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.
Putting aside random idiots who pop up in comments and forums, my first experience with the MRM would be running across The Spearhead, specifically an article about how anime teaches boys to be chumps or something. It took me a bit, but I read on and slowly came to the horrifying realization of what was going on there. And from there, I ran across our good friends Heartiste (then Roissy), Jack Donovan, Hawaiian Libertarian, Bardamu, and the main fucker, the great kahuna of pretentiousness himself, WTF Price.
And, of course, I discovered this blog through their no-hypocrisy-here rants about how much of a mangina David is.
Sideliner – even better!
MWUAAHAHAHAHA!
Niters!
Bob Dole – welcome!
“the great kahuna of pretentiousness himself, WTF Price.” <3
I’ve run into garden variety misogynists my whole life, but never heard that there was an “organized” (sic) “movement” (sic) until I started reading Pandagon, but I still didn’t really run across MRAs until I came from Pandagon to here. Now I recognize the common language and themes, and I see them commenting on blogs that I read.
I still have yet to meet one in real life (or have one reveal themselves to me).
In the mirror.
Fetlife? I’m curious… MRAs are populating Fetlife? I’d love some details! 😀
Bob Dole appreciates your welcome, Kitteh, though it’s worth noting that Bob Dole has posted here a couple of times before.
Seriously though, at the risk of going on about something in a fun thread, there’s something about Price that rubs me wrong, even though there are plenty of louder, brasher misogynists out there (hell, Donovan’s recurring theme seems to be about how we should destroy much of modern society and its advancements for the sake of playing warrior-gang). For now I’d guess it’s his tendency to affect historical perspective (you know about how someone will bring up the fall of Rome whenever anything remotely progressive is advocated, ever? Many of his articles are made of that) and that he seems to believe he’d be helping women by reducing their status (his hypergamy shit, even moreso than that of other MRA’s. And his comment of the week about “economic inequality”).
Of course, there’s the occasion where he drops pretenses of higher intellect and principle and just gets sneery (women’s soccer team, anyone?), so he’s really no different.
As a rather buxom person, I’ve seen my share of douchebaggery, but I’ve never run into any PUAs irl (I think I didn’t even know the phenomenon existed until relatively recently). The 2008 election was kind of a rude awakening for me, as I started encountering MRAs at every single political site I frequented. I’m pretty lefty, and it was a bit of a shock to run into as much of it in left-leaning political spaces as I did.
Then, about three years ago, I quit teaching, switched coasts and started working almost exclusively with technical professionals and discovered a whole new low. I always thought that MRAs were essentially trolls, enabled by the anonymity of the internet. Wow, did I ever get that wrong. There are plenty who are not afraid to spew their bile in person as well…
Strangely enough, it has been the older guys I’ve worked with who were more decent and respectful, while it was overwhelmingly the 40 and younger set which has been completely out of control. I’m also a sci-fi and horror geek, which has always put me in places where men are going to outnumber women, but until recently that hasn’t been a problem. It’s only been the last couple of years that rampant misogyny (as opposed to an almost quaint befuddlement about the ways and workings of ‘teh wimmenz’) and MRA goo has sloshed all over the social spaces for sci-fi and horror that I frequent.
Actually, Gillian, the thing about under-40 men being more misogynistic kinda makes sense: many a Spearhead article remarks about how “deluded” older men are about women and how younger men are “seeing the light.” Don’t ask me for a non-bullshit explanation for this if it’s real, though, I’d have no idea.
@Gillian
I know. That has been my experience as well.
My grandfather has some very dated ideas, but he is also very respectful of women.
And comic conventions………Wooboy. I honestly won’t go to some because of the attitude the men have had towards me. I enjoy comics. I have not read all the way back to the first comics of my favorite comics which apparently means I do not really love them. Now adays if I dress up I pick carefully so not to be attacked for being fake. I can do pretty much any Elfquest character because I have read EVERY comic. I can do anime stereotypes. I like to do that because people constantly are coming up with who I’m dressed up even though I’m being generic. I lean toward shojo comics (even though I like some shonen titles) because there is less backlash against dressing as one of those characters. I NEVER do video games. It really isn’t worth it.
I don’t know if I have anything to add (since I also came here through Pandagon), but it seems like since I’ve been reading here, I see MRA talking points everywhere. I don’t know if I notice because I can name it and it has always been there or if there is more of it around. I don’t know which is more depressing tbh.
Interestingly enough, while I was considering this, tonight’s Psych had a (spoiler) Nice Guy (TM) serial killer who found his victims through internet dating sites. And Juliet (the female detective) got to stop him all by herself! It was a good episode to drop any damsel in distress stuff imo.
@melody
My grandfather is the same way. Although we did recently find out that he isn’t anti-choice, which was a very pleasant surprise. 🙂 (He also started doing more housework when he retired ≈35-40 years ago to make things more fair between him and my grandmother.)
@melody Love your avatar!!
The older guys I’ve worked with have, at times, some ‘regrettable’ ideas (especially about gender) but I’ve also found them (for the most part) to have an attitude of “well, I think that’s odd, but live and let live.” Which was refreshing, really. The younger guys seem at the same time both naive and cynical (and maybe the two states are more alike than not), while also seeming to positively aspire to being assholes, and will egg each other on to be progressively more and more, frankly, disgusting. I have to do a certain amount of socializing with them and it’s always a disheartening experience.
Oh lawd, YES! FETLIFE, FETLIFE, FETLIFE! I even accidentally dated one! I thank FetLife for having radicalised me. Without it, I really wouldn’t be anywhere near as conscious of sexism (or anti-intellectual, unevidentially supportable attitudes in general) and the general public’s aversion to addressing it as I am. Thank you, FetLife.
Lots of MRAish stuff within the predominantly white straight guy atheist circles too.
So the cat lovers here will appreciate this. My kitty Buster has been having some hairball issues, so I tried to dose her with Petromalt. She wasn’t having it. So I did what used to work with other cats, which was to smear the dose on her paw — other cats used to lick it off. Buster however gave a quick flick of her paw and it flew directly onto my face.
Clever cat.
Petromalt is disgusting.
Just under the nose used to work for my ladycats. They hated me for it but it got the job done.
I first recall running across them when I was reading The Legal Satyricon, a libertarian-ish legal blog, years ago and their resident MRA asshole linked to something on the Spearhead approving. So I followed this link; at first I mistook it for someone taking the piss, then I got steam-coming-out-of-ears angry for about five minutes, then I went on from there. Disturbing.
Anyway I enjoyed popping up in comments every once in a while on TLS to tell him that his misogynistic horseshit was bringing down the entire tone of the blog, until he called me a mangina, which I am still proud of.
After that, the whole Elevatorgate thing in the atheist/skeptical circles was impossible to avoid, and now I notice the rabid little fuckers coming out of the woodwork everywhere.
Curious to hear about the FetLife thing. (I’m not on there.) What about it specifically is so awful other than the presence of MRAs (since they are many, many places)?
@marinerachel, That is exactly what I moved on to after I finished cleaning Petromalt out of my nostrils, teeth and ears. Take that, Buster! XD
@augochlorella
ewww on that guy. Why do people like that exist? Or at least do that… ;_;
@meldoy
A tease because you were wearing a swimsuit at a beach? the (lack of) logic, it baffles. O_o I wonder if he was walking around fully clothed. It’d at least make him look like a creepy jerk, instead of a creepy hyporcitical jerk
My first mra finding was probably in the comments of one of the feminist sites I go to, but I can’t remember which one. :/ I may be a little confusing today because I’m posting late at night….again.
This reminded me that I actually encountered Roissy before Elevatorgate and before I’d heard of Manboobz. It was some article on his older blog, I believe, featuring a letter from a “reader” about a boys’ pee-wee baseball game where the boys rejected the “everybody wins” policy. The author was very impressed with the boys’ rebelliousness and hopefully speculated that a real change might come with the swinging of baseball bats (I assume this was a euphemistic way to say there’d be violence, but I don’t remember it too well).
If anybody can think of a way to find that article, I’d be grateful. Googling “Roissy” just gives me results of things in France and I can’t stomach going to the douchecanoe’s blog.
@Bob Dole – repeat welcomes are a risk you run when my sieve-like memory is involved. 😀
@cloudiah – OMG Buster for the win, the evil kitty. Though I see you won in round two!
@picklefactory – well done on riling ’em enough to get the Name of Shame! And welcome, if you haven’t posted here before (see: above).
@melody re: the bathing suit – gods, it sounds like the sort of thing NWOslave ranted on about.
Tulgey, would googling Roissy and baseball game work as search terms?
Yahoo Answers, the Gender Studies section.
I wish I could give the name of a more intelligent website but sad to say, it was Yahoo Answers. There were more of them online than there were feminists. But it’s quite common to get kicked off Y!A and have what you’ve written deleted. So I doubt any really offensive stuff is still up there, or if it is, it won’t be for long.
Gods, Yahoo Answers. I gave up on that site pretty quickly – felt like it was sucking my brain cells into a black hole.
On many of the news coments pages here in Australia, I’ve noticed a big increase in the last three or four years of various permutations of: “men hunted mammoths”, “women only marry for money” type arguments. Genuine issues that affect both men and women, violence, rape etc are always deflected into “it’s all the fault of women”, perhaps because they don’t want to deal with the fact the most of the perpetrators are men. That’s why I think they will remain on the fringes of serious debate, they don’t genuinly seem interested in helping men at all, just blaming women.