I found this hilarious faux-MRA rant on the Tweeter. I don’t know where exactly it’s from, but kudos to lordsteve, whoever he is.
My question today: Are MRAs inherently misogynistic?
I mean, obviously the people I write about regularly here are, but are there a significant number of MRAs out there who are actually well-meaning souls who’ve been taken in by MRA talking points? Or do you have to be a bit misogynistic to begin with in order to be swayed by MRA-logic?
Oh and David, here’s a citation for point #2:
The Independent and Joint Effects of Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Age on Sentencing Outcomes in U.S. Federal Courts. Jill K. Doerner, Stephen Demuth. Justice Quarterly, Vol. 27, Iss. 1, 2010 (sorry for the weird formatting)
News from Brisbane: there was a gunman in the Queen street mall, who was fortunately taken into custody by police without him hurting anyone.
I don’t know if this bit is true yet, but they said on tv that he was there to see his ex-wife and “just wanted to see his kids”. He was already known to police too.
Though here they say it satarted as an argument between 3 men.
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/2013/03/08/12/36/gunman-in-brisbane-mall-reports
This hasn’t been addressed yet?
“…unless some kind of desexed hermaphrodite human is created, in which case we would likely cease to be human at all.” — kamilla1960
Before I start fuming, an point of academic note — hermaphroditus was born a boy, transformed into what ancient Greeks called androgynous, and had a penis and breasts. So “desexed” and “hermaphrodite” are opposing terms, all other *head explodes* everything else aside.
EVERYTHING ELSE!
1) hermaphrodite is a derogatory term for intersex individuals
2) desexed is a new one by me, I’ll assume you mean either people without gender or people without sex characteristics…
2a) people without gender — agender
2b) people without (or who want to be without) sex characteristics — neutrois
3) allowing people identifying as such, and seeking to be without sex charactistics, to have surgery/etc to remove their sex characteristics…would make us, the entire species, “cease to be human at all”
I don’t even…What. The. Fuck?
No really, what the actual fuck?
Guess I should give up complaining about how neon obvious my sex characteristics are and refrain from attempts at androgyny, because fuck, y’all still want to be human right?
Oh gods, LBT are you around? Sneak and Gigi broke humanity, we’re all aliens, or cybers, or something! (Sorry, we’ve reached the point where I have to joke or I’ll lose my shit)
I know a few people who’re not very strongly gendered and yet I still feel pretty human, and comfortably cis myself…maybe I turned into a bot and didn’t notice?
On a less snarky note – kamila, this is not a community that’s kindly disposed to gender essentialism. We do not want to party like it’s 1975.
That could almost word for word be the story of my bff’s grandmother and mother – they left Georgia (I think) for California, and her mother was seriously high in her field, and are they ever aware of how essential getting out of the South was.
@Argenti Aertheri
I am sorry you were hurt. I don’t know what was meant by that remark, but in defense of us mundanes, many of us have never knowingly met a trans person. Your posts have been enlightening for me and I have gone in search of answers regarding trans people on other websites. Nevertheless, this is the first time I have encountered the ideas of agender or neutrois. I value your comments on this blog and hope you can forgive those of us who would be your friend and yet still say stupid things in ignorance.
and in case it appears that I am asking you not to get mad at when I fuck-up (the probability of my fucking-up increases logrithmically with time) I am not.
Internet hug from an old bald bearded guy if you want it or my kitten if you prefer.
joanimal — “I value your comments on this blog and hope you can forgive those of us who would be your friend and yet still say stupid things in ignorance.”
I try to avoid getting sweary at true ignorance, this isn’t in anyway to say that anyone else has to educate ignorant people, the derailing for dummies “educate me!!” is still derailing. But I’m okay explaining when it seems like something was said out of honest cluelessness, as opposed to willful ignorance. There’s just no excusable reason to have said that creating any gender/sex category would make us cease to be human.
Idk, there’s a difference between “um, you forgot about me/trans*/genderqueer people” and “did you just actually say that?” — the latter seems limited to “no one can actually think that isn’t offensive, right?” Like Cassandra said, we’re not partying like it’s 1975 (unless that means cheap readily available acid, in which case I’m in!)
This is getting long, so I’ll at least pet your kitty (nothing personal, I’m just not in a hugging mood, or a being touched mood)
If we get desexed and are no longer human, does that mean we’ve become kitties? Or dogs, if you prefer?
Fish! A fair number are born female and become male either under certain conditions or after a certain timespan. And this is an appropriate use of the word hermaphroditism.
Barely related, my cories are having a small fit about the storm, they keep swimming to the surface and back down and it makes the weirdest little noise.
I was reading an old thread today, where you mentioned your cories were pretending to be loaches and doing a loach dance! There was a lovely video of loaches dancing with it. 🙂
I was thinking of desexed as in what-vets-do but changing sex works too!
MRA is what happens when non-Alpha straight males finally realize that the mangina lifestyle is ultimately unsustainable.
@cloudiah: I believe Esmay is the one who wrote “why I bring up the draft,” which argued… well, it didn’t exactly argue anything, but its thrust was that since women didn’t immediately demand to be drafted or take on some kind of other compulsory service after getting the vote, he gets to throw use the draft as an example of misandry or feminist hypocrisy or something. No idea how that chuckle duck is called liberal, but I guess he’s liberal relative to somebody.
HAHAHA my itouch autocorrected “chucklefuck” to “chuckle duck” and I am leaving it like that lololol.
It took me all of a cup of coffee and some bleary blinking to think of an answer.
“No, but…”
… I’m sure (as others above say) if you can’t pinpoint that there’s something wrong with the statements generally made after a while then our would be MRA is probably not too well off anyway.
I still think you can start from a perspective of “I’ve experienced people who happened to be male go through bad events, and I want to help them”. It’s a little vapid, perspective-wise, and it kind of assumes that ongoing social movements can offer nothing to an entire gender. So actually I think it’s not a case of misogyny being required or even inherent – I think its a case of mild narcissism, some solipsistic little half-thought and missed perspective. Privilege overshoot. So when someone says “Hey! Dude, consider the following about your privilege” what they hear is “You are bad-wrong and will always be bad-wrong and I hate you and all men must be shipped to the prison camps!” and flee to somewhere where at the very least no one will ever even consider that perspectives can be different and that people experience different things differently. Tautologies!
The cracked article actually helps underline that point. David Wong has a sort of kind of almost right idea? That some common narratives enforce a specific way of thinking and that that way of thinking when applied to reality causes misunderstandings. You don’t “get” a “hot girl” for “winning” because people aren’t objects. Then it drops the ball completely when it suddenly takes a sharp left turn into “And this, by the way!, is all about boners. And how we should totally pity people because boners. But but but boners. Because my mother told me to stop jumping off tall things we hate women.”
No, really.
Yes. All the alpha male political heads have plans, but us poor drones just do it to get laid. Pity their boners.
See? David Wong seems like a decent writer. And Cracked is a funny website.
But those last two lines are two adjectives, a “Slutwhore” and a “feminazi” away from being a typical MRA talking point. In an article specifically meant to address the point about how this is all a bad thing and a cultural impetus and a social narrative and how men can do better.
So even when talking about things in the spirit of attempting to make the world a better place through enlightenment, some people just naturally fall into hackneyed idiocy.
And now, imagine someone bitter. Or angry. Or upset. Tadah. MRA-in-a-can.
… Actually, terrible thought re-reading that article. Point 5, about rewards. There’s a lot about how frustrating it is for a man to have to deal with that and how it makes men hate women. Broken social contract.
There’s nothing that I can read about how it’s a messy idea to implant, how to unthink it, *why* it’s wrong or even how people aren’t like that. It’s almost sort of saying “This is what we’re told. Not getting it is frustrating. You are being bad women for not helping us deal with this“.
It’s… really not misogyny. It’s just a weirdly insular perspective. And that goes double for anyone on the fence.
Sorry about the minor derail there. Happy 8th of March.
What is a really interesting question is why some men are predisposed to this point of view and others not. It isn’t all jilted blokes and divorced guys. And even it it was, it doesn’t explain why jilted and divorced women don’t amass forces to create male sexbots and write detailed plans of revenge online. My husband is the nicest, gentlest man in the world. His mum was seriously emotionally abusive and he had an abusive girlfriend too. She even tried to kill him. He has no hatred or bitterness towards women and loathes MRAs. He isn’t any pushover either, he’s a charismatic person. Chicks dig him. My brother, on the other hand, treats women like shit, chases girls half his age, fucks and dumps them, and complains about the unfair advantages feminism claims for women. My dad was a fearsome misogynist and male supremacist who favoured his son and treated me, my sisters, and my mum like idiots and housework-bots. My brother, who never had anything put in his way, is an MRA. My sisters and I are feminists, on the other hand. My dad is lucky to get a Chrissy card from me.
“He can remember the first time he got in trouble for hitting somebody, for peeing in public, for trying to jump off some high object or set something on fire. All of the core male urges, all the suggestions whispered to us by Darth Penis, all of it gets us in trouble.”
Being a kid with no sense of self-preservation is a strictly Boy Thing? Being told not to do things never happens to girls? Being required to live within a society’s rules is only something that happens to boys? Being expected to grow up instead of staying a four-year-old is a hardship, and one only men face?
Funny how the Mighty Manly Man Brain MRAs love to boast about, the brain that invented All the Things and did everything, and that every man gets credit for … is completely overidden by a gland and some hormones. And carries lifelong resentment of Mummy telling it not to get itself hurt doing stupid things.
Sound of world’s smallest violin playing for the fuckwittery, inanity and complete narcissism of this one.
So apparently according to David Wong I’m one urge to piss in public away from being a man?
(I was not a cautious child. I got told off for jumping off high things just for fun too. Since I don’t have a penis I’m fairly sure this wasn’t because my mother was trying to oppress it.)
Also, Happy IWD everyone!
Things I did as a child: cross a fast moving river, jumped off the roof of my house, played in mud in my “nice clothes”, put cowpies in the fire, got in a fight with a boy, ect
Gosh. those sounds like stereotypical things BOYS do. I must be confused as to my gender.
I think this has more to do with them watching movies/tv shows that portray boys one way and girls another.
Because I had plenty of friends that were girls (and I had guy friends too) and they did all this stuff too.
Happy IWD boobz!
JTO has written a humdinger.. with this really weird disclaimer at the end…
Several paragraphs and statements within this article are, if taken out of the context of this article, clear calls for violence, including murder. A number of opponents of the MHRM have demonstrated a willingness and skill at repackaging selected quotes and framing a completely inverted meaning. Opposition to violence becomes a call for violence. You know who you are. Your work will be easy here. Go ahead. You betray yourself and your own desire for human damage every single fucking time.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that if you need to include a disclaimer like that, it may be worth going back over your words to change the murdery bits.
Also – men’s problems? Still feminist’s fault. Cool. Does anyone know what activism JTO is actually actively involved in IRL, aside from trying to FTSU?
Full article:
http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/why-yes-i-am-a-little-angry/
sorry for being O/T, I just read it and had to share… I will also share this, to balance the world again…
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175742
Is there a succinct term for when you read something so long and awful that your whole brain shuts down and you wind up fixating on one small little thing because if you thought about all of it your brain might melt?
That’s what just happened to me with the JTO article deezers linked to.
Here’s what I can’t get past:
Mr Rogers? Really? My childhood feels all sad now.
@katz
No, it was Besserwisser. I don’t know if you encountered him before you gave up on TVT…he seems to think that all sexism stems from an instinctive desire on the part of men to protect women from harm. He denies that women were historically viewed as property. For what it’s worth, he seems sincere in these beliefs – i.e. he’s not using them as excuses – and in the present day he has no problem with gender equality, but it’s pretty well impossible to talk solutions with someone who refuses to assign blame to the male-dominated power structure.