following ones.
Perhaps I ought to just say, spoilers in my best River Song voice.
Here’s a chronological list of Miles books. There are two others in which Miles doesn’t appear: Falling Free, which is set a couple of hundred years Before Miles, and Ethan of Athos, which is set fairly early in the Miles timeline.
That link is to Wikipedia, which blows everything wide open. Massive spoilers.
I feel I should say that one of the characters flirts with a Moral Event Horizon in Mirror Dance. I don’t think it goes past forgiveness, but YMMV.
@Argenti Aertheri
Thanks for the heads up on what pronouns you use. Did I call you by the wrong one, or is it just a warning? (And I apologize if I called you by the wrong one. If so, I should have asked first, my brains just junk b/c I was posting really late last night and can’t remember all of what I said)
@gillian
Sorry about your nice guy tm 🙁
Freedom! Justice! Reasonably Priced Love! And a Hard-Boiled egg!
The male circumcision thing is one of the reasons I wish MRAs were halfway thoughtful. As someone interested/involved in body mod culture AND living in a place where female genital modification of any kind (even piercings!) is illegal, I would absolutely love to have a sit-down and discuss all the nuances of sex and race (racism has a WHOLE lot to do with Western views on female genital mutilation) and why our culture finds some things abhorrent and closely related things completely normal, and why we devalue male bodies, and how we’d deal with things like religious and cultural freedom while supporting bodily autonomy. Unfortunately, the default MRA position is that feminists don’t care about male bodies, female genital mutilation is totes the same in EVERY WAY as male circumcision and no further discussion or examination is required, (insert racist bullshit here). They — the best among them, anyway — recognize stuff as being wrong, they just entirely lack nuance and go straight for “this makes my life more difficult than it should be, therefore the group I belong to is oppressed”. That means that the only part they get right is admitting reality is a thing, and forgive me if I don’t give them cookies for doing so.
I was gearing up to comment on the whole “financial abortion” thing, but y’all covered it way better than I could have xD I hear the “man = child predator” thing a lot, too, but I think they’re even further off the mark with that one. Yes, men who are around children are viewed with suspicion, and I feel enormous sympathy for them, especially those who love children. But they’re viewed that way because a) cultural norms dictate that women are nurturers who just love children naturally, while men can’t be bothered with such “trivial” things unless they’re getting something out of it or there’s no other alternative, and b) boys are raised to be predators, and to view other people as prey (particularly from a sexual standpoint). Those are both totally anti-man, but they’re also part of the very system they spend so much time and effort arguing either doesn’t exist, or is a good thing. Hell, they even support that, ahem, “worldview” themselves, with rape/adultery/abuse apologia that casts women as “gatekeepers” who need to protect themselves from “biologically” hyper-sexual, violent, and aggressive men who lack self-control and are only held back by society.
Also, I kind of wanna hope that the faux-feminist “troll” is actually, like, a super meta feminist pretending to be an anti-feminist pretending to be a feminist. Otherwise, it’s just kind of…sad 🙁
Someone asked me which Discworld character I would be so I said either Miss Rosemary Palm or Sandra Battye. Not sure what that says about me.
As other people have noted, some of the issues the MRA complain about do have a basis in reality, but the solutions they give and the reasons why they think they happen are so skewed and wrong that they basically negate any real points they ever had.
Also, I would perhaps have a little more time for them if they were ever really concerned with issues that face men who aren’t straight, white, cis and able-bodied.
They never seem to care about issues facing men who aren’t white, or gay men or trans* men, except when it comes to scoring points.
They don’t seem to care about issues black men face like disproportionate rates of arrest and incarceration and police racism and violence.
They don’t care about the bullying and the high suicide rates that young gay men face.
They don’t care about the violence and discrimination trans* men face.
Oh though they do sometimes care about neuroatypical men, but only when the conversation is about street harassment or women being hit on in public transport and they can whine that women should be super-extra nice to the men hitting on them just in case they might be on the autism spectrum. So they should just tolerate having their boundaries violated.
But instead they spend their time moaning about straight, white man problems, many of which they have made up or have blown out of all proportion.
There are men with real problems that threaten their lives, physical safety and freedom but they are more concerned with the evil women exercising their rights not to have sex with them.
And as to Terry Prattchet, I’ve read all of them, repeatedly. In my seminar today another student made a really, really obscure reference to it and I got it straight away (it was an impression of Detritus interrogating a prisoner, our seminar was about medieval heresy and we were looking at medieval reports of interrogation of those accused of it). The guy was really surprised that anyone would get the reference.
@Falconer – thanks for the link! I’ll be careful about those spoilers, sweetie.
I’ve been recced Vorkosigan all over the place. So far “The Curse of Chalion” is the only one I’ve read (er…listened to), but the “to read” list has gotten so damn long, and nobody will pay me to read books (read legal documents, yes – novels, no). I’ll get there eventually.
@princessbonbon – I’d want to be the Librarian. I really dislike bananas (even though I know when to stop spelling it), but being the Librarian sounds pretty much ideal.
And back to the topic at hand: Really, I don’t think MRA’s know what they want, they just don’t like themselves or their lives and are desperate to find someone else to blame for it.
“The fault…is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” As always, Shakespeare has a quote for every occasion.
@Historophilia
That’s one of my biggest pet peeves about their ‘valid points’. They talk about higher arrest rates/sentences in men and they act like it’s the same like white men and black men. It’s like *headdesk*
A man can be forced to pay child support for a kid he didn’t sire while the actual father is off the hook.
This is not justice.
@walterwart
Citation needed.
@walterwart – I’ll probably regret this, but…
1) “Sire” is for vampires and horses. Humans “father” a child.
2) Context please? Many people here agree and have already mentioned that society at large has an obligation to all its members. Much like our taxes are used for the building and maintenance of roads for the betterment of society at large, our taxes are also used to care for those members of our society who cannot take care for themselves or have no one to take care of them. This includes children, the disabled, and the elderly. Do you object to having your taxes used to take care of your elderly parents in the event that they can’t care for themselves and you, for one reason or another, are unable to take care of them?
No one is walking around pointing to random men and saying “You! Yes, you. You now have to pay to raise this one particular kid right here even though you don’t know him and aren’t related to him.”
Pratchett! I’m reposting this because it got lost in a different discussion late last night:
Terry Pratchett and an admirer
If only there are some way to test for paternity if the man in question is uncertain as to the father of his supposed children. I propose we call such a futuristic technology a paternity test.
@The Kittehs’
That is awesome!
One problem that I see is that MRAs act as a pressure group to bring their grievances to attention, but the movement seems to consist of people complaining about what they don’t like and other people saying “Yeah” “Right on” “Too true” and very little else. They are too incoherent both as a body and as individuals to do much else, and they are too happy to hear the sort of thing they like without actually paying it intelligent attention. Another problem is that many of their grievances are unjustified, and they seem to make up for this by the most extraordinary degree of brutality in word or implication.
One of their methods is to flood sites which report such things as the rape and abuse of girls with comments that begin — or might as well begin — with “yes, but what about us?” This strategy of belittling the problems that others face, if successful, would result in maximising concern for themselves and reducing the problems of others to irrelevance. In doing this they show that they are not concerned with justice but with getting the world organised in a way which suits themselves. Sometimes I get the impression that they assume that everybody else does this, so why shouldn’t they? This seems inevitable from a bunch of individuals in whom emotion and childishness reduce the possibility of connected thought to something close to nil. Criminals think this way, too. This doesn’t mean that MRAs break the law, but only that their way of thinking is similar. “Other people get things. They get things in a way that annoys me. The things they get annoy me. I want things, and I assert my right to annoy other people, especially intrinsically annoying people, like women (if they are people). Fair’s fair.”
Of course, there are sensible people in the MRA camp who sincerely believe that they are serving the cause of justice. The problem with them, as I see it, is that they are mistaken in supposing that MRA strategy, such as it is, is a proper means of achieving it. They end up having to fight battles with other members over such things as credibility and common sense. I wish that they would simply do their best without feeling that they have to belong. It’s always a mistake to put belonging before principle.
In their search for ammunition, MRAs inevitably bring real problems to attention, but regrettably they have no general principle of care for others, and therefore the issues they raise are merely used to further their goal of squashing others, often using the most despicable language. They can say that they really care about equality and justice as much as they wish, but their real concerns are shown by what they actually do.
It seems to me that if MRAs happen to be right about anything, it is probably accidental. There will undoubtedly be others who actually care about the terrible things that happen to men and are trying to bring public attention to them for that reason. Better to listen to them.
I agree they have some points that prison rape, rape of men or boys in general, and partner violence against men or boys need to be taken more seriously in our society. Sadly, this message gets drowned by their simultaneous justifications and excuses for those same things happening to women.
And yes, I will even say I have met some women who are very superficial and materialistic in regards to what they look for in partners and even people they socialize with…what the MRA’s call “goldiggers”. Just like I’ve met some men who can be that way and are often looked down on too– called “sponges”, “lambons”, “leeches” etc. But again, it would be just as silly for me to claim that’s what all men do as it is when they characterize every last woman this way.
Well put, Gordon. I definitely get the sense that the thought process for many of the MRAs involves something like: “I want this, and I deserve this (by virtue of being me) and not only am I willing to bash everyone else in pursuit of this, but I am justified in bashing everyone else; and moreover, everyone else should give me what I want so I don’t have to get up off my comfy chair and go get it. And I still get to bash other people, because they aren’t really people anyway, because they aren’t me, and I kinda enjoy bashing other people.”
This is a particularly insidious and disturbing type of narcissism.
@GordonWillis and ellex24
Agreed. I do wonder, though, how many of them have “I kinda enjoy bashing other people.” as one if their first things to look for in choosing/finding a movement. That is, I think for some MRAs, the selfish is a nice add-on to the primary motivation of hating someone.
OT: Governments Get Girlfriends guy is flooding my joke blog with comments. He is trapped by the conundrum of wanting to ban people from his blog so he can SHOW THEM, but also wanting to still wank at them, so he’s compromising by wanking at them on my blog instead.
@ellex24
Thank you, ellex. And I think you are right about that comfy chair. And it reminds me of something: I often think that bashing teenagers with the kind of abuse that no normal person would think of saying to someone’s face is only possible to those who do it if a high proportion of them think of internet commenting as they think of a computer game. Aren’t we dealing with people whose hold on reality is, well, tenuous, to put it kindly?
@Some Gal
Indeed, yes! That’s the other side of it, I think. Not just a game with unreal people but a damn good excuse to destroy someone. Petty power-seeking? But maybe still a game? I suppose dysfunctional people vary as much as reasonable ones.
I can easily believe that a man who raised and took care of a child who was not biologically his could subsequently be asked to pay child support in a divorce. It has nothing to do with the mother involved – its about the relationship between parent and child, in which a financial responsibility is part of the deal.
One of the things which incises me the most about MRAs and children in particular is how the MRAs want all the rights and none of the responsibilities. They want sole custody if they ask for it, even if they have no knowledge about how the child lives not participates in child are, and they want the child to disappear the second they don’t want them around. It pisses me off more than almost anything else, because the damage to the children in question is so permanent and hurtful, and children ar so vulnerable.