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:
But my favorite is this one:
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.
Thanks David! Thanks auggzilliary its the Montgolfier Brothers’ balloon.
Just so long as it ends up in some sort of bag. I’m sure as hell not touching it with my bare hands.
Normal people hear about the WW2 comfort women and think “war crime”, MRAs hear about it and think “finally our movement has a goal!”.
The first woman in the atheism 2 is Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She’s an atheist and very anti-Muslim, but she’s also a poster child for conservatives; she’s very right-wing from what I’ve read.
The message I’m getting is that Real Atheists are brave and not scared to be offensive, just like Real Manly MRAs, but that Evil Feminists want to shut down all criticism under the guise of not being offensive. Which is seriously the dumbest claim.
@kittehserf ah, okay! Thanks for clearing that up.
Ya welcome! 🙂
If the sign said “Patriarchy and Whitey: two sides of the same coin” they’d have a point…
QFT!
Normally, I am very unwilling to judge people for the content of their sexual fantasies, even when they’re very dark. But I was disturbed by the fact that this little piece of GOR porn was seen as an example of “artistry against misandry” and posted on a site endorsed by A Voice for Men. When you start using your rape fantasies as a weapon in the fight against feminism, yeah, that’s when you’ve pretty much exposed what your “movement” is about.
If anyone is interested, there’s some more discussion of that MRA porn in the Forum — just search for Artistry, and you’ll find the origins of my blog and some pretty hilarious mocking of the Westlake piece.
So I was sitting here going “I have an idea for a poster, but I’m on my laptop and all it has is Word Starter 2010.”
And then I was like why should that stop me?
katz, that poster is still better than the MRA ones! It looks like trippy wallpaper.
Hey Kittehs, I ran across something today I thought might amuse.
Young-earth creationists of the Noah’s Flood school believe that after the floodwaters receded, all the animals were concentrated in one spot — Mt Ararat, right?
Yet there are all kinds of animals all over other continents, where they couldn’t just have walked. It’s been referred to as the Long March of the Koalas.
Well, now some wise soul over at Conservapedia (“The Trustworthy Encyclopedia”) has suggested maybe some of the smaller animals had help. His proof seems to be that life returned to the vicinity of Krakatoa.
Just sayin’, drop bears are bad enough without being flung out of a volcano on the other side of the world.
Rape fantasies is pretty much all they got, though. Take that away and there is nothing left to the MRM but complaints about scented fucking candles and kittehs as dominatrices.
I really don’t understand why they can’t just acknowledge their weird kinks and try to deal with them constructively. I guess that’s where the pathology comes in.
Damn you, link kobold!
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unreasonablefaith/2013/06/whats-the-thought-process/
Hey, be fair now. They have lots of fantasies about domestic violence too.
And yeah, if it was just a private fantasy then whatever, but when you put it on a page with “activism” in the title then it’s not a fantasy any more, it’s a policy.
I miss the Word 2003 wordart. It was all so ugly and overused and it was the perfect way to instantly create kitsch. The Word 2010 wordart mostly looks pretty good. No more Impact (had to change the font myself), no more tiling dashes, no more rainbow gradients 🙁
Tsk, tsk, those people are just being silly! Of course drop bears didn’t get launched by volcanoes. They hitched a lift in kangaroos’ pouches.
(Actually that volcano idea is the funniest thing I’ve read in a while – ta for the link!)
@katz:
You’re more generous than me. I know fantasy isn’t reality, but if you get turned on by the idea of using violent sexual assault as a tool of subjugation and revenge against women who got out of line, then I don’t care how private you keep it, you’re messed up.
Real Atheists simply don’t believe in a deity. We aren’t necessarily pushy, blabby anti-theists who want to get in everyone’s face about religious beliefs. In fact, some of us Real Atheists think anti-theists are annoying asses.
There, I said it. I don’t regret what I said. I’d say it again if I had to.
Oh, I’d avoid them just on the basis of the fantasy, but to call posting it publicly “activism” is about 50 steps beyond “you creep me out” into “your movement is rotten to the core”.
That being said, I encourage them to keep posting their fantasies in public. It makes the job of anyone who wants to point out what their movement is all about so much easier.
Yeah, they can get real irritating, but it’s not like there isn’t lots of provocation.
The volcano-launched animals crack me up. (See, guys? Conservapedia is tons of fun!) But I feel obligated to point out that I can’t find any mentions of it anywhere that aren’t direct links to the Conservapedia article.