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?
Mr. Rogers?
🙁
Really puts his puppetry in a new light.
Glad I’m not the only one whose mind went there.
BTW random possibly less depressing derail – coffee. Any big coffee drinkers? What kind do you like best? I grew up on Arab coffee with green cardamon, so I love that, but as I get older I seem to be developing a preference for light roasts. So, favorite roast? Favorite varietal?
I’ve had Blue Mountain and loved it, but can’t justify spending that much on coffee on a regular basis. Never had the civet coffee – is it worth trying? I know where to get it relatively cheap.
I read one AVfM article yesterday, and refuse to read one today — especially one by JohnTheOtter. But thanks for the summary!
Kittehs’, If you’re interested in that history, I think I’ve plugged the book The Warmth of Other Suns here before. Really good. It proves that 6 million African Americans left the South because they wanted MORE racism. /sarcasm (Like, seriously, the biggest internal migration in US history happened because people wanted to make their lives worse. See also: the huge migration of Californians to the dust bowl, and of poor folks to New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.)
Tulgey, Chuckle duck is my new favorite swear substitute.
Coffee: I love dark roasts. Probably my favorite is Lion espresso roast. Oh, and I’m a fool for Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.
cloudiah: that damn nut loaf is even better today. Just had some for an early lunch, and OMG, delicious.
@AK – okay that makes more sense, although to me the “pedestal” thing would still be misogyny since it still devalues women, but perhaps I’m thinking about it differently.
@Argenti – holy shit I did not see that comment of kamilla’s until you replied to it. GAH. No. Taking away someone’s humanity for any reason, but especially for something to do with gender, is unacceptable, I don’t care how much or little a person knows about trans* issues!
And now, I make pie. 🙂
I didn’t read the comments cause it might ruin the fact that I thought of a very funny comment. And it is…
“The Duggars sure seem like they are trying to create an army of their own” 😀
@Mayara Arend
Isn’t that basically what they are trying to do because of the whole “soldiers of the Lord” and quiverfull things?
ran into this online, off but on topic…
http://www.funnyjunk.com/funny_pictures/5079/Banned+From+Kmart/
I don’t know of a term for it, but I do that all the time. Usually I get fixated on some weird writing style quirk or grammatical error. It’s like tunnel vision as a survival instinct.
CassandraSays, we mostly drink coffee with chicory here. My husband is caffeine sensitive and the chicory lessens it a bit, and I hate weak coffee. We had been drinking half-caff and just recently switched back. The only problem with the chicory stuff, though, is that it turns my teeth yellow. I bought some Crest white strips, I just need to get the motivation to use them.
I just read this on tumblr:
—i get mras and mrsa confused—
one’s a virulent plague upon the vulnerable members of society which is hard to treat and even harder to eradicate
the other one’s methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus
QFMFT
Are MRAs inherently misogynistic? Probably not. I think a lot of them so lonely and socially backward that they have little experience with women at any level. What they most long for is male approval. Bashing feminists give them a common grievance to bond over, but it’s more about wanting to belong to a group, especially a group that seems edgy and transgressive. They’re very competitive and they egg each other on, which is why the most outrageously offensive remarks get the most support. Their influence beyond the manosphere seems limited.
Or at least that is what I want to believe…
@drst…yeah, I agree. I wasn’t explaining myself very well yesterday. I was trying to acknowledge the difference between the absolutely hateful men often profiled on here, as opposed to a guy who engages in more garden-variety and perhaps unconscious misogyny, since it’s a distinction I often see made online (“but I can’t be a misogynist! I love my wife and have female friends and don’t think all or even most women are lying bitches!”). In retrospect, it was rather unnecessary. 😉
Happy International Women’s Day!
(This is what I post at teh menz asking for IMD
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=International+Men%27s+Da
because passive aggressive misandry)
In honor of International Women’s Day (on man boobz), I thought it would be fun to post examples of individual women who have done more to help men than the entire MRM. Here is one example.
I can empathize to a certain extent. After all, I was abused pretty badly, pretty darn early in life too by women. Physically, emotionally, sexually, all of it. I was bullied incessantly for years by my female peers as a kid. I can definitely see being more wary of people in general, I certainly am, but I didn’t become a raging misogynist because of it. I was pretty darn fucked up for a very long time, still am in some ways, but I don’t blame every woman or feminism for the wrongs of some women. I mean, I was also bullied and abused by some men so hating whole groups of people who shared certain traits with people who’d hurt me would mean I hated everyone. Which I don’t. I agree that for someone who has been abused or had a lot of negative experiences it’s a bit easier to see where they’re coming from, just, I dunno, I don’t think it’s that most MRAs are coming from that place. A lot of the ones I see just seem to be ones who were already pretty entitled and are mad at the world when they grow up and find that women are not just for fucking them or cleaning up their messes or again are ones who did recognize some legit problems but found their way to places like AVfM and because of internalized societal sexism “took the red pill” as it were and became raging misogynist douchebags.
I am in total agreement that there definitely needs to be greater emphasis on boys and men setting and enforcing boundaries, but again, this is one of those problems that can also be combated with more feminism. If strict gender roles and retrofuck ideals of masculinity didn’t paint “real men” as guys always wanting sex, then they would be less susceptible to coercion and could feel freer to speak out about rape or sexual abuse they experienced.
Also definitely yes on how to deal with emotional shit. That’s another thing that, with strict enforcement of gender roles, is blown to the wayside. But any guy mentioning anything like that to the MRAs would be dismissed as a “mangina” or any woman mentioning that would be yelled at for trying to “feminize men”. It’s sad, really. They’re their own worst enemies.
cloudiah – thanks for that book info, I shall look it up!
Speaking of the Dust Bowl, Ken Burns’s series on it is playing on TV here at the moment. Heartbreaking stuff. I knew it was devastating but none of the details, like the dust storms and the deaths from breathing the stuff all the time.
And then I loled forever
How depressing:
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/08/can_men_be_taught_not_to_rape/
With the usual death/rape threats following, of course.
Freitag: It is depressing, and all too predictable. I just put up a post about it.
@Kitteh’s: I like me some Ken Burns, but I never seem to have the time.
I’m working through his documentary The War, which is about as Yankee-centric as you can get, and I think I mean that. The filmmakers talked to people from four US towns about their experiences in WWII, and only one (Mobile, Alabama) is from the Confederate South. The other exception I have found so far is they talked to the late Senator Inouye about being a 17 year old witness to Pearl Harbor and serving in Italy later.
But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Burns makes documentaries about life in the States.
The series is just heartbreaking in places, which is one reason I’m taking it slow. If anyone wants to watch it, it’s streaming off Netflix and there’s a big ol’ TRIGGER WARNING because the series stands witness to the fighting by using historical footage. You better believe there are bodies everywhere.
RE: kamilla1960
I know a good few people off the gender binary, both friends and close loved ones. Don’t do that, dude.
RE: Argenti
Well, when I put it to Gigi, she gave herself antennae with her fingers and said, “But I AM a robot. Boop boop.” But you know. She’s Gigi. Were Sneak still awake, I’m sure zie could come up with something. (Send both kids your good thoughts; they’ve both been forced through hellish mental growth spurts in the past month.)
But yeah, definitely some sighs and eyerolls here. (Especially since, had we remained singlet, we’d be most likely androgynous–after all, when the alter numbers hash out to 1 female, 1 male, 4 other, 1 ? I think it’s pretty obvious which side of our bread was buttered.)
Falconer – Yeah, I love Burns’s work too. It’s my intro to American history in some cases. I still think The Civil War is one of the greatest pieces of television I’ve seen. Like the WWII one (which hasn’t shown here yet) it’s tough going at times. We saw the one on Prohibition a couple of months ago. Didn’t stick with the one about the Rocky Mountains expedition; it lacked the immediacy of the ones with the photos and film footage.
The Dust Bowl one was heartbreaking last night: it talked about dust pneumonia. Two men who were teens at the time, part of a family of some ten boys and one girl, told how their little sister died of it when she was two. They were in tears talking about it all these decades later, particularly the brother who’d done a lot of the looking after of her. When she was ill, she cried out his name, not for her parents, and he couldn’t help her.
+1 internet, or something, to Gigi. Not sure what the appropriate equivilant is for robots…
Seconding warm thoughts to both the kids, and any/all of: hugs, tea, chocolate, my assorted collection of toys, or my dinner — mattar paneer.
By the feminist standard, anything that isn’t cowering to their naive ideals is “misogyny”. In that case, I am a proud misogynist until they learn to deal with diverse opinions.
On the topic of posting stuff about women who have done more to help men than the hold MRM, I offer Ida B. Wells.
Pioneering African-American journalist who was a key member of the Anti-Lynching Movement. Lynching of course being something that was primarily aimed at black men. She openly challenged the discourse of the time which argued that black men were lynched because they had raped white women and deserved it. She made it clear that this was a false premise, based on horrible stereotypes which portrayed black men as animalistic and over-sexed and that lynching was due to economic and political reasons. For example the lynching of three black businessmen in her home town of Memphis because their grocery store was competition for white owned businesses.
She wrote and spoke about the issue and her actions helped kick-start the modern Civil Rights Movement.
She was awesome.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_B._Wells