The fellas in the Men’s Rights subreddit are getting worked up over imaginary feminists again!
Yesterday, in a discussion of paternity fraud, a brand-new Redditor who had never posted a comment before posted a completely unsourced screenshot of what quite a few of the regulars took to be some sort of official feminist statement on paternity fraud.
A few of the more discerning commenters suggested that the screenshot might just be satire, but others were convinced not only that it was real, but that it was the completely serious opinion of a representative feminist. As one put it, referring to the Reddit watchdogs in Shit Reddit Says,
Another chimed in with this:
I took a few moments to Google some of the text in the screenshot to find out where it originated and discovered that it came from a now-defunct Tumblr blog called feminismrising.
While the blog is gone, it has left little traces of itself all over the internet, and from these traces it’s easy enough to figure out that it was a satirical/troll blog meant to parody feminism. My guess, for what it’s worth, is that that it was written by a feminist out to parody the absurd visions of evil feminism that are prevalent amongst Men’s Rightsers and other antifeminists. But who knows. The only thing that’s really clear is that it was a joke.
Proof? Well, here’s one “Q-and-A” that evidently once ran on the site:
Q: My boyfriend recently asked me if we could have sex. I tried to explain to him that asking me to have sex with him counts as sexual assault, but he couldn’t understand it that piv sex is ONLY okay if I am the one who asks for it. Can you help me try to explain why what he’s doing when he asks for sex is misogynistic?
A: It seems he doesn’t understand sexual harassment to such a degree for all intents and purposes is basically sexual assault.
This is normal; men in general don’t understand even the most basic tactful ways to approach women.
A rule of thumb is that if you can see him, hear him and feel him it’s most definitely sexual assault. Now does that mean that just because you can’t feel him it isn’t sexual assault? No. That’s just something rape culture says. Going by that line of reasoning it wouldn’t be sexual assault if you simply couldn’t feel him as you’d been administered some sort of anesthesia.
So through absurdity reduction we rule out that it’s necessary to feel him. If you can hear him, see him and you feel sexually assaulted then you have been sexually assaulted.
He’s being misogynistic for saying he doesn’t understand.
I think only a complete Men’s Rights dunderhead could fail to detect the satire here.
You can see more examples from the blog here.
Elsewhere in the same Men’s Rights subreddit discussion, helping MRAs live up to another unfortunate stereotype, this fella gets a few upvotes for his I’m-just-sayin’ semi-advocacy of vigilante justice — specifically, murdering judges:
Oh, Men’s Rights Redditors. You’re just awful, aren’t you?
http://femfreq.tumblr.com/post/56494982629/coincidentally-whenever-i-see-a-noticeable-uptick
Poes law is a powerful thing.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a real feminist refer to sperm as a man’s “seed” before.
Those aren’t real feminists. Everyone knows they only go around in threes.
Also, the fiddler is clearly visible to them and they haven’t spermjacked him yet. Maybe that’ll come after all the dancing in the nudd, but real feminists would have done it right off.
Yeah, reading that, I got the sense that whoever wrote it and whoever believed it have never actually read any feminist writing, and don’t know how people actually talk.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a real feminist refer to sperm as a man’s “seed” before.
I’ve never heard a woman use that word except to make a joke. Other than MRAs I’ve never heard a man use it seriously either.
(The erasure of the desire for sex, which is completely different from the desire to get pregnant, by MRAs, is kind of a dead giveaway.)
I still think the feminismriswing blog must have been a feminist parodying MRA’s bizarre and paranoid visions of what feminism is.
Ninjaed by Ronanwills.
What is it with MRAs and the word ‘seed’?
Brain bleach … I think. It might not work for anyone who can’t stand hearing songs sung wrong.
http://www.youtube.com/Ybvwh0reiMU
Dang it.
GNL: *pat pat*
All they need is the word “quicken” and it would be straight out of Game of Thrones.
Like poison ivy. Groups of three, leave them be.
These guys are such lolcows, they never fail to amuse (when they’re not being horrifying).
David Futrelle
You wrote,
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I still think the feminismriswing blog must have been a feminist parodying MRA’s bizarre and paranoid visions of what feminism is.
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If that’s the case they did a good enough job of looking like what an “MRA” would think a feminist blog would look like that they couldn’t tell it was a parody. I wonder just how ridiculous a fake feminist blog could be and still fool people like this?
genderneutrallanguage : that’s not poe’s law. I don’t know if it has a name, but it could be “the Onion”‘s law.
Poe’s law is when a group is so extreme is hard to distinguish real talk and parody. For example, Christian fundamentalists are often so extreme that parody can sound the same.
In this case, that’s just a matter of “this confirm all my worst fears about my enemy an make them look bad”. I mentioned the Onion because I remember a (fake, obviously) article on an “Abortionplex” to make “[stopping] tiny, beating hearts” more fun and efficient. Many pro lifers were quick to believe it. Just like these redditors. How easy it would have been to realize it was fake is the whole point of this article.
tl;dr: that’s not what poe’s law is.
CriticalDragon1177: I barely see how it could get much worse than “my boyfriend assaulted me by asking if I wanted to have sex”
@Yellaine: Poe’s law states: “Without a blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of extremism or fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing”
Which, I think covers this situation pretty well.
Or, are you saying feminismrising doesn’t count as a poe since it’s a parody of straw feminists, not a parody of actual feminism?
damn, borked the link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law#The_law_and_its_meaning
Balls…of…sorrow? *snicker*
Also, I see “seed” used a lot in queebrotica.
Also, the comment bout judges? Is this one of those “moderate” MRA’s I keep hearing about?
But they’re not a hate movement!!!!!1111!!!!!eleventy!!!!
Their use of “seed” is in line with their obsession with men’s abortion rights, paternity, and evopsych. Genetics are the alpha and the omega, the all-important factor in everything. Genes determine whether or not a child is “yours” (if you raise a child you did not contribute genetic material to, you are a beta mangina). Genes dictate that a fetus is half-yours and therefore you should have a say in abortions, even though it’s not living off of your body and you don’t have to do jack shit to carry it to term. Genes are the difference between men and women (trans*? The fuck is that?) and the reason why men are stronger and more fit to be leaders.
“Seed” is just a natural extension of their obsession with genes. Their orgasm is an expulsion of their genetic material, in some ways, of themselves. That’s why they’re afraid of women “stealing” their sperm, they’re stealing their very IDENTITY. I have even seen MRAs disgusted by the idea of dating a woman who has ever gotten a facial, because she is permanently “marked” by another man’s seed.
To an MRA, genes, mostly semen, are their SOULS.
The MRAs I’ve seen terrified of dating facialized women didn’t care if they washed off, or how many times. She was “marked” in their eyes. They were treating the woman as an possession to be claimed. Literal objectification.
And I’ve seen a lot of “pro-choice” MRAs just using it as a framing device to argue that they should be able to have “paper abortions” so they can opt out of parental responsibility, ignoring the fact that the abortion debate is about bodily autonomy, not parenthood. But of course, why should they care about bodily autonomy? It’s not their bodies. They don’t care about the women or the pregnancy, they care about the option of not being parents.
If you wade into the actual reddit discussion, you will find some incredibly obtuse debate over whether or not sperm is the equivalant of the egg or of the womb. Well, obtuse on one side of the argument anyway.
I like the wayback machine. http://web.archive.org/web/20120825024403/http://feminismrising.tumblr.com/ 😀 This blog didn’t live long.
I love how SRS is now a “hate group” just for reposting the shit that the dingbat MRAs post themselves, but somehow the MRM is not a hate group despite being called out by the SPLC as a bunch of misogynist asses. They truly live in a universe made out of whole cloth.