So over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the regulars are engaging in a bit of self-reflection. Well, that may be a bit of a generous description on my part. They’re discussing the question “Are we fanatics?” Not surprisingly, they conclude that they aren’t.
Yet this is the most upvoted comment in the thread:
Those of you who have studied twentieth century history may have remembered Lady Hitler’s war on the Jews, the Romani people, and homosexuals; the Great Feminist Purges of Lady Stalin; the Cultural Revolution of Lady Mao. (Oh, wait, there actually was a Madame Mao, and she was a pretty evil gal, though she owed her power largely to her husband and was ousted shortly after his death.)
Moving on from all that war and starvation stuff, let’s return to that first sentence, since MRAs are so fond of blaming eeevil feminists for the draft.
The link in that sentence goes to a discussion of an organization called The Order of the White Feather. Take it away, Wikipedia:
In August 1914, at the start of the First World War, Admiral Charles Fitzgerald founded the Order of the White Feather with support from the prominent author Mrs Humphrey Ward. The organization aimed to shame men into enlisting in the British Army by persuading women to present them with a white feather if they were not wearing a uniform.
It’s worth pointing out that at the start of WWI, people of all political stripes and in all the countries involved were pretty gung-ho for the war. Even the big socialist parties of the day quickly forgot their pledges of international solidarity in favor of supporting their national war efforts.
So where do the evil feminists come in? Well, a couple of the most famous British suffragettes signed onto the White Feather crusade: Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. And yes, they supported compulsory national service — though they supported it for both men and women: men would go to war, while women would be required to work in factories.
Of course, the Order of the White Feather didn’t represent all feminists at the time. Indeed, it didn’t even represent all the Pankhursts: Christabel’s sisters Sylvia and Adela were pacifists.
Even aside from all that blather about feminists being responsible for wars and concentration camps, it’s highly misleading to present the story of the Order of the White Feather as “proof” that feminists are warmongering all-male-draft-lovers. As a quick visit to Google will demonstrate, feminism has a long history of antiwar activism, dating back to the 19th century — when feminists first organized Mother’s Day as a protest of war.
But, hey, MRAs, if you want to invent your own mythological version of history, knock yourself out. You only make yourselves look like the fanatics you are.
Thanks to this thread in the AgainstMensRights Subreddit for pointing me to this most edifying discussion.
thebionicmommy & Aaliyah have the best histories.
Wait, so… this Order was founded by a man. And it used social pressure to get men to enlist, rather than actually forcing them to do so.
How does this mean ANY of the things they’re trying to make it mean?!
The War of 1812 according to MRA’s
It all started because Josephine was using Napolean and his army to commit violence by proxy and cause wars in Europe. The feminists in the US made a big deal about it, though, so the British empire reluctantly set up trade restrictions for US. Then the feminists taunted, “You’re not going to let them treat us that way are you?” to the men. The men didn’t care. They didn’t need trade to thrive. It was the women demanding European perfumes and televisions that caused the trouble. So the blue pill men declared war on the men in England, even though they should have joined together to declare war on misandry.
The women in Canada then said, “Oh yeah? I bet you American men aren’t man enough to come invade our country!”. That was their way of spitting on the Canadian men who were too beta for them. The US men said, “Hey, let’s invade because we are alpha and those women want us”, but they lost because Canadian men took the RED PILL.
Andrew Jackson did something in New Orleans, too. Something to do with not firing their muskets till they looked them in the eyes. And the British had to run through the bushes where a rabbit couldn’t go, on down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. And it was all women’s fault, for voting too much.
cloudiah, I put your prehistory lessons at The Manboobz Greatest Hits Hall of Fame
Actually Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst abused the fact women couldn’t go to war and criticized men for not being manly enough to go, in full acceptance that they’ll never be required to go themselves.
[CN: sexual assault]
Occupy Wall Street according to MRAs
Just a bunch of losers who were trying to push forward their Marxist Agenda. Also, the female protesters were there mainly because they were protesting against the state’s reluctance to bend to their entitlement-infested whims. The men, however, are all honest, hard-working people who were cheated by Wall Street criminals.
Also, those ladies really should have shut up about the sexual assault that happened to many of the female protestors. If they didn’t want to get raped, they shouldn’t have gone forward to protest because it’s entirely unreasonable to expect people to not rape women during protests.
Okay, okay, I’m gonna really sink to the depths, here. If I don’t make it back, speak well of me:
The U.S. Civil War: A MRA TruFax History
The roots of the Civil War lie in women’s ambitions. You see, in the South, Southern Belles like Scarlett O’Hara demanded the right to live on plantations, which required slaves to operate. So, in order to provide that lifestyle a bunch of beta men captured some omega men (who just happened to all be Black or Indian by this time, because even beta white men have some conscience, and they figured they could at least ennoble some savages while subjugating themselves before their women).
Meanwhile, up North, other women were all upset that they couldn’t live on plantations, too. Since there weren’t any cotton fields up North, they decided to become abolitionists so they could free the slaves (mainly because they wanted to add black men to their cock carousels–you know why, right?). So their beta men, led by Abraham Lincoln, started working to take away the southern beta men’s slaves.
Well, one thing led to another, and war was declared. It’s also noteworthy that this is the first time that the U.S. (here meaning the unions) used conscription to make alpha men fight (since they knew the betas weren’t gonna do a very good job of it). This proves that Abe was a beta.
John Wilkes Boothe was just a misunderstood early MRA who was trying to break the growing feminist hold on the country, but the betas, answering the demands of their feminist overseers, made sure to kill him.
****
Okay, I need to shower. In lye.
History according to MRAs? Oh, I’m definitely in on this. It’s probably worth noting, though, that real-world China has a long history of blaming everything on women – particularly among imperial-era Buddhists, pretty much the MGTOWs of their day.
Aaliyah, did you know that an MRA has already written the definitive work about Occupy Wall Street?
Y’know, I feel like these histories, in order to be true to the source, need more Incomprehensively capitalized Words and perhaps also a nice side dish of Word Salad.
But then I’m probably just nitpicking because my delicate ladybrain can’t handle the clear and Ultimate perfection and unDeniability of MRA history.
It’s kind of funny that they picked the White Feather campaign to focus on as proof of their theory given the timing. It would be much easier to spin the issue of women and voting as “see, allowing women to vote stops war”, given that the war ended in November 1918 (the end of the year that women over 30 got the vote in the UK).
(For those who’re reading along and whose reading comprehension is poor – most MRAs, in other words – this is not what actually stopped the war, nor is at a claim that such was the case.)
Also, if we’re going to play “make vague allusions to history and pretend they prove that one gender is evil”! How many women were involved in drafting the Treaty of Versailles? Because the flaws in that treaty were a part of why WW2 happened.
@cloudiah
Nope, I didn’t know. It certainly looks like a miserable pile of awfulness, though.
(Cookies to anyone who gets the reference.)
Yes, girlofthegaps, I completely forgot those Essential things.
The Vietnam War according to MRAs
Not a Day went by without the Grandiloquent musings of feminists projected unto the whole world because of their Vain and Selfish Modi Operandi. In accordance with the A Priori stigmatization of male agency, they savagely advocated for the murder of millions of Men. And they did such by dictating that all men enlist in the army and Fight in Vietnam. Upon a white fluffy sofa the Feminists sat, drinking their Wine cup of Female Entitlement as they watched Mankind kill each other once more. “After all,” they said, “All men are rapist abuser scumbags anyway.” Such was a tragic Instance of Institutionalizes Female Supremacy.
…That’s hard for even me to decipher.
Oh my god, I didn’t think anyone would take me up on that one, but I have to say that I am completely blown away.
The Crisis of the Late Middle Ages according to MRA’s
In the 1300’s, medieval Europe suffered several demographic disasters caused by feminism. In 1315, feminists had burned too many scented fucking candles, and this caused the environment to change dramatically, as the medieval warming period ended and the little ice age began. So those wimminz and their overconsumption made Europe too cold, and the crops failed. About 10 million brave men died in the famine that resulted, while women got to eat everything because they are selfish.
Then things got worse in the 1340’s. The famine had weakened people’s resistance to disease, and they were vulnerable. The women didn’t care, though, and they kept pet rats and allowed the fleas to bite everyone. That’s what caused the plague.
But the feminists couldn’t leave well enough alone, so they forced France and England to have the 100 Years War. Edward III of England and Philip VI of France were supposedly behind the war, but they only had wars to impress HB 10 women. But kings, listen up, declaring war on each other to impress women is a beta move.
This proves that the Middle Ages were way too gynocentric.
An MRA’s History of China (Prehistory – Han Dynasty)
The Middle Kingdom has a long history of conflict and evolution. The history is often described as a cycle – women ruin the nation, men pull it back from the brink, then they become complacent and ruin it again. Of course, the feminist-influenced historians won’t tell you this, but there’s really no other conclusion to be reached.
It all started thousands of years ago, with the Xia people. They had lived in peace with their neighbors for many years, until the arrival of the Shang emperor. This poor man had been enslaved to the pussy of Da Ji, an evil sorceress and Asia’s first feminist. First, she ordered the emperor to wipe out the Xia. Once that was done, she forced him to participate in bizarrely grand acts of debauchery. Does anyone honestly think he enjoyed building that lake of rice wine? No, sir.
Eventually, the people wised up to their matriarchal oppressor, and overthrew their king, founding the Zhou Dynasty. This period saw many innovations in bronze- and iron-working, as well as a flourishing of the arts. All of this was because they learned from their mistakes and kept their women in check. This doesn’t explicitly appear in the historical records, but you must keep in mind that a good deal of early dynastic history was recorded by Sima Qian, a eunuch – the truest of all manginas. Therefore, we must glean information from between the lines.
The Zhou Dynasty was followed by the Qin and Han Dynasties, and it is here that we start to see the development of the matriarchal systems that continue to haunt us to this day. We see the birth of the bureaucratic system – the same bureaucracy abused by woman to steal money from the men they’ve spermjacked. There is the rise of standardization, used by feminists to force men to follow rules that deny them their manhood. Of course, we cannot overlook the feminist Qin Shi Huang’s effort to wipe out Confucianism and, thus, one of man’s greatest contributions to philosophy. History does not note if he planned to replace these great works with the writings of Andrea Dworkin, but it is a fair assumption.
Huh, how odd. Well apparently my nym has changed from the one I first started posting here under to the one I’m registered as with WordPress with no input from me… At least my icon’s the same I guess?
Argh! It’s the Big Book of Learnin’ on steroids!
I’ve had this “but you don’t support women being drafted!” thing thrown in my face when I’m talking about feminism. And I’ve gotta say, I don’t support women being drafted.
Because, you know, I DON’T SUPPORT THE DRAFT. FOR ANYONE. Somehow, it seems like a lot of anti-feminists don’t get that. Of course I’m not going to agitate towards expanding the draft to include women; I’m working to get rid of it altogether (in other words, make it so that men aren’t drafted either). It would be rather counterproductive to ask Congress to include women, now, wouldn’t it?
If I thought the draft was a good thing, I would support women being included in it. But I don’t support anyone being forced to go to war, so I don’t.
Somehow, the people who use the draft as an anti-feminist argument never seem to be able to wrap their heads around that. It really isn’t that complicated, though.
Trying to figure out if linearThinker is for women being subject to the draft, or for women losing the right to vote. Either way, though, he’s hoping things get worse for women, because that’s what advocating for the rights of men is all about.
(Psst LT did you ever consider that we could abolish the draft entirely?)
@thebionicmommy: that made me weep tears of joy. Not just because no MRA has ever heard of the crisis of the fourteenth century, but because I’m doing a PhD in medieval studies (albeit early medieval). Wonderful.
Oh, I guess that’s me delurked.
Viscaria – probably both.
Welcome Malte! ^_^ Here’s your welcome package.
(I finally got to do that to someone – yay!)
Malte, hi, and have one Manboobz Complimentary Welcome Package!
Ninjaed on a welcome pagkage, is that a first? 😀