Another question: Are MRAs inherently misogynistic?

I’m so glad to learn that lordsteve‘s rant is meant mockingly, because in just the short time I’ve been hanging around here I’ve already read enough MRA crap that was 100% sincere that I wouldn’t even have blinked at this one.

This reminds me of that awful, awful Cracked article: http://www.cracked.com/article_19785_5-ways-modern-men-are-trained-to-hate-women.html?wa_user1=3&wa_user2=Sex&wa_user3=article&wa_user4=companion

It seems all well and good on the surface, but then you start going hmmmmmm. Yeah sure, it makes sense that men might be in these positions, but why would they be so upset about them? Why would they blame WOMEN for them? There’s some sort of piece missing.

And the missing piece for each of them is: You’re an asshole. For non-assholes, none of these listed things would lead someone to hate women.

I am also leaning towards them already being a bit misogynistic before finding the MRM. I think that after they find it, they become a lot more misogynistic and paranoid. They ‘feed off’ each other, so to speak.

@ kamilla1960 I sympathise with your situation, but no, I don’t think it’s normal for most women to fear men. I didn’t grow up with sexist, horrible male relatives, and most men I meet try to protect me from harm (sometimes annoyingly so) instead of hurting me. For a while I thought most guys thought like MRAs, but now I don’t think that’s true. People are a mess of contradictions anyhow. Sometimes I think I have been really lucky when I read what other women have gone through, though. If I had had the kind of experiences with men a few of the commenters here have described I would probably absolutely loathe them.

I think it could be possible to go to some of the less overtly woman-hating MRA hangouts and never ever check their sources and maybe believe some of the stuff you read without actually consciously deciding to hate woman. Like, you might think “Wow! Men die at 200 times the rate of women and nobody wants to do anything about it because men are disposable? And women routinely divorce men in order to extort hundreds of millions of dollars from them, and nobody has any issue with it? These issues need to be heard!” But, I mean, I don’t think the intention matters that much. If somebody’s just totally taken in by the lies but doesn’t “hate” women as such, that person is still perpetuating myths that subjugate women. So, yeah, I consider MRAs to be inherently misogynistic.

@Karalora

it’s not that being for men’s rights inevitably entails misogyny, it’s that the existing MRA community is so rife with misogyny that you need to share or appreciate that view to be involved.

I agree with this, but think that a men’s rights movement will always be in some ways misogynistic. There was some discussion on this around the time Martyn Hare first showed up.

I am going to quote myself, but there were other great contributions. (Plus, Martyn is my favorite if most exasperating troll in a long time so I had fun seeing how it all began.)

Additionally, centering those who are already centered by society is always, in some way, going to promote the oppression of those on the margins. That is why feminism focuses on women’s rights, for example, to correct the historical and contemporary imbalance. Most of the issues that do affect men are those that will be corrected by feminism. Setting up a movement thar seeks to accomplish the same goals, but cares more about men or primarily about men may correct those specific issues, but will (I believe) do so at the expense of women because, at its fire, it recreates the inequality present in almost every facet of society. It is misogynistic in its premise because it takes secondary oppression as primary, thereby erasing the primarily oppressed.

This is earlier in the thread I just quoted from and the first appearance of Sid, I think, who is basically answering the question posed by today’s OP very eloquently. Later on in the thread, there are more great responses on the relationship between misogyny and men’s rights so, if you can stomach some more Martyn, it is worth a read.

Oh wow, where do I get me one of them fancy MAN footstools? /sarc

I agree with MKlein in that I do think there are probably MRAs who I would give the benefit of the doubt as being more misguided than actively misogynistic. Nonetheless, I think by-and-large these types are what I would call proto-MRAs, like an MRA but in a larval form. The distinction to me is that proto-MRA complaints seem to originate from an intellectual misunderstanding of feminism and women’s issues rather than a visceral hatred of womankind. I occasionally see such examples when they unwittingly blunder into an active conversation about such issues believing that They Get It or They Tried to Get It (But It Got Hard). They then will reel in butthurt when they are checked for their misunderstanding of the issue and express some version of, “geez, why won’t you feminists play nice? You really DO hate men!”

Disagreement =/= hate, but the distinction may be lost on your average MRA or proto-MRA who cannot take the extra step back and realize that sometimes, it’s not all about him. To be fair, some disagreement may elicit some strong anger and salty retorts from feminists that I sometimes think is a bit much. However, there are boatloads of women out there including myself who are sick to death sometimes of proto-MRAs presuming to know better, or proto-MRAs who try to steer the conversation off track and toward their problems, or proto-MRAs who don’t understand or care if an fun intellectual exercise for them can be an unwelcome emotional exercise for women.

But at the end of the day, ignorance is rarely a good excuse, especially in the age of Google.

@Cassandra I think there might be a tendency for some people who don’t frequent the MRA sites to be persuaded, in a purely surface way, of some of the assertions they make, assertions which get repeated uncritically all over the mainstream. I wonder also, if someone who is in a bad place because of a recent breakup or some other tension in their life might be primed in a sense not to immediately reject it.

I say this because I’ve had conversations recently with some otherwise completely reasonable guys over some recent news and found myself face to face with some pretty standard MRA talking points on rape apology and false rape accusations. Since I had some pretty reasonable interactions with them before, I was able to choke down my rage long enough to go calmly through what we really know about rape, with the statistics, especially the studies highlighted by Thomas MacAulay Millar and charged them to provide some evidence for their contentions. They couldn’t, of course, and it always seemed to come down to someone else they knew who had repeated the talking points with such conviction that they didn’t question what they were hearing.

I’m less willing to (automatically) say those folks were misogynist, especially as I have found them to be on the whole reasonable and progressive in their attitudes and opinions in all my other dealings with them. Yet all of them seem to have someone in their lives who is clearly misogynistic and whose ideas gain a sort of baseline credibility because of the relationship. One of them, for example, has a brother who would be a PUA if he weren’t so incredibly lazy that putting in the effort to learn the techniques would cut too deeply into his sports-watching and beer-drinking, and that’s where many of the weird ideas about the prevalence of rape and the complications of consent seemed to come from in that case.

It brings me to wonder if it isn’t necessary to come down harder on those propagating misinformation and lies about such issues, but then I wonder who has the energy and fortitude for it, especially in light of the mess that will come flying at you for trying (given that MRA sites are especially good for mobilizing trolls to fling their poo at any ideas they don’t like).

My initial reaction to this is that ‘somebody really needs to stay away from kmart’.

Not inherently, but since “MRA” and “MRM” are functionally just labels for reactionary misogyny, it really might as well be.

There’s a cluster of egalitarian Tumblrs that distance themselves from MRAs’ repugnant misogyny and stick to helping men. Maybe they’ll be the future of this movement.

Great! Now if only “egalitarian” wasn’t internet douche code for “I want to ignore the concerns of specific oppressed groups and systemic power disparities in favor of making sure women don’t generalize about men/PoC don’t say anything bad about white people.”

I think it depends a bit on your definition of misogyny. If you’re using it to mean an actual hatred of women, then yes, I do think it is possible for someone to identify as an MRA but not be a misogynist. However, using it in the more general sense, then no, I don’t think it is possible.

I think to be an MRA you have to have a level of privilege and sense of entitlement, along with at least a subtle sexism. They place the blame for legitimate men’s issues (prison rape and high levels of incarceration, rigid gender roles, etc.) on women rather than looking at cultural structures (generally rooted in misogyny) that cause them. So yeah, a sensible, not-hateful guy could conceivably be superficially* attracted to the MRM, but he’s still a misogynist, even if it’s just because he was raised in a misogynist culture and never examined that.

That’s not to say that there aren’t guys who are working on men’s issues who aren’t misogynists. I support a group that works to end prison rape and support the victims of it, who are overwhelmingly male. In the past, I volunteered for a crisis center that supported all victims of domestic violence regardless of gender, and had special programs tailored to male victims. Through those, I’ve met lots of guys who felt strongly about the problems men face, but they weren’t MRAs.

*I say “superficially” because I’m with those who don’t think it’s possible to find yourself nodding along to most MRA sites unless you are a raging misogynist.

I don’t see why, if non-misogynist MRAs exist, they can’t splinter off and form their own group. The fact that that’s not happening doesn’t bode well, imo.

I guess splintering off the non-misogynistic MRAs was something that TGMP was trying to do. That … hasn’t gone too well.

Have a puppy trying to exercise: