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a voice for men all about the menz antifeminism grandiosity imaginary backwards land imaginary oppression misogyny MRA oppressed men oppressed white men playing the victim rape culture that's completely wrong the poster revolution has begun

Canada: Land of Terror for Men? A Photoshop contest

Ooh, scary!
Ooh, scary!

Men’s Rights activists have discovered something that Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps and the rest of his gang at the Westboro Baptist Church learned a long time ago: outrageously offensive signs can mean media coverage.

Canadian MRAs associated with A Voice for Men recently got attention in Edmonton for posters mocking a date rape awareness campaign. Now some of their compatriots have captured the attention of the media with posters in Saskatoon.

This time the MRAs toned down the offensiveness in favor of simple outrageousness, combined with a healthy dose of incomprehensibility. The most incomprehensible of the current lot is probably this one, which comes straight from the A Voice for Men poster page:

currency

But my favorite is this one:

canadafrighteningplace

I was originally going to write a sort of rebuttal to this, pointing out that by most measures Canada is, generally speaking, a rather unfrightening place for men (and women), what with its high standard of living, decent health care, relatively low crime rate, and so on.

I mean, if I were to pick a frightening country to live in, as a man (or a woman), I would probably pick someplace like, you know, Somalia, North Korea, Sudan or South Sudan, someplace like that. Syria’s probably not a great place to visit at the moment either.

But then I was thinking: Canada’s main problem, in terms of its international reputation, is that people tend to think of it as boring, not frightening.

Maybe Canada should embrace the whole “most frightening place to be a man” thing, and take advantage of this silly quote from Erin Pizzy to promote itself as scary, edgy, intense, EXTREEEEEMMME!

Maybe with some posters like the one at the top of this post?

I don’t know. I’m not that great at photoshop. Perhaps some of you would like to have a go at it? I know we’ve got some talented MRA poster-parodists here.

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Fibinachi
11 years ago

Continue until it stops hurting.

A game, by the by, some of us are still playing. Cheers.

kittehserf
11 years ago

@Fibinachi – morning wood?

Stop hanging out with Owly, man!

Falconer
11 years ago

Valerian, I’m sorry, your poster exhibits too much design sense in that it obviously has some design sense. We’re going to need you to collage elements together without concern for the overall look in order to be competitive here.

(Srsly, though, I like it.)

Falconer
11 years ago

Oh, hey, Kittehs, I see you’re either up late or early.

I’m glad you like my new avatar. I made it on a whim. Probably I’ll go back to Uncle Cary or the Cat or something when I get bored of the sheer awesome/ugly of this hat.

deniseeliza
deniseeliza
11 years ago

I like it, Valerian!

I agree that the problem with the Comfort Girls fic isn’t necessarily with the fantasy. Surely I’m not the only one who has fantasies that would be seriously questionable if translated directly to reality? (Or maybe I am fucked up??) But anyway, my questionable fantasies just serve to amuse myself. I have no desire to inflict them on others, and I certainly wouldn’t consider them to be how the world or how sex “should” work. My real life sex life is almost completely vanilla and I like it that way.

The problem with this fic is, as others have stated, the idea that turning all women into rape slaves is a just consequence of feminism’s apparent over-reach.

takshak
takshak
11 years ago

The message I’m getting is that Real Atheists are brave and not scared to be offensive,

Considering that “Guys, don’t do that” is the most offensive thing ever said in the history of atheism, we know which are the brave ones. And it ain’t #braveheroes

(not tempting the blockquote monster yet)

A friend of mine wrote a Gor parody with the roles reversed and had it delivered to Norman, apparently he freaked out. People have been buying her drinks ever since.

sarahlizhousespouse
11 years ago

Tearchy! A world run by Tea Leaves and protected by their armed Tea Merchants! Tea Leaves are so beguiling, so inconspicuously delicious. They can meet with one another in a pot of boiling water, steep, and release their delicate, seductive taste and there is no word of protest from the blinded partaker. What kind of world are we living in when this is so?
The only resistance is that of the bitter, bitter brew of Coffee. Coffee is the drink for those who are awake and wise to the lie that is Tea. Slowly, but surely, with every new Starbucks location, Coffee is creeping into the domain that was once the stronghold of Tea! This oppression by Tea Leaves will not stand! The Time of Coffee has come!

Shadow
Shadow
11 years ago

@sarahliz

Can’t the beverages just get along 🙁

Argenti Aertheri
11 years ago

Takshak — you get a Welcome Package yet? The comments have HTML tips in them, including how to avoid the blockquote monster.

Fibinachi
11 years ago

@Fibinachi – morning wood?

Stop hanging out with Owly, man!

You’re in on the man-maple conspiracy. I see it. I see it all. A Voice for Trees has helped me see the truth! I’ve taken the Red Sap! I’ve chewed on the Green Root! I’m a free-rooter!

The problem with this fic is, as others have stated, the idea that turning all women into rape slaves is a just consequence of feminism’s apparent over-reach.

The confusing thing about the Comfort Girls story is how… strange it is. It was free. I skimmed it a while ago, because, I like terrible writing. You can tell – it’s how I’m inspired to do my stuff. But the thing about that fic is that it’s… Really the best word I can think of is evil.

I mean the rape is there. The violence is there. That’s all just stuff, and it’s even stuff people do to each other, often, and there’s endless endless stories featuring just that.

But it’s clearly not really the focus of the story itself. It’s not a fiction about women being forced to live in an underwater rape camp. That’s just the setting, the background noise. The actual fiction is about how women aren’t really people. They’re babies and idiots.

For instance, the reason they’re in the comfort corps is because they’ve been sentenced to do so as a punishment for various evil things. Someone murdered a man and ate some of his brain, someone else tried to hire an assassin to kill leaders of the Men’s RIght Internet. Someone worked as a geneticist to come up with a virus to destroy the Y chromosome. Okay, so punishment and crime.

But, the brain-eater has this scene where they say that the person she killed was found later, wounds matching, and murder is still illegal even under the Evil Matriarchy of Evil Matriarchs. The super evil woman who did super evil things and tried to hire an assassin was foiled by accidentally hiring an undercover FBI agent… So fishing for assassins is illegal, even if its trying to get someone to kill men. And the FBI, in this supposed evil matriarchy, still tries to stop people from doing it.

But instead of being sentenced to imprisonment, it’s off to the rape camps with them. Without anyone blinking. As if that’s the order of the day, some natural consequence of their evil deeds, and it’s obvious you’re supposed to think that they deserve it for doing these evil, evil female things.

Except, well, there’s talks about how all the Men Rose Up and killed and shot and murdered all the evil feminists? So murder is wrong, but only when the people we don’t like do it. If you’re female and hire an assassin you’re a bad, bad thing but if you straight up murder people for being a feminist you’re a rad dude.

There’s talk about the indignities that Men (with a capital M) had to suffer through under terrible female oppression… Such as public Walk A Mile In Her Shoes Events, while the women had Naked Slut Walks (I’m using examples you can also see in Katz linked read through). Or women divorcing their husbands and taking All Their Money in divorce settlements. Example: Someone is a marine on a nuclear submarine, and his wife leaves him with an officer because he’s away on missions often. During the Naked Slut Walks, all the terrible women would be naked and in their nakedness shout “If you touch us without permission, it’s rape!”. Naked. Did I underline that point enough? ButaApparently under the terrible gynocratic matriarchy, men are still trusted to handle nuclear weapons.

So the indignities and terrible things men had to suffer under this evil gynocracy was stuff like public embarrassment, financial penalties and divorce. They weren’t corralled up and shot. No one, say, ground down their bones for dust and used it to fertilize the fields as a hallmark of male disposability.

In return, what women go through once the tables are flipped is murder, rape, being forced into prostitution, violence, getting chained up at night to avoid moving around and being indoctrinated into slaves (There’s classes, you see, on pleasing men. They’re mandatory).
( Gift of Fear, Gavin De Becker, anyone? )

People are punished not so much because they do bad things but because they do things while having the wrong belief system. It’s not a tale of… justice, it’s a tale of blood money and nepotism. It’s not so much revenge as its straight up destruction. The “Kinky stuff” isn’t the rape or the violence or the… submission, it’s the complete annihilation of someone’s personhood and status as a creature capable of the slightest bit of anything.
Sure, in Gor, women are property… But at least everyone agrees that, hey, that thing there is a particularly fine table analogue! That’s a great female vase you have there!
And it’s also weirdly inconsistent.
The entire premise is based on comfort corps – which was a thing – and the people in the book realize it’s a thing… So they based their practice of sexual enslavement on actual practices of militaries past, but still go around claiming that their glorious revolution was necessary.
How? Why? What?

cloudiah
11 years ago

More slogans for the MHRM:

Put us in charge, and we’ll enslave all women in rape camps!
Every time a man dies, we’ll kill a woman!
Beat women with impunity!

http://www.avoiceforhatefulasshats.com

baileyrenee
11 years ago

So… will they stop throwing The Scum Manifesto and the agent orange files in feminist’s faces now? Because I think we found something that’s AT LEAST just as bad.

Not that there isn’t more of this crazy hate elsewhere in the manosphere, I’m sure… but holy shit you guys…

ggrdet
ggrdet
11 years ago

Rape perpetuates victimhood. Victimhood justifies feminism.

Using victimhood as a shield, feminists exact privileges.

Rape acts as an extremely powerful expedient for feminism.

The appalling irony is that – Feminism promotes rape – Rape promotes feminism.

It’s a never ending loop. A bloody vicious cycle. Heaven /Evolution help us men.

katz
11 years ago

So… will they stop throwing The Scum Manifesto and the agent orange files in feminist’s faces now? Because I think we found something that’s AT LEAST just as bad.

Unfortunately this isn’t an embarrassing secret that the MRM would rather gloss over, but instead something they (were) proud of and promoted front and center.

takshak
takshak
11 years ago

Why, thank you for the welcome! I have to admit I’ve been lurking far longer than is seemly.

cloudiah
11 years ago

That link is just someone on r/mr saying that women who make false rape accusations should be punished by being sentenced to a men’s prison.

grumpycatisagirl
grumpycatisagirl
11 years ago

Every time anyone suggests rape is an appropriate punishment (as I assume the commenter was suggesting by sending women to a men’s prison) it makes me very, very ill. Whatever gender the alleged “perpetrator” is. Rape is just never okay period.

Ally S
11 years ago

@cloudiah

Oh dear, I made the mistake of reading Straughan’s article:

One of the more methodologically sound studies out there puts the rate of accusations determined false to a reasonable doubt standard among university students at 5.9 per cent. Keep in mind that, despite being three times higher than the false report rate for other crimes, this is a minimum estimate of the false report rate, just as the 6 per cent of rape reports that end in conviction is a minimum estimate of rate of genuine sexual assault reports.

She cites the study behind the false accusation figure, but not the one for false accusations of other crimes. So her comparison is baseless.

And while Edmonton Police Services (EPS) statistics indicate only 1 to 2 per cent of rape accusations are false, EPS demonstrates no mandate to charge or prosecute them, even when evidence of falsity lands in their laps. Because of this, their estimates of prevalence are highly questionable and based not on solid case-by-case investigation, but on the utter lack of it.

…Those are false rape reports reported to Edmonton Police, not false rape allegations in a court of law. So whether there is any prosecution of false accusers is irrelevant.

This is some of the worst journalism I’ve ever seen.

dustydeste
dustydeste
11 years ago

Wow, so I read through the Wikipedia entry on Gor stuff and… not only is it violently misogynistic, it also looks racist as fuck? And the author’s a philosophy professor? And he likes to complain about how he’s be blacklisted by all the SFF presses because they’re all eeeebil feminists because there is no legitimate reason why presses would decline to print something that sold?

I just… I am having a hard time convincing myself that this is not an elaborate Poe, because it is just all waaaaay too over-the-top.

(I do know it is an actual thing, but really, I just can’t even.)

Pear_tree
Pear_tree
11 years ago

Going back to that rather horrible book, is the worst thing men can possibly imagine having inflicted on them being made to walk a mile in woman’s high-heel shoes? There is no torture, no beatings, no forced labour or anything. I don’t want these things to happen to men, but they are depicting a society that has turned on them and repressed them completely, yet the two worst things to happen are
1) they have to see naked women and not rape them
2) they have to wear high heel shoes for a one mile walk
I am privileged, I have a great background, my life is great really and I have had to do both of those things. (In my college town enthusiastic young male freshman occasionally stripped in bars, or just in the street)

I agree the wiping out of the Y-chromosone is something an anti-male repressive society would do. However you would have thought a society that was eliminating men would do something worse than have men wear high heeled shoes. Some guys even enjoy wearing high heeled shoes.

pineapplecookies
pineapplecookies
11 years ago

Every time anyone suggests rape is an appropriate punishment (as I assume the commenter was suggesting by sending women to a men’s prison) it makes me very, very ill. Whatever gender the alleged “perpetrator” is. Rape is just never okay period.

Yep. I hate it when someone suggest that a rapist should be raped as punishment as well. I mean… no. I prefer a complete rape free world, thank you.

pineapplecookies
pineapplecookies
11 years ago

This reminds me of the Kurdish men for equality: https://www.facebook.com/KurdMenForEquality

Pear_tree
Pear_tree
11 years ago

auggziliary it was based on this charity http://www.walkamileinhershoes.org/ and then made mandatory (or at least according to the small amount of the book I read in the link). While I agree forcing someone to wear high heels for one mile is cruel, it is not the worst possible thing I could imagine. It is an unusually tame dystopia.

grumpycatisagirl
grumpycatisagirl
11 years ago

Kurdish Men for Equality rock!!