Don’t worry, it’s not a video BY an MRA. It’s a video ABOUT MRAs. A little cartoon, to be specific, by Scott Benson, who has this to say about it on his Vimeo page:
A quick editorial cartoon about the intersection of self-pity, entitlement, rape, territoriality, misogyny and fear of women. You see it all over the place online in the form of Men’s Rights Activists (of whom there are a few reasonable non-misogynists), Men Going Their Own Way, Pick Up Artists, and dudes touting the “Red Pill”, because The Matrix is a good movie. Look any of these up if you have the stomach for it. These are extreme examples, but watered-down forms of these ideas are everywhere.
In lurking their blogs and youtube channels for a while, I’ve noticed that beyond the standard patriarchal chauvinism there is this deep fear of women – what they will do to me, how they will reject me, how they will use me, how they are changing society in a way that does not favor me, how they are making men into something I don’t like, how they are making themselves into something I don’t like, that they won’t give me what I want, and that they won’t give me what I think is rightfully mine. This goes beyond fear of feminism- this is fear of women at its purest. And that, to quote a puppet, leads to anger and hate. It’s sad.
Naturally, Benson had to close the comments to the video because of, you know, too much MRA.
He wrote more about it all on his Tumblr.
I was alerted to the video by various people, including Cloudiah, which reminds me to remind you all to go look at Cloudiah’s excellent Artistry for Feminism And Kittens blog.
Oh, and the spinning seal? Best thing ever. 😀
Welcome, saintnick86! 🙂
She basically said that “nice guys” don’t actually feel that they are entitled to intimacy because they work for the attention by being nice. Which doesn’t make any sense because it doesn’t detract from the actual criticism of “nice guys”: that they have no reason whatsoever to assume that intimacy should be a reward for nice behavior. She also invoked evolutionary psychology nonsense to “prove” that feminists who hate “nice guys” are really just trying to quell their cognitive dissonance, which is caused by feminists purporting their love for “nice guys” while subconsciously craving manly men instead. Because “nice guys” can’t satisfy any woman or something (although I wouldn’t be surprised at all if most women don’t like “nice guys” since they aren’t really nice at all).
It makes me sick when I see other women espouse that FeMRA hostility. It’s like betrayal in a sense. I know that sexism is wrong regardless of who it’s coming from, but sometimes I have even more hatred for FeMRAs when I hear them talk about their fellow women as if they’re subhuman. It’s horrific in a way.
I suppose my feelings don’t really matter to her, though, since I don’t expect her to take a trans* woman like me seriously. If she’s invested in defending binarist, cis-centric evolutionary psychology, I doubt that she cares about radical gender politics and opposing transphobia.
@Aaliyah It makes me sad more than angry. They’ve internalised a powerful and self-destructive societal message. I recently met a pregnant young woman. She told me she had found out her baby was a girl. I have two little girls and I broke out in smiles and congratulated her. She said, “I’m disappointed actually. I wanted a boy.” I asked her why and she said, “Girls are bitches.” It’s certain she will change her mind when she meets her baby, but that’s some hard-core self-hatred right there, and so openly and unselfconsciously expressed.
That’s really awful. I hope her daughter doesn’t catch or is affected by her self-hatred.
I guess the reason it makes me more angry than sad goes beyond that feeling of betrayal I described. It’s also because I feel that they make things so much worse for everyone by perpetuating patriarchal norms by themselves. They’re the kind of people anti-feminists point to and say “See, look at this woman – she’s a woman who thinks that feminism is wrong and women don’t deserve equal rights and respect. Why don’t you uppity ladies listen to her and stop clamoring for your rights and respect?”
And in doing so these FeMRAs also perpetuate the self-hatred you describe. I mean, I haven’t ran into a single FeMRA who doesn’t seem to be having some self-esteem issue.
@Aaliyah Yes, but you get the feeling that when she has the baby her feelings will be that it is all those other women who are bitches, not her little girl – just like women mras think about themselves. As for the kid catching it, let’s hope not. As you know – and as I know too – you can come out of a misogynist family with your decency intact. It’s hard, though.
I do understand what you say about betrayal, I agree. It’s frustrating to see mras see themselves validated this way.
Aaliyah, the MRAs and feMRAs also regularly ignore (or can’t grasp) that there’s a world of difference between a genuinely nice guy and a NiceGuy™, and it’s the latter that is criticised and scorned. The NiceGuy™ isn’t nice at all outside his own mind. It’s been said many times: he’s the type who thinks women are sex vending machines, and that when he puts kindness coins in, he should automatically get the sex he’s paid for. An actual nice guy – a decent human being – isn’t like that.
@Archeoholmes: I really don’t get that attitude and…really terrible sentiment for a parent-to-be to have towards their own child. My grandmother was the same way – which explains why she’s always treated my aunt like shit and has turned my man-child of an uncle (who leeches off her like a vampire does a village in Transylvania) who has the same horrendous attitude towards women. Thankfully it hasn’t rubbed off (completely) onto my other uncles, though I sometimes think it has with my dad given random comments he’s made. Maybe it was just him trying to be funny – it’s hard to tell with him.
As a guy who really want children at some point in the future, I’d…actually prefer having a daughter over a son. Though having a son wouldn’t “disappoint” me either, ’cause that’d be shitty. Maybe it’s just due to being raised largely by a single mother who I confided in often, since having a personal discussion with my dad was something I dreaded. He’s really impatient and kind of selfish, often whining “what about MY life?!” whenever I wanted help with something, as if I never give him any time alone (I do, a ton). I suppose I’m partially afraid I’d do the same thing to my son, inadvertently, due to my own relationship with my father (“Kronos Syndrome” I like to call it) while I’d feel more comfortable raising a daughter.
*ArchAeoholmes, my mistake…
@saintnick86 Yes, it is a terrible attitude. Like I say, it’s hard to believe it will persist after the baby is born. The attitude is about generic “women”, not anyone you actually know. They are those mythical. typical bitches like the ones mras are obsessed with.
“women and children first” rule of the Titanic … It was a long time ago but if I remember correctly what I read about it: It was an exception and the captain give it in order and allowed the crew to enforce it with deadly force if necessary. If anything this tells us that he expected the men on the ship to try to save themselves at the cost of the lives of the weaker. :/
About the Titanic, the so-called “Birkenhead Drill” has never been codified as international maritime law, and studies even suggest that survival rates favour men in general accidents. The only preferential treatment occurring today appears to involve disabled or pregnant passengers.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16576289
http://www.nek.uu.se/Pdf/wp20128.pdf
So… “Nice Guys” don’t feel entitled to intimacy, they just… feel entitled to intimacy? Psst, GWW, you’re arguing with yourself.
@Malitia: That is definitely more symptomatic of a patriarchal attitude (“these women are too weak to take care of themselves!”) than a supposedly matriarchal one. It still seems that, in a scenario where not everyone can be saved, that children would be given priority over adults regardless of their gender. I simply can’t imagine anyone (other than someone horrible, obviously) that would consider them expendable, given they still have the potential to grow up and be adults themselves. Still, ideally, many people should be saved as possible regardless of who they are – it’s a human life.
Well, I would put it more “children are weak and women are there to raise them” not that this isn’t just as sexist.
But I meant by it’s an exception that if I remember correctly men were statistically more likely to survive such accidents, which probably means than the “women and children first” rule wasn’t universally used.
In scenarios where not everyone can be saved, well, (in my very limited experience)… if there are still resources for non productive members, then children tend to be prioritized, but if there isn’t they will be left behind. Less vaguely: if for survival the boat needs 4 people to row their places can’t be given to children, if the boat isn’t big enough for more than 4 people all others will be left behind.
Also in older days when child-death was more common and people had more kids children were seen as being more expendable. Then the logic (however cruel it is) would probably go: “Why waste resources on someone who potentially won’t grow up if you can save more young and healthy adults, who can have more children in the long run?”
Except if they are rich of course if the Titanic taught me anything that is: “Rich people will be saved”.
Sorry. I’m cynical.
@saintnick
The way you described the dynamic between your grandmother and your aunt and uncle, and your dad’s behaviour reminded me a LOT of the stories on a blog I read called the narcissist’s child. Obviously I don’t know if the situations bear more than a superficial resemblance, but that blog is well worth a read for anyone.
“Rich people will be saved” I think survival rates vent:
1th class: 6 out of 10
2nd class: 4 out of 10
3rd class: less than 1 out of 10
Why isn’t there an edit button?
3rd class (roughly): 2 out of 10
Ugh, my dad has done so much awful shit in attempts to be funny. He used to value making people laugh at the expense of… well,common decency. I hypothesize it’s because of his white male privilege*, but I suppose that would be “misandry”.
Luckily, he’s tried to stop when I told him I was only comfortable with jokes that “punch up” (as in towards the oppressors).
*seriously, one of his shticks was a fakey japanese accent. bleh. X|
@Malita
I think there’s not an edit button because then the trolls could keep editing their posts and basically lying about what they’re saying.
See, I would expect people to cram in their children everywhere they could, possibly without considering the effect on the chances for the whole lifeboat.
So that lifeboat with 4 adult rowers is going to be crowded with children and yes, it probably will have to launch while parents are still trying to shove children aboard, but no one’s going to be saying, abandon the children!
And even when the chances of surviving childhood were small, parents still got attached to children, enough so that those who could afford it often handed their babies off to nurses and others to raise, to try and minimize the emotional pain when a child did cough itself to death (for example).
I agree completely.
Watching that video made me cringe so hard that the world shook. She even had the audacity to imply that the NiceGuy™ is actually a good friend everyone should be grateful for having. And that any woman who hates the NiceGuy™ isn’t worthy of friendship in the first place.
Oh, and it was 30 minutes long FFS. Half an hour of her essentially saying “Feminist women are terrible, and attack ‘nice guys’, those really genuinely nice people not filled with entitlement at all, only because they’re insecure and trying to make themselves feel better.”
@Fade: I understand. 🙂
And now something completely different! Update on the tabby kittens:
http://mahou.imouto.org/board/pic/780e552ea44508434ea40adacd9b44cb.jpg
@Aaliyah: Yeah, This. I think I had a rant about The Law of Equivalent Exchange? Because one of our trolls didn’t get it, and joked about it, and it underlined that he thought that in response for any friendship at all he was OWED sex, which was totally equivalent to friendship.
That’s the problem, right there.
I mean, not that you owe anybody anything. That’s bullshit to begin with. But then you’re certainly not owed something that’s on a totally different level from what you’re putting in.
Because it’s all about the entitlement. Men are entitled to women’s bodies.
That’s why the MRM slut-shames women on the one hand while complaining they ought to be getting more. To them it makes perfect sense. How dare she sleep with somebody else? She owes ME. How dare she not sleep with me? She owes ME.