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.
Hell, a lot of people aren’t emotionally ready to shoot a stranger in the bushes.
Killing someone might not be as bad as being raped, but it sure would still be traumatising.
And I’m just betting that unless the would-be rapist had previous, there’d be a huge guilt trip laid on a woman for shooting a man, apart from any guilt she might feel herself. My nasty suspicious mind just says it’s all too likely, especially as there’d be the inevitable chorus of “But he was a Niiiice Booyyyyy! He brought his mother flowers!”
*USians please note, “boy” doesn’t have racist connotations in Oz usage.
Fetlife. All over Fetlife.
Ahhhh…Ken Pangborn! That brings back memories!
I used to be an OP on a video game art related IRC channel (it’s actually still around and technically I’m still an OP but I haven’t been on in a few years). Back around 2002-2005 when I was really active on the channel we had this one guy who was a regular who was an obnoxious misogynistic ass. I now know that he was spouting a lot of standard MRA talking points: paternity fraud, domestic violence isn’t so bad, rape apology, homophobia, transphobia, etc. The kid was also just generally a mess and the other regulars tried to help him and reason with him especially since most of us were a pretty progressive bunch though he tried our patience frequently whenever gender came up (especially with one of my co-OPs being trans). Sadly we never really got through to him, one day he disappeared from the chat and we found out about a week later that he died (apparently suicide).
Honestly until I started seeing more MRA stuff popping up in the blog communities I frequent (I found manboobz via pharyngula) I didn’t realize where he had gotten all the ideas he had latched onto. It’s really bizarre sometimes to see the same points being brought up that I was shooting down from a depressed 20yo almost 10 years ago.
Amanda Marcotte made a good point about this on twitter: there’s no way for a woman to prove that a man she shot dead was going to rape her. So really, even in the archetypical “rapist hiding in the bushes” scenario, which is the most likely scenario in which someone would be both armed and in a good position to use a gun against an attacker, it’s not much help.
In other cases, we have to remember that rapists are predators. They’re not going to go after women who are clutching their guns 24/7; women who do anything less might as well not have a gun, as far as this topic goes. At least that’s how I think of it.
There’s also a racial component to this: if a white woman shot a black man attempting to rape her, she would be much more likely to be believed than would a black woman who shot a white man attempting to rape her. The former scenario is probably the only blip that shows up on most people’s mental radars, so it seems like a plausible use of a gun to them.
To spell out what my brain thought it was conveying psychically, Marcotte’s point was that a woman who did shoot a rapist dead would then be faced with the prospect of prosecution and jail.
Pretty much what I was thinking, Tulgey.
Yeah, like, the whole thing just makes me think of the Rape-X thing again. Nice theory, but doesn’t really work out in practice.
Honestly, I think the best protection we could’ve had from our rapes was if we’d been taught earlier on the concept of boundaries and what was reasonable, if we’d had an environment we felt safe discussing sex at all in, and of course, that we hadn’t been raised in that abstinence-only cesspit that said ANY premarital sexual activity, rape or not, made you dirty and a wasted resource. Even if we never said the guy’s name, we stood to have a lot to lose to even mention it. And you know what? That’s how he was able to operate.
http://www.jackholland.net/prejudice.php
I’m not sure I knew what the MRM was until college.
However, I was 13 I ran into a guy who called me a tease. I was a tease because I was at the beach wearing a swimsuit. Yep.
As far as now where I run into them….in my hometown and in (certain) bars.
I visit a great bar now. Very safe space for women and I’ve never had any problems there.
That book sounds really interesting Kamilla. Have you read it?
I first encountered MRAs about 15 years ago, when one sued my dad.
My Dad had handled his divorce, and the guy basically blew off every meeting with my Dad and court hearing that got set up for him. When the judge gave his wife what she wanted (at a hearing he didn’t show up for), he flipped. When my Dad tried to bill him, he sued for malpractice, claiming my Dad had never told him he had to attend any of the hearings (???).
The mere mention of MRAs still makes my Dad turn all red.
Anyway, the guy now goes around preaching about misandric family courts and all the usual. Weirdly, he was somehow associated with Tom Ball (of self-immolation manifesto fame) as well….so in retrospect I’m actually glad all he did to my Dad was sue….
http://xkcd.com/1178/
Shit, that’s scary, Sideliner.
Fiddle dee dee! I thought the pic would post.
Nah, we can’t embed pics. I don’t know if we never could, or could and trolls posted gross things, but it’s only videos that embed.
Hmm, now, what artist to pick up? 🙂
I don’t know if they identified as MRAs, but I remember seeing a bunch of people whining about how feminism has gone too far and how men are opressed now in The Escapist forums.
One of not awful posters put up a link to No Seriously, What About The Men, from which I found the Pervocracy and Manboobz, where I learned what an MRA actually is.
I believe I heard about them on Pandagon some time ago, but I’m not sure.
Certainly by 2007, when I helped someone accused of touching a little girl and he had found all this literature on the internet that described how mothers and prosecutors would coach children to lie about Daddy touching them, I recognized it as MRA bullshit.
@The Kittehs’ – Luckily at the time no one had any idea how far Tom Ball would go, so we may not have been as scared as we should have been…if that makes sense.
There actually was some justice done though: The guy in question decided to go back to law school so he could take on the courts directly, and my Dad found out about it. Apparently he wasn’t the only lawyer this guy had attempted to sue over his custody/divorce issues, and some of them got in touch with my Dad about formally filing a complaint with the bar association asking that he not be let in. They sent them a bunch of his angry MRA screeds, and the bar association actually decided he “did not possess the good character needed to become a practicing attorney”.
It always cheers me a bit to know that at least one MRA had his own words come back to bite him.
Should mention that I found this site via Hoyden About Town, a cool Australian feminist blog that also has lots of time for cute critters and posts about kitties. (One for the blog roll, Dave?)
Yes, I get what you mean about not being as scared as otherwise!
And that is really cool that this douchecanoe was kept out of law school.
TEH MISANDRIST FEMINAZI ILLUMINATI WIN AGAIN
@Stuffed Fantod, i second that, seriously, Fetlife, UGH.
Here, of course.
Also, i have a friend from college who’s an anarcholibertarian (my word, not his, but he’s not a libertarian like how Ron/Rand Paul are libertarians), and he’s in a think tank and publishes work in blogs and stuff, and invariably, there are MRAs in his facebook feed making THE DUMBEST arguments at all times.
Oh, to be clear, he got in to law school, got through it, got all the loans, but he’s barred from ever practicing as a lawyer because the bar association won’t grant him a license to practice (kind of like graduating from medical school but not being able to actually see patients).
I seriously didn’t even know they could do that…apparently it doesn’t happen often, but if you make enough other lawyers mad and put lots of angry awful things about women, kids, lawyers, and judges in writing, it can.
Anyway, I’m off to bed, to dream of kittens and such. Thanks for the kind welcome.