Here’s a cool, if momentarily puzzling, gif.
And another question for you all. Well, several related questions, really.
Where did you first run across MRAs and/or PUAs etc online (or offline)? What was your reaction at the time?
Flash forward to now: Where do you tend to run across MRAs/PUAs/etc or their ideas online (expressed by people who may or may not be MRAs/PUAs/etc)?
Oh, and by the way, feel free to discuss whatever else you want, or to post links to misogyny, and generally behave as if this is an open thread, because it is.
Aside from the trolls here, YouTube is the main place, specifically the comments. I try not to read them. I used to have a Facebook friend who was one, but I’ve pretty much distanced myself from him, which has been a big relief because he would heckle me on my own wall over every feminist thing I shared. That’s just obnoxious. Like, I don’t agree with everything all my Facebook friends share or post that appears on my feed, but I respect their beliefs so I ignore it or hide it unless it’s overtly hateful, instead of trying to change their minds using every tired argument they’re already heard a million times.
My first encounter with an MRA was on Usenet in 1998, I believe, on the alt.atheism newsgroup. We had some crossposting trolls coming over from alt.soc.mens.rights, one Kenneth Pangborn, divorce attorney and MRA who also had a bee in his bonnet about anonymous remailers, and an alleged disgruntled client of his that used an anonymous remailer to destroy his reputation by posting everywhere (I mean *everywhere*, this thing was crossposted over the entirety of Usenet) that he had swindled him of money with vague promises of getting his custody and getting back at this wife. Apparently the client was NOT a complete MRA asshole and after a while, seeing that it would seem he could choose either some form of custody OR being a dick to his wife forever, requested of his attorney to stop being a dick to his wife… which he didn’t do, poisoning the judge against him forever and denying him any custody whatsoever.
Both were crossposting troll assholes so it’s hard to know whether any of them was in the right, at all. What I do know is that Pangborn took the opportunity to insult every atheist on the board, especially our women ones (including one Michelle Malkin, an Australian atheist that got *really* pissed over the rising notoriety of someone with the same moniker). Unsurprisingly, he was a far right Christian dingbat as well. So while we weren’t exactly thrilled with his nemesis either, Pangborn himself was the biggest target of flamewars from our side.
Worryingly enough I’ve mainly encountered MRA types on dating websites. You can spot the PUAS a mile off, they’re so desperate, they never get anywhere. But the MRAs, sometimes they seemed ok at first, nice enough to go on a date with, but they would then let their decent person facade slip quickly… My reaction was to end things immediately. I’ve had some bitter/angry emails/txts in my time. I mean this was back in the day before I really knew what MRAs/PUAs were, (I don’t date much nowadays, unsurprisingly). I just thought they had some SERIOUS issues with women.
The MRAs tend to poke their greasy heads into social justice/ anti-sexual violence FB pages I frequent and moderate. More recently they’re making their presence known on the university of Toronto campus, so I’m presently working on setting up a counter protest tomorrow:
http://damsel-in-de-tech.blogspot.ca/2013/03/part-of-solution-providing-info-on.html
I first ran across them at the Pervocracy which lead to here, and my reaction was “WTF?”
I see them pop up on Jezebel a lot now, ever since they revamped their comment system. Pretty much any feminist blog will have MRA trolls shitting all over the carpet.
The weirdest place I’ve ever seen one rear it’s pointy head was over on the Ask A Manager blog. He got shut down pretty quick, but the talking points were there.
I met an Australian guy who was an MRA…he was like Mr.Al’s cousin or something because he was convinced, CONVINCED every woman thought he was hideous. I said he was ordinary looking to me.
Since then it is just a colleague who tells me that men are superior and I need to be back in the kitchen. I quote Lady Astor at him in retaliation.
I’ve only encountered the trolls on this site, or the sites you quote, David. I didn’t even know what the terms meant before I started reading here; I thought MRA meant Male Rape Apologist (which it does, with this lot, of course). I had pretty strong feelings about misogyny, and that the level of hate MRAs express underlying a lot of it if one dug deeper. The only revelation was that they are *cough* organised *cough* and put it right out there instead of pretending they just have “conservative values” or the sort of BS I saw in comment threads on HuffPo, for instance.
I wouldn’t know if I’ve ever met an MRA or PUA in real life. I don’t socialise offline and haven’t for years, and have never been on the dating scene (hurl); besides, I’ve never had the looks that would get PUAs harassing me, thank Ceiling Cat. I’ve met plenty of sexist or outright misogynist dickheads in the course of business, but I doubt they’d have been MRAs or even have heard of them.
princessbonbon – funny, I was thinking about some old Mr Al threads this morning, and that it wouldn’t matter if he was 6′ 3″, looked like Brad Pitt’s younger brother (cos women only like Brad Pitt, don’t we?) and was a millionaire, his personality would STILL make him a disgusting piece of shit. He might get laid occasionally, but they’d still be one-night stands, because his toxic attitudes would drive anyone away.
For me? TVTropes. Ran into this dude (could be Mr. Al’s clone; hell, could be Mr. Al for all I know) whining about this and that, and then, surprise surprise, next thing you know he’s singing the praises of GirlWritesWhat. Money quote:
And an enormous multi-page shitfit, featuring three or four different jackasses, about how the Doctor CAN’T BE PLAYED BY A WOMAN and I AM NOT SEXIST and WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP CALLING ME THAT? Money quote:
And also this dude who is, for real, a total DKM clone, showing up to bemoan how ladies just don’t act like ladies anymore, and can’t they just be helpless and frilly sometimes, for him? Please? Money quote:
Sigh. Had so much fun there, met so many cool people, but it had to end.
I have been intensely lucky not to meet folks who openly ID as PUA or MRA in real life. I think this is helped by me being so out that such people would probably avoid me, and I them.
But dear GOD did we have a hellish infestation of Nice Guys (TM) through high school and college. An infestation that magically vanished pretty much the moment I hacked off our hair and tits. SHOCK. But yeah, for a while, we were a geek fetish object for far too many people. The number of times I had to sit through bad poetry readings after specifically stating I didn’t do poetry…
Never accused of being a fake geek girl, though. I guess because our geek cred at the time was unassailable, plus supply and demand.
Here, Alternet, some atheist sites, HuffPo was the first place I came across…just weird, vindictive commenters. I assumed they were men (I do that anyway, to every commenter, unless they state otherwise). In real life, I really don’t know. I think I’m recognizing something but I don’t know what to call it. It’s not hatred but it’s not something that I would put up with for long.
They started coming to my blog last summer, since I write about women’s rights occasionally. I was pretty amused by it all, still am.
katz – gawd, they can’t leave anything alone, can they? Hell, I had a “no that’s all wrong” when there was a brief teaser put out during John Nathan-Turner’s time about the next Doctor maybe being a woman. But that was thirty years ago.
Never really examined TV Tropes, I got annoyed when it turned out to be the only place “single target sexuality” is mentioned – sure it may be a totally overused idea in TV, but it is also real!
I used to work in IT and a few of my younger coworkers had MRA attitudes. Most of them hadn’t dated much, if any. There was one guy in particular who I was friendly with (I had to be, as we were on the same team) who’d come out with this weird shit all the time like, “all women are gold diggers.” I’d call him out on it and he’d say “but Claire, you’re different.” Several of the guys would talk about buying stocks all the time (although I don’t think they actually bought any) and thought it was smart to buy stock in companies that made purses before Valentine’s Day, because “all women want expensive purses for Valentine’s.” When I pointed out that my purse cost $17 and was on its third year, it was “but Claire, you’re different.” Sigh.
I’ve also run into them in comments, mostly on feminist sites, but also news sites. It was such a relief to 1. find out they had a name 2. find out other people thought they were as awful as I do, and 3. find the mockery.
I run in some nerd circles, and every once in a while I’ll meet a guy with some pretty misogynistic views. I suppose I can’t say for sure whether they identified as MRAs or not, but I can definitely imagine a few of them sitting at their computer, ranting about women. I wasn’t familiar with the MRA as a “movement” until I came across this blog, though.
Ack. As I was typing this, I remembered meeting this guy at one of my first gaming parties who insisted that women use sex to get things because they physically couldn’t enjoy sex as much as men so why would they have it just for fun? (Protip: This is not conversation material for a girl you just met.) I was naive and argued with him. He wanted me to “prove” to him that women could have sex just for fun. Yuck yuck yuck. I was also clearly underage and he was clearly not. I’m going to go back to forgetting that now.
The first time I became aware of aware of MRA/PUA-like ideas, which both really just boiled down to raw misogyny, was through listening to the Tom Leykis radio show back in the early 2000s. At the time I was in my early adolescence, and didn’t have many countervailing influences, so in my naïveté I found Leykis’ cleverness, certainty, and rhetoric to be quite convincing. Luckily it did not manifest in adopting some chucklefuck ideology outright, and I eventually outgrew it.
My “second” introduction to MRAs was through the Elevatorgate kerfuffle. The sheer amount of indignation and frothing rage against Rebecca Watson over such a small thing coming from so many male atheists was an eye-opener. There was a video by TheAmazingAtheist on youtube that I particularly paid attention to: it was like a literal storm of shit.
Today, I mostly see MRA type shit on Reddit and Tumblr, although usually filtered through Shit Reddit Says on Reddit and social justice-oriented bloggers on tumblr. The Sociological Images blog, which seems to have a chronic MRA infection in the comments, was the most surprising place I’ve found MRAs, but I seldom pay attention to the comments there anyway.
Also, that gif reminds me of this video I saw today:
Like Hellkell, from Pervocracy.
I did hear from it earlier, specifically “fathers for justice” blocking a bridge in Montreal wearing Batman costumes, 10 or 15 years ago.
Then, 2 or 3 years ago, my boyfriend told me of his interest in learning about the “pick-up community” to meet women, and I googled it. To be fair, he was talking about actual methods to interact with women without crippling anxiety. But entered a whole new world.
Ever since that, I’m a bit fascinated, as in pity-fascinated. Because life must suck when you’re angry at things that don’t exist. I have to remind myself that there’s an actual possibility that MRAs actually believe the stuff they write.
Sometimes the hypothesis of a massive online joke as an art project involving thousands of people seems just as plausible as “it’s an actual thing, and they are for real”.
Random:The Silver Pesos is my new favorite band.
Most of the MRAs I’ve encountered have been commenters on Yahoo news stories and Dear Abby. But until I discovered The Pervocracy, and through that Captain Awkward, and through that Manboobz, I had no idea there was an actual term for them, and I thought they were mostly just ignorant douchewaffle ass-hats. Coming here and reading this blog, I realized that a lot of them did indeed share a particular (and particularly revolting) mindset aimed mainly at women as the source of all evil.
I’ve met some sexists in real life but nothing like these poisonous people. And being (a) not particularly conventionally attractive; (b) both quietly competent and completely not taking shit from anyone, anytime, anywhere, (c) having cultivated an innate ability to go unnoticed much of the time, and (d) vocally not interested in dating anyone, any time, at all, thank you very much; I think I’ve managed to avoid being a target for them.
I would prefer the Doctor not be played by a woman. But, if Moffat decided to cast a woman, I’d certainly sit down and give her a chance. I’ve never been one to diss a new Doctor – I love them all. Some more than others, but the watchword for the Doctor is always “change”.
I just ran across this article: Colorado Democrat: A Gun Wouldn’t Help You If You’re About to Get Raped (http://www.ijreview.com/2013/03/40086-colorado-democrat-a-gun-wouldnt-help-you-if-youre-about-to-get-raped/) and I am interested in what the manbooz community (except trolls) think about it. The comments from the article were not very helpful ie liberals all suck, the senator is too ugly to be raped etc.. At least here I can get an intelligent and informed opinions.
What is your take on what the either Senators ( the one who apologized for ‘discomfort’ of others prioritizing her right to self defense or the senator who used statistics to say that the gun might not have helped, but even harmed the victim)?
Do you think a college students carrying concealed guns actually reduce on campus rape?
I think the Democrat Senator did not articulate her point well, but I am not convinced that she was wrong. This could be however because whenever I hear the words college and rape together I immediately think frat parties. Booze, guns and frat boys are a scary combination to me. Also, how is carrying a gun going to help other date rape scenarios?
The Senator mentions that guns would not even be helpful with the stranger behind the bush attacks- the attacker may wrestle the gun away from the victim and use it against the victim. I know this is true for other types of weapons such as knives- but is it really true against guns?
Cute doggie picture as thank you for answering:
http://media-cache-lt0.pinterest.com/192x/d2/9c/64/d29c64ba70b3234c2c8ef94f24f7c8ce.jpg
I met my first PUA on facebook. He calls himself a life coach, but one of his main things is teaching men to talk to women. He’s actually a nice guy, and I went out to a bar one night with him and another PUA friend of his. They had some tricks they used – like slight peacocking which in this case was a godawful cardigan – and some slightly cheesey lines, but they didn’t do negging and it was mostly just about being super friendly, talking to lots of women and if they got rebuffed, moving on to talk to someone else. So yeah, just the sort of thing you do when you’re a social butterfly.
I guess it’s possible that they weren’t doing their normal thing because I was there and they knew I wouldn’t be down with any manipulative PUA shit, but though I’m not in contact with him anymore – the 2nd guy is my facebook friend and I haven’t seen any posts from him that were problematic.
RE: neuroticbeagle
Do you think a college students carrying concealed guns actually reduce on campus rape?
Not unless they are emotionally ready to shoot a partner, family member, friend, or acquaintance. The idea only helps in the ‘stranger rapist in the bushes’ scenario.
Not having handled a gun or living in a gun culture, my thoughts aren’t all that relevant, but it seems a matter of reaction times to me, and who, untrained, is going to get a gun out and have it ready to shoot-but-not-shoot? An attacker always has the advantage of surprise, of being the aggressor; the person attacked has the disadvantage of being surprised and put into fear. I don’t see that a gun is necessarily going to help at all.
We need Pecunium to come and talk about this, he’s got lots of experience in these matters. But yeah … wording matters aside, I think the senator was probably right. It’d take more than just having a gun.
And even then, only if you’re of a shooting disposition. I am not one of them. Forgot to add that bit.
LBT – excellent points, I was only looking at that least-common scenario, the stranger rape.