A Gif, and Another Question: Where do you run across MRA/PUAs/etc online?

@Polliwog

“women don’t actually have friends, they just pretend to care about other people in order to piss off their boyfriends.”

Because nothing pisses off a boyfriend like his girlfriend having a healthy and enjoyable social life? That is terrifying on a number of levels.

Don’t get me started on Goreans, I could go on all day about how fucked up they are. There’s a play party run by some friends which I really enjoy except for one fucking gorean who goes who annoys the hell out of me. Including giving me shit last time about topping a guy. Switches break his brain apparently. I had to keep repeating to myself that I can’t beat people non-consensually. I generally only hangout with pretty cool liberal feminist kinksters though.

I enjoy fetlife but I generally use it for keeping in touch with my kinky friends and events. I try to avoid the areas where douches hang out and resist the urge to poke them with the snark stick.

@Worried Mama Just wanted to say I appreciate your perspective.

I’ve noticed too that many MRAs are libertarians and atheists. I’m not an atheist personally, but I’ve been very disappointed to see how some people in the atheist community deal with gender issues. I know there have been many intelligent discussions on this topic on Manboobz before. I guess we can put to rest the idea that ‘only religious people and old people are sexist nowadays’ (which was what my father said when I asked him about the subject).

Long personal story:

I first encountered MRM stuff through articles on the hippie-granola drums-in-the-forest side of the early stuff, and in a book I saw in my high school library by the author of a bunch of parenting books my mum owned (Steve Biddulph, I think?), and then in yet another human-interest piece on “father’s groups” after an MRA type scaled the Harbour Bridge in a Batman costume to protest custody or something. I didn’t think at the time to question the assumptions behind the father’s rights stuff. Now, I love a good inconvenient protest, and the forest-drums-coming-to-terms-with-masculinity sounded reasonably benign, so I came to expect men’s rights stuff to be a lot like all of that and had a bit of a positive view of it. Stories of awful feminazis who want women to be better or something probably had an impact on me (from. . . somewhere? I don’t know. Seems they were in the air. I read pretty widely), but I’d always considered myself a feminist.

I would’ve been about or 17-ish with most of this.

Soon after all that, I had a pretty nasty and humilating breakup and fell into a bit of a slump. I felt hopeless about romance and googling what the heck to do led me to some of the more gimmicky PUA stuff – NLP and so on, people selling their courses. I spotted all this as bullshit, but looked into a lot of the PUA stuff. I could have sex with lots of women, thought I! Negs were one of the first thing I read about, and I though the framing was always a bit unnecessarily confrontational, but they fit in with my Aussie sense of friendly insults as humour. The “lowering self-esteem” thing was just how that all worked, then! Peacocking – dress differently to draw attention to yourself! Try, try again – that’s reasonable!

TVtropes (actually decent a lot of the time) and 4chan’s /r9k/ (nuke it from orbit, please) were both places I browsed at the time, and both were somewhere between slightly and incredibly misogynistic and supposedly sites for intelligent discussion, which legitimised misogyny as a viewpoint to me, I think. I’d seen a lot of female-on-male cheating for reasons that’d probably derail this already rambling anecdote, and a lot of the stuff read as “scientific”, so I didn’t get too upset about it or viewed it as reasonable if an overreaction. I never stopped considering myself a feminist, but I read and agreed or partially agreed with a lot of incredibly stupid stuff at around that point. I read Atlas Shrugged on a friend’s recommendation at the same time, but the strikes-in-reverse thing seemed pretty pointless even then. I agreed with a lot of libertarian stuff, though, and discovered original/left-libertarianism and democratic socialism around then.

It was when I first read incredibly “LMR” stuff that I suddenly felt very sick and began to really dislike the PUA thing for more than just trying to suck money out of people. NSWATM pre-GMP was the first blog I ever read calling those fuckers out – Ozy and Noah Brand wrote for it at the time. I wasn’t actually thinking of all that when I stumbled across Man Boobz – it was just an interesting name I clicked in the sidebar of Pharyngula, which I used to read a lot.

Anyway, thank God for me being too shy to never try out any of the PUA stuff.

I’ve encountered a few people with MRA-ish views since then and an old friend’s incredibly creepy and far older PUA boyfriend, in terms of IRL MRAs.

Was set up to see MRM as benign, got angry with an ex and read a lot of stupid shit, sort of agreed with it until I saw outright endorsement of rape and white supremacy that I couldn’t rationalise away, Ozy pulled the weeds out of my head, found Man Boobz by accident and loved David’s articles and the sense of community. I’ve encountered MRAs or pseudo-MRAs IRL but not often.

It’s interesting how many MRAs encountered online and IRL by people here seem to be Australian. Really sorry, everyone.

@Kittehhelp

SMH seems to be the most reliably non-shitty mainstream Aussie paper, but they’re all pretty bad. Hopefully this just isn’t my New South Welsh bias, but I think papers suffer from that less than the Tooheys-versus-CUB/NRL-versus-AFL/schooners-versus-pots/cossies-versus-togs arguments.

@Kitteh which Nwoslave rant? I think I must have missed it.

@Nepenthe I still ran into “nice guys” in college. They slowly diminished out once I got into the working world. Of course I work with kids which may factor into the types of men I meet.

@Marie

I don’t think mra’s are too common, but misogynists sure are.

It is hard to tell who is actively part of a movement and who is not without asking…..
I totally agree I think most men with misogynistic tendency don’t know about MRMs.

@Kgrrrl
I think the problem is that there are SO many more males than females on the site. Which is part of the reason I don’t want to join.

Male/Female ratio

This is the current ratio* between Male and Female (and ‘Other’) users at Google+

Male: 69.4%

Female: 29.2%

Other: 1.4%

http://socialstatistics.com/

Random: I talked with a trans woman today yesterday on the walk home (nighttime). She seemed a little freaked and we ended up walking and talking together.
It was interesting. And she was very open about herself once she realized I wasn’t a threat (it is weird to me to be thought of as a dangerous person a very unique experience thought after hearing her talk I totally understand).

It seems to me we all have met some misogynists. Internet hugs?

Melody – I haven’t seen the original one, apparently he posted a link to Google images or something to back up his assertion that women dress like sluts, and it included pictures of little girls at the beach, wearing, y’know, swimsuits. I’ve just seen it referred to in lots of comments from the last couple of years while I’ve been trawling around. (Anyone around at the time remember the specifics?)

He also focussed on the clothes of some eleven-year-old girls in a horrible video where they were (I think – the vid had been taken down when I read the thread) stripping and humiliating a smaller boy. If I read it right, one of the girls was in capri pants, and NWO ranted on about her being dressed like a slut.

That being said, I’d never go”mgtow” on guys, particularly not the dumb attitude Mgtows have towards sexual politics. >:P okayillstopramblingnow

Ah, someone who’s new to the Owly theory of sexuality, in which women experience their sexuality mainly by wearing clothes at men.

You forgot about how high heels clickity clack just to arouse men, which is something something a tease since they won’t fuck him.

Also, I must be a ninja because androgynous people don’t exist (I’m really tempted to switch back to my ninja avatar, but Cheshire Cat!)

I know we joke about misogynists not understanding that women are people a lot, but in Owly’s case he quite literally does not appear to understand that women have inner lives, subjectivity, etc.

I think he has a terminal case of invisible-to-me-itis — the condition wherein the sufferer is unable to see anyone they are not attracted to, whereby rendering said people invisible to the sufferer.

Which would make walking through crowds really difficult.

Owly seemed to think women’s inner lives or thoughts consist solely of making men miserable, extracting money from them (it’d be so much easier if the local councils would clean those sidewalks!) and teasing them sexually.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bloke with a boner in public. All those thousands of men on the train, on the street, in offices, in thirty years of working, and none of ’em seem to have this uncontrollable sexual arousal brought on by women being around. I seriously doubt they were all well-trained manginas, either.

OT, thinking about when we were talking about the term neckbeard t’other day: I saw a young guy yesterday who literally had one, but knew how to make it look good. He was sort of like a younger and prettier Russell Brand, without the weird wild-eyed expression – had the mane of curly hair, a neat moustache, and a beard that was mostly stubble above his jawline, and thicker below it. The thicker hair was short and neat.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bloke with a boner in public.

Lucky! Or, well, I could live with the boner, it was the guy with his fly open on the train who kept checking to make sure that people could see his boner that I could have done without.